The Bog Standard Press Release died last week

The 'bog standard' press release is now dead.

What journalist given the choice between a New Media Release and releases currently in use would opt for the old one?

There is no choice. Press releases as we know it will continue for several years but will progressively become less effective, less used and less relevant as the media builds its new publishing model on a combination of on-line and print.

This week the NMR podcast introduced some applications of New Media Release.

The gene is out of the bottle.

Links to the top topics on NMR podcast covered can be followed here:

• Todd Defren’s post, “Top 5 Principles of the Social Media News Release”
• New media release principles applied to Chevy Super Bowl College Ad Challenge
• SpiralFrog new media release #1
• SpiralFrog new media release #2
• Shift Communications new media release on winning the Novell AOR business
• Shift Communications’ social media release for Novell
• New Media Release wiki
• Google Groups mailing list for New Media Release discussion (please join!)

Here is a practical example of how a newspaper generates, re-purposed copy from a NMR. we have to be able to offer content like this as well as the 1000 word backgrounder or knowldege resourse generated via this technology and posed to del.icio.us for added depth.

Enterprise tagging - managing corporate knowledge

From Shel Holtz I find that Cogenz, Niall Cook’s startup that aims to bring social book marking to the enterprise level, is looking for corporate beta testers.

What Cogenz does is offer a capability whereby people can create a knowledge base that links people, departments, places, expertise and knowledge resources in a way that makes it easy to find and re purpose.

It is worth following the whole story from Niall's site to see how useful such a resource can be now and in the future.

To be able to create a New Media Release with such a competence will be easy and will make the whole process much more manageable for the Media Relations specialist.

Of course there are many other applications and some of them will make some organisations fundamentally more competitive.

Beyond the New Media Release

What must we do to our media releases to serve the publishing industry.

First of all we need to be able to offer formats that are helpful. Just as a paper press release is unhelpful to a journalist these days, so too is a format that forgets the media need to use SMS.

There is another consideration which is described byAdrian Holovaty who gives a good idea of what 'repurpose' means and says: "I don't mean "Display a newspaper story on a cell phone." I don't mean "Display a newspaper story in RSS." I don't mean "Display a newspaper story on my PDA." Those are fine goals, but they're examples of changing the format, not the information itself. Repurposing and aggregating information is a different story, and it requires the information to be stored atomically -- and in machine-readable format.

This is important for public relations on a number of counts.

Would we have to provide the wider and broader content? Does this mean that the New Media Release is inevitable? Yes it does in order that we can offer the formats that are realistic for todays' media.

But we have to go further.

For example, suggests Adrian "say a newspaper has written a story about a local fire. Being able to read that story on a cell phone is fine and dandy. Hooray, technology! But what I really want to be able to do is explore the raw facts of that story, one by one, with layers of attribution, and an infrastructure for comparing the details of the fire -- date, time, place, victims, fire station number, distance from fire department, names and years experience of firemen on the scene, time it took for firemen to arrive -- with the details of previous fires. And subsequent fires, whenever they happen."

This goes some way beyond a New Media Release because it uses will use the NMR tags to mix and match news stories.

This is how XPRL and NewsML will be helpful to the media and to readers who want to go beyond the news story to offer more facts.

IPTC G2 Family of Standards (which is the new NewsML) will allow news agencies to smoothly exchange news -- text, photos or other media -- while using standard XML modules and tools. The result will be lower costs and shorter development for news agencies and news system vendors who facing the challenges of presenting the news on the web and personal electronic devices.

The PR industry has to work on this to stay with it.

To offer PR services do you need a licence?

Toni Musi Falconi, as always with his finger on the button. He has entered the debate about whether PR practitioners should be licenced.

He makes this comment: Pressed by increasing social and media criticism of our profession and a recent comment by Richard Edelman on the potential merit of licensing, PRSA the other day asked its ethics committee to discuss the issue and make recommendations to the Board.
Criticisms emerged when the Committee decided to keep contents of the meeting confidential and subsequently a brief summary of that discussion was published on the PRSA website.
Interestingly, the debate on licensing of the profession is open also in many other countries. Some have already proceeded (Nigeria, Brazil, Panama, Peru amongst others), others are in the process (Russia for one, but also Puerto Rico…and one may also argue that the 2005 decision of the UK’s CIPR to be the first European Union country to be formally recognized by the national Government could well lead to this result, and this would inevitably influence the ongoing discussion in other EU countries).

A profile of the PR person worldwide

Public relations professionals worldwide are being profiled by the Global Alliance. Toni Musi Falconi reports on preliminary findings.

They are more or less equally divided in three main categories (30%): private industry, public sector, consultancy and services, while the non profit sector is close to 10%.
79% are either directly heads of their organization or report directly to top management, while a solid 79% indicate that the main part of their job consists in developing and implementing communication and relationship strategies and programs.
71% travel intensely in their home country while 36% travel frequently international.
67% earns a minimum of net 40 thousand US dollars per annum, but 12% more than 100 thousand, while 61% also benefit from free health insurance and 47% from a supplementary annual bonus.
58% is in the 25-44 age range, while 34% in the 45-60 one.
68% are women, 80% has a university degree and 98% speaks the English language.

Jamelia and the sun opportunity

Jamelia reveals how she can't wait to get married on Victoria Newton's Bizarre podcast offered by the Sun's web site.

Two things are important here. The first is that the Sun is working hard to get its readers to go on line and is providing simple and easy to follow instruction. second is that the Sun's podcast is another vehicle for communication.

Picture: Hometown AOL

Footbal podcasting

Every self respecting Association Football Club should have a podcast and Sunderland AFC is no exception.

The use of new media by football clubs and their technology uptake makes many businesses in Britain look neanderthal.

Second Life compromised

Second Life, the fast-growing online virtual community has suffered a computer security breach that exposed the real-world personal data of its users.

Linden Lab, the company behind the Second Life site, said in a letter to its 650,000 users this weekend its customer database - including names, addresses, passwords and some credit card data - had been compromised.

Old fashioned hacking has not gone away. Linden labs now has an issue management job to do because so many companies have begun to take space in their virtual world to gain commercial advantage.

Why blogging is becomming maintream in corporate communication

With companies increasingly using blogging to communicate both internally to staff and externally to clients and customers, 10 of silicon.com's 12-strong CIO Jury IT user panel said corporate blogs are more than just another technology fad that has found favour among senior managers.

Silicon.com have asked for examples.

Christopher Linfoot, IT director at LDV Vans, said: "Like all new technologies corporate blogs are often misapplied but there are valid applications, usually employee communication and not external. We do have a couple in use here in the former category."

New media platforms - old corporate wars

The Enquirer has this take on a YouGov pol. A survey of British directors, carried out by YouGov, has discovered that 29 per cent of them are prepared to steal corporate data when they change employers. But the hidden danger is from the mobile phone.

The chief devices fingered for enabling such data to be stolen are primarily memory sticks (obviously) and also digital music players – like the Apple iPOD. But what the experts appear to have forgotten is that a standard feature of any Nokia Series 60 3rd edition handset is its ability to appear to be a memory stick.

There is no doubt that many platforms offer communication capabilities to steal information from an employer.

Manginging porosity is a public relations issue as this post points out.

A lesson learned

Government minister David Miliband has vowed to continue experimenting with online engagement after his department's first move into wiki-policy ended in disarray, reports c|net.

Miliband commented on his blog: "Since writing this I gather that we have demonstrated the extreme openness of the wiki by playing host to some practical jokes... Strange how some people get their kicks. But the experiment will continue."


This was a brave idea and is an excellent case study. Using Social Media is not just a question of starting a blog or setting up a wiki. It is a serious undertaking offering great benefits but with its own management needs.

Just like starting a press relations campaign, a wiki or blog needs a strategy behind it.

It was not for nothing that I have campaigned for the PR profession to develop a strategy capability and gave an example of how strategy might be developed.

No we can learn the lessons from David Miliband's brave attempt and move on.

More comments from Tech Digest here.

Doctors don't like spin - pubs dont like quacks

A report suggesting Oxford has the biggest binge-drinking problem in the South-East and the highest death rates from liver disease should be treated with caution, health chiefs and pub landlords according to the Oxford Mail.

North West Public Health Observatory use of statistics need a health check and so too should all surveys used in PR. T

According to National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, NWPHO provides a resource for Public Health information and intelligence in the North West of England.

I expect the reputation of both organisation is what they deserve. One for rigging results and the other for endorsing quacks.

YouTube vid not fun anymore

The short video blog postings by lonelygirl15 on the YouTube website have attracted millions of viewers since they started appearing in May says Dan Glaister the Guradian's man in Los Angeles. But the postings' polished nature and the intriguing inconsistencies in the stories led many to suspect that lonelygirl15 was fake.

Exposed this week, the responce from Alissa Brooke, a blogger who has hosted a forum on the lonelygirl15 phenomenon wrote: "Well, that's no fun any more."

So fake blogs damage brands - We can take from this that sstroturfing is bad news for PR practitioners.

Frenchmen are better bloggers

Eurosoc tell us that Charles Bremner had a good post in the Times (Sept 6th) on how the blogging phenomenon has taken off in France. Apparently the country has more bloggers per capita, and more internet users who read blogs, than anywhere else in the world.

Bremmer reports that the blog epidemic has resilted in schools punishing pupils who ridicule teachers with text and video and the police have prosecuted bloggers for inciting violence on the city-edge housing projects. Psychologists are warning parents that blogs can cut kids off in a narcissistic bubble. The government says that internet should be kept out of children's rooms.

It would seem that when 7% of the population is blogging all sorts of mayhem ensues.

Does this mean a third of clients want to use Social Media.

Over a third (37 per cent) of respondents to a silicon.com reader poll think business blogs are not a good way for companies to communicate with customers. But just under a third (32 per cent) disagree - saying corporate blogs can be a good way for corporations to reach out to the people who ultimately pay their wages.


Does this mean that a third of all clients are potential bloggers?

If so what wouold you advise them?

Have you honed your social media strategy skills?

This is getting quite exciting.

Blogs and wiki's for corporate branding

David Meerman Scot has a case study of a company punching above its weight by using Blogs and Wikis.

The Social Software Debate

I don't know how he does it but JP Rangaswami but manages to find the most interesting items online .

His lates offering in which he states: "If the CIA, or for that matter any major grouping of intelligence services, can truly grasp the value of social software, then there is hope for all of us." is a must to read and floow through.

Gota good image idea - make it viral for your brand

Via CEO's Bloggers club comes Street stunts captured by citizens with camera phones and posted online to become viral campaigns are a new, engaging form of brand advertising, writes BusinessWeek, calling the tactic "the Golden Age of the street corner gimmick."

Teens in MySpace

What do MySpace users do and what motivates them comes from a new book reported in a CBS aricle.
If you want to eneter this space to build relationships for your organisation, check out the story.

Good think for PR people and how to 'get it'

The 'Change this' site is a mine of good white papers about social media and why it is so important.

Chris Anderson's paper (an extract from his book) 'The Rise and Fall of the Hit' should be smuggled into the CEO's overnight reading tonight.

While it highlights the downside for the recording empires it shows that the markets are still there.

The upside is that all those products and services that are not big sellers can be put on the digital shelf (web site) at a marginal cost and the development cost is no longer a write off but an opportunity sale, promoted in a passing post in the company blog, it can become an added revenue stream with good effects on cash flow and the balance sheet.

The same thinking applies to those press stories that did not quite make it.

They can be re-purposed and made available (in the media wiki for example) and are available for minority publishers (bloggers?) which gets value from them.

Comming to an employer near you too

Take note all you PR students. You will need your e-credentials to get a job in PR any day now.

Here is the experience of a US graduate this year (the UK is about 18 months behind).

During my recent job search, I came across many employers who are interested in public relations students, but the students must possess technological skills that were not necessary in the past. Students must be familair with building Web sites, contacting the media and knowing how to operate every computer application currently being used and proofreading everything from a one-page flyer to html text. The field is growing so rapidly that the requirements are blurry and students are becoming frustrated with the lack of opportunities with those who miss specific qualities.

Channels such as podcasts, white papers, blogs, webinars and RSS feeds are popping up everywhere and without question, if you are not "in the know" about these outlets, you will be left behind.

Perhaps there is the other side of the coin too. Would you want to work for an employer who did not want these skills?

Publishing the podcast of the interview that went into an article

It is not uncommon for people to record conversations and telephone calls. With modern mobiles it is easy. It sometimes can include video recordings to. This is relevant to public relations.

Such recordings, including recordings of press interviews can then be made available in the public domain as happened and is highlighted by Stuart Bruce.

This form of dual reporting from your conference presentation being blogged to having your conversation turned into a podcast is something PR has to manage. It has to go into the issues management mix and has good legitimate relationship management applications too.

Wiki's for Public Relations pitches

One of the advantages of the so called web 2.0 is that there are a lot of tools that help identify what is interesting people.

I wanted to know how social media was fairing and so used Google trends where you can compare interest in up to five topics. The results show, bu countries, how often they've been searched for on Google over time.

This is how social media is shaping up: I chose the following keywords:

If we take a closer look we see the emergence of wiki's as of special interest.

Perhaps this is a good time to talk to clients about the use and application of wikis.

The difference between Haymarket and Guardian Newspapers

The UK Association of Online Publishers has appointed Simon Waldman, the group director of digital strategy and development for Guardian Media Group, as its new chairman.
Mr Waldman takes over from Bill Murray, the managing director of group business information strategy for Haymarket Publishing, who has chaired AOP since its creation in July 2002.

Guardian makes real money online. Haymarket lock up PR Week behind online subscritions.

Have you noticed, I don't reference PRWeek very often.

If you hide content, no one comments about you. You loose the audience and Google Juice. In developing PR strategies, these issues need to be considered.

The growth and growth of the BBC

The BBC is among the top three for on the spot orriginal global reporting.

It is big in radio, TV, digital, online, blog, podcast and now BBC Worldwide is planning to roll out five global channels says the Guardian. The corporation's commercial arm wants to set up locally produced versions of CBeebies, BBC Lifestyle, BBC Entertainment, BBC Knowledge and a high definition channel in key countries around the world.

More channels for PR to pursue.

People like to download

If you make it easy to download from a radio stations people like it.
Mobile phone users are prepared to spend £9 a week downloading songs from the radio, the Guardian notes. On average the participants in the trial bought seven songs a week, costing £1.25 each, from pop station Heart.
This could also give extra life to radio programes, interviews and other radio content.
Note also this is convergent technologies. radio to iPod.

Rules for using music in Podcasts

I am grateful to Chris Heuer for this links to Voices.com and the notes on the use of musivc in podcasts.

They start with this comments:

A musical underscore performs three basic functions:
1. Sets the theme of the podcast
2. Prepares the listener for individual segments or features within the podcast
3. Entertains the listener by introducing and promoting new music, i.e. Indie Podsafe music

Can you keep up the Blog pressure

Dan Greenfield offers sympathy with Shel Holtz, whose daughter is not well. A sentiment shared by us all especially to his daughter who gave such a stunning interview on the use of IM some months back and, as a result, we all have a special relationship.

Dan then goes on to comment about Elizabeth Holmes comment in the Wall Street Journal about bloggers who debate about whether to post when taking a vacation -- much to the dismay of family members. The article pointed out that several bloggers suffered a decline in readership from not blogging or using guest bloggers.

The point being that using blogs as as a PR vehicle may mean that managing social media in times when people are away is a management consideration.

Fire ban laptops

The BBC has reported Korean Air has barred all Dell laptops and some Apple models being used after they were subject to a battery recall.

This is a long running issue for the PC manufacturers and Soney who makes the batteries.

It makes an interesting issues management case study for PR students.

Safety watchdog the US Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) said it was the biggest recall of electrical products in its history.

Petaflop

No, not worn out PR executive in the bar on Friday. Its equivalent of 1,000 trillion calculations per second.

Quite sparky then!

Email abuse

For Immediate Release and BL Ochman have both highlighted the Radio Shack abuse of people ans email.

Radio Shack sacked 400 employees by email at its Texas headquarters last week. The company apparerently didn't think taking the rug out from under employees, many of whom had been with the company for years, was worth any investment of executive face time.

As PR practice this is as abd as it gets.

Yahoo suspends email accounts

BL Ochman reports ....... So I was pretty surprised when I logged into my Yahoo Mail account today. My hundred or so saved mail messages and all of my contacts had been deleted - and my account suspended - because I hadn't logged in for a while. If I don't want that to happen again, they said, I can pay them for a premium account.

Why photos are important to online PR

Pocket-Lint offers us information from an Opodo survey. It suggests that 54 percent of respondents agree that digital technology has improved their photography skills because they’re not worried about wastage.


I can relate to that!

Over 40 percent upload their images to online albums to share. which is a significant behaviour and over half of those survey invite friends to view their images, while just over thirty percent are happy to share them with joe public.

We see here another form of social networking and, as many of the Photogrphic companies offer on-line album services, there is an opportunity here for a creative PR mind.

Survey tool

Mrweb offers this news: Kinesis Survey Technologies, a software firm based in Austin, TX, has announced the release of Version 4.0 of its online survey creation package. New features include multilingual support, and more advanced options for tabulation, validation and invitation management.The solution promises researchers the ability to easily design, launch, and analyze a web or wireless survey. Key new features include:

Movie from the mato grosso

Digital movie business debuts are publiciesd by cnet which says Amazon's service, which was expected to launch last month will deliver full-length feature films and TV shows to customers over the Web in two ways, sources said. One is through a subscription service, where customers pay a flat fee to view movies over a certain time period. The other will be either a pay-per-view or a pay-per-movie service, according to sources.
Meanwhile, Apple also appears to have Hollywood on its mind given the theme of its press event scheduled for 12 September, 'It's Showtime'.

This is going to unravel into the biggest social networking rip off of all time.

Podcasting Plod

West Yorkshire Police has taken an innovative approach to ensuring the county’s new students stay safe and secure.

The Force has broken with its traditional methods of delivering crime prevention messages and for the first time is using a series of special Podcasts featuring basic safety advice from the Force’s Crime Reduction, Detective Inspector John Minary.

The podcasts are for students to download and play back at a convenient time The Force’s Website Manager Patrick Brooke said: “More and more people are joining the “podcast revolution” downloading mp3 audio files, similar to radio, to listen to via their computer or on a portable mp3 device, such as an iPod. “They are especially popular with students and we hope they will download our latest topical safety messages along with their favourite tunes and radio programmes.

Facebook faces revolt

Kevin Allison the FT's man in San Francisco says that Facebook, the social networking web site is facing revolt from its 9 million users.

Th problem is the introduction of new features that have raised privacy concerns which allow other users to keep tabs on changes to their friends’ profiles, photographs and other personal information.

Yadee Yardy Ya - the PR phone-round - and celeb journalist

Yes, I know, it should not happen. There are all the reasons why a PR company should not blast out a hundred copies of a release and then follow each one up with a phone call...

'Hi my name is Samantha from Best in the World PR, we sent you a press release about The Greatest Company on Earth and I wanted to see if you would be using it ...... I will email you a another copy now .... let me get back to you about that .....'

It does happen... But will it be relevant in the new era as the newspapers move from 1665 to 2006.

Lets first consider the New Media Release first.

• Its technical
• You loose control because technology can pick up the content and mash it.
• It might not be interpreted by a journalist
• It could find its way into blogs.
• Why adopt a process that is going to put people out of a job and reduce billable hours?

Lets stay where we are.

OK.

But, over the last few years, the number of journalists both staff and freelance has been dropping like a stone. They are very busy, they get a zillion emails and even printed press releases, there are a host of phone calls and they are expected to output story after story like a sausage machine.

Having time to garner the stories the editor needs, checking back on facts and sources and writing is one thing, using, even trusting, feeds arriving from some on-line aggregator is suspect, time consuming and a pain. But... hang on, there is some merit in being able to get past the marketing speak to the story and having lots of available background to give journalistic depth and their own spin. Perhaps for the Journalist there is some advantage.

Disrupting their day is hard and tiresome for both parties when its human. When it is computer driven, it has all the attributes of a punch bag.

There has to be a better way.

Yes there is but, at face value, neither party is going to like it much.

The machines can do a lot more. There is a computer programme that can combine past editorial, current press releases, blogs and wikis and create mashed up content that is founded in historic reportage and current PR outputs leavened with academic research and papers and flavoured with social (blogs etc) content. The amount of content such programmes can review and include into relatively short articles is stunning. The resulting texts are very readable, germane and comprehensive. Unlike present content, the computer can be limited in the amount of content it will use from a single writer, title, publisher or genre of information. Yes, its plagiarism but of significantly lesser degree than current reporting and much less circular and worrying than the current model exposed by shown by Chris Patern earlier this year.

The output might need editing ( I have seen it and, yes, it needs editing into good grammar), but that is a heap better that all the work involved in researching and writing most stories.

I can envisage a day when news outlets deploy such programmes (very soon too).

What then happens to the PR agency and the journalist?

The PR agency is OK. It has to find more copy, more angles, deeper background briefing and content (sounds, pictures, video and even avatars in some cases), and interference in social media leavened with facilitating face to face (Oh! all right - Skype to Skype) conversations with key opinion formers. Its role gets bigger even if the skill sets change.

The Publisher get a big bonus. They have access to much more content, a wider range of content and can fill the new on-line pipeline 24 hours a day using automation. They never run out of news. It is current and cheap.

In addition journalists are relieved of the mundane. They can have more rewarding jobs in part because they do not have to be a sausage machine and in part they have access to the mashup of historic and current comment from which to take a new different and interesting perspectives.

If one takes the topic of the day in the UK, the 'orderly transition of the Leadership of the Labour Party', the new and news content was available electronically. It came as historic media and on-line news and comment and new blog posts and press releases. That kind of content can be automated. The added value was in private briefing and commentary, which once published, goes into the common pool of news.

One can see the difference between automated 'news' and journalist input.

The key here is that the real and actual voice of the journalist is present at his/her outlet and is 'mashed' for all other outlets.

What I see coming from these developments is celebrity journalism. Hugely valuable, hard working, very well connected and expert journalists.

There is an element of win win here.

And for us, the news consumer?

We can 'pull' the information we need, when we need it and then can indulge in that relationship that the media always brought to its readers, as Guy Consterdine put it, reading a favourite magazine is like talking with a friend. We can get the popular 'mash up' news and as a treat a personality journalist take on it.

Of course, these organisations that still want to hide behind firewalls will be fine. Just marginalised.

In the 17^th through 19^th Centuries all of the papers practiced an "advocacy" journalism, it is genre that can adapt and perhaps be more honest than the "objective journalism" of the 20^th Century.


How brave the publishers can be is evident from the Daily Telegraph which is investing heavily in its on-line future but who will be next and who will really adopt the semantic web as the backbone of media.



Picture: The Telegraph Hub published by the Press Gazette today: "The Daily Telegraph is promising to revolutionise the production process of its journalism with what it believes will be the UK’s first truly integrated multi-media newsroom at its new offices at London Victoria."

Clips go Mobile - PRNewswire

This week, PRNewswire is canvassing opinion as to whether practitioners would like their clips on their mobile phones.

This is a text only service. Some of these texts could be quite long.

As most readers know, I have summarisation software that can reduce a press clip to 50 words. A trial can be downloaded from c|net here.

In addition, with a bunch of friends, we have worked out how we can deliver press clip summaries text in spoken words (text to voice).

This means we could deliver clips (aggregate and de-duped RSS feeds or hyperlink to article):

Most relevant first
Any or selected times/intervals of the day
In summary linking to full text
Text email, web, SMS (RSS udate as well)
Voice to mobile phone, iPod, PC.
XML for internal interoperability (you can use the output in other software really easily and integration is dead cheap)
All sorts of metrics because the computer 'reads' every article.

So far no one has said they want it (well ... some want it free, of course).

New Blogging Software

The booming blogging market finds a surprise newcomer from the UK as Terapad.com (wwww.terapad.com) goes out of private beta and launches on September 6th says WebHost Directory.

"Blogging has been technologically very active recently, but feature-wise it's been completely stagnant. We've capitalized on this and added all the features of major corporate websites to the blogging equation." said Stephan Tual, CEO, as he inaugurated the site.

Why all PR students should blog and be in Second Life

Seth Godin passes this on:

Juggler Interview

Circus Manager: How long have you been juggling?
Candidate: Oh, about six years.

Manager: Can you handle three balls, four balls, and five balls?
Candidate: Yes, yes, and yes.

Manager: Do you work with flaming objects?
Candidate: Sure.

Manager: ...knives, axes, open cigar boxes, floppy hats?
Candidate: I can juggle anything.

Manager: Do you have a line of funny patter that goes with your juggling?
Candidate: It's hilarious.

Manager: Well, that sounds fine. I guess you're hired.
Candidate: Umm...Don't you want to see me juggle?

PR account exec candidate: "Have you read my blog?"

SMS applications

There’s a lot of talk about the use of SMS messaging as a communications tool recently. Textually.org has some interesting commentary on the matter, says Piaras Kelly.

This time it is about Text Messaging (SMS).

He says:
It’s obvious that a message is able to be spread much more rapidly than ever before, but can organisations take advantage of this and harness that power. In some cases I believe it can, but we have some way to go before we’ve mastered its use as a communications tool. An example of this would be BA’s decision to send 20,000 SMS messages during the recent terror scare in the UK.

Has your PR consultancy a capability as powerful as this?

It may be an idea to look into this form of communication.

MySpace in iTunes space

Website MySpace is to allow unsigned bands featured on the social networking site to sell their music as downloads reports the BBC.

The suggestion is that the site - which has 106 million users - is currently testing the idea, and hopes to rival market leader iTunes.

If you want to market your podcast (who said that its just music in the podscene), there would seem to be yet another place to offer it.

Pitching to the 24 Hour Telegraph

The Telegraph is to offer between 10 and 12 pages of news for download from about 5pm each day. The Guardian offers an online download service, G24, which is updated throughout the day, reports Guardian Online.

The working day will change as part of the "24-hour news operation", with the first editorial meeting at 7am.

Editorial meetings will continue throught the day in a rolling process.

You could pitch a story at 11 am and have it published by noon.

Can the clipping companies cope?

Mobile PR

Media Guardian notes that Advertising on mobile phones is expected to boom over the next five years, creating a market worth more than $11.3bn (£6bn) annually, with consumers persuaded to accept adverts on their handsets by the offer of free content such as TV channels, games and music.

I don't want to pour cold water on the hopes and aspirations of the aadvertisingindustry (all those advertising bucks and no where to spend them) but, it you want a serious turn off for mobile, advertising is it. They could get a lot of mud on their face.

This can only be good news for VoIP and the vendors of services that are not driven by 'in yer face' scream marketing.

Offering the means by which we can seek interesting things, including entertainment, when we want it, how we want it and in the way we want it is very different.

This means that PR has to understand the breadth of communications platforms that are available (print, radio TV, Mobile, PC etc) and the channels that can be levered on such platforms (pamphlets, newspapers, broadcast, interactive, blogs, podcasts etc).

It has to then consider values of the client and those with akin values and strike up a relationship (conversation) that is transparent, honest, open and inclusive and the social group will form round the subject values. They will, of course want their say, they may want to change the offering and they might even be critical.

It PR.

But advertising is a nonsense


The offer of free content such as TV channels, games and music as part of a conversation both before and after the event such that these freebies are integral to the organisation's value proposition will be a great way to engage key publics and the organisation's constituency.

Its PR and its not cheap, but there again when was advertising cheap and how often engaging?

Picture: a scene on a soap here called 'Emmerdale' a candidate for mobile TV

What do we want? Sex Google and Rock 'n Roll

The Hitwise report lists the categories receiving the highest volume of web site visits from 18-34 year olds in the UK.

The only thing I take out of this is that people like searching for content that they want to know about and don't much like stuff that is shoved at them.

The idea that marketing can somehow meet the value needs and interests of individuals in groups, target markets, stakeholder groups or other 'demographics' is showing its age.

Bundling up and delivering such groups as market segments can only work in very broad applications. In this case (18-34 year olds) it may not come as a surprise that sex, weddings, social events (where else to find a partner) and testosterone (Tennis and Wrestling?) figure highly.

Not much there for a detailed conversation until there is a closer understanding of individual drivers and where better to find them than in a conversation.

What is happening to Magazine circulation

I Read in Media Guardian that the once dominant title in the weekly women's market, Woman's Own's circulation has been hit by the rise of the new breed of women's titles such as Emap's Closer.

The IPC title had a circulation of 367,729 in the first half of this year, down 13.3% year on year and 150,000 down on 2002, when it sold 518,861 copies.

Market fragmentation in consumer publications has taken hold in a big way as consumers seek values in their reading closer to the values they espouse.

The principle of 'The Long Tail' extends well beyond the Internet and applies to print as much as to blogs.

In public relations we have benefited from the 'The Long Tail' forever. Now it is a force that has to be taken very seriously in all walks of life.

Using Google News Archive for research

I have been looking at Google News Archive as a research tool.

It has limitations but also many advantages.

One area where it is going to be valuable is in creating a representative corpus for content analysis which will be a boon for those of us who want to use it in development of a theoretical base for relationship value.

An old friend - turning print digital

Its easy to make a printed document from a digital computer essay. Its harder to make a digital version of a printed document.

Google has re-released an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) engine into open source (software anyone can used and change). It says: You might wonder why Google is interested in OCR? In a nutshell, we are all about making information available to users, and when this information is in a paper document, OCR is the process by which we can convert the pages of this document into text that can then be used for indexing.

The temptation to digitise copyright material will be even greater for many people and PR practitioners need to be aware of the limitations.

In addition, we need to be alert to the potential for such technologies to play in adding to corporate porosity. Just becaus its on paper, does not mean it cannot be on the web.

A leech in the media swamp

e-Consultancy reports research group comScore says 37.4 million US users visited the top consumer-to-consumer ad sites in July, a rise of 47% over the same month in 2005.

Craigslist.org was the most popular, doubling its unique visitors to almost 14 million during the month. Trader Publishing, the leader in July 2005, ranked second with 10.2 million visitors (up 15%), while AutoTrader ranked third with 6.4 million visitors (up 14%).

“While online classifieds are not new, it appears that internet users are really beginning to catch on to this phenomenon,” said Andrew Lipsman, senior analyst at comScore.

>What this menas in English is that small adds are moving from your local newspaper to your local PC.

Where does your local newspaper make most of its money?

Craigslist is just the job for students looking for a flat in Leeds right now.

This development has major implications for the PR.

How long will the media be able to afford to continue in its 20th Century format?

What is social media

Why is Social media so important to PR?

Let us take a view that the financial Of course one would want to extent the thinking of Confused of Calcutter (aka JP Rangaswami one of significant advisors on social media in world financial markets) . But his points are a reasonable jumping off point and I plagarise extensively:

• As an overlay on the internet and the web, social software is first and foremost about connecting people. It allows you to connect to people you don’t know; with collaborative filtering, it allows you to connect to people with similar interests, but not necessarily similar views.
• This is very powerful, since you are able to converse with people who care about similar things; mutual admiration societies, while a risk, tend not to form, because the similarity is about the interests rather than the views held about those interests.
• Networks form as a result, networks bound by relationships between people. The conversations between connected individuals become micromarkets, a patchwork of distributed, often overlapping, groups. People participate in these markets because there is a strong sense of community, yet with individual freedoms retained, even enhanced.
• This communal bonhomie allows a number of very powerful things to happen; people give freely of their time and of their skill, with nothing to gain but respect and recognition from their micromarket, the peers whose approval they see as valuable; people help each other, work with each other; people teach each other, learn from each other.
• All this is about individuals working together. Not the technology. What the technology does is reduce the barriers to entry, reduce disenfranchisement; reduce the search costs and connection costs; allow the conversations to persist and be searchable and findable; provide a rich context; have low maintenance costs; where relevant, allow people to work in small groups bringing their communal, often amateur, expertise to bear on lots of small problems. Massively parallel meets EF Schumacher.
• As the people experiment with the technology, new processes emerge; many of these processes are necessarily lightweight and non-intrusive, in order to preserve the individual freedoms as well as the communal value.
• The distributed nature of all this also makes other things happen; it allows a community to respond faster to things as a result of three characteristics; small agile groups; networked non-hierarchical relationships; low barriers to entry.
• The people, the processes and the technology, taken together, are slowly forming a new culture. A culture where traditional governance models are inappropriate, where co-creation is common, where communal ownership is the norm.
• This is not just about Wikipedia or even just about the Blogosphere. Social software is about people and relationships and conversations and markets. Enfranchising people to do things they have never been able to do, some of which their forebears could do (but on much smaller scales).
• Social software is explicitly about the individual and about preserving the individual, but in the context of the groups that individual belongs to. The technology allows us to scale all this, and as a result we need to build better tools. Tools better at publishing, at searching and finding, at connecting, at aggregating, at filtering and even at visualising. Today’s tools are a good start, no more than that.
• The experimentation phase we are in has already paid great dividends, Wikipedia is a good example of that. And there will be a number of serendipitous communal finds as we continue to experiment. Finds that relate to rediscovery of communal arts and crafts, art and music, that relate to new ways of learning and teaching, that relate to new forms of creativity, new ways of being rewarded for individual and collective creativity. Finds that relate to better understanding of ourselves and our ability to look after ourselves, repair ourselves, enrich ourselves.
• We need to continue experimenting. And for that we need open minds, soft hands and a willingness to work together without seeking to polarise opinion through sensationalism.

Now, lets cut to the core.

What then is the value of relationships. Are they the core corporate asset.

Interpreting each element a psychologist would, I suspect, see emotional drivers above all others. The Social Media is important because it affects emotions.

Social media has a huge capability to add to the value (asset value) of organisations.


Picture: The Institute of Culture Calcutta

New Media participation gets traction

Until the world discovered that combining the two yields explosive results, Coke and Mentos had little in common. Reports AdWeek.

It says that "Thanks to widely circulated Web videos of the stunt, the soft drink and candy were joined at the hip this summer.

In the aftermath, the companies took divergent paths: Perfetti Van Melle, maker of Mentos, quickly moved to align itself with the consumer phenomenon, while Coke kept a studied distance.
Mentos has attracted over 300 submissions, which have been viewed more than 400,000 times. The Coke Show, which wrapped up its first contest last week, got only 35 videos, with none getting more than 2,000 views.

PR lessons: Monitor, evaluate, join in.

How companies use RSS

Via BL Ochman this article by Roland Piquepaille on how companies can use RSS .

RSS technology, like blogs, can be used by companies in various situations. RSS feeds can be used internally or externally to improve business processes, as reports the editorial of the latest issue of CIO Magazine. This article gives some details about how real companies use RSS to complement — or even replace — their e-mail systems.

Secrets - on the web?

"September is Ethics Month at PRSA, and not a moment too soon," Says BL Ochman in her blog. "The organization is presenting "Resolving Bad Ethical Practice Situations" to discuss "recent high-profile ethical problems ripped from headlines, bylines and web blogs." It'll be presented three times, but all media is banned, according to O'Dwyer PR (sub required).

Says the PRSA website: "Celebrate PRSA’s Ethics Month with this informative and convenient teleseminar! ... Participants [except journalists] will have a chance to question the panelists during the last 20 minutes of the 90-minute broadcast." Of course, if any journalist gave a crap, wouldn't they just register as a non-member and crash the party?

O'Dwyers' reports: "A statement via PR manager Cedric Bess said the "ethics seminars will not be open to the media. This will allow for and encourage an open and candid learning environment for the participants who may be discussing sensitive issues."

Intgernet porosity will mena that a lot of this secret debate will apear online anyway. So why all the secrecy. Its not as though anyone is in any doubt about the need, context or content of the debate.

Beatles in the wiki

The Beatles Story calls on friends worldwide to help create the first on-line, fully interactive encyclopaedia devoted solely to The Beatles: www.beatlesstory.com/wiki

Based on Wiki software which allows multiple on-line users to submit and edit shared content, the Beatles Story aims to make this the number 1 site for all Beatles resources.

Readers to shape the news

Hemscott got this news in first. Wired News readers are getting a chance to shape the news: For an article about wiki collaboration software, anyone may contribute using, what else?, a wiki.

The online news outlet challenged readers to edit a 1,059-word article just like an editor would. The writer, Ryan Singel, has even posted interview notes and conducted additional research in response to questions raised by the community.

Another wiki application

WorldonPaper.com has issues a press release via Newswire announcing an implementation of a wiki customized to fit its customers' needs.

Implementation of this system, it says, is a part of a long-term goal of providing quality unbiased up-to-date information to photographers and non-photographers alike. We are dedicated to adding new content frequently, and assuring its quality and usefulness.

A new Wiki platform

MindTouch has released a beta version of an "instant wiki" system at the rather nice wiki.com address Says the Guardian's Jack Schofield on his Webwatch blog. It really is a beta, as I discovered by doing a quick bit of copy-and-paste to create a wiki about Pictures at an Exhibition. It's also not clear how anybody else would add to it.

Blogging in Lebanon

The conflict between Israel and Lebanon has spawned a host of weblogs, many of them in English reports the BBC.

They offer a variety of diary-style reportage, eye-witness accounts and photographs, and intense scrutiny and analysis of the coverage of events by traditional media.

Not only can bloggers respond and interact almost instantaneously, they can also use digital photographs, provide clips from TV reports, link to podcasts and make use of satellite mapping imagery.

They are also influencing media reporting as well.

Microsoft blogging service

Microsoft has launched a blogging software as part of its Windows Live service that makes blogging easier for technophobes reports Pocket Lint.

While most blogging services require that the users has some understand of web encoding, Windows Live Writer features a what-you-see-is-what-you-get interface, so that it just requires you write and format as you go.

Blogs and legal issues

A blog can be a good way to get your company noticed. But it can be a potential legal nightmare says PC Advisor.

Companies have begun to view blogs as a valuable tool for many purposes. These include marketing products, building goodwill and brand loyalty, putting a human face on the corporation, countering negative publicity and facilitating communications with current and potential customers.

Some firms have official corporate blogs, or policies to encourage employees to set up personal blogs that can be used to promote the business. But while blogging can benefit companies, it can result in legal liability.

More Blogger updates

Pocket Lint says Google has been busy the last few days. The company’s self-publishing platform, Blogger, has announced a new beta version that makes it easier to blog.

Blogger now lets users tag their entries so that posts are more easily categorized.

Drag-and-drop functions have been added, to make the templates less HTML-based, and users can now choose to make blogs private or public.

Search 200 years of news with Google

Web giant Google is further expanding its online empire with the launch of the Google News Archive Search reports the BBC.

21CN steps up mobile comms channel options

IT Pro reveal Businesses and consumers living in Cardiff will be the first to benefit from BT's£10 billion 21st century network (21CN is designed to offer communications from anywhere to any device).

This can include interactive posters at the bus stop and rail station, Skype phones, Xbox and many other communication platforms.

Pump and Dump

The BBC reports that spammers hoping to manipulate the stock market have begun approaching firms, offering to raise their share price in exchange for a percentage fee.

They are Farrington Fodder "The badly spelt and poorly punctuated e-mail in fact offers two services in one go: "boosting" the company's own share price, and offering "information" about other prospective share price rises."

College gives away free iPod

A college in Dover has a surprise for this term’s students; they’re each eligible to get one of 250 iPod nanos purchased by the school. They are being given out to encourage students to listen to podcasts of lectures

One Minute News

I get bombard with news so I thought I would pass on a digest of UK 'new media' news over the last few days. One thing that is notable is the amount of new media already in use across the UK.





An attempt by a UK cabinet minister to discuss proposed environment policy using a wiki has ended in embarrassment after pranksters made merry at the expense of the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs' reports The Register .


Horsham Today reveals news of a podcast on West County Council's website, launching a new service designed to offer help and advice to listeners using the latest mp3 technology.The very first podcast offers parents with children moving up to secondary school the chance to hear a specially recorded interview with Peter Senior, former headteacher at Steyning Grammar School.


The Guardian has revealed that a Syrian blogger has been arrested by the country's security forces without explanation, raising fears that President Assad's government is seeking to curb freedom of speech on the Internet. Ali Sayed al-Shihabi, an English language teacher, has not been seen since he was summoned to a meeting with security agents in Damascus on 10 August. It is believed his detainment may be linked to articles he has written on a political website.

LEADING Liverpool council officials and others named on a controversial website about town hall dealings are preparing legal action against its author. City lawyer Mark Manley confirmed he is acting for several people who want to sue the (now silenced) author of the Liverpool-Evil-Cabal blog for defamation.

In Mobile Digest we discover that a next-generation iPod phone (dubbed the iPhone) would not be a huge success.

A digital music survey of 3000 British consumers suggests that most people would either keep phone and music player separate, or want a phone that plays music rather than a music player that makes phone calls:

• 46% of those surveyed said they would prefer to use a phone that played media files.
• 21% said they'd use a music player on its own.
• Over one-third said they'd never use a combined phone and music player.

Meanwhile Pocket Lint revealed a survey commissioned by the government Home Office that shows people do more to protect their gadgets at home than they do their passports. Only 22% of the 1064 people polled by FDS online lock their passports away, compared to the 28% that said their iPods and jewelery were locked up, with another 44% saying they were “kept securely”.



Farmers Weekly report on a survey of nearly 6500 consumers for Sainsbury's the UK supermarket chain which revealed there is no such thing as the average shopper. Which is encouraging and give comfort to those of us who think social media is ideal platform for individual conversations. The theory of the long tail rules!


The BBC reports that Children in Britain are among the most lazy in the world, the survey found UK children spend an average of 9.4 hours a week playing computer games or watching TV, but less than one hour a day being active. The report, commissioned by supermarket chain Tesco, surveyed 3,500 young people from 10 countries around the world, including Britain, the US, Australia and India. Ranking the 10 countries in order of their children's fitness, Britain came in as the seventh fittest nation.

Contractor magazine found out that Silicon Valley is the worst technology hub in the US from which to start-up a business in the USA. A survey of the region’s enterprise leaders says the region comes last on a long list of potential locations for tech start-ups because of its high house prices.

Here is good news for Rupert Murdoch. E-consultancy reports the 2006 Digital Music Survey, carried out by Entertainment Media Research, which shows the likes of Bebo and Myspace have a strong influence over the way listeners’ discover and purchase music online. Almost a quarter of visitors to social networking sites said they have a “massive” or “big” impact on their music purchases, while 31% said they had bought music they had discovered on these sites. Nearly half (49%) also said they regularly or occasionally recommended artists to other users of social networking sites.

It looks like Rosie O'Donnell's blogging days might be at an end , since Barbara Walters - Rosie's new boss on The View - doesn't really like it very much. It is still up and running .

eGov Monitor reported that almost one in four EU households is now connected to the internet via high-speed “broadband” links. Broadband’s popularity grows with household size – only 12% of single households have it, compared with 34% of those with four members or more. And, of those households that have only “narrowband” internet connections, 40% do not wish to upgrade, either because they are satisfied with the speed of their dial-up connection or because they do not use the internet enough to justify the higher cost of broadband.

Roy Greenslade on the Guardian tells us that Traditional media In Britain are seen as the most trustworthy source of information, according to a survey by Telecom Express. The report finds that newspapers and TV are far more trusted than websites or blogs, with TV topping the poll at 66%, papers receiving 63%, and radio getting 55%. However, websites get a 36% rating while news blogs are the least trusted sources with just 24% of the vote.

Wensleydale Dairy Products has launched its own blog to raise support for a campaign to protect the origins of Real Yorkshire Wensleydale Cheese reveals Digital Bulletin. The blog, created by PR agency Green Communications , has been launched following the company's application for a Protected Designation of Origin mark, which protects EU foods produced in a given geographical area similar to the protection won by Parma Ham and Parmesan Cheese. The website will include members of Wensleydale's 190 staff giving regular updates on developments at the creamery.

The London Times has launched a daily comment blog called Comment Central , which is to be edited by Daniel Finkelstein.

Finkelstein, a long-time columnist at the paper, is a former adviser to Prime minister John Major. He will edit the site, selecting the newspaper's best writing, and give a guide to opinion on the web. "Blogging is an incredibly exciting form of journalism, especially in the field of comment. Just as the role of a newspaper is to filter and edit the best for the reader, the role of Comment Central will be to bring the online reader the most fascinating comment and analysis on the web," Finkelstein said. I bet he would love to lunch with Colin Farrington.

In Computer Business Sun Microsystems' CEO Jonathan Schwartz's latest blog is a great example of how to help to cross-sell your biggest partners/customers without it being immediately apparent to everybody that what you're doing is cross-selling your biggest partners/customers.

The Observer reported that a Syrian blogger has been arrested by the country's security forces without explanation, raising fears that President Assad's government is seeking to curb freedom of speech on the internet.

Yahoo! will launch a service today that allows users to ask other people's advice , when looking for anything from a good hotel or bar to an apple pie recipe, rather than rely solely upon electronically generated search results. The search and online portal operator will promote Yahoo! Answers with its largest advertising campaign in Britain since the dotcom boom.

Mark Lazarowicz has put his political thoughts online by setting up a weblog says the Scotsman . The Labour backbencher claims to be the first city MP to have joined the world of blogging.

Another Political blogger

The Conservative Party's increasing use of the web has continued during David Cameron's trip to India. He is writing a blog and posting video clips.

In his first piece for the blog, David outlined why he is travelling to India, and posted a short video he made just before getting onto the plane.

Bloggers have so far responded well to the "David Cameron in India" blog, which you can read here.

I guess, from now on we will have lots of pictures of politicians sent to Coventry if they don't come up to the Farrington standard.

Cheer for Yorkshire Bloggers

This post is for Stuart Bruce and Richard Bailey.

Wensleydale Dairy Products has launched its own blog to raise support for a campaign to protect the origins of Real Yorkshire Wensleydale Cheese.

The blog, created by PR agency Green Communications, has been launched following the company's application for a Protected Designation of Origin mark, which protects EU foods produced in a given geographical area similar to the protection won by Parma Ham and Parmesan Cheese.

This means that any manufacturers outside of Wensleydale, where the cheese has been produced since 1150, can not produce a cheese and call it Real Yorkshire Wensleydale.

Some of the posts bring a lump to your throat: " Now, the most famous tea rooms in Yorkshire are backing Real Yorkshire Wensleydale Cheese. Bettys, which has six tea rooms across Yorkshire, only uses real Wensleydale made at the Creamery at Hawes." Ahhhhhh!

Picture: Wallace & Gromit Wensleydale

Lets Create Wealth

In one day, years of PR research and study is being made available to everyone in the Public Relations industry.

Three people all working independently created similar wiki's.

• Richard Bailey has created the a wiki about books every Public Relations student (not to mention practitioner) should have at hand in his wiki 'PRbooks'.
  

• Another academic Philips Young has also created a Public Relations wiki called Mediations wiki
  

• And I have been working on my Public Relations Bibliography too.
  

We discovered our mutual activity earlier this week.

Yes a coincidence, yes some duplication and yes competing with other specialists in the field (see this list courtesy PRbooks).

Constantin Basturea is one of the pioneers with The New PR wiki whose seminal work in the field of Social Media is a great resource.

Each of these resources is unique in its way (comprehensive, selective, subject specialist).

Critically, the above are all searchable and editable by anyone who wants to help develop these resources. In addition people can comment about pages and content. These are resources that the PR academics and PR practitioners can add to and contribute their efforts for the wider good. I encourage you all to make your contributions to each.

Other resources are not as easily maintained (as I know to my cost) because they are efforts using non-social media.

Amazon UK: Public Relations
Chartered Institute of Public Relations: Library catalouge (members only)
Colorado State University: PR Bibliography
David Phillips (guilty as charged): PR evaluation bibliography
Northern Kentucky University: History and evolution of public relations
Ohio University: Journalism history: readings and resources
PR Place: Bibliography of PR books
PRSA: PR International Bibliography
The Museum of Public Relations: Reference Library

Richard Edelman and more recently Sir Martin Sorrell, have made their position quite clear: Social media is important and central to future success. It is the responsibility of the PR sector to take it forward and here is a classic case study of social media at work.

If this coincidence had not been two academics and a part time lecture, but three local retailers tempting consumers or a global booksellers to appreciate the niceties of their products, there would have been both a first mover advantage and competition through content. Just as important, all the other retailers would have been wrong footed.

Today's announcements, because of the timing, will create (just watch this space) a buzz about these developments.

In addition, the very nature of this same day event (and as it happens we are all announcing on the same day because we discovered our mutual activities were common and, at the last minute, we colluded to post on the same day), will also flush out other such available bibliographies because bloggers will tell the world. This too will add to the wider knowledge of our industry. In the commercial world, the same things happen. There are ethical issues. Commercially would our collusion over the announcement timing be unfair and ethical?

In this case there is no ethical issue and the whole PR industry benefits. This kind of initiative could have been an industry sector-wide initiative with all the PR institutions creating new wealth for the sector. It is the kind of thinking that we now need to adopt in PR and for our clients. The very nature of organisations is changing. Yes... it is already changing. The Internet and many manifestations of social media are having an influence on the value of organisations.

This is a one off. We just found out that we were all doing similar things. But it is a classic case of social media in action.

Hiding from the social media phenomena as it gains pace is a failure of fudicial duty as much in PR as in corporate governance.

Next up, of course is how we can collaborate and, most especially, involve all PR academics and practitioners to help build on these resources and add value to their industry.

What is especially exciting for me is that this is an example of how a wide range of values is presented to an audience. These values are presented in a token that could be called 'bibliography'. There are a host of such tokens (both wikis and bibliographies on line) these particular tokens are relevant to the PR industry. Here then, are tokens with values relevant to a particular group of people. It is not beyond the realm of the possible that these wikis will find resonance with practitioners and relationships will be created. This is classic for the theory of the Relationship Value Model. It will be a case study worth following especially as the channels for communication are blogs and wikis.

The employers of 3000 press and public relations practitioners in the UK public service might find these works helpful for the continues professional development of their practitioners. The consultants who can now so easily access the reference works that underpin the veracity of their practice might point to these contributions and the institutions that represent the industry will no doubt reference these works as evidence of a thriving practice.

Here then is a place where knowledge can be accessed quickly for practitioners who want information or access to the leading thinkers and researchers in in the PR sector.

What would now be fantastic would be help so we can all collaborate and really develop a single global, detailed and always up-to-date resource for the industry.

Picture: The Library of Alexandria

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