Where is the value in TV and film programmes

The punch-up between Viacom and Google reminds us how far the copyright debate has to go.

It seems to me that most people in companies have a funny idea about the value of their value systems.

Most have not read the 1994 John Perry Barlow article in Wired Magazine.

Lets take a simple example. There is a special thrill in reading good old fashioned newspapers. The paper, the layout the mix and match of style and context makes this a special experience. It is the same with magazines both consumer and B2B. There is a special relationship between a reader and the mag. Even if you read the story in a newspaper, the magazine take is different. You buy both magazines and newspapers.

The trouble is that content in newspapers (and magazines) has a limited exposure and a short shelf life. From time to time some people try to increase the reach of a story or its longevity.

They take clippings. Reading clippings is not the same as reading the original. It is sanitised and comparatively ugly. Now here is the rub. Publishers don't like people taking press clippings because they feel that this is an abuse of copyright and if someone wanted to read the article, they should buy the whole newspaper. The reality is that, with few exceptions, the value of a clipping content as an experience is not enough to prompt people to buy the newspaper. The value is just not worth it most of the time. So the publishers limit the longevity and reach of their copyright in the UK through an agency set up to do just that.

Some people read content online. Once again the story has an increased circulation and life. The experience of reading press stories online is very different to reading it in print. People read more words online (yes - that is a surprise). The content is in a different context. But publishers don't like us doing that. They want to charge subscriptions, or get at email addresses to shout at people who want to read their journalists' content (but possibly not the publishers' advertisers' content) . Alternatively, the publisher serves up advertisement and online readers will accept some of that interference in exchange for reading the editorial.

What the copyright holders find hard to understand is that these three media (and there are lots more) for their initial copyright are different experiences. The commercial model can be different too.

Trying to make copyright fit all platforms and channels for communication is stupid. The experience is different and what and how people are prepared to pay for it is different. I like listening to the verbal declamation of some newspaper journalists, as well as reading their writing in print and online and the added blog comment as well as some of the online video.

The same goes for music and video. I am listening to Guitar music (Mario Parodi - Fur Elise on Sky.fm) as I write using a headset. I could be listening to a track on my laptop in a range of formats. It is different to using earbuds, LoFi and HiFi CD players, and broadcast radio, indoor concerts, and outdoor gigs, the London Underground busker or (horrors) in a supermarket.

Like the publishers of news, publishers of music and video are just rubbish at getting the most from their copyright. They want a one stop suits all method for getting the best value from journalists or artists.

What they miss is the value of copyright. In reality it is worth nothing.

It gets value in an exchange with, guess who, you and me.

Today, its digitised and can spread and replicate and transcend platforms and channels for communication and the publisher can still have it and hold it as its own.

Keep upsetting me, I say to publishers, and I will just go somewhere else or will just break your rules and end up in court where you win the case and I win the argument.

With just a tiny bit of imagination - publishers are not renown for it - the ways of making pots of money and creating massive assets are available to all copyright holders.

When Roland Gribben says " DaimlerChrysler was born out of ego, arrogance and an element of naivety. Jürgen Schrempp, Prussian-style chief executive of Daimler Benz, was on the ego trip." Its a great statement. Here is a long standing and respected global commentator making a powerful statement. To hear that in podcast form, on YouTube or in debate, could be a much richer and added experience. The drama is everything in print and has great potential elsewhere not least in the PR exchange that always follows such statements.

Drama that a lot of people would want to exchange for real money.

It is in the morphing and Internet Agency where true value arises online. Digitisation releases information and knowledge creativity and authors from the place where copyright has its hold.

Value is in the values that go with the content and delivery channel and changing values into a new metaphor for value (OK so you want money) is a different trick altogether.

Olympics in the near field

Near field technologies and social media have a potential to be both part of the security system for the London Olympics in 2012 and a key part of the public relations activity for the Games.
While there are squabbles over who gets what contract, PR agencies are exploring how the same near field technologies can be used to optimise sponsorship and develop new channels for reaching one of the most savvy audiences in the world who will attend the Olympics.

Near field communication, which can be as simple as a Bluetooth add-on to downloaded value added widgets to most mobile phones can be activated at any pinch point such as turnstiles and Underground ticket terminals.

This will be a really nice way to add value to the Olympic experience. Or it could be more marketing bling, spin or hype - depending on where companies think they can get the best ROI or loose most of their reputation.

Adverts turned into conversationtional value

I want to comment further on the post by Charlene Li on the acquisition of Right Media by Yahoo!
While here post and the Right Media (not to mention Yahoo!) focus on serving up advertisements, I want to change the setting somewhat.
If instead of serving up ads, the 'advertiser' served up ideas or even dynamic conversations what would happen?
The advertisement would become a conversation and although push in the first place could quite quickly become the method for pull.
The concept turns online advertising into a form of interaction not dissimilar to RSS feeds.
Instead of shouting, PR can enjoy a conversation with interested parties.
What will be happening will be that values will become a currency between users and organisations... nice thought.

Estonian attack - cyber tank outside Parliament and economic sanctions announced

European and U.S. leaders have repeatedly accused Russia of using its energy resources as a weapon against its neighbors. Russia has always denied it, citing different technical reasons for energy supply halts.

Now Estonia Russian oil firms are re-routing a quarter of their refined products exports away from ports in Estonia and Russia's railways halted deliveries reports Reuters.

This is set againts what Estonian Prime Minister Andrus Ansip called 'continuing cyber-attacks from the servers of Russian state authorities' a few minutes ago.

The Russioans have a cyber tank on the lawn outside the Tallinn parliament and now have economic sanctions in place.

I guess that we are still waiting for the EU to imagine this is not happening ahead of a nice long week end break.

Russia shuts Ken Livingston down - EU delegation on its way

Let's suppose, for a second, that London was Estonia. Imagine if the statue of Karl Marx in Highgate Cometary was to be re-located to Westminster Abbey.

Two days later would we hear Ken Livingston, Mayor of London, reported as saying: "cyber terrorists'" attacks against Internet pages of City of London government agencies and the office of the Mayor originated from Russian government computers."

Well, according to the BBC and other media, that is what is happening in Estonia today. This is State sponsored cyber terrorism. It is an attack on the government of a NATO and EU member just as powerful as a tank on the lawn.

Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves on Wednesday called on Russia to "remain civilised" amid a spiralling diplomatic crisis sparked by the removal of a Soviet war memorial."It is not customary in Europe to demand the resignation of the democratically elected government of another sovereign country," he said in a statement. "It is not customary in Europe to use computers belonging to public institutions for cyber-attacks against another country's public institutions.

There are deep ethnic divisions and a cruel history at play here which is not part of this post. This post is about how governments can invade the cyberspace of a nation's peoples. But one cannot but wonder if this is not a row that is part of the NATO concern over Russian President Vladimir Putin's threat to freeze his nation's compliance with a key arms control treaty

F-secure list many Estonian government sites, that have been subject to attack and on Saturday this was the situation:

www.peaminister.ee (Website of the prime minister): unreachable
www.reform.ee (Party of the prime minister): reachable
www.agri.ee (Ministry of Agriculture): reachable
www.kul.ee (Ministry of Culture): reachable
www.mod.gov.ee (Ministry of Defence): reachable
www.mkm.ee (Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications): unreachable
www.fin.ee (Ministry of Finance): reachable
www.sisemin.gov.ee (Ministry of Internal Affairs): unreachable
www.just.ee (Ministry of Justice): reachable
www.sm.ee (Ministry of Social Affairs): reachable
www.envir.ee (Ministry of the Environment): reachable
www.vm.ee (Ministry of Foreign Affairs): unreachable
www.pol.ee (Estonian Police): reachable
www.valitsus.ee (Estonian Government): unreachable
www.riigikogu.ee (Estonian Parliament): unreachable


If it were London, there would be a run on the pound, the Stock Market would be in free fall and reaction on behalf of the European Union to the behaviour of Russia would be as vigorous as possible.
We would hear Ken saying "This could mean suspending different talks between the European Union and Russia or not commencing them at all. The postponement of the European Union - Russia summit should be also given full consideration."

For the last few days I have been watching how this skirmish has been panning out.
The world media has been following the story with a bigger bias of Russian coverage than European

To ensure that Estonian Government statements can get to the wider world, bloggers have been spreading them, some with nervouse statements about membership of NATO and the EU. One gets the impression that some Estonians are not sure if they can count on the support of the European Union or NATO.

Blog spam has been brought to bear but not to great effect because the spam is the same content on lots of sites (I expect it will pop up here soon too).

Ross Mayfield (founder of Socialtext) has been following (fighting?) the propaganda war on Wikipedia.

There is a war of video and pictures on line too. YouTube is caught up in the propaganda war.

Twitter has been involved in distributing news and Podzinger is showing podcasts on the subject too.

The attack on Estonian sites has been effective but its interesting to see how Social Media has come into play and offered a range of perspectives.

In addition, social media is showing that shutting down web sites is no longer the threat it once was and that an online interactive conversation, even when passions is high, a range of views are available and in play allowing a wider and global population to align with the value of people they would support.

There is a lot more to come on this story.

Social Media can be controlled

There are riots in front of European Union offices in Moscow

There is almost no media coverage about it. There is even less Google news juice. There are few blog posts about it. Its just as though someone was working really, really hard at Denial of Service against a plan that has been in place for a long, long time.

The story could have been written by Ian Flemming and is about Russian imperialism and the scars that go back to Nazi and Russian deals over the Baltic states that kept peoples in shackles for fifty years.

It is a story about ethnic Russians abandoned by their own country and forced to face the ire of their one time subjects and Russia using both sides to drive another wedge between European interests and Russian ambitions.

So, how come a DoS attack?

What if wikipedia was closed to new edits? What would happen if some newspapers' stories seemed not to get indexed except in the copy of secondary pages - by Google? What if the news aggregators have lots of content from Tass and Interfax but not much from the mainstream European or US press?

It would seem odd. It is odd. Tim Wilson reports on DoS attacks which seem very slick and comprehensive for a country of a million people, even the clever Estonians.

It will be interesting to see if you have similar experiences.

If there is a way to hide/bury or deny a competitor space online would n't that be a good products to sell to the command and control freaks?

What do we need to know about the media

There are many channels for communication. More arrive every day. What do we need to know about them if we are going to use them for public relations activities?

Here is a small list:

1. Title (e.g. email)

2. Definition

3. History (wikipedia or another resource)

4. Fast Facts (how would you explain this channel for communication really quickly)

5. Communication platforms (p.c, laptop, cell phone, print - yup I guess the dead tree society deserves to be included in social media resources).

6. How do people (the public/s) contribute to this channel? To what extent is this common (past/now/future)

7. How does the public share knowledge of content in this channel - using this channel and across other channels. To what extent is this common (past/now/future).

8. Risk analysis (issues, future opportunities, threats - read the lecture and fill out the risk assessment matrix )

9. What services are available to help you set up/deploy this channel (software, suppliers and/or contractors; are there expert people that you could employ on behalf of a client)

10. How to implement the technology (what are the steps involved)

11. Internal/external policies (examples of such policies will be needed if you are going to use this channel)

12. How do you optimise this channel to help people find/use it (e.g. Search Engine Optimisation)

13. Monitor (what is there out there that can help you monitor the effect of your work using this channel - e.g. can you set up and RSS feed or a search engine monitor. Can you monitor how this channel is affecting its audience and how? Do you need to use a monitoring company and if so who has the expertise - and how much will it cost?)

14. Metrics (what numbers are available in the public domain? What numbers are available in the private domain? Is this best measured as page views or is it the number of references it generates in Digg) or a combination or are the metrics completely different?)

15. Evaluate (How do you set realistic targets and outcomes; how can you measure how hgood you are at using this channel for communication; how can you evaluate the effectiveness of using this channel for communication as part of a relationship building campaign?)

16. Overcoming barriers to dominant coalition (what are your arguments; how are they supported with real and verifiable evidence; can you call on quantifiable evidence and case study supported reasoning?)

17. Case studies of good and bad practice (Can you find case studies and can you look at the best examples and the worst and then identify the risk mitigation or opportunity optimisation policies you need to have when using this channel for communication).

18. Relevance to organisations and practice

19. Training (training resources, training examples, etiquette)

Did I miss something?

Evaluation by another name

The discussion at E-consultancy’s March 2007 roundtable on Web Analytics offers some interesting insights.

They suggests that this form of measurement is now an industry worth some £56 million (2006).

They also offer some ideas as to how outcomes can be measured in this post.

The importance of all this is that it is now part of the mix of reporting data needed for PR in our Internet Mediated world.

Opinion Polling is showing half of the story

Sir Robert Worcester FIPR has been offering his opinion polls to the PR industry for years. Mostly these services offer useful information and sometimes insights (you might imagine that, in another life and as the founder of Media Measurement, I had some occasion to monitor what was offered and used by some of his clients).

Today I read his comments about uptake of the Internet and why we should not rely on it because it does not reach a range of segments of the population.

To begin with lets be clear, the Internet is not a channel for communication and it is as much a place as a range of technologies. Thus if people do not access the Internet using a PC, they might by using a cell phone of television set, Skype phone or Playstation3. Thus the Mori factoid offered in Profile Magazine does need to be read with salt and a wake-up pinch.

Mr Worcester's contribution offers us this:

"...But still only about one in four of those 65 and older have taken up the Internet, and there has been no growth during the past 18 months.

"- And still fewer than one in ten of those 65 and older in DE households living on state benefits are taking part in the benefits of the internet.

"It is also true that the majority of wealth is in the hands of the oldest third of the country, who did 43 per cent of the voting at the last election. If you are thinking that communicating to your audiences is so easy now that the internet is so ubiquitous, think again. You might not reach all of your target audience using traditional media, it is also true that you won’t reach all these people via the internet, without also using the traditional media."

This is using an opinion poll as a 'PR exercise' on behalf of the newspaper industry (big Mori customers one cynically might add) .

Just as one would not depend on SMS for interacting with these segments of populations, one might also not use Blogs or telemarketing the over '80's.

That the Internet - a place - is where a lot of people visit and is not far from anyone, does not mean that it is in the least bit appropriate for direct relationship building any more than Heathrow Airport.

All That Robert Worcester's polls tell us is that loads of people use PC's to use the Internet - Wow! another victory for the pollsters.

This was just a plea to get PR people to use Newspaper interactions and is just nuts. If a campaign is worth its salt and is only exposed on one of, lets say 60, Internet mediataed communications channels, the media will report it.... no need for press releases - just good journalists who are on the look out for a good story. The newspaper proprietors will eventually learn that there is a need for good journalists for print as well as online and that printed newspapers are different to digital news (Read differently, at different times, using different channels etc).

If Robert wanted to get to the meat, he might ask if a story is relevant for the constituent and if so which media is not reporting it. You see, if the story is not on a tape, my 90 year 'old other person in the household' would not read it in a newspaper either - she is one of the nine in ten of the over 65's not using the Internet everyday (well except DAB radio) and is blind.

Come on Bob - it was a cheap article.

A backgrounder

We spend a lot of time going through the background of what is happening to media and so I have created this slide show. If you want to use it its available under the Creative Commons Licence (say where you got it from):




It is downloadable from here too.

Internet Archive

One of the great places to put out of print books and papers that you always meant to submit to a journal but just could not face the form filling is the Open Archive.
I have put my first book about the Internet there.

It saves having to back it up every so often.

Top blogs

You can get this page here and this is what is on it:

Managing the risk of technology

The graphic below comes from a post by John Milan in Read/Write web and is very germaine to PR practice. We are not going to stop Internet Transparency or porosity. We have to manage it.

If you look at the image, it offers the means by which the senior practitioner can manage lack of IT knowledge and responsibility or innovation.

Using the techniques of Risk Management, Organisations can asses thier level of risk along both axis (1-5) and can then look ate what can be done to mitigate the risk and test the assumptions again.



Sophisticated applications of these types of approach offer a good idea of ROI for managing risk (and opportunities).

Nice graphic!

It Just Happened

You can embed this video using this code from here: http://eyespot.com/blogs/leverwealth?postId=9378

The online module for a PR degree

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

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

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

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

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

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

Its a lot to handle.

But what have I missed out.....

Workplace Blogging is OK

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Register had to find out.

The employment lawyers are going to get rich on this.

Internet Porosity

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

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

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

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

Round up of news snippets.

This is a busy week for online PR news

Google is now mobile.

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

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

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

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

The ethics of the 'empty chair'

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

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

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

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

Underlying this debate is a serious point.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Communities attract participants

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

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

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

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

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

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

An anti-Astoturfing regulation?

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

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

The Rogers Review specifically targets activities pertinent to:

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

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

The Review detail is available here.

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

Rogers makes the point that

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

advertisement

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is not an option.

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

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

Newspapers to take on TV

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

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

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

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

Sony is the platform for a third life

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

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

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

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

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

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

Copyright will kill economies

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

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

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

The actualitie of copyright is that it is broke.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There has to be a better way.

Does Google drive traffic?

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

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

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

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

The results look like this:

www.lalibre.be

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




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



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



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

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




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

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

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

OED recognises Wiki

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

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

Thanks VNUNet

Advertsing and PR need not apply

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

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

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

Use your thumb to get a grip of web stats

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

So say Comscore.

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

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

Bang bang ... both feet

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

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

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

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

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

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

Could you believe that marketers are unethical?

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

eConsultancy reports.

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

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

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

The opportunity

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

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

Stick with the knitting BT.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stick with the knitting BT.

Bad management is not made good with firewalls

Web 2.0 report that a survey of more than 1,000 office workers found that 42 percent of those aged between 18 and 29 discussed work-related issues on social-networking sites and blogs.

The research, carried out by polling company YouGov for content security specialists Clearswift, revealed more than a quarter of young workers spent three or more hours a week surfing blogs and sites such as MySpace and YouTube during working hours.

Nearly four in ten admitted accessing such sites "several times a day".

This is supposed to say what?

Is it that organisations are, as a result going to become more porous. Well there is no news in that. The CIPR was telling the world about that when Lionel Zetter was in short pants.

Perhaps porosity is a bad thing? Well if Employee relations are that bad, then there is little hope for thr corporate future anyway and that has nothing to do with the Internet.

Perhaps having employees aware of online information is a bad thing... well... what sort of employer is this or perhaps employees are so badly motivated about their job they go off on a YouTube hunt for the banal.

All-in-all, I don't see what all the fuss is about except that bad management is not made good with a firewall.

The teaching of PR

There is conflict between what is happening in an Internet Mediated world and PR Theory:

I would like to explore, and do not have the licence to expound that with 1.1 billion (yes - billion) observers of corporate (and personal) activity, online PR is set against a practice that self evidently undermines scream management, spin marketing, bling PR, conscienceless and conscience driven CSR and privileged lobbies. For every propagandist, there is a counter propagandist: for every view, a countervailing argument. The wisdom of crowds is at once powerful and scrutinised. Where we teach Public Affairs the Internet offers the perpetual revolution (Mao lives - Zittrain proclaims the Cultural Revolution). The influence of the Internet on so many authors we use for teaching is a problem for a module that encourages online searching. Banish the words 'market segment' (unless a segment of one), stakeholder (when everyone can see, change and influence everyone and diversity attacks Freeman's ill founded ideas) and treat 'publics' with care (because a blogger is at the nexus of a relationship cloud that can be tiny or huge and have equality of power and influence in five minutes of global fame). NOLA.com, the web affiliate of New Orleans' Times-Picayune, was awarded the Breaking News Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of Katrina. It is a blog and its content was powered by SMS. Can a PR student master (comprehend) SMS mediated blog relations? Even Porter and Grunig have modified their views in the last two years . Then, of course, the very nexus of contracts (Coase, and Easterbrook weep) is dismantled when the reality of Internet agency and porosity etch away at the Intellectual Property of 'the contract' as surely as MP3 downloads and relationships replace conversation (Sonsino) as the driving force so that organisations cease to exist as we know them – proof being three students who, asked to provide a press release as freebie to a friend with a start up web business, have asked for part equity in exchange for an online (social media) PR programme. This is an issue for all PR teaching as we know it. Die press agentry Die! Die! Die!

With so much vested in Marketing, and notably Marketing PR (whatever that is), its disintermediation before our very eyes shows the PR and Marketing Schools suffer from schizophrenia in some style. London is the world leading online advertising capital. The UK is the biggest market for online advertising; Martin Sorrell briefs the City that his empire is not dependant on Advertising and marketing agencies and keeps his share price afloat; Web sites are in slow decline, sex sites are eschewed, social media soars in exponential appeal; relationships conquer all; the brand is an RSS feed; the message is corporate values systems (British corporate value systems are scrutinised by more English speakers in China that in the UK and USA combined). Transparency, agency and porosity is the theoretical core of Web 2.0 and is nearly a decade old and still the marketers believe they have a future and, worse, encourage students to take marketing degrees.

Like many organisations, the CIPR this year ceded its online presence to the UK's PR bloggers. Many of the latter had, individually, more reach and page views that the Institute or the leading trade magazine.

Major companies and brands are in the bottom quartile for online interactive presence despite the best efforts of the likes of Martin Sorrell who are fighting off freely created wiki content for Google ranking despite a massive online budget and not a few millions spent in online advertising.

We are now past the 'does social media change behaviours' we know it does - and more measurably than advertising. We are past page views and need to measure engagement. But these are measures that we still have to learn about and teach.

Online studies undermine 'marketing by numbers' not by the way they are taught or through the content in the modules but by the evidence of the online conversation space. Projection or rejection of brand messages, brand values, semiotics and values is no longer at the disposal of the brand. At best it is available by permission. The power has shifted. Power and influence is now held by a nexus of relationships and all too often they are outside the organisation and the organisation, whether it knows it or not, is changed.

Scream management; Pap marketing; Bling PR

Scream management - Pap marketing - Bling PR is what we are taught.

It will not survive. Karl Fisch offered this:

http://www.lps.k12.co.us/schools/arapahoe/fisch/didyouknow/didyouknow.wmv

I listened to MySpace.

Information and knowledge are disintermediated.

What is success:

Conversation, innovation and listen, conversation, innovation and listen.

Listening offer values. Values are intangible. Values create relationships. Relationships with richness and reach create wealth. Wealth offers money.

New wealth is based on conversation, innovation, listening, values, relationships, reach, wealth (and money what ever that is?).
Old wealth is available through conversation, innovation, listening, values, relationships, reach (and money what ever that is?).

Pap marketing (with associated scream advertising) and Bling PR (with associated CSR) offer no values. PR and Marketing as we know it have a very short shelf life.

PR ethics - are these the right question?

There is a significant debate on the issues of PR ethics bouncing round the bloggersphere and media. Heather Yaxley has a good conversation going on about it on her blog. Tom Murphy has a take as does Leo Bottary at H&K.

I just don't think it has been thought through. We are constrained by old thinking. We are either looking in or looking out. But there is no inside or outside.

This whole debate and the issues of professional and ethical Public Relations, the survival of trades like marketing and the disintermediating effects of social media are moving corporate practices towards what some might call relationship management. There are no segments or stakeholdera snd few 'publics' in the new world.

Last year I proposed that people recognise tokens because they identify associated values and that when there are convergent values with another person or organisation empathy will create a relationship (Towards Relationship Management... 2006 JCM).

In many ways this goes beyond discourse/rhetorical, propaganda debates because they are comparatively insignificant to the nature of values and relationships.

In exposing the values (indeed, value systems) of organisations, the organisation survives because of its values or not in interactions with its wider constituency.

Is the ethical practice then to expose the values or to change them?

A purist practitioner would expose the values and be damned and would allow the organisation to be damned by its constituencies. It is a form of practice that can stand back from the consequences of foolhardy management.

On the other hand the PR manager (a person who attempts to manage the relationships between an organisation and its constituencies) would attempt to change the organisation.

If the organisation wants to use propaganda (aka marketing) the purist practitioner has an ethical duty to expose the value systems that support that approach in so far as they are values evident inside the organisation. It is an acceptable professional approach and there is no ethical issue in exposing the true nature of the organisation.

In many ways this is part of current practice with the 'bog standard' 'boilerplate' intro paragraph you see as the first par on most press releases. This exposes the organisation as having values that are propaganda (pejorative) based.
The decision to issue such a release, if taken consciously, is ethical because it exposes the value systems of the organisation. The constituent can then live with such value systems or not - Publishing is happy to do so which is fine for the publisher (and might go some way to explain away falling readership).

Dell-Hell was not about a computer it was about values and value systems of an organisation. Wal-Mart dito.

The practitioner who is not making the conscious decision between exposing values or not is, of course, not a professional practitioner and belongs in trades like marketing.

To those who would argue that 'spinning' and 'putting the best face' are unethical practices I would argue that there is now a discursive inevitability that these practices will be exposed by the online conversation in due course.

This inevitability may be a challenge from any quarter. It could be some comment in a blog or it could become the disintermediation of a whole industry.

The assumption that 'it can be hard for the public to evaluate viewpoints and come to a reasoned conclusion' is unreasonable (more marketing speak). Who is 'the public'? Who are we to judge? If we believe such ideas we doubt the very foundation of democracy.

The attraction of values that represent tokens is hugely powerful and more potent than scream marketing can guess at. Did Tesco and Morrisons do enough to allay fears of polluted petrol with its advertising campaign this week? Yes they did. They paid through the nose to pay for the repairs to customer's cars, but, a week after the problem arose, what have they yet to do to assure their constituencies that the values of supermarketing and their constituencies have common resonance. The backlash will not come where the petrol is cheap. People are not daft. It can now come from anywhere and the real damage is that Tesco and Morrisons have no way of knowing where or when it will happen. Reputation in crisis is not knowing where the damage will be manifest.


There is no dichotomy for the ethical practitioner exposing corporate (institutional) values. The values are reflected in the people who can live with such value systems and killing the messenger is not what the PR industry should be doing. Indeed, our inability to be purist or manager is giving rise to a massive 'Citizen Public Relations' (CPR) sector which is replacing much of PR practice.

Our role as business managers has some way to go if we are to be empowered to change the very nature (and values) of organisations.
We are not forgiven and have a reputation in crisis.


Picture: Charnine
Charnine.com features information on surrealist artist Charnine

12 Themes on the 'User Revolution'

Piper Jaffray & Co. Internet Media and Marketing research team today published an in-depth, comprehensive research report titled, "The User Revolution.


There are 12 key themes discussed in "The User Revolution" report:
1. Global online advertising revenue to reach $81.1 billion by 2011.
2. Communitainment: Internet has increasingly become a principal medium
for community, communication and entertainment -- three areas that
have collided and are impacting each other's growth -- generating a
new type of activity: communitainment. Communitainment is taking time
away from other, traditional, types of content consumption on the
Internet.
3. Usites -- The increasing popular category of user generated sites,
which we are calling Usites, are driving traffic away from other
destinations and pose a challenge to the advertisers and publishers.
4. The Internet is now a mainstream medium: The web is the leading
medium at work and the second leading medium at home behind
television.
5. Internet usage patterns are changing, favoring Usites,
communitainment sites, search, and away from traditional portals.
6. User Generated Brands. The consumers are taking control of content
consumption and branding.
7. Media Fragmentation: Advertisers increasingly will need to buy more
inventory, from nearly all types of media, especially the Internet,
to have the desired impact.
8. The Golden Search: search has become the new portal.
9. Google's dominance is likely to expand, partly fueled by a wide
variety of non-search related products that create a virtuous cycle
of brand affinity for Google.
10. Video ads will be the driver of the next major growth in brand
advertising and getting additional dollars shifted from traditional
media to online.
11. Ad networks are experiencing increased demand due to increasing
Internet fragmentation, desire for more targeted inventory,
increasing usage of networks for branding and increased site
visibility.
12. Agencies are rapidly evolving into more sophisticated,
technology-savvy entities that combine best of breed offerings.

Delete Ads, insert relationships.

How do you know your blog is interesting?

The Uses and gratification theory, first identified in the 1940s by Lazarsfeld and Stanton (1944), attempts to explain why mass media is used and the types of gratification that media generates.

Rubin (1986) states that there are two underlying presumptions of the uses and gratifications model. First, researchers need to understand audience needs and motives for using mass media in order to comprehend the effects of the media. Second, understanding audience consumption patterns will enhance understanding of media effects.

A social cognitive theory of Internet uses and gratifications: toward a new model of media attendance by LaRose & Eastin, (2004) is very interesting and links U&G to Internet use.

Denis McQuail (McQuail, D. (1987): Mass Communication Theory: An Introduction (2nd edn.). London: Sage) offers a schemata to help establish the quality of web sites. When reviewing a site, this is a method that may be valuable to gain insights into how people will regard and use a web site (or a blog).

Morris and Ogan (1996) poit out that U&G is a comprehensive theory and is applicable to Internet mediated communication ( see also McLeod & Becker (1981).

INTERNET PUBLIC RELATIONS - interactivity

INTERACTIVITY

As we go through the aspects of Internet mediated public relations it is noticeable that someone has secretly sneaked into the place where they keep management, public relations and marketing rulebooks and scribbled on most of the pages.

In traditional management teaching, public and stakeholder relations created understanding of the culture or context for a company or organisation. People ‘understood where they were’. This relationship, largely crafted by companies, and other organisation (politicians, church, civil service, charities and Non Governmental Organisations etc) created an environment to allow a company (or organisation) to effectively promote its products and services. This created and context and public knowledge and (sometimes) an empathy with the public. Within this context, advertising and marketing promoted products and services to achieve sales. The chain of supply, production, distribution and payment process took over and distributed the product or service. It was simple.

Figure 1 (c) David Phillips 2007 The Traditional Information Value Chain

This process is now changed – someone has scribbled in the book! The public relations (politicians, church, civil service, charities and Non Governmental Organisations marketing, advertising and value chain transactions) contribution is now increasingly subsumed into an Internet driven context.

This conquest is both overt and hidden.

The overt presence (promotion and interaction between an organisation and its constituency) is now largely transparent and available in the Internet network. This is because of the application of web sites, news distribution, Internet marketing and market makers, in business to consumer and business-to-business environments.
The subliminal influence of the Internet, as the means by which an organisation is evident in the human (and machine) context, is not difficult to uncover.
The presence of information and messages about organisations is spread by, and through, web crawlers, search engines and RSS (note these are technologies not people). They are also distributed by people using email, Mobile text messaging, Instant Messaging, blogs, newsgroups, chat, personal, media and corporate web sites and much more.

Even tracking a new message in cyberspace is daunting. Monitoring all the messages, new and old, is already too difficult. The Internet is thereby in charge of creating context in which an organisation is evident to a broad constituency.

Such change is of the Internet. There is more. This change is affecting the ‘traditional’ context more than most understand.

Because a large part of the physical world is now dependent on information delivered across the Internet and through a range of devices, the once separate relationship between traditional and Internet driven relationships has gone. For example, reporters and news providers have become heavily dependent on the Internet which means that ‘traditional’ newspaper readers are reading Internet driven news by proxy. Traditional banks, manufacturers, logisticians, lawyers, physicians.... (the list is too long to enumerate) and more now depend on the Internet for information to allow them to operate. The context by which an organisation is known is only as good as its ability to use the Internet and to be part of the Internet culture. The web site is now the front window and front door for most organisations.

New employment dependencies are becoming apparent such as the print, publishing and distribution of books and CD’s benefiting from the on-line success of Amazon, Barnes and Noble and their competitors. This true of so many industries.

Progressively, overtly and subliminally, Internet technologies throughout the supply/demand chain, or, more appropriately, the value chain, but more significantly throughout the ‘value network’ have taken charge. Now, the whole population is dependant either directly or indirectly.

The context in which an organisation can thrive is rapidly moving from its ability to create relationships with publics (public relations) to relationships created by and across the Internet – and mostly via third parties beyond its control.

Figure 2 (c) David Phillips 2007 The New Information Value Network

The value network, extending upstream to suppliers and downstream to customers also includes the value added third parties to the transaction as well as other tertiary contributors in a network of networks. At an ever-greater extent they attenuate processes as information flows transparently through the whole of the transaction network. At once the supplier can be customer, partner, social commentator and commercial foe in such a networked structure. The consumer of news is also its author, editor, distributor and promoter as bloggers file their copy, pictures and videos and journalists comment upon them.

The international effort to sequence the human genome resembled an open-source initiative. It placed all the resulting data into the public domain rather than allow any participant to patent any of the results. This has resulted in a wave of new drugs and treatments, criminal investigation techniques, archaeological research and so forth. The information, once made public has created wealth in many directions.

The Internet's capability to allow people to access information comes through the nature and use of search engines, a very popular form of interactivity, but so too is an ability to interact with products and service, buy and sell, to pay taxes and to hold conversations, exchange virtual artifacts like pictures poetry and films.

Any analysis of pages viewed or searches made this century will show that interactive sites get more people involved.

More people have access to the Internet, more people can get 'stuff' faster because they have broadband, people are spending more time online. Industry has responded. It has invested in 'better' web sites. More graphics, eye tracking to optimise page layout and many other methodologies.

The result is disappointing.

Corporate web sites, by and large, have seen little by way of exciting growth in the amount of access by Internet users. Exceptions are those that offer opportunities to play, interact or buy.

Is the relatively poor performance of the generality of institutional web sites just because there are many more sites for people to visit? Is this because search engines have made it easy for people to find new places to go?

The Myspace, YouTube and Second Life phenomena suggests otherwise. Analysis of these types of web site, hugely interactive both in terms of their technologies and as the means for development of social groups, shows dramatic acceleration in numbers of users, frequency of use and interactivity. Even more significant is that these sites are key recommenders. People share information about their favorite web sites.

Conversations have been important for Internet users since it began but now these conversations are among millions, are easy to use and are huge drivers.

Interactivity changes organisations. As users interact with organisations, the organisations have to change. They have to respond. As a result they create systems, protocols and processes to re-act. If an order is placed online, a company has to devise systems to deliver goods, services and interactions with users. The Internet is changing organisations. Processes are included in the intellectual capital of organisations which is one way in which the Internet is changing the asset value of organisations. The online relationships are affecting the value of organisations.

Internet mediated Public Relations adds value in its own right and, additionally, as its evolution as a catalyst for empowering users in their relationship clouds, it becomes a bigger player in changing the value of organisations.

The demographics of the web - broader than you think

The current generation of "silver surfers" spends an average of six hours online each week, research by the insurance company AXA found according to the Daily Telegraph.

Emailing and online chatting to friends and family was the favourite internet activity of the retired people surveyed, followed by researching information, booking holidays and shopping.

According to the survey, 41 per cent of retired Britons named internet usage as one of their favourite pastimes.

Four in 10 retired people said they were regular internet shoppers.

This are the baby boomer generation. The generation that most marketers do not target online.

Which beggers the questions

Who is no longer part of the Internet generation?

What media is valuable for engaging with these people?

Is the PR industry using it?

Radio as we don't know it

The announcement of the latest Rajar figures is heralded as a great success for radio broadcasting by the broadcasters and the media. It is nothing of the sort.

Radio was dieing.

Then came the Internet

Then came that hackers and illegal file sharing folk

Then came light. Broadcasters found that MP3 was a friend, streaming Internet Protocol radio shows was a friend. The long tail is a friend.

They told the copyright lawyers to go away - well almost.

The shared their shows and find that digital radio is up, Podcasts are up, radio on TV's is up, Radio via mobile phones is up, listening via PC's is up.

Top programmes are up, niche programmes are up, listening to historic programming is up.

As the Independent put it: The digital revolution and the expansion of new ways of accessing information through the Internet has given a huge boost to one of the older and more traditional forms of electronic media - the radio.

There is one other angle. You can listen to the radio and do other things. It is great multitasking medium.

The research says that we we do things concurrently by switching from one task to another when we multi task so that is worth bearing in mind. This is not full and complete attention for much of the audience for much of the time.

PR practice has a big challenge, alongside the Rajar channels there are all the podcasts. Dozens of them.

Offering content both in terms of talking heads and ready made content is now a very definite part of the communication mix for PR.

Bang! Bang! Marketing

I shudder at a Guardian article about modern day marketing.

I Quote:

"We got a group of 14 or 16 actors, who were all football fans, but pretended to be fans [of the unnamed club]," explains Graham Goodkind, Sneeze's founder and chairman. "And they went round bars and clubs around the ground, in groups of two, saying that one of their mates had been sacked from work because he kept on getting these text messages and talking to everyone about it, and his boss had had enough and given him the boot. So they were going round with this petition trying to get his job back - kind of a vaguely plausible story.

"And then the actors would pull out of their pocket some crumpled-up leaflet, which was for the text subscription service. They'd have a mobile phone in their pocket, and they'd show them how it worked. 'What's the harm in that?' they'd say. And they could have these conversations with lots of people - that was the beauty of it. Two people could spend maybe 20 minutes or half an hour in each pub, working the whole pub. We did it at two home games and reckon we got about 4,000 people on the petition in total."

The petition went in the bin, of course, but subscriptions to the club's texting service soared. "The week after we had done the activity it went up to 120 sign-ups," says Goodkind, who is also boss of the Frank PR agency.

A lot of this is spured by the poor performance of advertising:

A 2004 study by Deutsche Bank found that, in the short term, just 18% of television campaigns in the US actually generated a positive return on investment. In the long term this figure rose, but only to 45%, suggesting that most TV advertising is little more than a fun way for a company to waste its money.

There is much more to this article and it is worth reading iffor no other reason that to look at the ethics of moderndat Marketing, advertising and - I regret to say PR.

Social Media stats keep comming in - and its good to talk

I have been commenting on the rise and rise of social media in the Internet firmament.

I noted Heather Hopkins contribution to this meme on Monday and added BBC news about the phenomenon in Google searches.

If PR really wants to offer an effect for its clients, these are the statistics that should be on the tip of the collective indutry's tounge.

Today Heather offers more evidence.

At the risk of taking her thunder here are some of her facts:

• Adult websites are down 20% in market share of UK Internet visits comparing December 2005 and December 2006.
• Gambling websites are down 11%.
• Music websites are down 18%

• Net Communities and Chat websites are up 34%.
• News and Media websites are up 24%.
• Search Engines are up 22%.
• Food and Beverage are up 29%.
• Education (driven by Wikipedia) is up 18%.
• Business and Finance up 12%.

Google accounted for 25% of upstream traffic to all categories of websites in December. The #2 source was Hotmail, accounting for 3%, and #6 was MySpace accounting for 2%.

• Search Engines (including Google) accounted for 35% of upstream visits in December, up 13% year on year.
• Net Communities and Chat accounted for 7% of upstream visits, up 64% year on year.
• News and Media accounted for 5% up 26% year on year.

Where does PR education go now?

The use of communication technology is ubiquitous in contemporary public relations practice, and often there’s no choice but to adopt the newest communication technology. So says the Commission on Public Relations Education in its recent report.

In the preface it says: For example, even the smallest and most traditional businesses require the Web sites that their customers expect, and the submission of a simple news release to a mass medium’s electronic newsroom must satisfy the technological requirements of that medium. Organizations must continually monitor blogs, recognizing that harmful rumors can spread worldwide in minutes. The contemporary practice of public relations requires practitioners to immediately respond to emerging issues and crisis situations via Web sites, blogs and other new media. Today, the choice of communication channels is dictated by technology: a practitioner must seriously consider which message forms and channels would be best for specific publics. Often, new technological forms and channels, such as electronic pitching, podcasting and blogging, prevail over traditional news releases and media kits.

This is recommended reading.

Social media continues to take over

Some time ago I noted how social media is growing compared to traditional media. This post showed how social media page views and reach is dominating web evolution Now there is more evidence from Heather Hopkins at Hitwise. She reports that social media search is showing this evolutionary trend too. The BBC has noted the same effect in Google searches.
Social media is a critical area for PR development and we need to embrace it fast.