A new blog from the CIPR

Active Events is a new blog from the CIPR.

The opening post (20th September - oops that too me a long time) says:

Looking for information on PR events and training? Want exclusive previews of CIPR events? Interested in getting PR tips from top practitioners and trainers? You've come to the right place!

activevents is a new site from the CIPR training and events team. We'll be announcing all our events here, with the latest additions to our programmes as they are confirmed. You'll also find tips on a range of PR hot topics, taster information from many of our conferences and workshops, and news and reviews after the events. Plus we'll be giving you the chance to take a peek into some of our sessions when we publish information live from the front row of selected events – more details on this to follow.

Where are the TV audiences going - on-line of course

With TV audiences dwindling and interest in online video content on the rise, it seems that audiences do not just want to watch TV shows any more.

They want to make and star in them too says Marc Cieslak of the BBC.

According to Cieslak, Google's Patrick Walker believes a number of factors are coming together at the moment to facilitate this.

"First of all there is an incredible amount of bandwidth available. People have broadband at home so the speed is much faster than ever before," he says.

"Couple that with really easy tools of production from a basic webcam and being able to record that, to filming something and plugging your camera into a PC and doing some basic editing. Also storage cost has come down considerably."

This offers a range of PR opportunities.

First of course, this is a great way to share information about your organisation and its 'actors'. It offers sponsorship opportunities to people who make 'home made TV'. There are opportunities to re-purpose and redistribute relevant content from the existing services and all this content can be transferred from the computer to cell phone to handheld to iPod. It is then available to all employees to use and show to clients and friends in offices pubs and even in shops.

Free mobile phone calls?

Most people's cell phone plans come with a virtually unlimited local calls (think about all of those free night and weekend minutes). But long distance charges for international calls are usually costly. So what Rebtel does is it uses the existing cell phone system to allow people to use their local minutes, and then switches those calls over fat Internet connections to overseas cities in 35 countries, where it is switched back to the local phone system. You can call as much as you want for $1 a week, and you only get charged for those weeks when you actually use the service.

To find out more see B2Day article.

More disintermediation.

Virtual communities

I saw this on B2Day:

It's official. The domainers have taken over the asylum. Next week, a new social network/ virtual world called Weblo will launch where members can buy digital real estate (including cities and states), manage celebrity fan pages, and own Weblo domains (that only exist within the social network). Each piece of real estate is tied to an actual property in the real world—Buckingham Palace, the Taj Mahal, your house. CEO Rocky Mirza came by my office today to explain:

The concept is very simple. We are recreating this world on the Internet. Weblo is a virtual world that gives people a second chance on something they missed before. It is social networking with commerce.

Anyone can buy and sell any building (they go for $1 to $2 each to start), or people can buy entire cities or states (New York City will be $300 or $400, and all of California wil go for $50,000). Mirza reports:

One guy has already sent in $25,000 to buy Ontario. We have three or four people waiting to purchase NY. Our first-day goal was to do $100,000. That is already done.

Its amazing what people will spend money on. Is this a competitor for Second Life?

All about Tags

We keep hearing about them. Tags I mean.
There are XPRL tags, Technorati tags, Social Media tags, bar coded tags, part of speech tags, and they all mean something. This article in New Scientist offers a spooky insight into where all this might lead us.

Social media tags are all over the place and here are some social media vendors that use them:

• Del.icio.us - A social bookmarking site that allows users to bookmark many sites and then tag them with many descriptive words, allowing other people to search by those terms to find pages that other people found useful.
• Flickr - A service that allows users to tag images with many specific nouns, verbs, and adjectives that describe the picture. This is then searchable.
• Gmail - A webmail site that was one of the first to allow categorization of objects using tags, known as "labels" on emails.
• LibraryThing - A social book cataloguing and community website, tags feature heavily here.

Practitioners might want to make sure that tags used about a client, product, service, brand or key employee is most associated with content that aids the PR strategy.

Most PR consultants are small busineses in a global world

Most PR consultancies are small businesses.

Is the Business Week description familiar:

Small businesspeople today have to deal with the same issues big businesses do—global markets, complex supply chains, and fluctuating currencies—and they have to do it without an army of MBAs to support them. Gone are the days when the business owner could walk out back to talk to his local production crew before knocking off early to sneak in a round of golf or go fishing. Many small businesspeople today are the business equivalent of fighter pilots—hurtling around the globe at breakneck speed as larger competitors leave them little room for error.

If a PR consultant is not involved in considering global issues there is a pretty good chance that they have been locked out of opportunities, are paying too much for services and have not got adequate tools for the job.

For example. Their name could be used in another country, they will not be visible to people looking for their services from out of town and there is a load of great software and tools available from other countries. Of course, they are not able to advise their clients, have no handle on the international effect of their media campaigns and cannot use social media much because of its international nature.

As Toni Muzi Falconi points out We all now work on an international stage.

Byting the bullet

In PR we sometimes want to send a file to an editor or journalist. Sometimes we want to make an audio comment of a video comment available.

Of course we want to keep it short and to the point and put the news first and then fill in the background.

What, then are the limitations. Is it words? Time? Or megabytes.

And how would you know how many megabytes is acceptable?

A megabyte per second is good.

The Dark Side Returns

If you buy a Zune player from Microsoft then you'll be able to share your songs with your friends using its built-in wireless link.

However Microsoft, clearly worried about what the record companies will think, has decided that you'll only be able to listen to a transferred song three times, and that after three days you won't be able to play it at all. Says the BBC's Bill Thompson.

Zune could have been a deal competitor in the digital audio player market but Microsoft has not yet learned the lesson. It is described here and the outcome will be more expensive wars and another alternative on the market that will hack to monopolies.

I just do not understand why normally rational people cannot see that the market has changed.

Understanding that disintermediation is a major issue for companies is advice that the Public Relations manager must put before the board.

In the meantime, I will remove IE from my computer again.

Bebo gets tough

The music social-networking site announced a new feature on Thursday that allows Web page owners to pre-vet all posts to their pages. The change enables owners to preview all responses, and delete or permit them based on their own discretion. They can also delete previous posts they do not like and ban specific posters altogether, reports cNet.

This puts even more control into the hands of the community... not a bad thing. It also means that badly pitched ideas and promotions will get no play time.

Linking up with a broadcaster to campign blog

Pakistan rape victim Mukhtar Mai has been in the international spotlight as a result of her campaign to seek justice for herself and other women in Pakistan.

She has been writing a blog for the BBC's Urdu website with the assistance of the BBC's Nadeem Saeed.

Is this a new breed of activism an campaigning? Are there opportunities to tie your blog to a high exposure we/news site like the BBC.

Food for thought and creative campaign ideas.

Good blog pitch

George Bush Snr is at the Ryder cup this week and is pictured on the BBC Ryder Cup Blog with glamoutous Ryder Cup WAGs. A well pitched story to the BBC bloggers the.

Sunderland Football Club seeks bloggers

Sunderland Football club is looking for Sunderland fans in Ireland to become resident bloggers here on safc.com.

The interest in Sunderland from Ireland has escalated in recent months, for obvious reasons.

Chairman Niall Quinn heads a consortium of predominantly Irish businessmen, Roy Keane, from Cork, is the club's manager and his squad features many Irish players.

Everyday Sunderland is on TV, radio and in the papers in Ireland.

Safc has had a stream of emails in recent weeks - from Dublin to Donegal - from fans wanting to know how they can set up an official Irish branch of the Sunderland Supporters' Association. The interest is huge.

To help with this initiative, safc wants some more blogging. Applications to safc

Alliance and Leicester gets e-prizes

Financial Services Forum has recognised effectiveness rather than merely awarding good copy or a creative advertisement in its awards scheme this year. Alliance and Leicester won twice, for e-commerce and integrated campaigns, as did Scottish Widows, which won in the public relations and new product, service or innovation categories.

Rider Cup chic

Cathy Martin, a fashion public relations consultant, said the golf WAGs knew how to look classy and chic but without taking attention away from their partners.

"With the golf WAGs (wives and girlfriends), they don't want to be the centre of attention.

"It's about their husbands and their sport," she said.

Sensible PR for the girls and thier golfing husbands

Social Text explained

IWR reports the Social Text upgrade and explains how this blog/wiki combo works.

The Sun Shines

I am often asked to explain social media in simple terms. I am defeated. But along comes the Sun Newspaper... great journalism and today.... How to download podcasts. As easy on the brain as Page three is on the eye.

Copyright or copywrong

Cory Doctorow's website is Craphound.com, and he is co-editor of Boing Boing: A Directory of Wonderful Things. He also has some interesting views about copyright.

He says:

Science fiction is a genre of clear-eyed speculation about the future. It should have no place for wishful thinking about a world where readers willingly put up with the indignity of being treated as "licensees" instead of customers.

It may be worth the while of a Public Relations manager to ask if the company copyright statements are for the company or consumers and if the company - why?

Are your stakeholders Licencees?

Read the full article here.

Attribution Rules

Over at Media Orchard, they are debating attribution.
They are finding the newspapers are no longer quoting sources:

Matt Duffy, a college journalism instructor, has noticed that pubs as esteemed as the Wall Street Journal are running quotes directly from press releases without citing the source.

Is this how bloggers should behave - nope. Is it how we should reference work in other PR activities - Nope.

And if you do... chances are you will get exposed as a fraud online.

Ethical and practical reasons not to follow the hacks.

How Much is YouTube worth?

Michael Arrington at Techcrunch is saying that YouTube is looking for $1.5 billion.

He makes these points which are relevant to a potential purchaser:

YouTube is serving over 100 million videos per day, with 65,000 or so new videos uploaded daily.

These 100 million daily video views aren’t people watching kittens fall aleep. Most of the popular videos on YouTube contain copyrighted material that YouTube shouldn’t be presenting in the first place.

But it is a very useful service for the PR industry, allowing you to make your company videos available on line for everyone to see (and share with friends).

A really Good description of RSS

Back In Skinny Jeans has a great explaination of RSS, that essential that makes social media , well, social media.

For those of us who want a simple explaination, its really good.