Movin' on

After 1,148 postings and almost three years worth of writing I am moving to blog on Wordpress. This means a shiny new domain called renaissancechambara (we put a focus group working on that one for a while) where you can find the same poor standard of posts on similar topics to what you've got used to. I will be leaving my archive of postings here, until I work out how or if I can move my postings over.

Update: my blog has now moved on to renaissancechambara.jp. You can subscribe to the RSS feed here.

Social Media Club London - the second coming

First of all thanks to Jackie Danicki for chairing Social Media Group London this time around at Fleishman Hillard's offices on Longacre. It was interesting to catch up with some people that I knew like Stephen and meet some people that I kind of knew but hadn't met before like Stuart Bruce.

There were a number of themes that came out of the discussion that I found of interest:

• In terms of online media consumption patterns, about two thirds to three quarters of the attendees had reached a post-RSS stage in their online media consumption. Typically they had went through subscribing to hundreds of feeds, reached information overload and pared them right back

• Often they used a friends blog as as a meta filter for content, a kind of very tailored BoingBoing. Given that the attendees are likely to be high media consumers and early adopters this is an interesting trend to watch out for

• There was a corresponding decline in the 'trust' that these users assigned to both mainstream and narrowcast media. Film reviews were cited as a classic example, some of the participants were no longer willing to accept pundits viewpoints and instead wanted to only trust very close friends

• This concept of shrinking the community was discussed around Facebook, in line with the real-world analogy of a village how should marketers handle the parochial monoculture perpetuated on such closed communities?

• The challenge of surfacing quality free content was mentioned: how do you find the content that you want if it hasn't been recommended by a close friend? Flickr's interestingness seemed to be making in the right direction. There was a suggestion of a market-based engine of sorts. However, what happens if everyone wants to benefit and no one wants to participate (like the post-RSS culture)?

• What is participation? - What would be considered to be consumption patterns in old media (like reading a newspaper or watching television) was considered to be participation in new media. Many of the participants didn't see the contradiction, which I found to be an curious viewpoint

Media ethics 2.0

Blogging has some challenges as a media. At the moment the media blogosphere consists of a number of 'cottage industry' micro-publishers and a number of progressive traditional media companies.

For many of the larger companies blogs offer a cheap CMS (content management system) especially when you consider that in order to have got on board web 1.0 they may have spent tens of millions of dollars for the software infrastructure of their main site.

It is often taking them a while to work out how to make the most effective use of blogs and how to monetise them.

Their conventional approach and the larger infrastructure of dedicated sales and editorial teams means that they are largely the same as their previous incarnation.

This includes to varying degrees an amount of checks and balances such as the separation of editorial and sales. The fact that these work most of the time makes slip ups noticable and newsworthy.

In fact Michael Heseltine writing in this months Management Today (which celebrates the magazines 40th birthday) pointed out that the only time the management team at Haymarket Publishing had allowed commercial interests to sway editorial judgement had been when they created a mock-up of the first Management Today and featured the chairman of the British Institute of Management.

Ok, but in reality this separation isn't practical for most micro-publishers. Rather than trying to pretend that the separation is there why not provide the consumers with complete transparency so they can see who pays for what. Its not just how much they pay, but what proportion of the micro-publishers income they represent.

Let's face it if you get the majority of your home loan payment and the groceries put on your table by a sponsor, you are not likely to frag them. Readers can understand that, they are media literate and can make allowances.

Its time for a new set of media ethics, will any of the digerati have the guts to embrace it?

Broken Glass mark II

I noticed that The New Republic editor Franklin Foer has posted an apology to readers about a lack of transparency in a blog written by Lee Spiegel.

You can find the offending comments here, Spiegel responded under the alias Sprezzatura.

The New Republic seems to have learned from its experience with Stephen Glass and moved on.

What is interesting is how the blogging conversation provided additional avenues for journalist misconduct that wouldn't have been available in the mainstream media.

Whilst blogging has made media much more fluid and dynamic by lowering the barriers to production, there is still a lot that the blogosphere can learn from the checks and balances of the fourth estate. I am sure that the blogosphere will get burnt with its own Stephen Glass-style scandal as part of its growth into a vibrant media industry.

There is already a payola system by Payperpost.com in place with clients such as the William Shatner DVD club.

In addition with most commercial blogs being one-man bands it can be hard to be both salesman and editor.

I suspect things will get interesting soon as blogging, podcasting and other peer-to-peer media formats undergo growing pains, providing even more fodder for discussion on this blog...

Big Brother for Business

The Ford Motor Company is in trouble. Ford in Europe has had issues for a long time, the last time it was cool to drive a Ford was when Bodie and Doyle were chasing bad guys in a Ford Capri on The Professionals.

The company has been consistently outclassed and outgunned by rivals.

It used to be said when my Dad was driving a Ford Anglia 105E around rural Ireland for the Irish Sugar Company, Bord na Mona and Massey Ferguson in the 1960s that the biggest benefit of buying a Ford was the amount of garages. If you ever broke down there was always somebody near by that could fix it.

However in the couple of decades since it hasn't been acceptable to repair your car as a hobby or have the sump pee oil on your drive Ford has started a long march into decline.

In Europe the company retreated from certain markets such as luxury saloons, instead purchasing brands like Land Rover, Jaguar and Volvo. It merged its commercial vehicle division with Iveco and strove to build world cars, rather than cars that people wanted to drive.

The picture in the US is more dramatic, the good ole boys no longer want Ford pick-ups and SUVs and like General Motors mistakes made years ago on workers benefits are coming home to roost.

The company is trying to pull itself out of the mire, and has a site where it is communicating what its doing to achieve this. The site continues a discussion with stakeholders. What I found most bizarre though was the voyeuristic feel that that the site had, like one of them TV shows on MTV where they try and reinvigorate the career or a faded celebrity like Taylor Dayne.

Some of the third-party content is a really good read, you can check out Ford Bold Moves here.

Kudos to Seth Stevenson at Slate.

Weblogs, reputation management and rotoscopes

InfoWorld says that Jupiter Research claim that 70 per cent of large companies will be using blogging to try and get word-of-mouth online karma going about their product. IT is having to look after the weblog infrastructure and the columnist is bitching about it as IT resources are overstretched. Ok, well why not use the outsourced blog in India as a trial for rightshoring more of the IT taskload?

It isn't as bad as they make out as there are plenty of really good hosted services that are ready for enterprise grade blogging; Six Apart most immediately springs to mind, hell Yahoo! product-specific blogs for Yahoo! Answers run on Y!360 which is a toy platform in comparison to Six Apart and yet the IT department are worried about enterprise blogs. What I find interesting about this article is that the journalist does not see weblogs as important for the company image and reputation, yet they wouldn't say the same about the corporate website would they?

The laurel branch of innovation has been passed on from IT to other branches of the business apparently.

Brandchannel have a good primer for marketers on the importance of PR and reputation management, I can think of a couple of marketers who think that the PR budget should be spent on Google AdWords who may benefit from a read ;-).

Stephen sent through a link to a French film that has the monochrome feel of Sin City matched with the rotoscope goodness of Through a Scanner Darkly. Find out more here.

Carson Workshops had some good guidelines in their email newsletter about pimping your latest web application:

------------------------------------------------------------------
Tips: How to Market Your
Web App - Ryan Carson
------------------------------------------------------------------
1. Write your "Ten Second Sell" and learn it.
2. Put up a holding page to generate pre-launch buzz (You'll probably get between 2K - 5K email addresses).
3. Use the blogosphere to your advantage, pull in favours.
4. Write useful articles for big sites and submit them.
5. Dream up a publicity stunt - we did http://www.barenakedapp.com
6. Try to avoid paying for advertising in the beginning
7. Tell people how great your app is - every chance you get.
8. Try to get speaking slots at conferences
9. Network - be helpful to others and they will help you back.
10. Use Technorati and Google Blog Search to track when people blog about you - Subscribe to these feeds

PR 2.0 part five: When to blog

1. 

This installment in the PR 2.0 is a bit out of step with the rest of them but fell out of a discussion that I had yesterday evening with someone I had met from a consumer agency. As an agency they were being pressured by their parent company to move more towards blogging, online PR, joining in The Conversation, worshipping Robert Scoble/Steve Rubel/Jeremy Pepper/Dave Winer (insert favourite touchstone blogger name in here as appropriate) as the second coming of Christ etc.

Two issues that came up and got my attention were: - What do you say to a client that wants to start a company / product blog? - How does digital culture and society link together?

What do you say to a client that wants to start a company / product blog?

First of all ask yourself will the client flame out in 12 months or are you in for the long haul?

If they're a flamer, their funding is going to burn away like foam on the space shuttle's undercarriage on re-entry, so you may as well bill them and be damned otherwise they'll just throw it away on business-class flights or Cisco routers.

However if its for the long term the first thing that I think you do is fall back on consultancy skills and ask the right questions. The big one in this case being why? My own thought is that it is better to do nothing for the right reason than encourage the client to do something for the wrong reason. Although you have lost the mark-up on employing a digital agency to set up a template and a Word Press server you will have helped build a longer term relationship with the client based on trust and valued counsel.

Where you can sell blogging services even when you are discouraging your client from using blogging as a communications tool is by pointing out that the client from a HR perspective should have blogging guidelines in place because at least some of their staff will be participating in the online conversation.

You can then utilise your expertise and Google to find and adapt guidelines to suit the client's corporate culture and business requirements. Voila! Two days of senior time that can be billed to the client.

They probably don't blog about the company, but giving employees guidelines can encourage them to become company ambassadors because they know what is acceptable and what isn't.

How does digital culture and society link together?

My take on this was that the online world largely mirrors the offline world, however it also exerts some influence as a feedback loop. A great example of this is the mobile phone: it became popular because it was convenient to use and fitted into consumers lives, however the 160 character limitation of SMS has given use a new written vocabulary and camera phones have facilitated the expansion of citizen journalism.

(Citizen journalism was about before in a less impactful way, the amateur photographer or tourist with a camcorder or the eyewitness phoning up a newspaper and recounting their story down the phone. The difference is that now the citizen has more control of the distribution.)

I think that there are generational differences in world outlook that also influence this: most bloggers are late boomers or generation X. Boomers are existential in nature broadcasting their views, gen X like the conversation and debate of the comment fields and generation Y have a different world view that is much more collaborative so social networking makes even more sense to them.

Looking at generation Y is their collaborative nature borne out of the technology world around them or inspite of it. I read an article a while ago that pointed out that just over a decade ago caller ID was pushing the bounds in privacy, whereas generation Y realise that they don't really have privacy anyway.

Then again, the exhibitionism of MySpace could be also down the cult of celebrity show-it-all phenomena from MTV's The Real World or the The Osbournes to Endemol's Big Brother; or for all you Daily Express readers out there its just another sign of the end times in a decaying society brought about by the premature death of HRH Princess Diana.

PR 2.0 series
Part four
Part three
Part two
Part one

Link of the day

The University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth has a good report providing advice from established bloggers. Gen up on this before you go wild with the PowerPoint talking all that jive about direct communications with your prospects and existing customers. Kudos to the former Pirate cabin boy at Jonny 'the ladiez choice' Rosemont over on the Bitemarks blog of his present employer.

Blogging as marketing placebo, RSS as spam

There is an interesting article over on Charlotte Li's blog where she discusses how hard it is to put a value on PR and web blogs.

In a rare admission, Charlotte says that she shouldn't have talked about her blog providing at least a million dollars value, since there wasn't any quantative data points to back this up the claim (not that would normally stop an analyst with an eye on media exposure ;-)).

Over at the Bite PR blog, Reuters correspondent Eric Auchard talks about how RSS is worse than email for data overload, something that has been borne out by conversations I've had with UK journalists recently whilst conducting a media audit.

Blogosphere slooowwwwing down

David Sifry's blog posts on the state of blogosphere are now the webs equivalent of the Halifax House Price Index. Each announcement causes people to go scrabbling off to update their PowerPoint presentations. In the case of David's postings there follows a stream of phrases like participation media, citizen journalism and even heaven forbid Web 2.0.

For all you PowerPoint jockeys, here's the numbers for this month

• Technorati is tracking over 35.3 Million blogs
• The blogosphere has been doubling in size every six months
• It is now over 60 times bigger than it was three years ago
• On average, a new weblog is created every second of the day
• 55 per cent of bloggers are still posting three months after their blogs have been created

Ok, where it gets interesting is looking more closely at Sifry's graph pictured above by clicking on the image. The rate of increase in blogging seems to be slowing down if you look at the period of August 2005 - April 2006.

Thoughts?

Empirical Evidence

Due to work, I found myself down at The Guardian's main office last thing on Monday afternoon with another colleague to talk through a community-related product that we had just launched in the UK.

While we were in the papers swanky and reasonably priced canteen in the bowels of the building, I got to shoot the breeze with Jane Perrone about blogs.

Jane is assistant news editor of Guardian Unlimited.

The first topic of discussion was Comments is Free; the new editorial commentary blog has meant that some of her old media colleagues have had to learn about how to work in a new medium.

Jane also pointed out that some of the interns find it hard to get to grips with blogging and often don't have a clue what's it all about, reinforcing my own views of the generational marketing gap opening up between unversity students and younger scholars.

Jane is a keen organic gardener, (she blogs about it here) also mentioned the rise of retired bloggers who document every aspect of their life obsessively. One woman Jane mentioned documents the size of eggs laid by her free-range hens each day. Nokia's life blog concept now starts to make sense.

Bubblicious

Some of the more evangelical talk around blogs has them shaking the world of media apart. I found blogs an interesting way of communicating and making personal publishing easier than ever.

I felt over time that blogging would affect companies reputations because of search engine rankings and would occasionally drive the news agenda.

To use two examples:

• Some of the most consistent search engine traffic that comes to this blog is for people looking for information about Sinn watches because of this blog posting here
• The second example is the result of a posting I wrote about Steve Ballmer's Stolen stolen stolen which received pick up from The Register, and Wired News Cult of Mac column
  

However there is a limited opportunity to create a media empire from it:

• Some early adopters like Gawker Media have managed to become successful
• Most media companies have adapted their online presence to include blogging as it is a cheap, effective content management and publishing system (when you consider that people like the Financial Times spent tens of millions of pounds to get online)
• Daniel Gross has a great article Twilight of the Blogs over at Slate talking about how Blogs have bubbled over, read it back-to-back with my contribution from a few years ago to FastCompany magazine online regarding the original new economy

In the same way that the net stratified out into having its own media establishment, so blogging has allowed a few people to join them. I've said before that the goldrush to corporate blogging reminded me of a similar rush a number of years ago on corporate webcasts and online press rooms. I am inclined to think that the business opportunity for high priced consultancy in these areas has passed.

Bottom line, am I likely to subscribe to an RSS feed of a blog allegedly written by the CEO of General Motors? No more than I wanted to watch their first webcast six years ago, unless I was an analyst or journalist looking at the automotive sector.

Blogging has joined the PR toolbox along with media alerts, press releases, webcasts and white papers; the difference is that the audience has to go and demand the content by clicking on a web link or subscribing to a feed in order to get it rather than receiving an email or snail mail package. In the same way that Daniel Gross talks about blogging firms selling out at the top of the market or taking venture capital funds for everything that they can get you can see a similar pattern in agency blogging:

• Rubel's move to Edelman has allowed him to 'sell out' at the top of the market and fair play to him
• Edelman's marketing efforts for this year will focus around podcasts, with Richard's new offering on the Edelman home page. Podcasts work better for agencies because they require a bit more prowess than the ability to use a web browser and have basic literacy skills. Not that many people have a good 'radio' presence to carry it off well. On the downside they require a bit more effort and time from a consumer PoV so I am unlikely to be podcasting any time soon
  
• Its a matter of routine now in my company and our competitors to put out non-game changing news purely as a blog post

Blogosphere update

David Sifry of Technorati has an interesting blog posting about the growth of the blogosphere. About 50 per cent of blogs are still going after three months, blogging is now becoming a habitual experience for Joe Six-Pack. The blogosphere doubles in size every five and a half months or so. 2.7 million blogs are updated on a weekly basis

Not surprisingly spam is an issue, with fake pings acting as a denial of service attack against Technorati. About nine per cent of blogs are search engine spam attempts including machine-created blogs.

Jargon Watch

Sping - A spam ping. A ping is the automatic signal that blogging tools send out when a new post has been created. Kudos to David Sifry.

Built to flip - Not one of them soft-top Suzuki jeeps with the Rhino vinyl wheel cover on the back that hairdressers used to drive, but the return by Web 2.0 companies to a business model of coming up with a new product and then being bought out by Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft (delete as appropriate). A sign that we're living in bubblicious times again. Kudos to Om Malik.

Cringely gets company

PBS.org has a new media column joining its work with internet and technology maven Mark Stephens (aka Bob Cringely). Mediashift is penned by Mark Glaser, a well known media industry commentator. Kudos to Frank Barnako's Internet Daily newsletter from MarketWatch.

You abandoned me, love don't live here anymore

Interesting article in Metro the free paper available on the London Underground according to 20,000 a day start a blog by Stephen Hull (Metro page 16 January 11, 2005) the growth figures for blogs are a bit deceptive.

It quotes an estimate of 85,000 blogs created every day in the UK. Many of the creators are serial bloggers, so a more realistic figure is 20,000 new bloggers start online every day - according to Lastminute.com (why they would be an authority on blogs is lost on me as well).

Many blogs are set up and then abandoned or laying dormant after a few weeks, however these car wrecks in cyber space still count into the success numbers of blogs.

I don't want a retraction, I want some retribution

Since the beginning of my PR career, when I when I was media relations grunt in my agency days, if the client wasn't keen on what a journalist had written about their announcement, or taken out of an interview they would ask me to get a retraction.

Usually, the best course of action would be to let the waters cover over the story and move on because journalists always had the last word and it damaged relationships in the longer term.

With blogs, this power balance may have changed, and not for the better.

Entrepreneur Mark Cuban was unhappy with a piece that ran in the New York Times business section: Is Mark Cuban Missing The Big Picture that questioned the wisdom of investing in a cinema chain.

Cuban came back with some blog postings of his own here and here.

From a PR perspective, this concerns me as it means that executives may shoot off a blog entry first and only worry about the corporate reputation once their ego has been put back in the box. At worst, they could tie themselves up in a debased slagging match.

It will then be PR's job to try and clean up the mess. In a few months after, PRs will then be beat up for not doing their job because said executives aren't getting the volume of coverage they want.

What do you think? (Feel free to post a comment below)

UK PR Blog List

This site has made it on to a list of UK PR blogs. I don't know whether to be happy about the recognition and the improvement it will have on my page ranking in search engines, or whether it is a sign of how untrustworthy or dubious the content is?

I have always thought of this as a blog that happens to be written by a PR person, rather than a blog about PR..... If that's what your expecting you may be disappointed, but feel free to stay and have a poke around, and make yourself at home anyway.

Jargon Watch

Death by blog - According to James Burleigh in The Independent Ad guru blames bloggers for demise (October 22, 2005), this is the phrase that Neil French worldwide creative director of Ogilvy used to describe how outrage at his off-the-cuff remark at an entertainment-orientated speaking event for advertising industry people that all women in the advertising industry were crap came back to haunt him.

Anyone who had read French's op-ed column in Communications Arts, would have known the kind of boisterous personality to expect.

Nancy Vonk another Ogilvy employee is the woman who started off French's death by blog with this posting here on ihaveanidea.org. Whilst French may no longer be employed at Ogilvy, the lessons and values learned from his creative work will continue to inspire creatives to go against the grain.