Simon Collister, PhD

Strategy + Consulting

Ethics

The Tim Ireland and Craig Murray case is a blow to blogging and democracy

by simoncollister 3 Comments

Uzbekh
For the past few weeks there’s been a lot talk about blogs being (mis)treated as traiytional media outlets when there are distinct differences.

Sadly, one of these differences is that most blogs do not have the legal and financial collatoral of big media establishments.

As a result they can be much easier to silence – as Craig Murray and Tim Ireland have found out.

The story is basically Craig Murray – former (and infamous) British ambassador to Uzbekistan – and poltiical blogger, Tim Ireland, wrote about their experience and views respectively of the Uzbekh oligarch Alisher Usmanov who is trying to buy Arsenal FC. Ellee Seymour notes that "lawyers letters followed which led to the webhost pulling the plug. "

Ellee also asserts:

"Newspapers are not shut down if they face libel allegations, (not in
the UK anyway) there is a legal process that is followed. Surely that
process applies to bloggers too. If the offending comments were not
libellous – and only a court can decide this – then Mr Usmanov’s
actions could be deemed illegal. He would have to pay damages. There
are all sorts of legal ramifications involved with this story."

In a way the real driver of blog independence – the power of individuals to articulate and publish free from editorial and commercial constraints – is its archilles heel.

That said, curtailing freedom of speech is pretty abhorant and the actions of Schillings (Usmanov’s lawyers) may be legally astute but utterly counter-democratic.

The way forward for society is advocacy, compromise and understanding. That’s real democracy in action and exemplifed by blogging,the internet and networked communities. Using heavy-handed legal tactics to break this system is abhorent and should be brought to light by bloggers everywhere just as Chicken Yoghurt is doing. Read their list of who’s blogging this scandal here.

Technorati tags: Craig Murray, Tim Ireland, Alisher Usmanov, democracy, media independence, blogging

Doing PR in today’s post-modern society

by simoncollister Leave a Comment

Came across a fantastic quote earlier this week about how contempiorary society is being changed by technology and post-modernism (no! wait… keep reading!).

US academic, Sherry Turkle:

“identifies a close ‘fit’ between network technology and ppostmodernist visions of contemporary life. She writes of a ‘nascent culture of simulation’ in which the self is constructed and the rules of social interaction are built, not received’. In consequence we ‘are inventing ourselves as we go along’.”

How good is that? Amazingly it was written *way back* in 1995 in Turkle’s book Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, I came across it in James Watson’s Media Communication: an introduction to theory and process.

It definitely chimes with my own thoughts about online identity posted the other month. And I also believe it has very important lessons for anyone in PR to learn.

Essentially, how can you attempt to communicate with the public if you don’t understand them? Well, traditionally, it was easy. You picked the relevant publication: you knew what the journalist liked and trusted them to know what their audience (broadly your target public) liked.

But in the online networkled world we are dealing with individuals – real people – and the broad brush-strokes of traditional PR and media relations become obsolete.

That why people like Tom Coates get pissed off – by being treated as another part of the traditional PR process.

Again, for me proces is part of the problem. Real social interaction doesn’t have a fixed process. PR implants a process on building relationships so we can manage it. But look at what social interaction is like in a post-modern (contemporary)society. According to Turkle: “the rules of social interaction are built, not received”.

So doing PR in the online space means working at building relationships as we go along, not using our pre-determined processes for planning PR activity that works for mass, broadly undefined audiences but fails when building real relationships with real people. Which would you prefer your client or organisation to have in the long-run?

Technorati tags: public relations, PR, post-modernism, network technology

Tom Coates, public relations and public relationships

by simoncollister Leave a Comment

There’s a big discussion going on at the mo’ about the role and function of PR in the blogosphere. It was all started by Tom Coates who feels he’s been treated like “a piece of meat” by PR companies who target his blog as “influential”.

The source of Tom’s ire seems to be Stephen Davies –someone I count as a friend. Stephen adds his thoughts to the debate and asks what others think of the situation.

So… [two penneth alert] for me the issue is two-fold: it’s retrospectively about how the PR industry is missing the point about the social web and going forward how PR can engage with the online environment properly.

Firstly, the PR industry misses the point with the social web/live web/blogosphere/whatever because it is far too process driven. PR people are ever used to writing a release, creating a media list and blanket mailing it out. This is partly the problem at the heart of Tom’s predicament.

Now, this process can be improved by some extra effort and understanding and Stuart Bruce offers a good overview of how PR people can improve this process.

However, working in an online social environment the PR industry needs to abandon process and adapt to working in a networked world of individuals. This invokes real effort, spontaneity, trust, genuine dialogue with real people. It’s the stuff PR should have been about from day One but which got lost in the world of mass communications.

It would mean that PR people would know who Tom is and know not to appraoch him. Tom is vociferous about not receiving press releases from people/companies/etc but other bloggers aren’t.

But it also means more than just pitching bloggers which is really a glorified version of media relations, but media relations done properly.

PR done in the real way of the social web will – and I say ‘will’ because we haven’t got there yet – mean companies (both PR and clients) being social. That way there will be no crow-barring of bloggers and social networks into horrible mass marketing campaigns. The social worth of an organisation will be there for people to choose to engage with from the outset.

The problem is, of course, that this requires giving over control of the campaign to the ‘crowd’ and that is a huge wrench for most marketing and PR types. This means that their beloved ‘process’ is taken over by other people – YIKES!

And I think this comes down to something that my colleague Rick Murray talks about when he says we need to change our understanding of PR from being ‘public relations’ to ‘public relationships’.

That’s what I’m striving for. It’s about moving beyond doing PR where colleagues say: “Can you find some bloggers that want to write about ‘product X'” and explaining that most people – bloggers or not – don’t want ‘product X’ or ‘company Y’ pushed into their life.

Only problem is… I’m not entirely sure how to get there yet.

Other people blogging about the great debate:

Technorati tags: Tom Coates, Stephen Davies, PR, public relations, public relationships, blogging,

[Disclosure: Stephen’s work was done with Edelman whom I now work for]

Google News adds comments

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If you’ve not seen the news via Steve Rubel (here), Google has added a comment facility to it’s Google News making it – in Steve’s words – “an editorial product rather than simply an aggregator”.

This leads to Steve’s next question: “can a PR agency comment on a source’s behalf (assuming they represent them) and if so how is our affiliation verified?“

It’s the same question being asked by the fore-father of citizen journalism, Dan Gillmor – only from the other side:

“How will this work? How will Google verify that the people commenting on what’s been written about them are actually the people in question? What kind of data-gathering will this lead to on Google’s part?“

Dan’s argument is that traditional media outlets have missed a very big trick to allow readers to add their voice to news coverage and as a result the ability to do so has been claimed by one online media giant.

What this means for the future of news coverage remains to be seen.

Technorati tags: Google News, Steve Rubel, Dan Gillmor

Why politics won’t benefit from Web 2.0’s change in attitude… yet

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Two days, two great examples of why the electorate will remain apathetic and disillusioned – no matter how many politicians start blogging.

Today saw the announcement that no-one will face charges in the loans for peerages ‘scandal’.

I put scandal in inverted commas because it has been largely par for the course in British politics that a donor gives a million quid (or less) and gets made a peer.

However. the whole case has thrown light on a dimly-lit and sordid part of the British political scene and given the chaotic investiagtion I was surpirsed to see the man at the centre of the controversy, Lord Levy, appear in the media beaming like a kid in a sweetshop.

Given anyone with half a brain understands that the case was wound up probably due to a technicality or lack of evidence rather than any inherent wrong-doing, it seems a bit churlish to gloat about your ‘innocence’.

Conversely, yesterday saw the admssion by four of Gordon Brown’s cabinet, including Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith (above), that they had smoked cannabis in the past.

For me this a shot in the arm for politics. Having politicians bold enough to own up to something a majority of people (surely?) would think doesn’t make someone unfit to be a politician is an important step to make politics relevant and accountable.

The point I’m making is: double-standards.

In a society where more and more individuals want honesty and respect from their brands, surely politicians need to start adapting their behaviour and policies to this shift in values as well.

On one hand, Lord Levy cracks a repugnant smile that says “everyone knows we did things that were morally dubious if technically legal” while Jacqui Smith says “Yeah. Most students have dabbled at some point in their lives and I’m only human”.

Which one would trust more?

Technorati tags: cash+for+peerages; Lord+Levy; cannabis; Jacqui+Smith; trust; politics

Is ‘transparency’ a genuine value or corporate platitude?

by simoncollister 1 Comment

A story not really covered by UK bloggers was the big hoo-har over Federated Media paying US A-list bloggers to put their names to advertising content.

I won’t recount the affair as Jeff Jarvis has a comprehensive write-up. But one idea raised by Jarvis stuck in my mind. Referring to a previous campaign conducted by Federated Media which created a Wikipedia entry for a client, Jarvis opines:

"I’m afraid they are still on the dark side. You just can’t put something with commercial motive into Wikipedia. Admitting it is hardly better; it is still a crime. The Wikipedians and bloggers will attack hard and they will deserve what they get."

The important point here is: FM thought that by admitting what they were doing, they were being transparent. They weren’t. They were being open about their activities, but ultimately masking their intentions.

It’s where transparency as a genuine value meets transparency as a corporate platitude. The former is vital for holding real conversations and building real relationships. The latter is the cross-over point where conversations meet marketing.

One commenter on Jarvis’ blog, Sam Harrelson, explains rather neatly the reason for this:

"In our post-modern world, ideas such as “trust,” “objectivity,” “disclosure,” and “reliability” have been turned over and rendered subjective. That doesn’t mean that these terms are meaningless, it means that things like trust are now subjective in the eyes of the beholders. Authorial (or editorial), on the other hand, is meaningless. How I perceive you means everything."

This is important for PR and marketing people to understand as it reinforces there are no half-measures when working in the blogosphere/live web/whatever.

This also dovetails nicely with something Steve Rubel wrote about last week. In his view, the PR industry needs to move away from ‘pitching’ stories to online communities and instead move towards ‘participating’ with them.

I agree completely but I’m still grasping at just how we do this genuinely, without adopting different identities… or maybe adopting different identities online to participate in a number of atomised communities is something that will become second nature.

Technorati tags: Federated+Media; Jeff+Jarvis; transparency; conversation+marketing; Steve+Rubel