PayPal have 33% UK market penetration

One-third of all UK adults now have a PayPal account, according to the online payment company.

Not only does this open opportunities for e-commerce, it means there is a currency out there for more on-line PR as well. As direct PR generated relationships mature, the buying proposition can be as a direct result of PR activity.

Currently, around 15 million people in the UK use the system to make and receive online payments.

PayPal CEO Geoff Iddison said advances in technology and the demands of a "time-poor" society are transforming the way we shop and transfer money.

More about heads in the oven

Second Life - the corporate invasion

Besides Crayon and Text100, lots of real-world businesses that have set up outposts in Second Life.

Adidas
Nissan
Sun Microsystems
Reebok
Penguin
American Apparel
Reuters
CNET Networks
PA Consulting
Yankee Stadium
Bartle Bogle Hegarty

On line more secure than you think

e-commerce is far safer than it is perceived to be. And yet the message appears not to be getting through.

Sure there are problems - where there is money there is crime - but statistics from PayPal (which has a very obvious reason to want to address these concerns) suggest the majority of UK adults still think the internet poses a considerable risk.

And, according to Silicon.com

A credit card number has never - to our knowledge - been intercepted in flight. This is because, to use an analogy, it is like trying to shoot down the smallest, fastest moving bird through a thicket of trees.

To further the analogy, it's far easier for the criminals to wait therefore until all these birds are sat in one big coop with all the other birds and then try to find a way to take them all rather than wrestling with the complexity of taking them one by one.

As such, the database is more commonly the target than the transaction. And databases are at risk whether it is an ecommerce site or a high street shop processing the transaction.

e-media spend - £36 per year per person

Nielsen/NetRatings reported that UK consumers are starting to embrace the idea of paying for their e-media.

On average people are spending £36 per year. Video content is closing the gap on audio, accounting for 43 per cent of spending.

The biggest spenders are unsurprisingly the 18 to 24 age group, which spends an average of £5.34 per month on online content. Men shell out around 40 per cent more than women per month.

Does this mean that men need more entertaining.

Interactive video

The Agent Provocateur film, will be the first viral film that allows viewers to click on objects within a moving video and be directed straight to the relevant information webpage/site.

The viral trailer is being distributed this week by NovaRising via interactive video email, which opens directly within the receiver’s email application. Initial click through rates of up to 56% have been recorded so far in the campaign.

In the meantime, in the interests of factual completion, I thought you may like to see the video in YouTube.

It cuts out the email middleman.

Integrate email and cell phones plus mobile video and podcasts

Allisblue has announced a partnership with European Telecom, to offer its 'SMS2mail' service in the UK.

The technology creates a link between SMS and email and transform all types
of mobile telephones into Web remote controls.

By sending an sms (or placeing a a call) to initiate the transfer of content, applications can include:
News briefs, administrative forms, access to a contest, downloading of an MP3, Video clips, Manuals and even a video game.

This will be a useful tool for all kinds of PR activity including issues and crisis management, information for journalists, podcasting and lots of other things.

The Online PR opportunity

A study, commissioned by Bluestreak, reveals consumer behaviour and attitudes towards emerging technologies including podcasts, text messages (SMS), RSS, blogs and message boards as well as the more traditional email platform.

The rate of adoption for new communication technologies represents a huge opportunity for Public Relations. The findings of the survey help us find out why.

People use a range of channles: 100 percent of respondents currently use email compared to 88 percent using text messaging; 71 percent using message boards; 63 percent using blogs; 36 percent using podcasting and 28 percent using RSS.

There is acceptance of adjunct messages and even advertising as the trade-off for good content and a further willingness to accept ads and "sponsored" content as long as the information is relevant and high-quality. As always, over-communicating can have an adverse effect both on the marketer's brand and their bottom line.

The proliferation of sponsored channels seems to have an impact on consumers’ usage (30 percent would stop reading a blog they know it is sponsored, 34 percent would stop reading a sponsored message board). Text messaging advertising is cited as the most unpopular form of advertising communication among these five emerging channels (77 percent of respondents say there is too much text advertising and 80 percent feel negatively towards text message advertisers).

A majority of respondants expressed a feeling thta ads are either “random” “get in the way” or “are not directed to me”

Although consumers accept the existence of advertising, most do not respond unless they feel the offer is "personalized" or "useful"

Although podcasting is included in this criticism, it also had the highest score among its peer set on relevance/personalization with 25 percent feeling the ads accomplished that goal.


Consumers are mainly concerned about viruses, identity theft and spyware as byproducts of using such channels (64, 56 and 53 percent respectively). Spam concerns were listed below these at 44 percent.

Respondents consider “emails they once signed up for but no longer want” as spam.

Building communities would still seem to offer the best opportunity.

PR TV now playing

PR practitioners can now host their own on line video Screening Rooms, inviting others to watch high-quality video content, while they control the video experience.

Online portal Lycos has launched a new site that lets users watch video content and chat with other users at the same time.

Initially available as a beta test, Lycos Cinema uses a patent-pending video platform which allows users to view and chat in real-time.

IBM sticks its head in the oven

On Monday I commented about how we have such an awful time with our heads stuck in the virtual world of our computer screens. Well IBM has already given it a lot of thought.
CEO Sam Palmisano announced a $100 million spending plan in front of more than 7,000 employees at a Town Hall meeting held on the popular virtual world Second Life. Palmisano unveiled 10 new business opportunities the company intends to pursue.
Each of those ideas will receive approximately $10 million in funding to be spent over the next 12 months. One of the ideas Palmisano will announce is that IBM is forming a new business unit to help clients use lessons learned from virtual worlds to real-world business problems.

Chief technology officer, Irving Wladawsky-Berger, is on record saying (on his blog) "using such virtual, highly visual capabilities to help us design, simulate, optimize, operate and manage business activities of all sorts is going to be one of the most important breakthroughs in the IT industry over the next decade."

"I am convinced that dealing with such business applications in a kind of SimBusiness fashion -- that is, the application feels like a realistic simulation of the business and its operations -- will not only transform IT but business itself."

I have no doubt.

Web advertsing - big under estimations - Semel

There is a fixation among so many people that the internet is the web. US online ad revenues have reached a new record according to figures from the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB). They are talking about web sites (remember those things - sort of brochures with gizmos).

The report, conducted by PwC, showed a 33% increase in internet ad revenues from the same period in 2005.

But, in a speech in London yesterday, Yahoo! CEO Terry Semel said growth predictions were underestimating the market by failing to take account of the potential of video, social media and mobiles advertising. "[Video] will be ever-present throughout the internet, and it will find its proper way to advertise. "So whether it's mobile or whether it's video or whether it's more and more community, these factors have not gone into those numbers, so we think the actual growth potential of advertising online is really being understated."

And lots of it is 'community' the natural space for PR practice.

Local Newspapers stringers for the Beeb

BBC director general Mark Thompson speaking at the Society of Editors conference promised that online local TV would work in "partnership" with local newspapers, and even pay them for content.

"But in the words of one regional newspaper executive, the most constructive thing Thompson could have said would have been: "We're not going to do it."

"Thompson told the Glasgow conference this week: "In addition to our own local and regional newsrooms, we want to draw on the newsgathering clout of the UK's local and regional newspapers — and we'll pay for it.

"That means a revenue stream, but also visibility and credit on the BBC's new local service."

Not to mention an extra outlet for the video content generated by local newspaper reporters.

Vodaphone offers grungy broadband

Vodafone has said it will offer broadband for £25 a month from January 8 to Vodafone mobile phone customers.

The "Vodafone at Home" package includes line rental, unlimited broadband access, landline calls within Britain and 25% off calls to mobiles. Bla de Bla de Bla.

Rivals Carphone Warehouse, Orange and satellite TV operator BSkyB, BT et al have been battling for subscribers with grungy 2 to 8 meg Broadband a load of junk dumped on your computer (called 'giveaways') and time wasting hours - sometimes days and days and weeks of Internet downtime while they swap you to their equally slug like service.

If Vodafone could offer cellular broadband for my laptop at a price that makes sense, a decent link from phone to computer without a heap more software dumped on it (oh... and yet ANOTHER bloody email address), they may have a chance.

Welsh put forward best PR campaigns

David Williamson tells us that SWANSEA-BASED public relations agency MGB PR has notched up eight nominations in the PR industry's flagship awards.

This record number of possible prizes at the Chartered Institute of Public Relations awards is a first for Wales in the process as it now holds the title of the most-nominated PR company in the UK.

Brits lag in the blog race

Among Europeans Britons are the least switched on to web logs, an Ipsos MORI poll found.

The French are far more savvy.

The survey of 2,200 Europeans that 90 percent of French people surveyed said they were familiar with blogs, nearly twice as many as the number of Britons interviewed (50 percent).

But the rest of Europe is barely logged-on when it comes to online diaries either. The Spanish did only marginally better than Britons in recognising the term blog (51 percent), while in Germany, 55 percent were blog-aware, and in Italy, 58 percent had heard of the term reports Reuters.

Blogs - the new sellers medium?

Blogs are becoming a force to be reckoned with as a means of advertising products, according to an Ipsos MORI poll. It found that the Internet journals are a more trusted source of information than TV advertising or e-mail marketing.

Well! What a suprise! Here is more of the report from Reuters.

Ipsos MORI found a direct link between blogs, or user-generated content, and people's intentions to buy goods or services. Any company that fails to come up to standard should beware. The blog is replacing word of mouth for endorsing or condemning a product or service. About a third of those Europeans questioned said they had been put off making a purchase after reading negative comments on the Internet from customers or other web-users, while 52 percent said they had been persuaded to buy after a positive review on a blog. Get it right, and blogs could be a boost to companies and even save on their advertising and marketing budgets. Blogs, or weblogs, are a more trusted source of information (24 percent) than television advertising (17 percent) and email marketing (14 percent), the survey commissioned by Hotwire, a technology public relations consultancy, said.But they still lag behind newspapers (30 percent).

Head in the Oven

The NewPR conference on Friday was, as always, great fun. The light bulbs that go on are especial fun and meeting Victoria Newlands (a student from Lincoln University who is really into social media) and having a good gossip with Simon Wakeman, Stuart Bruce, Neville Philip, Rob Skinner and Rob Skinner was an extra bonus.

Nicky and Andrew Wake from Don't Panic have a very friendly way of managing conferences which is a boon. I should say that Sam (from Bournemouth Uni was there too... Hi Sam! can't wait for you to blog about the conference too (and this is what we got up to while you trained it back for the Graduation Ball).

The conference closed with an overview of networking and a short but debate-provoking look at virtual environments but mostly Second Life.

One of the conference goers, said that she would rather out her head in the oven that go into SecondLife.

It struck me that this is where most of us really are.

We have our heads stuck, not in an oven but close to it, a computer screen. In there we play with a pretty clunky virtual environment (word processing, emailing, a bit of IM, cut, copy, save, drag, retype, look up phone number, tasks to do - all that sort of stuff). Its very boring. It is virtual environments with none of the fun. It is the equivalent of a smoky industrial town of the 19th century. It is a pretty smelly oven.

PR's, Journo's, marketers, CEO's all with their heads in the oven.

Perhaps it is time that decent virtual environment should be made available.

Something and somewhere worth inhabiting. A place where work is not clunky, soulless, and populated by documents, pages and emails but populated with people, action and results.

We have had our heads in an oven.... Can we move on now please?

Public Relations affects England soccer lin-up

ROD LIDDLE writing for the Times Online reports that:

".... it is assumed, probably correctly, that Beckham’s defenestration from the England set-up was a judgment based more on public relations than on Beckham’s apparently declining ability on the football pitch.

A new manager who began the job tainted by his association with the discredited previous regime asserted his supposed independence by dropping the player most closely connected to Sven-Göran Eriksson — the player Sven would never drop, no matter how hopelessly he was performing. Steve McClaren seems not to have the slightest intention of picking Beckham, no matter how catastrophically his first-choice XI perform."

The interesting part of this is a media comment that recognises a PR strategy into the management mix. The important part is that it shows how important it is, even for a Football star, to have a public relations strategy.

Voices for your podcast

After wading through the usual PR/marketing hype, this news from a press release may be useful.
Voices.com has added three new categories of voices including documentary voice over categories that you can use for you podcasts.

The abomination called a press release takes hundreds of words to say it but if you are really bored, the release was published at Newswire Today.

Google dug up worms

Google has apologised to users of its Google Video Blog, some 50,000 of whom were exposed to an email worm after three postings were infected and sent out to mailing lists. No details of how the incident happened have emerged, and Google claims to be 'taking steps' to prevent such occurrences reports Virus Bulletin.

The blog (here) is used to keep readers informed of the latest and best additions to the YouTube-style Google Video system, and includes an email subscription system for updates. The postings, made on Tuesday night and since removed, were infected with 'W32/Kapser.a@mm', also commonly known as MyWife, Nyxem or Blackmal and referred to in the press as the Kama Sutra worm.

For PR people this sort of news is a problem. Where do you go to for advice, how can you tell if you have a virus and how can you be sure you are not passing one on.

Try the virus checking software people. They have really good information on these things.

Telegraph.co.uk launches bloggers 'style' guide

Telegraph.co.uk, which has 14 bloggers, has published an editorial style guide for its bloggers.