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 2)

Read part 1 here

According to Tapscott and Williams, the second way in which the internet is transforming news reporting is by allowing the internet user to be an editor of news content. Content sharing websites like Delicious and Digg enable users to receive customised feeds of news stories which they like. Tapscott and Williams argue that the collective logic of multiple web users is making the traditional role of editor obsolete, and they ask the question: Are the editors really in a position to best the collective judgement of their audience?

To answer this question I went over to Digg to have a look at what Digg users were Digging...















Perhaps I'm completely out of step here but what of the bombing of Gaza? Climate change? The global financial crisis?

I'm not saying I haven't already clicked on the sex shop story and sent it to all my friends (here's the link if you're interested). Like every other web user I'm all over twisted funny stuff like that. The point is that I need editors to save me from the trivia, and to force the more boring - yet undoubtedly more important - stuff down my throat.

PR of course loves the trivialisation of news. We thrive off pithy features, funny research and non-events. In this respect the phenomenon of user-as-editor will play into the hands of PR practitioners, provided they know what kind of stuff has internet mileage. A good place to start is to look at sites like Digg or Delicious to find out the features of a viral story. But none of this helps the case of mass collaboration as a reliable organiser of news and content - in the case of Digg, what we get is a peek into the grubby mind of the internet masses rather than a rewarding and informative news experience.

I don't believe that this particularly hurts the Wikinomics thesis. The book documents many cases where the principles of openness, peering, sharing and thinking globally have brought about staggering advances in business, technology and education. However, readers of Wikinomics should be careful not to get so caught up in the rhetoric to believe that mass collaboration makes absolutely everything better.

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!).

My Christmas reading

There seem to be quite a few trendy books about social media and web 2.0 doing the rounds, so I really have been quite spoilt for choice when its come to choosing my Christmas reading. Luckily, lots of these seem to be practical manuals written for business people who have never used the internet, which has helped me narrow down the pile somewhat. The technicalities and realities of social media are no mystery to me; I'd just like to understand the bigger picture. Right now, if you ask me what social media is good for, I'd say "being sent pictures of dogs dressed as other animals", and that isn't going to get me anywhere fast.

So I've opted for Wikinomics, by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams, which was a widely acclaimed "must read" from last year. From the blurb, I gather that its about the internet, specifically user generated content, allowing disparate amateurs to create value outside the traditional framework of profit-driven business. You might want to check out this video of Mr Tapscott discussing his book (it's long but good).



What has Wikinomics got to do with public relations? Well the prevalence of user-generated content means that everyone on the internet is potentially a news outlet, turning the traditional media and communications model on its head. If the book's thesis is correct, successful PR increasingly will require an appreciation of the publishing powers unlocked by the so called Read Write Web and an understanding of the impact this has on conventional PR practise.