Six lessons learned

This blog has helped me to reach some useful conclusions about how public relations should make best use of the internet. Here are some of the main themes that have emerged:

1) Get to the point
Whether for better or worse, much of the blogging community is beginning to naturalise the "Tweet ethic"- limiting one's message to 140 characters. Some bloggers specify that even press releases should be kept to this length! Whether taken to this extreme or not, the amount of data on the internet is such that that if you do not keep your messages short and sweet, it is likely to be filtered out.

2) The breaking edge
Twitter is a very useful tool for environmental scanning. Not only is it very easy to search, but news, gossip and feedback breaks on this format before it appears anywhere else. PR professionals trying to establish an online voice should not underestimate this increasingly prevalent communication medium, especially given it's recent use in reporting world events (eg. in Gaza and Mumbai).

3) Transparency and honesty
PR agencies and their clients will be smoked out and punished if they try to dupe their online audience, and since new laws were passed in the UK, flogging or astroturfing will carry a legal penalty as well. Therefore PR professionals must exercise utmost caution when trying to create online 'buzz', and must make every effort not to misrepresent themselves or their product.

4) Let go - The best buzz comes from others
Corporate efforts at creating a 'viral buzz' with a carefully sculpted marketing message are likely to backfire. The best buzz is created by those who take your product and interpret it themselves. In the nomenclature of Wikinomics, mashups and remixes are what the internet does best, so let it happen!

5) Social media aren't for everyone
Different products and different messages have different amounts to gain from social media efforts. Some products (like the Wii) are well suited to this communications environment, while others will seem out of place.

6) Learn what works
Scan Digg, Delicious and other sharing sites to see what kinds of articles are being given preference. The online rules of newsworthiness are a little different from print and broadcast media!

I'm sure I haven't covered everything here, so please use the comments to add some more observations of your own...

Wikinomics - A short rant (part 1)

In the first year of my undergraduate degree, I wrote an essay in which I crowed about how much free music I was downloading off the internet, and how this was the start of some drastic shift in production and society at large. Although it received a fairly good mark, I eventually admitted to myself that the essay contained some fairly half baked ideas and, acknowledging that file sharing amounted more or less to theft, I locked many of them away.

Only now, having read Wikinomics, am I tempted to release the information anarchist that has been quietly hotboxing my bad arguments cupboard for the last few years.

"You're free to go. Dom Tapscott and Anthony D Williams say you haven't been doing anything wrong and that as a N-Gen citizen you're actually helping to renegotiate the definition of copyright and intellectual property. Now find me a pirate copy of Chinese Democracy."

Of course the book isn't just about filesharing, and it's considerably less half baked than my first year sociology essay. Wikinomics is about the potential of peer production in a world where information flows more freely, and people can collaborate more easily than ever before thanks to the internet. Check the Wikinomics blog or read the book if you want the details. I'm going to concentrate on the ideas which relate most strongly to news production and thus to public relations.

In Wikinomics there are two key ways in which news is changing as a result of the internet. Firstly, internet users are becoming producers of news, creating content on blogs, Wikipedia, Twitter and the like. Secondly they are becoming editors of preprepared news content. I will talk about the former in this post, leaving discussion of the latter for another time.

Tapscott and Williams cite the Wikipedia page about the July 7th London bombings as an example of how Wiki technology can organise information about an event more quickly and effectively than standard news gathering agencies. They state that cocreation of news by various internet users will give rise to "balance, fairness and accuracy" in news reports, as well as making them "more dynamic".

I have already expressed excitement on this blog about how multi-layered news content can make the media experience more dynamic. However, it does seem a little optimistic to assume that accuracy and balance (read 'journalistic quality') will naturally arise from citizen reporting. This is especially the case if organisations are excluded from the conversation, as Wikipedia has stipulated they should be, and if there is no quality control on the information being published. Certainly public perceptions of user-created news are relatively poor. The BBC website received widespread criticism for its use of Twitter during the Mumbai attacks, with some users feeling that it had sacrificed its journalistic integrity by using Tweets as a news source, and not sufficiently differentiating it from other content.

So in line with another one of my previous posts, it seems that mistrust is rife on the internet - both towards organisations and individual users - with people continuing to value more traditional media sources. Mass collaboration can work where people have a clearly defined task, and don't have political axes to grind or conspiracies to propogate. Unfortunately news sites have no such direction, and like a sweaty crevice, provide fertile breeding ground for rumour, speculation and prejudice. This, understandably, is a turnoff for many people seeking quality news coverage.

For the moment, this remains good news for the PR industry, which retains privileged access to trusted media outlets. But equally it cuts off opportunities for all of us in terms of getting continuing access to highly integrated, multi sourced and interactive news content. So if trust is the issue, how can this be addressed?

Simply, providers of internet information services should encourage greater accountability of their users. In the same way that journalists can be held accountable for information they publish, so too should any internet user who claims to be in possession of the facts. A good first step has been made by Twitter, which encourages people to set up accounts in their own name and to use photographs of their face as a profile picture - a progression from the shifty alter egos that riddled the old web. Of course this need for transparency extends to public relations practitioners, for as long as PRs are creeping around on the internet posting misleading items under false identities the wound of mistrust will continue to gape (and we'll continue to be banned from Wikipedia!).

Holy f***ing s***t – I was just in a plane crash!

Not my words, but those of one Mike Wilson, as he records his brush with death on Twitter. His message, sent via mobile after his Continental Airlines flight skidded off the runway at Denver Airport, seems to have been more widely reported than the crash itself, and is being held up as evidence that the tide of news reporting is in some ways turning. This use of Twitter follows its widespread use during the Mumbai terror attacks, to bring front line experiences to a worldwide audience before conventional news outlets.

In the case of the Denver crash, it is significant that first comment on the crash did not come from a spokesperson for the airport or the airline but straight from a member of the public via the increasingly reported microblogging site. Indeed Loic Le Meur comments that when a Continental Airlines spokesperson was questioned on CNN, he had few answers for reporters (annoyingly I can't find this footage on Youtube).

Public relations practitioners will need to adapt to this new form of news reporting by recognising the need for greater transparency, accuracy and speed in their interactions with the media. Also key in this new reporting environment will be the need for swifter resolution of issues as they occur on the ground.

Of course, when it comes to relatively unmediated content like Twitter, there are obviously issues of trust and professionalism. There are no codes of conduct and no formal professional standards because everyone who posts on Twitter is doing so in an amateur capacity (to illustrate, have a look at the photo above, taken on the scene by Mr Wilson - not amazing is it?). For this reason Twitter is unlikely to replace traditional news outlets any time soon .

However, noone is really talking about one type of reporting replacing another. The most exciting opportunities lie in rich, multi-layered content, and the relationship between user generated and traditional news agency content should be complementary. Along these lines, Dan Thornton over at 140Char.com, makes the case for news websites to integrate microblogging into their reporting of stories - something I personally find a very exciting prospect.

Is news fine as it is, or could it benefit from more interactivity? Would you trust a member of the public to bring you front line news or would you rather wait to get it from a journalist?

To Tweet or not to Tweet

When the chap from Cow PR came in to our PR class to talk about social media, he made mention of a social networking application called Twitter. It was, he said with the conviction of a man on the bleeding edge of social technological evolution, the next big thing.

Twitter does indeed seem to be making something of a splash online. Its growth in terms of unique visits has been a sizeable 640% in the last year, and there appears to be much excitement in the blogosphere about the service (no need to link...just Google it). In brief, the website asks users the question "what are you doing?" and gives them 140 characters or less to respond. It is traditional blogging stripped to the bone for todays go-getting information professional.

And yet when Mr Cow asked for a show of hands about who was using Twitter, noone in the class had even heard of it. I have since carried out a snap poll of my friends, and have even posted a thread on an online forum enquiring about who is using this amazing new microblogging site.

The answer is that if anyone is using it, it is not my contemporaries. One response from a friend was that they were too tied up with Facebook, and that they didn't see the difference between status updates on Facebook and so called "Tweets" (the name given to an utterance on Twitter).

But elsewhere I have got the impression that Twitter is something more. Droves of bloggers, including a mass of PR and marketing professionals can't all be wrong. Plus a respondent on my forum thread (which I have purposely not linked to here in an effort to retain work/life balance) stated "The bloke I sit opposite at work is obssessed with it - I get to know the exact moment Stephen Fry has a dump."

You don't get that kind of dirt on facebook: I have decided to catch the zeitgeist.