Simon Collister, PhD

Strategy + Consulting

New media

Edelman Trust Barometer – UK findings and video

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I’ve had a couple of requests for the UK specific results from yesterday’s Trust Barometer launch.

I haven’t got managed to get my hands on Robert, our UK CEO’s presentation yet, so I have embedded a video of his presentation of the key UK results below.

The over-riding – and perhaps surprising – result was that trust in Britain has seen a significant upward leap. There are a number of speculative reasons for this as Robert outlines.

PART 1

PART 2

Technorati tags: Edelman, Edelman Trust Barometer, Robert Phillips

Social media: The death of spin has been greatly exaggerated

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

Social objects work for Marcomms, but what about Corp Comms?

by simoncollister 1 Comment

I’m mightily envious of Hugh Macleod trekking off in his rural retreat. But at least he’s still churning out quality posts like this one about social objects and marketing.

I was lucky enough to see Jaiku’s Jyri Engestom deliver his original presentation on object-centered sociality – a concept Hugh now elegantly applies to marketing and PR.

In a nutshell (and I love this) Hugh tells us that the best kind of marketing (and PR) is done socially via word-of-mouth – from one real person to another. But this is a problem is you’re a PR or marketing “professional” as you have no real control on the outcome of this kind of marketing. As Hugh puts it:

“a lot of socializing is random. Ergo, yes, a lot of marketing is also random.”

It’s so true and obvious if you think about it, but try telling that to the client or your manager.

In fact Hugh makes a philosophically significant point about the that fact to hide this fact, the marketing and PR industry has constructed ‘mythologies’ that are used to create accepted conditions – or ‘realities’ if you want to be contentious – that marketing and PR works within.

But enough of that… Hugh’s overview of marketing and social objects is great, but I’d argue that if we apply his thinking to PR (and we have) then we are talking quite specifically about Marketing Communications – Marcomms.

Where does the object-centred sociality fit within the world of corporate communications PR? What can become the social object is the firm is tasked with shaping corporate reputation – a concept that doesn’t necessarily deal in tangible assets?

I don’t have the answer but would love to hear what others think? I suppose we could try to create and build corporate communications around a tangible social object – but what if the social object was an idea or concept associated with the organization – the raw material that goes into shaping ‘key messages’?
.
We’d have a random – ie. socially constructed – concept of the organization generated through conversations. It might not necessarily fit the desireed (ie. top down) Brand Image but it would be undeniably real and match public expectations. Just some thoughts…. Happy to hear others.

Imagine a world where everybody can write the news

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There’s an interesting post on the BBC Editor’s blog at the moment in which BBC News website editor, Steve Herrmann, explains the editing decisions which led to a moment in which the late Benazir Bhutto told Sir David Frost that Osama Bin Laden had been killed being edited out of footage used.

Herrmann explains:

"Under time pressure, the item producer responsible for publishing the
video on the BBC website edited out the comment, with the intention of
avoiding confusion. The claim appeared so unexpected that it seemed she
had simply mis-spoken. However, editing out her comment was clearly a
mistake, for which we apologise, and it should not have happened. There
was no intention on our part to distort the meaning of the interview,
and we will endeavour to replace the edited version
currently available via our website, with the original interview as
broadcast by Al-Jazeera, which, in the meantime, you can find on
YouTube here."

Personally, I think their explanation is insufficient but that’s not what interests me here.

What is fascinating is a suggestion by one of the commenters (someone called Kendrick Curtis if you;re interested) who suggests the BBC publish a ‘page history’ for news stories on their site.

Curtis suggests that if:

"every published version of an article was available via a
link from the page (and each revision had hardlinks for deep-linking
purposes) then it would be thoroughly obvious when a revision was made.
New revisions could even carry a tagline to indicate what had changed
between the previous version and this one."

Now that strikes me as a brilliant and hugely radical thing to do. Except it’s not that radical as it sounds to me like the edits History page on Wikipedia. Add to that a Discussion section on BBC news stories like Wikipedia’s Discussion and you have a near perfect system for improving the authority of news stories.

You do so through building the news round social knowledge. I won’t go into a deep definition of ‘social knowledge here and now but David Weinberger’s intention for the phrase is the way in which Wikipedia accepts up front that there is no definitive version of the truth in the same way there’s no definitive version of the news.

Social knowledge allows a record of the multifarious voices in any situation (news story) to be heard and mapped out, ultimately providing us a slightly messy if not better and more accurate version of reality. See pp. 140-147 in Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellaneous.

However, I don’t know how likely the BBC – or any other ‘traditional’ media outlet would be to implement the idea. As Weinberger points out:

"A similar delaminating of authority and knowledge would have serious consequences fo traditional sources of information because their economic value rests on us believing them."

Technorati tags: BBC Editors, censorship, social knowledge, David Weinberger

Blogs: that was then, this is now

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Happy New Year one and all. As we enter 2008 I thought I’d flag a great post from Richard Bailey reflecting on blogs as mature communications tools and their place in the online mediasphere.

Richard considers how blogs were viewed when they first hit the mainstream somewhere around 2003:

“Compared to newspaper or magazine journalism, blogs seemed ill-considered, ill-informed and unaccountable.”

But that was then and this now. The growth of social networks has become exponential and Richard suggests if we compare blogs to social networks it’s fair to say “blogs seem considered, valuable and highly literate. The froth has gone, but there’s something substantial left.”

I agree and this situation has been hinted at last year with analysis of Dave Sifry’s State of the Live Web report which showed a distinct slow down in blog growth leading some to speculate that blog networks were consolidating with the strong ones surviving and becoming even more important as online influencers.

Even more interestingly, Richard plots a chart of the publishing ecosystem ranked according to speed, reflectiveness, interactivity and immedicacy. As publishing tools blogs sit firmly between traditional media and newer tools such as Twitter, Jaiku, Facebook etc.

According to these criteria, Richard suggests blogs now occupy a relatively important lace in the media/publishing ecosystem. A position whereby they offer the PR professional a tool with “speed [and] a high degree of reflection.”

Put like that it seems pretty clear that the dust has settled around blogs and we can see where the strengths/weaknesses of social media tools lie. In turn this can give us a steer as to which ones are right for different PR programes or campaigns.

I don’t know where Richard got his charts from, but I think it’d be a good idea to continually revise them as new products/tools evolve so that we can build a kind of Gartner Hype Cycle for the online publishing/media tools. If anything it’ll help guide PR practitioners towards the right tool for their campaigns and communication/marketing programmes.

Technorati tags: Richard Bailey, blogs, publishing, media, communications

Goldsmiths: Futures of News?

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I’m back from Goldsmith University’s inaugural symposium for it’s major research project: The Futures of News, funded by the Leverhulme Trust.

I’ll try to give the day a full write-up soon, but it’s Saturday and I’ve had a couple of glasses of Rioja gran reserva.[not that rich!]

In the meantime, disappointed at the event organsiation….. it may have been the future of news but there were only about four laptops in the audience (including me) and no wifi. Plus the organisers seemed to have overbooked the event and we had to schlep between buildings for presentations and coffee/lunch.

In a nutshell, the over-arching parameters of the group’s research seems very media institution focussed and takes on "new media" from a definite top-down perspective.

Other worrying ommissions were RSS, social networks, YouTube…… in fact anything remotely technology related. Still, some interesting presentations. More to come.

Technorati tags: Goldsmith’s University, Futures of News, media industry, research