Ethics

Social media: The death of spin has been greatly exaggerated

01/15/2008 by simoncollister 6 Comments

Wendy from Liberate Media has posted on their blog about the fundamental forces within social media require any PR to be as transparent as possible. In particular she cites political communications as a potentially huge beneficiary of this.

Her starting point for the discussion is Gordon Brown’s appointment of former “spin doctor” (as the Telegraph calls him) Stephen Carter to be his principal advisor.

Wendy observes:

“Politics is one subject in particular that is becoming harder and harder to ‘control’, with so many opinions and arguments being voiced across social media networks. The influence that spin doctors can have on political matters is rapidly being diminished, and in my mind will very soon be a thing of the past. There is no pulling the wool over the public’s eyes, when social media offers so much opportunity for the truth to come to light”

I left her a comment saying I totally agree but while this is ostensibly good news for democracy/civil society I had two major concerns.

These are:

1) PR in the UK is still not getting social media. There’s little or no industry leadership from the CIPR & PRCA and just look at my previous post on how some of the industry is engaging with the online space by artificially manipulating search rankings – this is still spin, albeit online spin with Google becoming the regulator.

2) Political parties seem to be recognising the value of this transparent medium, but they’re turning to advertising to roll out online campaigns. I think this is partly due to tradition but also because PR in the UK is far behind the curve on understanding and implementing social media strategies. What we could then end up with are creative, engaging digital campaigns devised by advertising and marketing firms which look good but aren’t planned or implemented with long-term relationship building in mind.

This is leads us to a potentially dangerous situation where the public (and worse the media) thinking political parties are giving the people a voice, when in fact they disenfranchising them by paying lip-service to participatory democracy.

If this happens then traditional, hard political power hardens at the centre while the public play with digital toys that keep them entertained but no closer to (argubly even further away from) democratic engagement.

That would be a very bad thing indeed.

Technorati tags: public relations, social media, politics, Gordon Brown, Stephen Carter, hard-power, democracy

Google warns PR firms: no link farming

01/11/2008 by simoncollister 8 Comments

I can’t quite believe I’m reading this in PR Week in 2008, but the UK edition of the magazine has a story about Google warning PR firms not to pay for link farming and other dubious practices. Instead, the article tells us PROs should be working at having conversations with bloggers which will boost their search rankings.

I mean… where do you begin with this one. Here’s my dismal thoughts:

Not content at editing client’s Wikipedia entries to manipulate public reputation PR firms have not got wise to what online marketing firms have been doing for years… and ‘cheating’
I know I keep saying the marketing profession is encroaching on the work
of PR, but retaliating by taking up link farming etc is
counter-productive
I can’t believe that in 2008 there are still PR firms who don’t know anything about blogs, the internet and understand the reasons why they need to engage
Oh yes… and that reason is about having real conversations with client’s customers, listening to their feedback, praise and concerns and acting strategically
PR is about communicating with your audience…… or not as the case may be for Volkswagen:

"Volkswagen Commercial (VWC) ran a successful trial programme 12 months
ago that saw its search engine optimisation (SEO) provider, Net-rank,
use an algorithm that searches the internet to find the most
authoritative web sites and bloggers. It then sends four press releases
to them every month."

As a blogger I can’t think of anything I’d love more than being selected by a robot to receive four unsolicited press releases a month. Wow!

Seriously, I know I bang on about this – and there are some notable exceptions to the rule – but am I missing something or is the UK PR industry really not getting doing PR in a digitally empowered society?

Technorati tags: PR Week, UK PR industry, not getting it, hang heads in shame

Could the internet ever become an ‘us vs them’ giant walled garden

11/11/2007 by simoncollister Leave a Comment

David Weinberger links to a good post by Marc Andreessen giving an overview of Open Social, the new EBFB (Everyone But Facebook) API.

I have yet to read enough about OS to make a judgement, but David states:

"Thus, the walled garden approach will at least allow us to move among the walled gardens."

… which is definitely a good way of looking at OS – especially as one of the commenters notes that the EBFB coalition is basicially made up of people who aren’t a threat to Google.

With Google’s dominence of the online space and driving force behind OS, could we ever conceive of a time when the internet is a number of walled gardens, such as Facebook, Open Social, LinkedIn etc…?

As we put more and more of our lives and personal data online will we come to a point where we want to have some security and know our presence only exists in a verifiable environment and shared with only a community we have authenticated ourselves?

Technorati tags: Open Social, Facebook, walled gardens, secure communities, Google, Everyone But Facebook

Can you Proveit and does it matter?

11/09/2007 by simoncollister 4 Comments

Received an email from old time pal and PR blogger, Stephen Davies, telling me about his firm, Webit PR’s, latest offering: Proveit.

Proveit is a service that provides copyright approval for clients using Webit PR’s online newswire to reproduce and use cuttings from 1000 online editors and bloggers.

As Stephen pitched it:

"Say if you’ve written a blog post about a company or product and the PR
team for said company creates a cutting from your blog post without your
permission. How would you feel about that? If you discovered they had
would you think it was copyright infringement?"

Now Stephen knows me well enough to know that personally if my blog gets cut I won’t be too bothered. However, if you are one of those hardcore commerical types or indeed a professional blogger you may well take umbrage at having your site used in this way.

My only thoughts are:

if you are run an overtly commercial type of blog – or at least are commercial enough to worry about copyright issues – then are you perceived as less credible than the ‘someone like me’ character most trusted by the public?
Plus, I presume that any bloggers using Creative Commons licences are happy for their content top be re-used?

I mean, kudos to the guys at Webit PR for continuing to bring online PR activity closer to the world in which traditional PR types understand, but if we reinforce the existing perception of the web as a logical extension of offline PR – one with the same rules – are we missing out on the chance to change the way PR practitioners think and behave?

More info on
their SMNR here.

Technorati tags: Webit PR, Proveit, copyright, creative commons

Net neutrality is an issue for everyone (heavy topic with fun picture)

09/27/2007 by simoncollister 2 Comments

I must admit I’ve not really ever delved too deep into the whole ‘free internet’ debate.

For me it has always been a case of "I’m sure it’s a worthy cause, but it’s something for others to take care of." – which, I’ll be honest, is a pretty easy position to occupy and has got a lot of people into a lot of trouble in the past.

But then today I saw this image:

Now, this really drove the ‘net neutrality’ debate home. How would you like to live in a world like that!

So while I still haven’t read the full cases for or against as of today I am officially taking an interest. If anyone cares to join my quest for information why not try:

Cluetrain author, David Weinbeger – Why Net Neutrality Matters
Wikipedia – Network Neutrality
Jeff Jarvis – Dangerous DoltsThreaten Our Internet

Technorati tags: net neutrality, free internet, David Weinberger, Jeff Jarvis