Edelman 'New Media Release' is a PR exercise

PR spin, especially from 'Edelman, the world’s largest independent public relations firm' (would it, could it be anything else - the marketing boiler plate from the marketing boiler just has to be added), has announced that it has a new template for press/social media story announcements - A sort of replacement for the old fashioned press release. Fantastic!

The concept of a social media news release, says Edelman, 'has been a key topic of discussion within the public relations profession during the past several months'.

Of course, had Edelman been awake, they would known that this has been a key topic of conversation for half a decade and that there is already a 'social media release' and it has been available for four years from Yellowhawk.


This would have saved Edelman’s me2revolution team (part of the world’s largest independent public relations firm) development of the StoryCrafter software (to help accelerate the industry’s adoption of the social media news release) years (okay - minutes) of revolutionary fervour.

One, of course cannot get a close look behind this revolution. In an open source aid to adoption of social media the command and control me2revolution (the technical brains behind the world’s largest independent public relations firm) did not acquire the ethos that goes with being a revolutionary (ahh for the good old days - where are the anarchists?).

Probably more important is that this has all the trappings of an underfunded, me-too, 'Public Relations Exercise' into the fashionable world of 'my new media is bigger than your new media releases' or Todd Defran 1.0. with (the world’s largest independent public relations firm) Edelman spin.

Here are some things one might expect in a NMR:

The Todd Defran layout
Content in format that can be re-purposed for print, web, blog, podcast, vcast, sms alert, mobile web, iTV. With full content for editorial mashup (including two-shots etc), deep briefing by way of searchable, editable wiki content.
It has to be XPRL compliant, NewsML compliant and must be able to have NITF tags the IPTC words need to be identified for the news agencies and for the business community there has to be an XBRL schema interface.

For authentication there is a need to have automated (duel key?) security and these days it is simple to include trace, tracking, monitoring and evaluation components.

Plug-ins might also include auto notifications to:
Backflip BlinkBits Blinklist blogmarks
Buddymarks CiteUlike del.icio.us digg
Diigo dzone FeedMarker Feed Me Links!
Furl Give a Link Gravee Hyperlinkomatic
igooi kinja Lilisto Linkagogo
Linkroll looklater Magnolia maple
Netscape netvouz Newsvine Raw Sugar
RecommendzIt.com reddit Rojo Scuttle
Segnalo Shadows Simpy Spurl
Squidoo tagtooga Tailrank Technorati
unalog Wink wists Yahoo My Web

I did not see the button to 'blog this release' , I did not see the 'vlog this' button or the podcasting buttons. There does not seem to be an 'email to a friend' capability or 'turn this into a PDF' for (the the dead tree paper) freaks in your office button.

I just have a feeling that this is another 'fire from the hip and to hell with the consequences' PR approach to an important issue.

Edeman (the world’s largest independent public relations firm) wanted to be seen to be the web 2.0 leader. Its WalMart problems show a lack of training in-house. Its pitching policies to bloggers show an even bigger training gap and now it is showing that it has only a shaky grasp of new media and its opportunities.

As far as I can see, this announcement is nothing more than a digital version of a 1970's backgrounder press brief with tags instead of tabs. Big Deal!

Some publishers don't get it

"I do think the internet is a problem, but it is also the solution," said Fabrice Rousselot, Libération's internet editor.

"The mistake I think for any kind of media today would be to think they could do anything without the internet.

"You have to integrate the internet as part of your business model."

So far so good.

But then both the editor of the mass selling french newspaper and David Reid, the journalist on the BBC's Click programme fall off their perch.

Reid says:


"There is not much point, for example, putting exactly the same stuff on the website as they put in the paper."

Followed by this quote from Mr Rousselot.

"If you offer on your website the exact same content as in your newspaper, why would people buy the newspaper? It makes no sense economically"

But, Mr Rousselot, you miss the point. People read newspapers and people read web sites. Is a web site the same as a newspaper?

Of course not. They are different. People read newspapers because they are newspapers. They enjoy a sensation. People read articles on-line because it is news and offers them an instant of information.

Why sacrifice half of the users of an article by not having your content online?

UK Two Years ahead of US for online advertsing

In an interesting review and projection for next year Alan Patrick notes that the UK is almost two years ahead of the US in terms of online advertising. At least, that's the conclusion of Terry S. Semel, chief executive of Yahoo!, in a recent New York Times interview. The situation has arisen mainly through the underlying growth of broadband in the UK.

During 2006 broadband penetration increased from about 40 per cent to 50 per cent. In addition, the time people spend online has risen to 23 hours a week and online spending has risen from about £800 per head to £1,100 per head.

As companies have followed customers online, internet advertising has grown rapidly. By the end of June 2006 it was up from 8 per cent to 10 per cent of all UK ad spend and is expected to be nearer 14 per cent by December 2006 - the highest ad spend per head in the world.

Would you believe it of - Marketers!

Dubious Internet marketers are planting stories, paying people to promote items, and otherwise trying to manipulate rankings on Digg and other so-called social media sites like Reddit and Delicious to drum up more links to their Web sites and thus more business, experts say.

Oh! Thats OJK then its not a 'PR excercise'.
It is a PR issue and I hope that the PR Managers are giving the marketers a real ear bashing or worse.

Finding your people

Stuart Bruce pointed to this 'mashup'.

The numbers of applications for this kind of thing goes on for ever and ever.
IN PR just being able to show whwre shops, representatives, spokespeople etc are located, is one such application..

Thanks Stuart.

Thanks PR. - you did good

This is, for once, a positive story on the public relations professional community. It is able to get its act together and to make an effective impact on the public sphere while promoting a sustainable view of the profession.

What broadband did

Internet usage across western Europe is being driven by cheap broadband deals and social-networking websites, the European Interactive Advertising Association (EIAA) has revealed.

Countries such as the UK and France are now experiencing broadband penetration rates of over 84 per cent, while the average time spent online each week has risen by over ten per cent in the past 12 months.

Meanwhile, social media websites are now visited by almost one quarter of all European internet users every month, with that figure rising to 32 per cent among 16 to 24-year-olds.

Being relevant - PR does not need to be

On Friday I will be involved in a CIPR Senior practitioners round table breakfast. Of course it is going to be fun meeting up with Hugh Birley, Justin Hayward, Larry Webber, and Michael Blowers among others.

What can one say in such highly respected company.

I suppose a lot of what I want to (say is summed up in David Dunkley Gyimah's video and web site. The video is the winning International Jury independent video journalist award held in Berlin called 8 Days.

Against a backdrop of:

Declining (media ad) sales figures; increasing pressure from multimedia news deliveries; citizen journalism; Philip Meyer's assertion that newspapers are heading towards redundancy; and the BBC's plans to introduce a more localised form of news in the regions, what do you do if you're a newspaper publisher?

The story is of how eight local newspaper journalists learned to create video news stories.

What I find compelling about this is the speed and extent to which local newspaper journalists can bring television style reporting to their 'newspaper' 'readerships'.

Charlie Westberg , Cleveland Police's veteran media manager was deeply involved (and notes that Cleveland Police now knows it will have to alter the press conference room to accommodate this new breed of print journos with cameras). It was a learning experience for him too and he also found out that the new breed of 'print' journalists could also use CCTV footage because now they are videojournalists.

You see, my view is that the PR professional does not have to change. The 'press release by post or email... phone call... I will get back to you...' model still exists.

It does not have to change.

The journalists and publications will change but PR's don't have to.

They may become less relevant when their unchanging ways are set against Alan Yentob's programme on BBC1 last night. Yentob met Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the web - and explored how TBL's creativity has fuelled the creativity of millions of others.

He showed Dandy blogger Dickon Edwards and sex blogger Abby Lee; the hardcore members of the Arctic Monkeys message board; masked animator David Firth - whose cartoons have been watched by millions on the web - and Ewan Macdonald, the young Scot who wrote the millionth entry in Wikipedia - all feature alongside figures such as veteran director Ken Russell - currently making a film to upload to YouTube.

I know there are those in PR who still want to use paper; who believe that this online craze is a fad or marketing or just not for them. So be it.

How will they respond to the video journalist? How will they be relevant to the Arctic Monekey, David Firth and Ken Russell generation? Is it by being relevant to the Daily Telegraph generation housed as it is in a new multi media press centre?

Valerie Grove of The Times puts this point of view:

Like Paxo sneering at Newsnight’s podcast, I recoil at infinite choice/infinite accessibility. If “too much information” is now a conversational mantra, why unleash more of it? Who wants a Christmas round-robin from everyone on the planet? Yentob gave us a glimpse of the website someone has created in his name (Darth Yentob) and countered with his own online version of his virtual self — tall, skinny, smooth-suited, able to dance and fly: “the possibilities are infinite”. What fresh hell is this? He left me baffled, and happy to flee back to my finite world.

It's an understandable argument but its flaw is that she wrote it on The Times web site a long day before the print version hits London's Gentleman's Clubs. Her argument failed in its delivery.

For the publisher it is print, web, sound, video, blog, wiki, virtual space as well as conference, exhibition and bound keepsake annual. Mix and match at will to get eyeballs and those elusive advertising shillings, groats, pounds or euros.

The internet will account for a fifth of all UK advertising revenue by 2009, and will almost match the amount spent on TV advertising, according to figures from ZenithOptimedia. The group's Advertising Expenditure Forecast reveals that the UK has the world’s highest proportion of online ad revenues, at 13.5%. The need for publishers to be online is compelling. It is where to advertise and is a place where tempting people to your web site or other internet medium is critical. More on-line editorial vehicles means more opportunities to sell advertising. Its quite simple.

“Every pound withdrawn from traditional media either to be saved or spent online, where supply is in handsome surplus, exerts more deflationary pressure on the total market,” said Group M in a recent report on the British ad market. “And if online proves more productive, advertisers have the option of investing less.”

These media bucks that are powering the move online is aimed at a very active audience. On average, Britons spend 23 hours a week on the Internet, according to the Internet Advertising Bureau, says the New York Times. The Internet accounts for about a quarter of Britons’ time spent with all media, according to Citigroup, nearly double the percentage in the United States. Americans use their computers an average of 14 hours a week, reported by Nielsen Media Research.

Does this mean that the PR industry can afford not to respond. Yes absolutely.

Does this mean that it will be relevant?

Oh yes, perhaps I can suggest that there are compelling reasons for the adoption of social media without the PR industry having to get involved as bloggers or podcasters or vloggers. They have to get involved because their primary journalistic publics have to be online and have to be able to use social media tools. Commercially the driver is too big not to. We just have to create the tools that will make life easier for journalists.

It is just that normal PR practice 20 century style is changing. The press release, for example is being updated and in a variety of forms.

The further opportunity of using social media for direct interactions with our constituencies is just a bonus. A big one, but a bonus.

The Cloud

The Cloud

The Internet, as we know is huge. It shifts masses of data via a network. This three dimensional space with millions of nodes using a range of pipes (wires, radio, cable, cellular, even sound signals) is huge at the core. Most of that data is of no interest or value and is well beyond the understanding of more than a few dozen people. Who knows, cares or even has an interest in the TQM data transfer about the real time ware characteristics of a bit drilling holes in an engine for a manufacturer three thousand miles away for a customer two thousand miles further on and a designer in another location altogether. But it is that sort of information that makes up the big juicy heart of the Internet.

On top is the rich, thick, heaving and growing relationship cloud. It feeds off email, instant messaging, web, VOIP, and other stuff that gives these billions of people the sort of Internet they want and need. This is the Internet of relationships. The social Internet. Here are billions of relationships - the Relationship Cloud.

This is the stuff of social communities. Groups of, now, billions of people who, in the context of the time, environment, and interaction and with values held in common express themselves using a raft of different technologies in even more billions of relationships. The daily billions of e-Mail, MySpace, Bebo, YouTube or eBay social interactions are essentially small group in nature. They are each first and foremost of a culture, of social standards, of language, of place.

The groups of people, the social interactions are dynamic, pervasive and permissive. they reach deep into the Internet core and flirt and flame with the marketing veneer of actors on the fringe of the The Cloud.

Some 70% of all email is considered spam by people in the Relationships Cloud. By extrapolation, is 70% of all the other commercial interceptions in the social Internet also regarded as spam?

I have a sneaking suspicion that there is more than a grain of truth here. Do we want the flashing advertisement, the pop-ups, the click throughs? Can we mechanically mentally block them out. How does The Cloud flirt and flame with marketers?

The Relationships Cloud believes it has rights. It believes it has rights to availability of the Internet, it claims rights over copyright, it believes it has rights over the views of others, it believes it has rights to service. It accepts some responsibilities. It is prepared to tolerate some advertising and cost for delivery service. It will, in some cases pay 'fair' prices but the line is finely drawn.

It does not matter what the accountants and economists say. The Relationships Cloud is valuable. Some parts of it like MySpace and YouTuble are represented on balance sheets, are worth billions in the 'real' world. But theses parts of the Relationships Cloud but a few ant hills in a world infested by ants.

It does not matter what the sociologists like to think, the online groups are a real phenomena that uses games to build whole new communities as real as Trumpton to a five year old.

In the management of nation states the boundaries have changed. Politics has changed. It is not that boundaries have been abolished. It is that a different type of boundary now also exists.

This is not a matter of haves or have nots, Internet users and non users. All mankind is sucked into the mediation of the Internet. They are affected by the social groups that form and make up the Relationships Cloud.

Right now, people in marketing and advertising and PR are trying to stand close to the Relationships Cloud. Their web sites gain traffic, sell goods and services and offer information with thousands of interactions but into a mart of social groups aggregating relationship transactions counted by the stars in the sky.

But, one gets the impression that the relationship cloud radiates powerfully and can burn and sicken the corporation that stands too close or offend to greatly.

The waspish nature of The Cloud is quite capable of wreaking vengeance. Too much spam and spam blockers become common and email addresses are just abandoned. Popups are blocked, adverts are just avoided (RSS still scores well here). Blocking and flaming becomes common, viruses are created or The Cloud simply flows round the obstacles.

The Cloud is quite happy to shrug its shoulders over command and copyright and work round control. More sights and sounds are being downloaded than forever and an even smaller proportion is being paid for now. The Cloud has spoken.

The Cloud can also attack. It will attack companies. Ask Dell, Wal-Mart/Edelman.

We have not yet seen a major confrontation between The Cloud and other institutions but the skirmishes have been pretty bloody.

It attacks individuals too.

The Cloud has no Parliament. It is and is not a democracy. It has a currencies of relationship values. It has no grand rules and yet tends to self policing.

The Cloud can be wrong by any measure and yet The Cloud can avoid the justice of our traditions.

Love the social interaction and beware The Cloud.

Photo: Photoshop talent.

BBC get its licence fee payers to create its content

Oliver Luft reports that the BBC News 24 has launched a news programme based entirely on user-generated material.

Your News, which began a pilot run on Saturday, will feature stories, features and video proving most popular with viewers on TV and the internet.

Of course, I expect some PR type will get in there with something worth watching.

Disintermediate the Ad Agencies

This move by Google could make some agencies wince. Anyone can buy Google Ads. Its easy, cheap and understandable - and now can cross over to newsprint (and radio, TV and well... YouTube) like falling down at an Agency lunch.

Public Relations the strategic management function - not a communications strategem

Three weeks ago Professor Grunig put his thoughts about what public relations is to the New York Yale Club.

I quote:

Simply put, I have come to understand public relations as a strategic management
function that uses communication to cultivate relationships with publics that have a stake in the
behavior of the organization—either because they benefit from or are harmed by what Dewey
called the consequences of that behavior. Public relations has value to an organization because it
provides publics with whom it develops relationships a voice in management decisions that
affect them.
...

Quality relationships have both financial and nonfinancial value because they reduce the
costs of regulation, legislation, and litigation; reduce the risk of implementing decisions; and
sometimes increase revenue. They also have the secondary effects of improving the reputation of an organization (what members of a public think about it) and reducing negative publicity
because there are fewer bad behaviors for journalists to write about. The only way to “manage a
reputation” is through managing the organizational behaviors that are reflected in that reputation.

Some critics argue that the interests of organizations and publics are incompatible.
However, a great deal of research shows that organizations that interact with their publics
responsibly are also the most successful—based both on financial and nonfinancial criteria.

Cutlip and Chase identified a gap between elite practitioners and the mass of tacticians
and technicians who massage the media daily to make organizations and their products look
good. Some theorists might say that the elite practitioners have a theory of the nature of public
relations and its value and values whereas the mass of technicians fly by the seat of their pants or simply do what employers or clients ask them to do. I would say, in contrast, that both groups have a theory—just different theories. I believe there have been, and still are, two major
competing theories of public relations both in practice and in the academic world. I call these
approaches the symbolic, interpretive, paradigm and the strategic management, behavioral,
paradigm.

Scholars and practitioners following the symbolic paradigm generally assume that public
relations strives to influence how publics interpret the organization. These cognitive
interpretations are embodied in such concepts as image, reputation, brand, impressions, and
identity. The interpretive paradigm can be found in the concepts of reputation management in
business schools, integrated marketing communication in advertising programs, and rhetorical
theory in communication departments. Practitioners who follow the interpretive paradigm
emphasize publicity, media relations, and media effects. Although this paradigm largely
relegates public relations to a tactical role, the use of these tactics does reflect an underlying
theory. Communication tactics, this theory maintains, create an impression in the minds of
publics that allow the organization to buffer itself from its environment—to use the words of
organizational theorists—which in turn allows the organization to behave in the way it wants.
In contrast, the behavioral, strategic management, paradigm focuses on the participation
of public relations executives in strategic decision-making to help manage the behavior of
organizations. In the words of organizational theorists, public relations is a bridging, rather than
a buffering, function. It is designed to build relationships with stakeholders, rather than a set of
messaging activities designed to buffer the organization from them. The paradigm emphasizes
two-way and symmetrical communication of many kinds to provide publics a voice in
management decisions and to facilitate dialogue between management and publics both before
and after decisions are made.

Francesco Lurati of the
University of Lugano, distinguished between the strategic role of corporate communication in
defining organizational objectives and its tactical role in supporting organizational objectives. He
pointed out that practitioners of public relations are eager to assume a strategic role, but they
typically define strategic public relations as communication that supports the implementation of
organizational objectives that corporate communicators had no role in defining. In his words:
“From this perspective corporate communication is considered strategic when it pursues
objectives which are merely aligned with the corporate ones. The term ‘strategy’ does not change
the tactical nature of the task communication fills. In other words, the communication function
here makes no contribution to the defining of corporate strategy.”
If we truly want metrics that show public relations has value to an organization, the
measurements required are deceptively simple. We should measure the nature and quality of
relationships to establish and monitor the value of public relations. And we should evaluate
public relations strategies and tactics to determine which are most effective in cultivating
relationships. In his book, Corporate Public Relations, Marvin Olasky, a conservative critic of
public relations, argued that before the invention of “public relations,” corporate executives
engaged in “private relations” by being personally involved in the community and civic
organizations. With the advent of public relations, which he equated with the interpretive
paradigm, Olasky said that public relations practitioners intervened in this relationship to
manipulate the media and to participate in camouflage techniques of supposed social
responsibility to isolate executives from their publics. Olasky thus identified the importance of
relationships in public relations. Today, we must use social, mediated, and cyber relationships as
well as the interpersonal relationships of Olasky’s ideal time in the past. Relationships are the
key to effective public relations, however, and they can be measured to show its value.

Excellent!

How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything

Howard Rheingold says this about don Tapscott's new book: "The copy on the website is a little hype-y, but the research behind the book is very solid, and their thinking about intellectual property, collaboration, innovation is deeper than their promotional copy indicates."
This is going to be a great Christmas!

Technolgy is finding out if you are to be trusted online

I have been looking at the Google Quality Score process. It examines the experience of consumers as they click through to a site as part of the Google AdWords product.

I thought that it would be interesting to think of this process in terms of whether a web site could be considered trustworthy. In a commons of interest sort of way, yes it can.

If one extends this idea to content such as a press release..... yes you get where I am coming from. The is an application that suggests that 'If I get a press release from this organisation, it is probably an extension of the truth' or 'Its propbably trustworthy'.

Very handy if you are a hard pressed publisher wanting to serve up only worthwhile content to your journalists' RSS feed.

I would bet a fortune that a 'Trust barometer' using the Google API will pop up pretty soon.

The Power Geeks - Bloggers

Forrester Research has said that the four million European internet users who write blogs should be "got on side" by advertisers wanting to succeed in the online market.

The company's study into blogger attributes has revealed that those who write blogs spend more time online than they do watching television, and that they spend 50 per cent more time online than regular internet users.

Crucially, Forrester reveals that bloggers are more welcoming of targeted advertising than most internet users, with 41 per cent saying they don't mind such adverts compared to an average figure of 34 per cent.

Bloggers are also more willing to investigate new products, and the social aspect of the medium means that almost 25 per cent of bloggers trust other blogs, compared to just ten per cent of all users.

"Active bloggers can make or break a brand in less than a day. Firms shouldn't fake a relationship with them or they will experience a backlash. To get bloggers on their side, firms should gain bloggers' trust by establishing an honest and transparent relation," said Forrester research director Jaap Favier.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Brands

Andy Lark has an found an excellent article about how PR people can listen to conversations about brand to get a better understanding of what is being said about brands.
The original article is to be found here.

Cutting out web censorship

A tool has been created capable of circumventing government censorship of the web, according to researchers reports the BBC.

The free program has been constructed to let citizens of countries with restricted web access retrieve and display web pages from anywhere.

The University of Toronto's Citizen Lab software, called psiphon, will be released on 1 December.

Net censorship is a growing issue, and several countries have come under fire for blocking online access.

Of course, this is just another example of how Internet Transparency at work.

We really do have to wake up to this phenomenon and learn to live with it.

Making millions in virtual worlds - a PR opportunity?

Still think Second Life is just a game asks B L Ochman. Rob Hof's Businessweek blog, The Tech Beat, reports that Anshe Chung, Second Life's virtual land baroness, has become the first millionaire in Second Life - in real US dollars - from profits entirely earned inside a virtual world. She parlayed her fortune from a $9.95 investment in a Second Life account two years ago.
No we may even see a PR firm act as agent in virtual worlds to make thier fortune - that would be fun.

YouTube on Mobiles

Users who subscribe to Verizon's Vcast service will be able to view content on the YouTube website via their mobiles.

The trial, which will begin in December, will also allow users to post video clips from their phones more easily.

It is likely that similar tie-ups will follow as mobile operators look for value added social network opportunities. Services in the UK are not far away.

More than 100 million video clips are viewed every day on the YouTube website.

Get your video voted onto TV

A TV satellite channel dedicated to user-generated content has been launched on the UK-based Sky platform.

The Sumo TV channel, available on Sky Channel 146, will show clips from the Sumo TV website.

Participants who upload video clips to the Sumo TV website will have a chance for them to be broadcast on national TV and get paid if they are broadcast..

Which clips are broadcast will be down to how popular they prove online. All content will be closely monitored by Cellcast, the interactive TV company behind the channel.

I guess there will be a load of competition for good content