It Just Happened

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The online module for a PR degree

I am pondering what we really need in a PR first degree course now.

At present the online module includes a syllabus that is primarily based round online strategy: how the online landscape is changing for organisations and how to assess the change (the Internet is ever evolving); Online demographics and segmentation (is segmentation now in the hands of the user?); the significance of value systems online (marketing speak served up as values lays organisations wide open to dissonance); development of aims and objectives (but this time aimed at the online communities of which there are many); strategy development (the mix and match of multi-touch communication and related effects); risk management (is a management function that is essential); tactical use of social media from YouTube to web widgets, wikis to blogs. We also have to develop strategies for graduates to keep up to date with online communication developments.

Students should provide case studies of social media to see how social media is being used and how. Must they must have their own blogs (even if it is an existing Bebo or MySpace account)? Is it ethical to force anyone and expose student experimentation to future employers - forever?

There is no substitute for work on a brief for an organisation (presented in a wiki - with all the background reserach) and they should use and apply web widgets, search, monitoring and evaluation tools and strategy software. They have to deal with legal, copyright and ethical issues and there is a case for the development of a video blog.

Add this to writing and semiotic skills on top of what theory remains (after the digital tsunami has wiped out 'the media' as we have known it for 50 years) and symmetrical relationship building and we have a start.

Oh... they must get that RSS feed going on week one otherwise they are as out of date as Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire (June 7, 1757 – March 30, 1806) buying votes with kisses.

Its a lot to handle.

But what have I missed out.....

Workplace Blogging is OK

James Richards has just posted his paper on work related blogs. It is timely because today The Telegraph reports that an Englishwoman sacked for bringing her employers in Paris into disrepute by writing an internet diary under the pseudonym petite anglaise was awarded £30,000 for wrongful dismissal yesterday.

	Catherine Sanderson: 'It's really fantastic to be vindicated like this'

In a test case for bloggers in France and beyond, a tribunal concluded that Catherine Sanderson, whose blog is said by some to be the equivalent of "Bridget Jones in Paris", had been dismissed "without real and serious causes".

Her former employer, the British accountancy firm Dixon Wilson, was ordered to pay 34-year-old Miss Sanderson 44,000 euros in compensation plus 500 euros in legal fees, and to reimburse the French benefits office the equivalent of six months of wages.

Meantime, The Register reports that Blogging is part of the job.

Last week, Sony BMG UK issued a new corporate marketing strategy.

According to an official release from the group, Ged Doherty, chairman and chief executive of SonyBMG in UK and Ireland, said the company "has made it obligatory for all senior staff at both Columbia Records and RCA Records to start blogging actively".

So what happens to staff who refuse to toe the corporate line, or perhaps fail to produce the required quantity of blog blather?

The Register had to find out.

The employment lawyers are going to get rich on this.

Internet Porosity

Roy Lipski coined the expression Internet Porosity for the CIPR/PRCA Internet Commission (published by the CIPR five years ago called 'The Death of Spin' a document now lost to practitioners and members alike now that online PR seems to be of interest to the PR industry). It describes the effect when people let slip information about their organisations to an online audience.

It can be accidental, innocent or malicious but it happens a lot.

There is more about this here and there is now some new research into into Internet porosity using blogs from James Richards .

Internet Porosity (listen to the podcast and see the definitions) is by no means new and the use of blogs is pretty old too. It is a factor in any and all online PR and so this paper is important for all practitioners.
For those that take online PR risk management seriously (and we all do - don't we - and here's how), this is an interesting paper.

Round up of news snippets.

This is a busy week for online PR news

Google is now mobile.

Half of Internet users in the UK shop on-line.

"You're looking at a 30-second ad, not a four-minute pod," said Mike Ripka of Millward Brown. "You'll sit around for 30 seconds, so you're highly engaged with the advertising." Audiences are less likely to get up during those 30 seconds than during TV ad pods.

Now you can use someone else's delivery system software to deliver goods if you are a local shop wanting to deliver locally.

At Bournemouth we teach online risk analysis as part of every campaign - good job too. Its really easy to have you TV commercials hi-jacked.

The ethics of the 'empty chair'

Like many people, I watched Jeremy Paxman on the BBC Newsnight programme Michael White of the Guardian and "Guido Fawkes" a political blogger.

The discussion talked of the relationship between Journalists, bloggers and politicians.

The debate told how some politician 'punish' some journalists by not allowing access, the 'empty chair' whereby access is denied to the fourth estate when the politician has had some sort of bust up with a newspaper, TV channel or journalist. The other side of this trade off is when journalists do not report or who selectively report about a politician in a way that harms the the politicians standing with the electorate and other constituencies.

This is, of course, an example of the all too cosy relationship between Public Relations and the Media.

Underlying this debate is a serious point.

Who is all this content really for? Would it be, just by mis-chance, electors or others who want to be informed about the events among politicians and government?

If not. It does not matter much, other than it is a huge and costly exercise affecting the public purse.

If it is, then there is a big issue and one would no longer doubt why people are turned off by political maneuvering to manipulate the information they need but a wrangle at their expense.

Lets take this further and into the realm of all Public Relations.

Lets suppose an organisation wants to get its message across to a constituency and relies on the media to act as the purveyor. Is this legitimate? Is it ethical?

There can only be legitimacy if this is the only method for communication. Today, of course, this is not so. There are endless channels for communication. The traditional Press, radio and TV are but three conduits among many (The press release is no more than a form of blog post that saves lazy journalists setting up effective RSS feeds).

If, on the other hand, the Press is being used to add legitimacy to a story, then it has to do the job. It should not be selective or deny access because it has had some sort of tiff. It cannot be childish about it. Today, the press release can find its way onto a web site; the background can be offered and debated using blogs, wikis or any other form of publishing and social media. On the other hand the Press can be critical, it can add that most precious of values, time and expertise. It has a resource and journalistic expertise to put the story into critical context. The same might be said of bloggers but without the authority of the publishing house. The closer the media gets to PR the less it is valued for its critical faculty and its authority.

At the same time, when a person (minister, politician, celebrity, company, brand) plays the empty chair routine and and does not provide access to a journalist, programme or newspaper, the media response has, once again, to be critical and explain to its audience that it is being denied access and transparently explain why it is not able to report or discuss issues in public.

The public, including the elector in the case of Fawkes, Paxman and White, can then make a judgement.

Pretending that the present state is 'News as Usual' demonstrates a lack of ethics by both parties. It undermines the authority of both and diminishes trust.

An ignored person, politician, celebrity, company or brand has YouTube and blogs available all the time. Its use is news on a number of fronts. An ignored journalist has the privileged position of showing how a lack of transparency is against 'the public interest'.

The status quo, in an age of social media corrupts both PR and journalism and both sides need to recognise it if only to re-build trust among their respective constituents.

This is not just a political issue, it is an issue for all practitioners. Why only use Press releases and private briefings when the whole world can see the story for what it is using social media.

It is time the publishing houses looked at what they can offer that blogs can't. Expert, timely, critical, reporting.

It is time for PR to act ethically and expose stories to their publics and not hide behind copy takers, the so called journalists of our time.

Communities attract participants

In this new era of "conversational marketing", the measure for engagement in a community isn't the number of people logging on. Rather, it's how actively people participate in the community, according to research by Communispace.

The anaysis of participation behavior among 26,539 members of 66 private online communities, provides an initial look at member participation in communities.
The study evaluated communities along three participation metrics:

• Frequency - how often members contribute
• Volume - the number of contributions made by each member
• Bystander or "lurker" rate - what percentage of members are simply observing versus actively participating.

It seem that in a typical online forum (e.g., wiki, community, message board or blog), one percent of site visitors contribute and the other 99 percent lurk. (Source: McConnell & Huba, 2007. Citizen Marketers: When People are the Message. Chicago: Kaplan Publishing). This disparity suggests that the more intimate the setting, the more people will participate and get involved in the community.

"Big public communities may attract more eyeballs, but they may not be the answer for practitioners who are looking for deep engagement with customers" says Julie Wittes-Schlack, Communispace vice president of innovation and research.

I can believe this. A social space refelecting a the social values of an organisation and its constituency will attract like minds and participants.

An anti-Astoturfing regulation?

The Government has announced its acceptance of the recommendations of Peter Rogers' Review to set national enforcement priorities for local authority Environmental Health and Trading Standards services in full. The announcement was made in the Chancellor of the Exchequer's Budget Speech. This could be an opportunity for the Chartered Institution of Public Relations to insert an anti-Astroturfing clause into the Finance Act.

Astroturfing campaigns are described by the Institute as: the practice of falsely creating the impression of independent, popular support by means of an orchestrated and disguised public relations exercise.

The Rogers Review specifically targets activities pertinent to:

Fair trading (trade description, trade marking, mis-description, doorstep selling) ... (where) people become victims of scams.

Astroturfing is a mis description where a person or organisation deliberately sets out to mis describe the efficacy of an idea, product or service through the manipulation of public media and thereby are not an accurate description of goods or services; are a mis-description and is an, often online, activity of the nature of 'doorstep' selling or a 'scam'..

The Review detail is available here.

Specifically, an anti-Astroturfing clause could re-enforce rules to 'Ensure traders describe
goods/services accurately' and do not act to deceive.

Rogers makes the point that

Fair trading is a national enforcement priority because of the huge economic damage caused by rogue trading and mis-selling and the impact on individuals, particularly the vulnerable and elderly...

Trading Standards Professionals play an important role in maintaining a fair trading environment, a level playing field that benefits all good businesses. The way they operate is as important as the policy areas they cover in supporting the outcome of economic development.

The comment in Rogers that affects Astroturfing is where he notes:

Fair trading is an example of an area where multiple bodies are involved in delivering regulatory
objectives. Partnership in Delivery:
DTI is responsible for setting the framework of consumer and competition law which lies at
the heart of UK economic policy and within which OFT and local authority Trading Standards
Services (TSS) operate. OFT’s mission is to make markets work well for consumers. To achieve
this OFT works with partners with whom it shares common objectives. Its partnership with
TSS encompasses support to help them deliver their regulatory objectives and collaboration to
deliver shared regulatory objectives. OFT provides a national perspective and a focus that
complements the local and regional perspective and focus of TSS.

The regulatory Authority would be the Office of Fair Trading with enforcement by Trading Standards Professionals, whose chief responsibilities are fair trading, consumer protection (among others).

It would be a big feather in the cap of the CIPR to get a clause added which could be a precursor to EU wide regulation.

Talking of Europe-wide legislation, which as Retail Bulletin reminds us, demands that companies only send unsolicited sales messages via email to non-customers if they have actively opted-in to receiving them. Some 30% of companies are not implementing such policies. In practice, this means that whenever someone's details are recorded they must be asked whether they want to receive subsequent sales marketing e-messages from that company or any other third party. The legislation makes it crystal clear that simply offering someone the opportunity to opt-out of receiving unsolicited emails (or indeed pre-ticking an opt-in box) does not comply with the Directive.

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There is other legislation to protects people online. The Consumer Protection (Distance Selling) Regulations 2000 impose requirements on businesses that sell at a distance' i.e. sell over the Internet. These regulations require that certain information, such as the identity of the business, a full description of goods or services and the costs involved in their purchase has to be provided before a contract is completed. When buying goods or services over the Internet , consumers have a cooling off' period of seven days in which they can withdraw from a contract.

With an anti-Astroturfing regulation, we could begin to see a body of law that is practical for the practice of Public Relations.

"You can't hide anything anymore" - Don Tapscott

Wired has a great article today.
There is nothing really new about it because it was covered by the CIPR Internet Commission five years ago as a principle but now Clive Thompson offers it in case study format.

The key issue now is the extent to which these ideas change organisation.

Today, at Bournemouth, we talked about theses things. We talked about how hiding from the digital rip tide is not an oprtion and embracing it must, of its nature change organisations.
Clive re-enforces the visible part but not the wholesale change that has to take place inside organisations.

It is not an option.

As Alex Iskold writes What has happened is that a load of 'Rights' are now transfered.

• The Basic Human Rights in the attention economy
• Property: You own your attention and can store it wherever you wish.
• You have CONTROL. Mobility: You can securely move your attention wherever you want, whenever you want to.
• You have the ability to TRANSFER your attention.
• Economy: You can pay attention to whomever you wish and receive value in return. Y
• our attention has WORTH.
• Transparency: You can see exactly how your attention is being used.

Newspapers to take on TV

Press Gazette tell us online spending grew by more than 41 per cent in 2006 to just over £2 billion, according to figures released by the Internet Advertising Bureau. Online advertising spending in Britain overtook national newspapers for the first time in 2006.

'Newspapers are too cheap and there are too many of them.'

That is the view of the Guardian's deputy commercial director Adam Freeman, who today rejected the notion that newspapers are under threat as a medium and said the future for his newspaper will "probably be in video".

Newspapers are "in denial" about the need to invest heavily in an online communities, Guardian Unlimited blogs editor, Kevin Anderson has warned.

Sony is the platform for a third life

The BBC reports that the PlayStation 3 console has broken UK sales records with more than 165,000 machines sold in the first two days of release, say analysts Chart Track. More than a million consoles were shipped across Europe on launch day last week with 600,000 sold.

PlayStation has graphics, immersion, the Internet, a huge following and its user base spans the generations (OK... 6 to 26 at least).

If ever there was a new communication platform games machines are top of the pops this month.

They are a PR dream channel and then there are the others like X-Box and Nintendo. Between them, they reach into over a third of all UK households.

The games genre is too important to miss. Just look at the power of World of Warcraft - people PAY every month to keep playing. Compare that with the declining numbers for corporate web sites and media web presence which are free.

perhaps it really is time to think into the X-box.

Copyright will kill economies

Charlene Li has returned to the Viacom/Google battle over copyright. It builds on her earlier comments and broader analysis including this extract:

In the end, the Internet works because it can be indexed automatically. This is what makes Google work -- it's what makes everything from RSS to Technorati work. Those indexes drive traffic. The original owners of that content need the traffic. They just don't want to give up all their rights.

But it is transparency that is the key here. If organisations are not transparent, they loose competitive advantage and if they do not facilitate transparency they loose visibility.

The actualitie of copyright is that it is broke.

The rights over intellectual properties are important in only a few instances largely to do with protecting the weak and innocent and nothing to do with patents, process and tacit knowledge.

Herceptin needs Nice If the drug company is not able to expose its medicine to the full glare of informed public opinion, then governments have to be trusted to do the job for them.

The Google issues (Belgium Newspapers, Viacom/YouTube) are only the tip of the iceberg. The web scrapping capabilities of many web widgets and the ubiquitous use of deep linking is driving new knowledge and creating new value.

I have no doubt that in the USA, corporate America will introduce significant controls over the use and distribution of copyright material. Here is a view on that from JP Rangaswami.

In the UK things are different, you do not have to register content to own the copyright... you just have to be able to prosecute a case against someone using your content because you have automatic copyright of your works.

The EU, used to the command and control continuum from Nazi, Communists, Gaulists to Blairist, has no problem with copyright and a free and liberal exchange of intellectual property and thought is simply no more needed than the preaching of a crazed cleric or manic ayatollah or.... wait for it ... thousands of bloggers, web site scrapers, deep linkers and mashers.

The problem is that without considerable dismantling of copyright as we know it today, both corporate and national economies will become less competitive.

If you are a writer and work for the BBC, why should your work be forever hidden from view because the Corporation specifically forbids deep linking (the relevant content, I reproduce here and from this page in complete contravention to the terms and conditions laid down for the use of the site).

You may not copy, reproduce, republish, download, post, broadcast, transmit, make available to the public, or otherwise use bbc.co.uk content in any way except for your own personal, non-commercial use. You also agree not to adapt, alter or create a derivative work from any bbc.co.uk content except for your own personal, non-commercial use. Any other use of bbc.co.uk content requires the prior written permission of the BBC...

Of course, I have just picked on the BBC but almost every site has similar restriction.

The reason I do so is that the BBC like most organisation contradicts itself all over the place. Here is an example:

Browser-based news readers let you catch up with your RSS feed subscriptions from any computer, whereas downloadable applications let you store them on your main computer, in the same way that you either download your e-mail using Outlook, or keep it on a web-based service like Hotmail.

OOps! They recommend that you create a derivative work by using a an RSS reader...

Henry Jenkins makes a similar point here http://wbztv.com/video/?id=27945@wbz.dayport.com

See what I mean... the whole business is nonsense and copyright as we know it today has the capability to kill off major economies and return us back through to the command and control and slavery of past generations.

There has to be a better way.

Does Google drive traffic?

Last September Google was ordered by a Belgian court to remove all French and German-speaking articles from the News results and cache of Google.be. Found in violation of copyright laws, The case was brought to court by Copiepresse, a Belgian copyright firm that represents French and German news journals, including Le Soir, La Libre Belgique and La Derniere-Heure.

Andrew Larks' pick up on what is happening to the traditional print media prompted me to look at Belgium again.

I was interested in the results of the action against Google believing that it would have a deleterious effect on the pages viewed.

I was wrong if Alexa is to be believed. Reach is mostly up (in some cases a lot) and readership is down but no more that other publications in other countries. Eventually the predictions of Doc Searle and Warren Buffet have to be examined. Attrition is eating away at the traditional publishers across the world. But is denying Google access to news pages going to hold back the digital tide or not?

The results look like this:

www.lalibre.be

The number of unique pages viewed per user per day for this site up 22%. Reach is up 152%




www.dhnet.be
The number of unique pages viewed per user per day for this site down 8%. Reach up 88%.



www.lecho.be
The number of unique pages viewed per user per day for this site down 13%. Reach up 159%.



www.lesoir.be
The number of unique pages viewed per user per day for this site down 6%. Reach down 11%

The UK's Daily Telegraph with its new Internet focused investment has page views down 8%. Reach is down 6%.




Reach for Lesoir is down 11% compared to the Telegraph fall of 6% but the remainder of the Belgium papers has soured.

What seems to be happening is this:The newspapers have to gain a huge increase in reach to maintain page views in a post Google era. But they have achived it.

This is an event worth following to see if there really are alternatives to search engine promotion for traditional web sites.

OED recognises Wiki

The word 'wiki' has officially made it into the Oxford English Dictionary.

'Wiki' began life as 'wiki wiki', a Hawaiian word meaning 'quick', but the OED has recognised the abbreviated version as "a type of web page designed so that its content can be edited by anyone who accesses it, using a simplified mark-up language".

Thanks VNUNet

Advertsing and PR need not apply

Western Mail reports that companies which have hidden behind advertising and public relations must directly engage with their customers by using new internet opportunities, one of Wales' leading internet experts warns.

Matthew Yeomans, who contributes every day to Time magazine's website, runs Custom Communication, a Cardiff-based enterprise which helps businesses grasp the potential of "social media".

The impression that PR practitioners are not getting involved in social media goes well beyond this blog then!

Use your thumb to get a grip of web stats

“As technologies like change the Internet landscape, certain measures of engagement, such as page views, are diminishing in significance for many Web properties,” said Jack Flanagan, executive vice president of comScore Media Metrix. “The introduction of these new metrics based on ‘visits’ provides an alternative for measuring user engagement that tells us how frequently visitors are actually returning to the site to view more content.”

So say Comscore.

This is useful for those PR people who take measurement and evaluation seriously and have realised that counting on all ten fingers helps.

An aside is to note that social media continues its challenge of traditional web sites among the most popular sites.

Bang bang ... both feet

The International Cricket Council has ordered YouTube to remove "hundreds" of World Cup clips claiming copyright infringement, says the Guardian.

ICC Development, the body's commercial arm, and commercial rights holder the Global Cricket Corporation, have gone after the video-sharing website to protect the rights of broadcast and sponsorship partners.

"We are here to protect the commercial broadcast rights for the ICC and GCC and there is an issue here," said Christopher Stokes, the chief executive of online rights protection agency NetResult, which represents the ICC.

"In general there is a dilemma for rights holders in that they want people to enjoy the event but also have stringent contracts with TV broadcasters and with mobile rights holders. In today's world, broadcasters buy highlights as well as live coverage and mobile rights means clips. There is an obligation to protect them.

Of course this is nuts. More YouTube content means more viewers for the TV people.
If you hide the sport of cricket, it will be hidden and who than will care.
TV is not YouTube. They are different just like online news and newspapers are different.

Killing off a channel is just daft - just like shooting yourself in both feet.

Could you believe that marketers are unethical?

Between 12% and 15% of clicks through Yahoo! search marketing ads are identified as erroneous and discarded from advertiser bills, the company has said.

eConsultancy reports.

Announcing a stepping up of its fight against click fraud, Yahoo! announced the appointment of veteran company lawyer Reggie Davis to a new vice-president of marketplace quality position.

In a role mimicking a similar senior position at rival Google, he will need a new team as well as cross-departmental efforts to improve reliability and eliminate the possibility of fraud-related legal action.

The advertsing and marketing industries are not comming out of their work in Cyberspace very well. Fraud is Fraud.

The opportunity

According to research released by eGain today, 57 percent of UK companies offer little or no web self-service, resulting in lost revenues and declining customer satisfaction. Only 17 percent of UK companies are offering their customers "visionary" or "above average" customer self-service via the web.

So here we have PR consultants falling down on the job... Just speak nicely to your client and invite their comment on how they too can enjoy the fact that 10% of all retails sales are now online.

Stick with the knitting BT.

"BT Tradespace is pitched as taking "a giant leap forward in digital marketing", encouraging users to "join a fast-growing community of buyers and sellers in your specific business area".

Business owners can garner some of the staples of Web 2.0-style Internet offerings - comments, reviews and ratings - to build customer-facing reputation...." according to e-consultancy.

Well is a couple of examples are any indication, there is some way to go. This one is an example of push communication in social space while others look like Yellow Pages.

BT has a problem with social media and always has. It is a marketing driven, push communications, scream marketing set up. It is desperate to be the final solution as witness its mad desire to sell broadband wrapped in email addresses, web gizmos and a computer stopping software bundle.

If it just did one thing well - lets say, deliver bandwidth to each home in the UK - everyone would know about it and would use it. But its would rather get into stuff that can be provided by Typepad or Blogger, MySpace(its partner in this venture) for free and better.

Turning social media into web site look alikes is trying to turn the clock back and it won't work. People use social media and web sites for different things.

Stick with the knitting BT.