New media

Paddick’s a Qwitter

06/03/2008 by simoncollister 3 Comments

I blogged back during the London Mayoral elections about Lib Dem candidate Brian Paddick using Twitter as a tool for a virtual Q&A session with the electorate.

Well it seems that his dalliance with the tool has ended pretty soon after the election happened.

Personally I think it is slightly worse that he is signing off with a "I’m winding down now" message which kind of implies that he has been a regular user of Twitter rather than what was essentially a engagement-initiative-as-PR-stunt.

Maybe that is a bit of an extreme take on it, but wouldn;t it be more authentic to just say: "I tried this during the election to engage with voters and now the election is over I’m signing out."?

Hat tip: Dominic Campbell

Technorati tags: Twitter, Brian Paddick, Politics, Mayoral Elections

Finding ‘natural communicators’ – the real role for PR consultants in a social media world?

06/02/2008 by simoncollister Leave a Comment

May has been a crazy month and hopefully normal blogging service will resume shortly.

But in the meantime I was thinking about some work we have been doing with one of our clients over the past month – seeking out views on how social media (and the wider social web) affects business and more specifically corporate communication.

One of the key questions that saw significant debate was whether organisations are in a position to trust their employees – both communications/PR staff and non-communications/PR staff – to become online advocates and de facto communicators for the business.

The discussion was varied and swung between those who argued that employees are effectively communicating about their employer all the time anyway so why not support that; and those that adhered to the traditional notion of channelling all the company’s news and communications through professional communicators.

The interesting thing for me is that the opposing views didn’t follow a divide between comms and non-comms staff. It seems that the main differentiator between those that ‘get it’ and those that don’t is dependent on a much wider mindset; perhaps between those that recognise the importance of authenticity in business and those that like a more traditional controlled approach.

This got me thinking: some of the best ‘communicators’ or ‘communications advisers’ in a socially connected online world are not corporate communicators, but those that can be considered more ‘natural communicators’.

And maybe that is where we are going wrong with social media strategy and programmes – we try to teach corporate communicators how to communicate naturally – that is authentically – which doesn’t necessarily come easy. An analogy might be trying to teach a senior civil servant to write poetry.

Instead of focussing our effort on converting people in roles that are traditionally siloed, should we – as PR consultants – instead be tasked with identifying an organisation’s natural communicators and empowering them (or helping their employer empower them) to speak authentically on their employer’s behalf.

Review of Charlie Beckett’s Supermedia

05/22/2008 by simoncollister 2 Comments

So it’s been weeks since I’ve ahd a chnce to put some thoughts down into a blog post, but an email from Charlie Beckett, director of the new media think-tank at the LSE and London School of Communications, about his new book called Supermedia [full title] has finally spurred me into action.

Supermedia is an optimist and positive book outlining how the media can enhance its forces-for-good using the internet. its essential argument is that:

journalism plays a vital role sustaining healthy liberal societies;
journalism (like most industrial economic complexes) is being re-shaped by the internet;
that we are a media cross-roads where we have the chance to shape the future of journalism for the better;
that when we talk about contemporary journalism we mean, in effect, digital journalism.

Charlie terms this type of contemporary digital journalism: Networked Journalism. Networked Journalism includes what we term ‘citizen journalism’ bit it is also a type of journalism that “is a reflection of emerging realities” as well as an opportunity to transform the ethics as well as efficacy of journalism.”

Now I haven’t read the full book, just the introduction (available with other chapter excerpts over at Harvard University’s Berkman Center). But it seems to me that in creating the concept of Networked Journalism Charlie is seeking to explore how journalism – and by extension – the news media can function in an internet-enabled or to use Yochai Benkler’s term, networked information economy.

This gets my thumbs up. There is a lot of general talk about how the social web and its various tools is changing media production for the worse – eg. the dumbing down argument (in fact, Private Eye magazine, the original challengers of establishment views are one of the worse purveyors of this which really annoys me – but that’s for another post).

The only issue I would raise about this line of argument is that in a networked world where everyone can publish their news, Charlie takes a specifically journalism-centric approach to the question of who actually owns contemporary media production.

Nowhere (at least in the book’s intro) is this made more clear than the following sentence: “Networked journalism offers the news media to enhance its social role.”

In my notes I wrote: “Or offers society to enhance its news media role.”

The point I’m making here is that the internet rejects the traditionally formalised structures and boundaries we artificially created around things like “the media” and “business” and “politics”. To borrow David Weinberger’s idea, the internet makes all of these traditionally siloed areas of life miscellaneous.

To push that idea a bit further, the interent removes these areas of life of their identity until we chose to invoke those identities in what ever form suits us best – not media publishers, not politicians, not business leaders, us.

So with this logic, the news media is no more. Or at least is no more different than citizen journalism, blog content, Flickr content etc. Charlie discusses the importance of these new social media tools, but still privileges ‘real’ journalism as a separate part of this new media ecology. In my mind the internet rejects any and all hierarchy and distinctions between citizen journalism and professional journalism.

Anyway, I’m getting abstract and I don’t think this represents any faults with Charlie’s arguments. Charlie himself tells us early in the intro that “I do not pretend to be objective … So I’m afraid that it is back to the journalist this time to understand what is happening to our news media.”

Supermedia is a book about what is happening to contemporary journalism, written by a journalist, from a journalist’s perspective. That’s not a problem – that’s the framework through which Charlie is interpreting the miscellaneous landscape of the internet.

One final thought on this is where PR or the professional communications industry sits in this view. I bet that for every 10 citizen journalists or bloggers there is a PR person trying to work out how to influence what that blogger blogs about.

This clearly presents challenges and opportunities to the growing ethics and efficacy of the news media. Maybe this issue is covered off later in the book but I’d love Charlie’s take on the subject.

Technorati tags: Charlie Beckett, Supermedia, Polis, London School of Economics

PROs take note: the battle for Google visability begins on 5th May

04/20/2008 by simoncollister 1 Comment

Another busy working week means another 3,000 unread feeds and so I came across this news story in a magazine (yes, I know! Crazy huh).

Personally I think the stroy is of huge importance to the PROs and posing quite a significant threat to the industry. That said, I haven’t yet seen the story in PR Week or on other UK blogs (bearing in mind I haven;t read many feeds this past week!).

According to Marketing, from 5th May Google plans to open up its keyword bidding allowing anyone to bid for keywords, effectively letting your clompetitors buy up – or at leastpush up the cost – of your company’s, clients or brands keywords.

From that date forward, Google’s "trademark complaint investigations will no longer monitor or restrict keywords for ads served to users in the UK and Ireland."

The reason for the change, Google’s UK Director, Matt Brittin, argues is

"to give users greater choices to help them make
informed decisions."

"Advertisers are accustomed to the fact
that users searching for their trademarked terms as part of a phrase
may see ads from competitors."

Interestingly, the argument against this move in the article comes from digital agency, Equi=Media. One of their directors, Gavin Sinden, tells Brand Republic, that Google is trying "to increase bid values and volume of bids on a huge range of
terms."

He also wanrs advertisers that "you could type in a search for a particular
brand and be confronted with nothing but a sea of competitors".

SHOCK. HORROR! It seems the ad industry is running scared because they’re further losing the ability to own and/or control space within Google.

Personally I believe this change will offers those within the PR industry who place value on real, genuine engagement with customers major opportunities. Ensuring clients secure high search rankings on the back of quality service and content will become all the more improtant. It is in this that PR delivers real, strateguic value rather than the ‘quick fixes’ of digital marketing and advertising.

Technorati tags: Google, adwords, search marketing, PR, public relations, digital marketing, digital advertising

Social media and the dark side of doing PR

04/09/2008 by simoncollister 11 Comments

There’s a, well…. how can I put it… rather depressing post by former Friendly Ghost aka Brendan Cooper on the issue of ghost-blogging. It’s quite timely given my post on the subject the other week, although Brendan comes at the issue with a very different perspective.

The post begins:

“The blogosphere is no garden of Eden. We can try to self-regulate, but in so doing we’re only exposing our own naïveté.”

And it continues with the theme that, like it or not, the internet will evolve to match the current world of traditional media and PR.

Rather than clients appointing us to help them create sustainable, long-term relationships based on trust and respect using the social web, it will be business as usual where spin, ghost writing and paid advertorials are not only common place online but expected.

If that sounds a little bleak, Brendan tells us to quit our bleating and hammers home his point:

“There will be a time, a year or two or three hence, in which we look back at the arguments against ghost blogging, and laugh. It lacks transparency. It lacks integrity. It lacks authenticity. Gimme a break.
In a year or two or three hence, the big money will be savvy. It will be pushing messages out in every digital channel available. The people you think are saying things, will not be saying them. Other people will.”

I find this alarming both in the sense that Brendan thinks these thoughts but is also prepared to share them with others – although perhaps I *would* think that given that Edelman takes very much the opposite stance to Porter Novelli. In fact we’ve just launched a group blog about PR and the drive for transparency appropriately called Authenticities.

In a way, Brendan’s view kind of makes sense. He is a former copywriter and now social media planner – which suggests to me (and is alluded to in by Brendan his post) a strong tradition with top-down, command and control communications.

Arising from Brendan’s post are a number of interesting things.
Firstly, I personally believe Brendan is missing the entire challenge to traditional media and PR created by the internet. People don’t trust advertising, PR and marketing. That’s the power of social media – it is connecting real people with real people. That’s why it works. Faking blogs or social networks etc will similarly shut down genuine relationships built on trust.

Secondly, Brendan’s post is timely because if offers a startling counterpoint to the idea raised by Dave Winer and now picked up on by Doc Searls that maybe it’s time to get out of blogging. Blogging is becoming flogging, suggests Searls. Brendan seems to reinforce this idea – or at least confirm its growth.

Thirdly, I was blown away by the Cluetrain manifesto when I first read it. Brendan suggests in a comment that the Cluetrain Manifesto is “pretty naïve”. Um. Woah. I’m not even going to get into that one.

Technorati tags: ghost blogging, blogging, flogging, command and control, Cluetrain