You Read it On-line first

The Times is to put foreign news stories on its website before they appear in the printed paper.

This follows a move by The Guardian, announced last week, that it would post certain foreign and business news stories on the internet first.

Also last week, The Telegraph revealed plans to delay publication of stories online until later in the day to encourage sales of its print product

The response from the PR industry is encouraging.

Acording to Amy Fairbairn at the Public Relations Consultant's Association, there is both the economic background and interest in new media to use new media to meet the challenge. In an Interview for FIR, she made it clear how interested the UK industry is. You can listen to the Interview here.

Beeb Pop

The BBC News website has launched a 'Most Popular Now' page allowing users to gather information about which stories are proving to be most popular.

The New Journalism.

From Journalism.co.uk

The University of Southern California's Online Journalism Review is offering a series of suggestions on how new techniques may improve online reporting.

The site's online journalism wiki highlights strategies that seem to turn the traditional work model of journalism on its head.

It suggests the practice of open-source reporting - the journalist tells readers the topic he or she wishes to investigate, and inviting them to submit leads, sources, ideas and information. The reporter loses any exclusivity.

This second technique - distributed news reporting - relies on readers submitting information themselves into a database of incident reports.

This model is used in examples like citizen photojournalism agencies like Scoopt and Cell Journalist .

RIP Traditional Media

I don't go the whole hog on this but Mediatrack has:

Following on from the AMEC forum last week about “how evaluation fits into the new media climate” the issue of whether traditional media has had its day or not seems to be a thorny one. Whereas some see it as presenting an overwhelming challenge to accepted media evaluation methodology others see it has offering a wealth of opportunity in a rapidly expanding market, the Internet. There’s no doubt in anyone’s minds that the PR model is now severely disrupted and mainstream media is on its way out. In its place we have the new phenomenon of social media, blogging, RSS (Really Simple Syndication) and web 2.0 community based sites. Features such as tagging and social book-marking are a huge growth area and heralded as the way forward in producing a more semantic and reliable web. This is powered by the basic human need for immediacy, control and cost. People want information now and they want it for free. The social proof supplied by consumer generated media helps feed this movement.

Picture: Jo Kline

Swindon WiFi

The local government of Swindon announced this week that is to be covered by a wireless Internet network. This could mean its 200,000 residents could log onto the Internet anywhere, and any time within the borough's boundaries.
Greg Dyke, the former director general of the BBC has adopted the initiative and so there is a big hitter involved. He was reported in the local newspaper, the Swindon Advertiser, last Monday saying that “Swindon has a real opportunity to turn itself into a centre for new media in the digital era.”

This announcement follows an initiative by BT one of our monolithic telecos with a 12 UK cities announced a few weeks ago.

City wide wifi was first introduced to Grand Haven, Michigan in 1994 and according to Yankee Group there are already around 300 municipal wireless projects in the US including San Francisco, so Shel, you may be next.

With such local news, I had a hunt round to find out what advantages people see in municipality wide broadband.

The first obvious advantage is the provision of low-cost solution broadband access to low-income residents.

It can save operational costs by providing broadband connectivity for public-safety such as video surveillance.

Welfare agencies can maintain minute by minute contact with there stakeholders.

It opens up application of mobile wi-fi phones and services like Skype which will be a major cost advantage for many public and private bodies.

City governance cost drop, not least for contact with municipal workers.

Wi-Fi Internet access available to students in the local schools, libraries, and classrooms can be located anywhere in the city to connect to the Internet or school networks.

Workers in the locality like doctors will be able to wear wireless badges to replace pagers.

Depending on bandwidth, there is opportunity for digital radio and video of various kinds.

Then there is entertainment such as gaming devices and other applications.

Many believe the networks will help boost economic development by drawing more people to the city.

Certainly the cost of changing locations drop.

The use of blogs and wiki's for mobile and home workers becomes practical.

Communication such as in-store advertising, local podcast news and community networks are a real options as well.

Picture: Cellular Operations Building

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Where would you invest?

I nearly missed this post by Niall Cook. And it is far too interesting to let slip.

It shows where people go when visiting Hill & Knowlton. Blogs come out on top and Niall asks 'where would you invest'.

I am not sure exactly what he really means. Does he mean where would a company spend promotional money from the trading account or does he mean would you invest in H&K because it has such powerful blog presence.

The answer for sentient investors would, of course be, invest in Hill and Knowlton unless it did not reflect the relevance of this asset on its balance sheet. In which case sell.

The reason I say this is as follows. There is dubious legitimacy for a company to spend cash flow on investments (accumulation of assets) unless it is declared to investors. The reason being that it dilutes earnings. Cash spent on such investment is not available to shareholders on the one hand and and the higher valued shares yield less. PE ratios become meaningless because the full value of the company is understated which deflates price and overstates earnings and H&K understate its online asset as it is. Spending cash on blogging and other social media to exacerbate this under-reporting is close to corporate sin. H&K can get away with this because accountants use keyboards to count beans instead of value and regulators have not 'got it' either.

Creating asset value is a legitimate activity for all companies. One of the least expensive ways of creating assets is on-line. This means that, as long as H&K can recognise that its online presence is an asset, and I come to this below, it can and should raise equity to fund the development of its online presence.

How can I justify such scurrilous talk? Well let me explain.

There is the tangible asset of H&K. Tangible assets (tokens) may include: premises, cash, creditors, equipment, work in progress, stock. Some tangible assets are negative such as debtors.

There are the intangibles such as patents, copyright, trademarks, processes, know-how, know-what, brand values, stakeholders (sometimes, and narrowly called human capital when referring to internal stakeholders). This is the H&K you meet and see in the H&K offices round the world. For many people this id the 'Real self' of H&K.

Neither tangible or intangible assets have any value without relationships. These can be physical, technological, inter-organisational and personal relationships. Relationships require a medium in which to inter-react.

But there is another H&K. It is the H&K “Digital self”. The one that most of us (including clients, vendors and other institutions) know.

This digital self is influenced by on-line actors affecting the organisation. Some actors are technologies, some are organisations and yet others are people (hyper-links, search engine ranking, on-line responses and form filling, email, Instant Messaging, references on other web sites, on-line media content, comment in blogs, wiki's, podcasts and other social media). To be effective, H&K has to invest in properties (IP, processes etc) to give itself access to the benefits available from these actors. Such properties will be technical, some process, some know how.

These investments are assets (that should be declared on the balance sheet) and they facilitate relationships between H&K and its many stakeholders.

As the Internet affects organisations, there is a two way flow of information from the 'Real self' organisation and the 'Digital self' organisation. This is a logistics issue and requires logistics assets to make them work.

This adds a new range of (intangible) assets to the organisation including new processes and original responses to the new circumstance. In addition new relationships are created in new logistical responses are deployed (email, web, Database interactions, Instant Messaging, social media etc).

The organisation is changed by its 'Digital self' Its digital self provides the means by which the organisation can exchange values with stakeholders.

In another era, such assets might have been transport (ships, trains, trucks, etc.) and would be on the balance sheet.

As the 'Digital self' grows through investment and engagement (more hyperlinks and comments – providing search engine 'Google Juice' - for people and organisations interested in corporate values), its digital asset grows and now shareholders need to know how the investment delivers products, services and productivity.

So this is not just an issue of H&K blogging, it is wider than that but it is an investment and separating the investment from trading is important and relevant for investors, regulators and business managers alike.

I single out H&K because of Niall's comment and yet in a country where 10% of all retail sales are online, I suspect that there is a lot of under-reporting going on that is massive in scale.

Social media revs up the pace of change. H&K's web site is by no means a dog, it is at leat in the top quartile worldwide and yet the evidence from the H&K findings shows that its blogs have a particular potency greater than its web site. This has been archived in 18 months (I think Niall first posted on a H&K blog in December 2004).

These assets are potent and are real assets and one expects they will be reported as such. If so, how much PR activity should come off P&L?

Nice thought......

Released from 40 years in bondage

An article in the FT and the steady progress of young people who know more than I do catching me up added to my thinking about values. For the PR industry, like many others, age diversity policies loom.

It all comes down to pensions in the end. Will I be wealthy enough in retirement – then the answer, of course, is no. That is until one looks at the totality of values involved. For my part, I have no intention of retiring. But if I did (when I do), there will be a set of values that will be even more important than the cash value of pension funds. I like teaching and research and will find a niche somewhere. As today it will be the rich relationships with family, friends, neighbours and the interesting books, the adventure of visiting places I have not been able to see during my working life and so forth. Modest exercise will continue with sailing (and winning races against my all too professional sailing daughter), wandering the Wiltshire Downland and achieving a state of grace with an Eden like garden. I will, no doubt, keep tugging at the CIPR beard and dunderhead practitioners who are not prepared to sustain CPD at an advanced level (not that one is suggesting that the CIPR isn't........ummm..... er – six blog posts a month! – trying).

We know from David Snowden, that active brains can remain very active into old age- to the extent that they outperform under 45's; From Sherry Willis and Warner Schaie that oldies can zip up their mental performance ahead of all except children (and keep it too) and we also know that people who have not done loads of different things, and seek the routine slow down long before they collect their fob watch. A career in press agenty might seem quite good, but a career that extends PR to its fullest and widest (corporate affairs, internal comms, investor relations, social media and all those many domains of PR practice) will produce better minds as well as better practitioners.

I know from people in the communities I have lived in that those older than me both contribute and enjoy their social environment. The driest sense of humour in the world belongs to a friend of my 89 year old mother-in-law – and you have to be very quick to follow him. I also know that work colleagues still seek out his opinions and breadth of experience two decades after retirement.

For the Public Relations industry in the UK there is a serious age diversity challenge comming later this year it may be a good idea to see what values they will be recruiting against over the next few months.

Now that PR is wriggling out from under its 40 year bondage in press agentry, it has can work at the 'top table'. This, of course goes well beyond being the Comms Person pontificating/scribbling at the table. It brings relationship management skills to the board, has a broad landscape and argues its corner when more specialist managers hold forth at length about 'our brand values' (who owns them?); our assets (tangible, intangible or relationship assets); our valuable employees (under whose roof?) and our customers (at which point/s in the 'conversation' with the organisation).

Such values are at a premium and are far from the telesales operation that infest the the floors between reception and executive suit of so many PR consultancies.

Picture: Traped

The Scoble Effect

One of the big news items among geekier bloggers is that that Robert Scoble is leaving Microsoft to join PodTech. The reason this is important in Public Relations is that his powerful presence in the bloggersphere has been a real lesson for Public Relations practice.

The right person, right media and right time and above all a frank relationship with readers and internal publics has given him iconic status at Microsoft among its customers and especially among the many Microsoft opinion formers.

Compared to other organisations, this approach has given Microsoft access to market influencers and protected it against restrictive regulators to an extra-ordinary extent.

A more complete explanation (and communication theory) of the Scoble effect is available here.

Social Currency and the Relationship Value Model

For a long time I have been looking at the relationship value model and I want to explore the concept of values we use in interactions as the coinage of social currency.

In examining the significance of relationship in the Relationship Management domain of Public Relations, the theory goes that organisations are not monoliths but the nexus of relationships which merge morph and change from day to day and hour to hour.

These internal relationship are not really internal, it is just that that is where the focus, the nexus, is.

The key is in relationships and these are created and formed when people find values in common and which tickles the deeply embedded motivations that make us human, the Deo Optimo Maximo among social animals. We are genetically programmed to form social groups.

It is worth going back a long way to see what the thinkers had to say in their time and if the realty matched the ruminations.

In 2001, author and broadcaster Douglas Rushkoff explained the currency of values with the expression Social Currency which he explained like this:

When my father was growing up, bubblegum companies competed by offering free trading cards inside their packages. Little pieces cardboard with the images of baseball players proved the most successful, and soon children were buying whole packs of baseball cards with only a single stick of bubble gum. Today, baseball cards are sold without any bubblegum at all.

More importantly, this depth of data allows the card to serve as what I've started to call "social currency." While children can debate the merits of one brand of gum over another for only so long, they can talk endlessly about the players' whose cards they've collected, trade them, or even just peruse one another's collections. See, the cards aren't really ends in themselves; they are the basis for human interaction. Johnny got some new cards, so the other kids come over to see them after school. The cards are social currency.

We think of a medium as the thing that delivers content. But the delivered content is a medium in itself. Content is just a medium for interaction between people. The many forms of content we collect and experience online, I'd argue, are really just forms of ammunition -- something to have when the conversation goes quiet at work the next day.

Content on the Web is no different. Sure, the Internet allows people to post their own content or make their own web sites. But what do most people really do with this opportunity? They share the social currency they have collected through their lives, in the form of Brittney Spears fan sites or collections of illegally gathered MP3's of popular songs. The myth of the Internet -- and one I believed for a long time -- is that most people really want to share the stories of their own lives. The fact that "content is king" proves that they don't. They need images, stories, ideas, and sounds through which they can relate to one another. The only difference between the Internet and its media predecessors is that the user can collect and share social currency in the same environment.

Dynamic and successful people and organisations can make things happen

Nancy Dailey, Ph.D. and Kelly O'Brien offer us further insights

People who can make things happen have one thing in common-social currency. Imperceptible, yet powerful all the same, social currency is like business accounting for goodwill. It's the intangible value earned from the exchange of positive human interactions. Helpful relationships produce social currency. Regardless of your position in the social space at work, your social currency can wield influence and power to make change happen.

So what is social currency? It's the new power tool for today's work world. Technology is pushing interdependence in our organizations faster than we can adapt. People need to mirror the technology: fast, focused, integrated, and web-like in their interactions with co-workers, clients, and vendors. People with social currency can move faster and be more effective because they have established trusted relationships. It1s these relationships that move others to change, to try new things, to explore possibilities.

Here's how it works-The more helpful relationships are, the more information is shared. The more information is shared, the more people feel connected. The more people feel connected, the more they trust the relationship. The more trust people feel, the faster the acceptance of change. That's why this notion of "social currency" is replacing information as a key power driver of change.

Having information by itself is no longer the same as having power. Just think of the number of emails you receive each day (and don't read). Distribution of information in organizations today, at least technically, is fast, focused and integrated. What is missing in organizations is the mechanism to make sense of all the information and for the information to make any difference. Information alone means very little. It's what people do with or about it that matters. That's where social currency comes in -- it attends to the ‘people side' of the equation -- where information gets transformed into knowledge, skill, and action.

Nancy has a number of interesting papers on her site which add to this thinking.

Social Media and Social Currency

In this contribution, they begin to introduce the idea that out modern technologies have a role to play. Perhaps we can explore this a little further with John Clippinger at the Commons Blog who puts some of these currency and values ideas into an Internet context. He sees some values as tags and I paraphrase:

Reputation systems are an especially important aspect of social cooperation because they are attached to an individual and form the basis for whether they can be trusted and accepted. A reputation is really the collection of tags that are assigned to an individual or entity to reflect assessments of their competence or status within a specific social network. Given that individuals play different roles in social networks - they can serve variously as connectors, gatekeepers, truth-tellers and enforcers - reputations are tied to roles within social networks.

It is not difficult to see how important reputation tags are in small traditional societies where once a reputation is acquired, it may be very difficult to change. Honor-based societies depend upon reputation tags as the principal governance mechanism for defining and enforcing a social order. "Honor killings" of a daughter or sister in order to preserve a familiar reputation suggest the power of reputation in Human Nature. Even in online communities, reputation tags are the motivator and governor of behaviors. People take seriously the reputation scores of an eBay seller/buyer, the accumulated scores of a player of online games, or the number of friends and ratings one has in the online social networks of Linkedin, Orkut, Friendster, Facebook, or My Space.

Reputation tags affect an individual or group's ability to participate within and across different networks, thereby becoming the basis for granting/revoking certain privilege and decision rights. Since reputation tags can be measures of competence by a socially credible third party - e.g., religious, educational, financial, political, trade or professional institutions - they play a very powerful role in governing social mobility and enabling/thwarting interactions between different social networks. By providing information about information - who or what it is, where it came from, as well as marking the rights and privileges for accessing, exchanging, altering, or forwarding goods, services and information, tags are the true control points in self-organizing networks.

A social currency is the reputation score an individual or entity acquires in a particular social network that credibly reflects their value in that network. For example, like a monetary currency, the value of a social currency may be set by the demand that an individual in a given social network can command, as in some kind of supply and demand calculation. Yet the calculation may also reflect a more subtle calculation of value based upon peer ratings of performance that cannot be captured in measures of supply and demand.

Different social networks have their own social currencies reflecting their reputation and membership rules. Highly proficient members of these networks - those who know how to truck, barter and exchange - can accumulate their own form of social capital - i.e., favors, obligations, goodwill. In many cases, they can convert one social currency into currencies in other social networks. For example, success in sports is often convertible to success in politics, business and entertainment. Likewise, social currencies accumulated in a business network are generally convertible into the currencies of social standing and political credibility. The more open and diverse a society is, the greater possibility for social mobility - something rarely possible in closed, traditional societies.

Coming more up-to-date with comments from Earl Mardle we see how Social Media, Social Currency and relationship management are beginning to play out and how practitioners think about their future:

Charlie Todd, 27, posts to video sites because he enjoys "the ability for your users to rate and comment on your work," he said. He also posts because he doesn't have the server space or bandwidth to host memory-intensive video. Todd is the founder of Improv Everywhere, a New York-based improvisational comedy troupe that organizes heavily planned "missions" around the city to make people laugh, and then posts the results on the different video Web sites. They garner high ratings in the process.

Higher ratings means more views, which push the videos onto the front pages of the sites, which then guarantees more views. If it's good, it stays on the home page, said Arik Czerniak, CEO of Metacafe. At Metacafe, a top video could get half a million views in 24 hours. "You don't need to get lucky ... because we've streamlined the viral process, if something is good it will be noticed by the community. You don't need to have 1,000 people on your mailing list," he said.

The fundamental question is why this is so much better than traditional media fare and an answer is that it lets us do something that has been smacked out of our lives for too long, it lets US Play. Call me a Philistine if you like, but there are no redeeming social or humanitarian values to be gained from "Everybody Loves Raymond" and its ilk, none. Numa Numa, or the Brokeback Mountain trailer for Back to the Future or many of the hard case snippets on YouTube are no better as great art, nor any worse; but they are great generators of social currency, both directly for their creators and for those who email the links to their mates or blog about them or talk about them over the water cooler.

The discussion has come full circle and can see a commercial manifestation in the interview with Russ Klein, Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer of Burger King Corporation, did for Shel Holtz this week 'on a theme he introduced called “social currency” - an evolution of word-of-mouth into a real-time and ongoing collective conversation in the marketplace'.

We now need to understand the coinage of social currency, those values that are so critical in relationships which I have touched on before.

Picture: McWhite

Issues management

Keith Jackson is always worth reading and his views on Issues Management and the resources he selects are helpful for practitioners. In this case, www.issuesmanagement.org. offers some useful ideas but I do have some problems with many practitioner's views about Issues Management. I would add three thoughts to the article.

The first is that all issues are of their nature negative. This is not true some are great opportunities and need to treated with the same care and attention.

Second is the difference between Issues and Crisis. Issues are commonplace and, by degree, the daily process of management. Crisis is a threat to survival.

Third is that there is never and issue which has a single stakeholder response. There is always a need to map and prioritise the range of publics that influence issues both internal and external.

If this sounds a bit like normal PR practice, then its about right.

Picture: Bubblegum crisis

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Clarity made simple

I have just been working on how I can make The Clarity Concept, which Jon White Peter Prowse Dejan Verčič and I have been working at for longer than I care to remember, more accesible to practitioners.

It is a way that Public Relations practitioners can develop a 360 degree view of the publics that are key to organisations.

Using Gliffy, the free counterpart to Visio and it was not too difficult at all.

The Times to launch online TV service

News and jobs for journalists :: The Times to launch online TV service: "According to The Times, the service, called Times TV, will initially consist of news clips from third-party providers and will launch this week.

Well, we also have TV going into Radio:

Channel 4 launches internet radio service
Television broadcaster unveils plans to diversify into radio and take advantage of unregulated area

The Times reports that the initiative was announced by Les Hinton, executive chairman of News International, News Corp's British newspaper wing, as part of a plan to 'triple our page impressions in the next few years for Times Online'.

In May, Times Online generated 59.9 million page impressions. The newspaper plans to expand the service with the online TV wing by encouraging readers to contribute their own news content to the service.

According to News International, which also owns The Sun, The Times' online revenue has risen 45 per cent year on year. Much of this is attributable to its mobile phone quizzes, puzzles and crosswords service."

Emotions Are Contagious!

Emotions Are Contagious!

In a research study titled 'Emotional Contagion', scientists revealed that emotions can be transmitted to subsequent receivers as fast as the blink of the eye, according to a study findings published in The Washington Post.

Elaine Hatfield, a professor of psychology at the University of Hawaii and co-author of the study, says that emotions whether positive or negative are passed from person to person without even the notice of the receiver.

John T. Cacioppo, professor of psychology and director of the Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience at the University of Chicago says that the people who are more expressive spread their emotions more powerfully and the ones who are calm on outside but respond strongly to emotional events are most susceptible."

How do we rank media for campaigns?

In communication management there is a need to be able to identify media relevant and effective for communication.

Having a methodology that could test each medium for its influence over an issue/brand, its importance to the success of the issues management/brand and its empathy with the issue/brand seems like a good idea.

Using the Publigram software, it came out quite well.

I am open to adding other media to this list.

Telephone

Mobile voice

Mail

RSS & RSS optimisation

Search engine optimisation

Own site

SMS

Email

Search engines

Press Radio and TV advertising

Media relations

Brochures

VoIP

Blogs

Bloggers

Chat

Other web sites/portals

Instant Messenger

Usenet

Direct Mail

Exhibitions

Conferences

Point of sale

Tele-sales

Discussion lists

Hurry up! Hurry up - I haven't got all minute - net revenues are escaping

The PR industry should already have 10% of the online budgets. In the UK this means £140 million last year and nearly £200 million this year. It should be taking a bigger proportion every month as new media takes hold. This represents 20% of the total turnover of the UK PR industry if the CIPR research is to be believed. Tony Bradley, no doubt has development of this market as a big industry sector priority.

For the USA, Duncan Riley has posted interesting figures about growth in online advertising. The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) report that Internet advertising revenues reached a new record of $3.9 billion for the first quarter of 2006.

But, back to the UK, the Online Marketing Show opens in a couple of days time. Colin Williams speaking about the show told me yesterday that pre-registered attendance figures are up 45% over last year.

With £1.4bn spent last year, online has overtaken radio, consumer and outdoor advertising and the Interactive Advertising Bureau's goal to create a billion-pound medium by 2006 is met. It it is now talking about doubling its target to overtake newspaper advertising, currently worth around £1.9bn in the UK.

The Online Marketing pre-show survey, published two weeks ago, showed that over 15% of respondents said that they now spend more than 75% of their marketing budget online, up 10% from last year. Overall 23% marketers spend more than half of their budget online, compared to only 9% in last year.

Yes, it is time to take a lot of this budget.

'New Mobile Services' from Portio Research identified that as many as 50% of European mobile users are interested in mobile TV and are prepared to pay on average €10 for 'all you can eat TV' - the potential market, especially in Europe, is huge; Video calling is in its infancy with only 6% having used it, but over 60% want to and are prepared to pay for it; Mobile advertising is a big turn off for most with over 65% of respondents expressing a zero tolerance.

Meantime, Sarah Lelic reports in the Guardian that Vodafone, the mobile operator last week unveiled the UK's biggest ever corporate loss, with pre-tax losses at the group hitting £14.9bn for 2005. Market saturation and big write downs are the cause and competition is hotting up. Europe's first "quadruple play" mobile phone service, offering its customers mobile, fixed line, voice over IP and broadband all bundled together with one bill is promised from Orange, another mobile operator.

Channel 4, the TV channel is moving into radio. They say:

“Promising a fresh approach to radio programming, Channel 4 Radio has already begun commissioning a range of innovative audio content. Programmes available from launch include radio extensions of flagship Channel 4 television shows such as Channel 4 News, Richard & Judy, Lost and Big Brother – with further cross-over commissions planned for later in the year.”

So here are many PR opportunities ready made. The market is growing, the marketers are interested, they want to explore social media marketing, they have the budgets and are getting the message that advertising is a turn off.

We are seeing client driven demand and the industry has to be ready to respond with real capability and really quickly too.

Tony, all yours.

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Net Neutrality

I made a comment on the Hobson and Holtz Report this week over an issue that is really important for everyone who uses the Internet. It covers a major threat to Net Neutrality. It is an issue that should be followed by our institutions.

My comment was this:

I seldom go back to politics these days but feel I now have to return to the fray and this is a personal view.

Net Neutrality affects every person on the planet. Without neutrality the world faces an uncertain future.

At present, anyone with an Internet-connected computer can reach out to a potential audience of billions.

This democratic Web did not just happen. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the Web in 1989, envisioned a platform on which everyone in the world could communicate on an equal basis. This concept has created untold wealth.

The US House Judiciary Committee on Thursday approved legislation aimed at preventing broadband providers from discriminating against unaffiliated services, content and applications.

The worry is that the vote was 20 to 13. The 13 want to restrict use of the Internet and force companies to pay ISPs extra to ensure consumers can access 'our' content. This high minority is a real danger not just in the USA but for the world it reflects a significant body of opinion in the body politic.

The early vision of the Web is being threatened by telecoms, cable, and other Internet service providers. They want to impose a new system of fees that could create a hierarchy of Web sites.

Major corporate sites may be able to pay the new fees but at a cost to the consumer. People like me and you could pay up or simply be shut out.

Sir Tim, has begun speaking out in favour of "net neutrality," rules requiring that all Web sites remain equal on the Web.

Corporations that stand to make billions if they can push tiered pricing through have put together a lobbying and marketing campaign to try to achieve it.

I am, of course in Sir Tim's corner and have little patience with the chief executive of AT&T, Edward Whitacre. His AT&T and SBC combined organisation returned a pro forma net income of $1.32 billion during the first quarter of 2005 and net income of $1.45 billion for the first quarter of 2006. Nice work.

Yet in his Business Week comments last November,

He is reported to say: How do you think Google or Yahoo or Vonage going to get to customers? Through a broadband pipe. Cable companies have them. We have them. Now what they would like to do is use my pipes free. So there's going to have to be some mechanism for these people who use these pipes to pay for the portion they're using. Why should they be allowed to use my pipes?

His issue is how to enhance his ROI.

His pipes affect every user on the planet.

The companies have invested in infrastructure and they have to maintain it. Returns so far have been handsome. Now they are threatened by advancing technologies. I guess that similar investments by the content providers is for nothing. Over 65% of web pages of corporate web sites provide information for free. I guess they might want to reciprocate. They might want to charge Mr Whiteacre for the public service information they provide to attract people to his pipe. It is a symbiotic relationship now. But it could change.

So, this is about a licence to operate.

First, if AT&T and co. proceed, they will incur the wrath of about a third of the population of the two biggest economies in the world, the USA and EU. I don't mind that. Companies have shot themselves in the foot by ignoring their wider stakeholders before.

Second, these companies can be dissintermediated. They may think that the web, and the Internet for that matter, must use their big pipes. Time to re-think:

They could loose these pipes. Some might ask if they really have a franchise to own them!

They may have to face competition. It is not as though there is not a lot capital and creative engineering out there.

They may have to face The Open Source Movement who mobilised in this way is a mighty adversary.

There are alternative technologies such as ultra broadband switching of high-speed fixed wireless technology which is one of the group of distributed technologies coming on fast.

Third, governments would shake electorally - If G W Bush wants a really awful legacy, he could do no better than be the President who impedes advancement of the Web to Middle America while al Qaeda uses it with impunity.

Fourth, governments will loose much of their present investment in the Internet and would have to find reliable alternatives.

But for me there are three over-riding issues.

The difference between command and control dictatorships and democracies is the difference between shutting the web out and embracing it.

The difference between command and control dictatorships and democratic economies is between stagnation or open, fast-moving and wealth creating entrepreneurs.

Finally, the great protection we have from terrorists and dictators (I tend to think of China and Russia first) is that we can, for all its faults, use the Internet to lever up value and create wealth from intellectual properties because we have unfettered highly educated and creative populations.

Any impediment to open, free and common accessibility means the cold war returns and it will be set against a backdrop of economic recession that feeds on itself.

Round the world people are watching America's thirteen politicians. Their actions affect us all.

Picture: HIFN

Embracing social media

This is an early graphic that I am preparing for two lecture on why organisations can, should and must embrace new communications technologies.

I think there are two reasons. The first is that there is a competitive defence and advantage in using such media and the second is that there has to be a coporate stategy to avoid disintermediation affecting the capital base of the organisation.

I shall be publishing both lectures in due course.

Getting the research right

I am grateful to Constantin Basturea  for bringing me up sharp because I was sloppy with my research. In  my post about eFootprints, I did not think to do combinations searches using Google's Trend tool. He did (and this was his more complete result). Fortunately his interventions did not diminsih the argument but that is not really good enough on my part.

Thank you Conatantin.

The graphic should look like this:

astra zeneca    astrazeneca    glaxo smith kline    glaxosmithkline   

The resuly is even more significant in that it shows how important it is to gain advantage when people seek a company out.

Powered by Qumana

eFootprint the other organisation

We are quite clear that people carry a model of the world and their place in it round with them. They do not see the world as it is but from a personal perspective. In addition, these perspectives change depending on context or social role.

Today, there can be a new and different 'self. It is a 'self' that emerges in cyberspace as people interact on line. Some of this 'self' is created by the individual but it is added to as the Web links other content to and from the presence the individual has created or has been created by others about them. Add to this content in web sites, email, search engine data, blogs, podcasts, wiki's chat discussion lists, Usenet and a host of other on-line properties and the 'digital self' can be extensive.

It is not the real self of the person it is a construct (mashup) contributed by the person, other people and Internet technologies. It also juxtaposes history and current information and presents this person to the wider world.

As people get involved in social media, there is a combination of influences that affect the digital 'self'. The nature of hyperlinking and search engines is that as a person is becomes more linked to different Internet properties, the ranking by search engines is improved. In addition, the nature of social media created an Internet context about that person.

This translated to organisations too.

The 'corporate self' exists in cyberspace. Is a sociological corporate identity comprising properties like web sites and links to and from other web sites. This presence is often enhanced using techniques such as Search Engine Optimisation (a business growing at the rate of 100% per year, I note today) and RSS capability. In addition people tend to discuss organisations in the social media and link to the organisation and to each other. This enhances the ranking of the organisation by search engines and, additionally creates and adds to the context about it on-line.

Most organisations are best known by their on-line presence. It is how stakeholders discover information about them from their web sites, from search engines (example) and through discussion (example) and context created by third parties (example) and interactions (example).

The numbers of web site links into the organisations site is very important (see: example 1 and compare with this one example 2) as are social media links (see example 1 and compare with example 2)

This 'digital footprint' gives organisations competitive advantage with differing trends in searches by people:

astra zenica glaxosmithkline

These results are about the digital presence thy are not the companies involved. The difference is the real companies and the digital ones.

The effect of being involved with the social media is significant. It increases awareness and presence of companies. In particular it redresses the balance between companies with an existing big eFootprint by enhancing the eFootprint of the smaller organisation and adds inward links as people link to blog posts.

The organisations that engage in social media thereby gain competitive advantage.

This is a powerful reason for companies to examine social media strategies.

Graphic: Google Trends

Searching for image

From Search Engine Watch we learn that the image search offered by Google, Yahoo and other search engines rely on a range of clues to identify the subject of an image—things like filename, image ALT tags that describe the image, text immediately above or below an image (which is often a caption of sorts), and links pointing to images. With enough of these clues, a search engine can make a decent guess about the content of the image.

Another approach to image search involves analysing certain characteristics of an image, attempting to "see" the image in the same way humans do. And taking this approach, you can also ask a search engine to, in essence, show you images that have similar characteristics to the one you're currently viewing.

Tiltomo is an experimental search engine that works in just this fashion, allowing you to find similar images in two ways. You can search for images that have similar color and texture characteristics, or you can look for images with similar "themes," which adds an analysis of subject matter to the color/texture mix.

In PR semiotics is becomming significant which makes this announcement important.

Hooray for the Digital Tsunami

More digital tsunami news.

From the FT: MySpace, the fast-growing "social networking" site, is in talks to forge a internet search link with either Google or Microsoft.

The rapid growth of social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook has threatened to tip the balance of power on the internet away from traditional portals and search engines. Their potential to become the places where many young people spend most of their internet time could make them the "gatekeepers", or the entry point for online activity.

For my money it is the portals that have most to loose.

But there are more battles comming. Yahoo! and eBay have joined forces in an advertising, payment and communications alliance aimed at thwarting Microsoft and Google, says the Guardian.

The deal consists of four components: bolstering advertising revenue; integration of eBay's online payment system PayPal across Yahoo!; a co-branded eBay toolbar; and the development of "click-to-call" advertising through Skype and Yahoo! Messenger.

Not a good time to be a phone retailer or bank especially as PayPal has just launched a service to allow you to pay other people from your cell phone (as wellas invoice by email, web page da de da).

The disintermediator

Google is seeking to take the pay-per-click model it refined for text ads and apply the approach to video.

This takes television advertising and puts it on the web in style. Bye Bye TV as we know it.

Google video ads first appear on Web pages as static screenshots in small television-screen like boxes. Only when a consumer clicks on the screen does the ad begin running inside the box - instead of jumping off the page as many video ads do - giving users control over how much or how little they view.

Mashup of the news

At 1200 GMT on 23^rd May 2006 there were 35 different perspectives of news about Estonia derived from 58 media stories in GoogleNews. These were identified by my Latent Semantic Analysis engine automatically. In addition, the engine was able to create abstracts about these perspectives using relevant content from one or more of the media stories and is able to identify the news story that is the single most relevant to the perspective (if there is one).

What you are seeing here is a an alpha version of a Web 2.0 application for extracting intelligence from news coverage automatically. It makes sorting reading and evaluating news much faster. It creates visual maps of the news and backs this up with content resulting in files of the relevant content/context, a full index is here.

The significance of this kind of research is that it shows how we can extract 'intelligence' from web pages such as news stories and blogs, identify relevant and related concepts and then re-assemble the news based round these concepts into short stories for fast news briefing.

It makes reading 'the news' faster and identifies the critical issues of the day from different angles.

If you want to try this out for your subject (industry sector, company, brand etc.) let me know. There is development work yet to be done (and some more investment in software) but you will get an impression of the power of this kind of capability.

Picture: The literary cat.... can obviously see the news in the dark

Cutting the C * * p

So here is a 'modern day' social media press release. But you need software to get to the story. Its all too confusing.

The software reduced the page of 'blurb' to this:

News about SHIFT Communications: "SHIFT Communications believes that journalists and bloggers are now fully adapted to using the World Wide Web for research purposes. The "“Social Media Press Release"” merely facilitates their research by using the latest tools (social bookmarking, RSS, etc.) to provide background data, context and on-going updates to clients'’ news.

Sorta to the point don't you think?

Try it for yourself and see.

Piffle and podcasts

I don't feel in the least bit smug about this and certainly have difficulty aligning myself with Kelvin MacKenzie but the Rajar proposals are just plain daft. Radio is in bad shape and the numbers it is prepared to use to sell airtime is not worth the paper, and I mean paper, it is written on.

These data are needed by the PR industry for planning campaigns and evaluation and they are just rubbish. In addition, we are seeing considerable growth in both cellular broadcasting and, most notably podcasting.

The marketing industry may be satisfied that this is how it is prepared to operate in the interests of its clients but the PR industry should not. Until the media buyers are up in arms, Marketing will just have to live with another nail in its coffin.

The radio broadcast industry is not served by this Luddite approach to broadcasting data and the PR industry needs to think hard about how it can help planners resolve their broadcast targeting and monitoring needs.

Picture: Old Radio

There I was, trying to comment at the CIPR president's brand new blog and it all fell over.

Then it came back and now its swallowed my comment. Such a shame (perhaps the CIPR moderation takes time). The Chartered Institute of Public Relations is responding to the 'New Media challenge and I was going to offer some thoughts. Well, untill it is possible to connect, here it is:

Well done Tony.

The digital tsunami sweeps us all up in the end.

Of course, the Institute will have this properly planned.

In the same way it expects us all to plan communications initiatives. A true example of best practice. Undoubtedly there has been some really good lurking (its like getting the daily press clips but more important).

I guess the Institute is thrilled with the current comments about it in the social media and its competitive position against organisations like IABC (for example).

Then there is the review of CIPR Google Juice – (one above me in Google today – good going - now you are blogging, I hope it gets better).

The objectives based on this and other exhaustive research no doubt has lead to profound strategy and tactic development.

I too can be caught up in the excitement now the Institutes's web site is having RSS feeds on each page, podcasts of Council Meetings for members and quiver over policy development, training and best practice wiki's.

Then there is the thrill of new accessibility available from vendors like Skype (for free phone calls), Skype (for free Instant Messaging) like this Government does, to cut the cost of communication and enhance accessibility.

It will be so interesting to see CIPR members' blog roll. people like Simon Collister, who has good things to say about some courses and training in New Media and then there is Philip Young, and Stuart Bruce, Stephen Davies, Richard Bailey and many more.

It is all so exciting now it also includes a President's blog. Welcome to the (sometimes critical and occasionally challenging technologies) bloggersphere.

I have to say that some of the comments posted are even more ironic than mine. Anthony said: bodes well for the CIPR's leadership in coming years.

I just cracked up.

Picture: Tony Bradley

Online PR evaluation

Robin Gurney of Altex alerted me to this Free Pint post. It is a very good run-down of tools that are available for monitoring more than just newspaper clips.

Here are some of the search engines that Patrice K. Curtis recommends in her article.

IceRocket <http://www.icerocket.com/>-
Technorati <http://www.technorati.com/>-
Google <http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch>-
BlogPulse <http://www.blogpulse.com/> -
Blogger (Google-owned) <http://www.blogger.com/start>-
Bloglines <http://www.bloglines.com/>-
Feedster <http://www.feedster.com/>-
del.icio.us <http://del.icio.us/>-
Podcast Alley <http://www.podcastalley.com/>-
Podcast.Net <http://www.podcast.net/>-
Podzinger <http://www.podzinger.com/>

Monitoring in this digital age need not be scary stuff.

One would expect every PR person to be aware of such tools. After all, if you issue a press release to your favourite newspaper and it does not create Google Juice, it got lost in the post.

I would add 'The Daily Chase' and CyberAlert to the list to help my customers with thier on-line monitoring to ensure the sweep is as complete as possibe (news, Usenet and New Media - a bundle that costs justs over £450 per month – but less of the advertising already).

The issue that really faces us is the capability to extract, de-duplicate and and make sense of all this intelligence. There is far too much 'stuff' here to be read and digested and it would consume the life of any PR person to the detriment of pro-active work.

With Girish, the head of software development at the Springboard PR in Bangalore, I have been working on a capability that take any combination of RSS feeds and summarise the content under subject headings with access through to the original stories and posts (We keep a blog running on developments for those who have a technical interest).

The subject headings are derived as part of a Latent Semantic Analysis process in effect creating a newspaper 'on the fly'.

These are very Web 2.0 and are going to be valuable as we move from clippings and 'evaluation' towards intelligence gathering.
Picture: Mask Mashup by Bonnie Gillard

A bad month for 70% of CIPR members

This month has not been a good month for UK Press officers.
The butter is melting on their bread. The P45 looms.
The CIPR research shows that 70% of in-house PR people are involved in 'media relations' and nearly as many write for the press. The figures are less for agency staff who spend more time on media planning and strategy.

I guess they might be a little concerned:

• Press circulation continues to slide.
• Readership of news online is growing.
• People trust the Government more than the media in the UK which does not bode well for PR's use of the press for third party endorsement.
• On the other hand, the Internet is engendering trust.
• The TV channels are developing novel approaches to online delivery. Including the BBC and Channel 4 (which today said it was trialling mobile video news) and the broadcasters know what is coming.
• Social Media is making itself heard.
• It is gaining eyeballs too.
• Meantime the Internet is set to become the fastest growing medium for marketing over the next 12 months, according to the Chartered Institute of Marketing.
• But its not going on PR. Not even on-line PR.

Online PR needs a focus and a champion Like, for example CIPR. Is its training programme delivering the on line goods?

Let me see......

June

1
Group event
North West group event
Manchester
2
Workshop
Client handling skills
5
1-day conference
Internal Communications
London
6
Workshop
Writing for the press
7
Workshop
Creating PR strategy
Edinburgh
7 & 8
Workshop
Introduction to PR
8
Workshop
Understanding the PR Profession
9
Workshop
Selling in your stories
13
Workshop
Writing techniques for e-communications
Which I have already commented about
13
Freshly Squeezed
Web words
CIPR HQ
14
Workshop
Writing techniques for e-communications
Manchester
14
Workshop
Creating PR strategy
15
Workshop
Internal communications
Leeds
15
Workshop
Strategic leadership
16
Workshop
Leadership in action
19
Workshop
Evaluating PR
20
Workshop
How to survive the PR jungle
21
Freshly Squeezed
The picture desk
CIPR HQ
22
Freshly Squeezed
Tips for the top
CIPR HQ
22
Group event
International group event
London
26
Workshop
Event management
27
Workshop
Writing techniques for e-communications
Edinburgh
27
Freshly Squeezed
Vibrant design
CIPR HQ
28
Workshop
Managing your PR team
29
Workshop
Fundamentals of PR strategy
30
Workshop
PR writing skills

Oh... (not quite 'Management Function' stuff) ... good. Three opportunities to discover how to write for an Intranet.

The brighter light on the CIPR horizon (including Simon, Stephen, Nicky, and Richard) is this one: It is the session at the CIPR's Northern Conference 2006 PR blogging workshop session which takes place on Thursday 6 July in Leeds.

Picture: Colin Farrington CIPR's Director General