Me and My Webshadow

So posting has been a bit slow recently. I blame this on not being at Uni for four weeks*, combined with going on holiday which led to being a bit less busy and hectic than usual, which meant somehow it was more difficult to find time for all the stuff I was fitting in previously, like training for that rather scary race and keeping the Tough Gaffs blog updated too.. Summer term has now started so expect blogging and training to resume.

One thing I have managed to do with more success of late is go to a few events, in fact over the past week, all of which were interesting for various reasons and will be covered in another post shortly. The first was the launch of Antony Mayfield’s book, Me and My Web Shadow: How to manage your reputation online. Mayfield described the launch event as a cross between a christening and a job interview, as the assorted crow sat on sofas, or the floor, to listen to the rationale behind the book and ask questions, it felt a little more like story time with teacher. I regret not taking notes as many of themes that Mayfield touched upon as he described the content have been explored a little here over the past two years. Things such as privacy and why we need it,  what Google knows about us and a slightly prescient post questioning of social networks will set the social norms. There was also a discussion about people protecting their reputations for the sake of their future selves.

I finally flicked through the book last night, mainly as its due to be handed over the person I bought it for this weekend and I’d not already done so. Mayfield said he wrote the book with Hotmail users in mind, and wanted to provide a Haynes Manual for online self-protection and he’s answered his own brief perfectly. The person who I bought it for is concerned about what their shadow is, would firmly describe themselves as a digital immigrant and will, I hope, relish, this useful guide that they can dip in and out of. As Gmail user and if not a digital native, then at least a visa holder with full residency rights, I picked up an awful lot of useful tips  and reminders about tools and techniques I’ve not used in a while.

If I had to offer one criticism, then it would be that I’m not sure the term anomie offers an accurate reflection of the confusion people feel about the fluidity of online etiquette as new technologies and communication methods evolve. Aside from that, I’d heartily recommend it as a useful refresher for the gmailer and an essential part of the book collection to lend out to worried hotmailers.

 

 

 

 

*If this is true, expect Niff, Naff to be mothballed from July to October.

Truth, Privacy, Veracity & #BeMyGuest

BeMyGuest, the month of mutual blogging seems to be going swimmingly and my first guest spot has just gone up on Paul Sutton’s Tribal Boogie blog.

As the regular reader will be aware, I’ve got a hang up about privacy this year and therefore it’s not surprise that it’s the topic of my post, which questions what is more important, truth, privacy or veracity. Got read the whole thing over on Paul’s blog and then go read his stuff, it’s rather good.

Rentokil, Ben Goldacre and Twitter

No doubt some of the UK PR community had a wry grin on their faces when they heard that Brands2Life had been called out by popular pointer-out of media medical mistruths and general caller of shens, Dr. Ben Goldacre. On Friday Goldacre picked up on a story that had appeared in the Mail, Telegraph and Standard about just how many creepy crawlies we share our daily commute with. The company behind this obviously PR driven piece was RentoKil, and it had apparently found, after spraying the inside of a tube carriage and bus with insectide and counting the dead ‘uns, many many iccky things that we’d rather didn’t share our travel space – nice.

Goldacre, like some of the initial reports, questioned how Rentokill came up those figures, and being a savvy sort followed up his unanswered media request via Twitter, where it appears to have been duly ignored until late in the day.  A clarification of how the figures were arrived and apology was eventually posted on the Rentokil blog on Friday night, well over a week since the initial press release was distributed.

This post is not an autopsy into who did what wrong, rather the reading the various tweets and associated blogs posts raised a question with wider implications. While he waited for his questions to be answered, Goldacre flagged that Rentokil’s twitter strategy seemed to be a bit askance, and pointed his readers to a Rentokil post reassuring people that it had recently started to follow in Twitter as to why it had started to follow them on Twitter. Some of the commenter’s on the post seem to feel quite strongly that they don’t like the idea of being followed by a company and consider it to be spam. One even said that if @rentokil were to follow them it would block it and report it for spanning.

Now spam to most people means receiving messages or information that you haven’t requested. If a company follows you on Twitter, then that’s not necessarily going to happen unless you follow them back, and then it’s not spam, it’s bacon.Of course they could @  you with all sorts of spammy-badness but they don’t need to follow you to do so.

To be honest I am a little confused about the overreaction but perhaps it’s an indication of Twitter users becoming more savvy and protective about their Twittering space.  What is interesting is that this reaction came about after RentoKil decided to:

move outside of the field of pest control and find experts in other fields including social media, websites, PR, facilities management, I.T., etc. and others who are not experts but who just seem to enjoy using Twitter (there are still quite a few of us that do – despite the 109 million hits on Google which state Twitter is dead!)

A strategy to which only one, one-word, question can be asked – why? Twitter is great for building audiences and engaging with interested parties, (NB. emphasis on the interested there). Following people, no matter what their expertise is, who are outside of your field of interest is always going to a look a bit, well a bit like you’re hoping that they will follow you back and increase your own popularity and influence. Which while not technically spam is very off behaviour in this more personalised world of social media. It is entirely possible that it’s not the case, but you have to wonder what the overarching objective is to be supported by a tactic of following lots of random people, or if RentoKil, like many companies are mixing up the success of a tactic with the success of the strategy.

Also posted on Clicking & Screaming

Society and the Web: Is Social Media Killing our Kids?

In only the second ever guest post on Niff, Naff n Triv, and the first ever as part of the inaugural #BeMyGuest month of mutual blogging we proudly present Paul Sutton and his thoughts on Social Media’s impact on society.

Paul Sutton is a Social & Digital Media Consultant with over 14 years’ experience in PR and marketing communications. Fascinated by the psychological and cultural impact of digital media and the web, he has a passion for online communications, social media, inbound marketing and the ongoing convergence between PR and the web.

Social media, mobile internet and the pervasion of the web in general is getting a bad name in some quarters. There’s a sense of unease among some parties that web 3.0, or the semantic web, far from being the progressive enabler of future generations, could actually lead to a society that is wholly dependent on internet technology not only for economic and sociological reasons, but also for its psychological health.

As technology converges ever-increasingly on the web and we spend more and more time online, some social commentators have voiced very real fears that the web will make our children, our grandchildren and every generation that follows both less intelligent and incapable of forming lasting social bonds. The issue was addressed recently in the excellent BBC mini-series, The Virtual Revolution, with presenter Dr Aleks Krotoski presenting the case of South Korea, the most wired nation on Earth, where there are big concerns over so-called ‘internet addiction’.

Generation Y, generation web, whatever you want to call it, is under threat. At least, if you listen to Generation X it is. Gen Xers fear that as we become more used to tools like RSS and 140 character status updates, we will lose the power of concentration, swapping in-depth reading, knowledge and conversation for skim-reading, surface-level understanding and brief interactions. The outcome will be a society that knows little about lots, but lots about little. It will be a culture where individual intelligence is sacrificed for the all-powerful global brain. And this will only be reinforced as the real-time web becomes reality.

So where has this web aversion come from? Perhaps from the fact that our children “don’t go out and play anymore”, instead choosing to spend their free time plugged into the internet, whether that be gaming, surfing or chatting to friends. It’s estimated that the current generation of digital natives will have spent around 10,000 hours online by the time they reach adulthood, with a large part of that taken up by social media – Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Twitter and multiple other networking channels. And so it stands to reason that social media gets the blame.

But can society truly be altered by social media and the web, and even if it can, is this necessarily a bad thing? The answer to the first of those questions, would seem (to me at least) to be yes. Taking South Korea, where 62% of 3-5 year olds regularly use the web, as an example, the country’s children regularly top the world’s education league tables and are reported to display a great willingness to work together to solve problems and help each other out. Whether their individual IQ is effected is unclear, but importantly they demonstrate a community intelligence where they are more informed and make better choices as a result. The way they communicate and interact as human beings is evolving, facilitated by the social web.

So is this social media-influenced evolution a bad thing? I’d argue not. There’s little doubt that my daughter will grow up very differently to the way I did, but unlike many other Gen Xers, this doesn’t scare me whatsoever. If anything, I’m going to try and embrace it as she gets older. The way I see it, she could have greater problem solving abilities than I ever had due to the way children now are willing to share information and ideas, and the way in which they find information via the web in the first instance. Whether her grasp of the English language will suffer as a result of the txt generation and the limitations of communicating via status updates is an unknown, but maybe it’s my responsibility as a Gen X parent to ensure that she reads books and not just skims web articles?

Stephen Fry made the point in The Virtual Revolution that when the motor car was first introduced people thought it was evil due to deaths on the roads. Did that stop us? Of course not. We adapted the technology to make it safer and, as a culture, we adapted to embrace it. And should this not be the case with web 3.0 and social media? It’s technologically-facilitated evolution and is such a great enabler that, rather than fearing what changes its impact might have on society, shouldn’t we be addressing our concerns, understanding what’s happening and channeling it?

For more on Paul, visit his blog at www.tribalboogie.blogspot.com or contact him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/thepaulsutton

Social Media Marketing Opt Out

I attended the inaugural meeting of the Social Media Group for the Direct Marketing Association yesterday. It was generally a gathering of the great and the good from various social media and digital agencies, along with some software houses and a few other (useful) odds and sods. It’s early days but initial discussions around what we might achieve as a group were good and I’m looking forward to seeing what we can build.

As ever when you get more than two people involved in social media together, there was a brief discussion about what we meant and what the key issues were, one of the many that cropped up was privacy. In particular, what right do we have to approach the person via their online homes? The note I scribbled to myself to explore later said ‘is it up to companies to seek the individual or the to be there when the individual comes looking?’. Obviously the answer is both, the tricky part is getting the right balance.

Some individuals will be happy to be sought out. Though we shouldn’t assume that just because a consumer makes their data publicly available that they actually think, want or desire that a business, of any size, will use it to market to them. Of course some individuals will make it difficult to find that information, they are the ones who value their privacy. We also shouldn’t assume that just because a online user is sharing data that it is actually the truth. For example, do you really think I’m actually going to do the Tough Guy?.Seeking out the individual via online channels cannot be done lightly. One fleeting thought I had was that perhaps, in a few years, we will see a Social Network  preference service which people can use to opt out of being pro-actively targeted.

The other side of the coin, is making sure that you are there ready to answer the questions that a consumer may have that you can reasonably answer. Knowledge of search is going to be vital for PROs in the future, you’re already missing a trick if you’re not considering it as an integral part of what you do right now. And by search I don’t just mean optimising press releases and distributing them over the wire to help build link love.

Clifford Stoll, Newsweek 1995, Why the Internet will Fail

Except he didn’t actually say that.

Predicting stuff is hard, and human nature means that we love it when predications go drastically wrong. Think how many times Bill Gates has been reminded that he once said ‘640k ought to be enough for anyone’ or the alleged quote by an IBM employee way that there is a ‘world market for maybe five computers’. What’s missing from these is context,  which is something that Twitter is also great at stripping away from the information that is passed round.

Today I’ve seen a fair few tweets linking to an 1995 Newsweek article by Clifford Stoll. Actually more accurately, most of the tweets say ‘Why the internet will fail’ by Clifford Stoll. The headline  comes from the blog, Three Chant, which picked up an article from Newsweek in 1995 by Clifford Stoll, called ‘The Internet? Bah!’, sub title -  Hype alert: Why cyberspace isn’t and never will be Nirvana. In which he was arguing against

Visionaries [that] see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic.

The Internet: Bah. Clifford Stoll, NewsWeek

Not exactly damning the future of the interwebz, if not an overly positive viewpoint. Admittedly he was wrong on some points, such as:

The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper,

However, on others he was spot on,

no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher

The main thrust of his argument was that even back in 1995:

Every voice can be heard cheaply and instantly. The result? Every voice is heard. The cacophany more closely resembles citizens band radio, complete with handles, harrasment, and anonymous threats. When most everyone shouts, few listen.(…)the Internet is one big ocean of unedited data, without any pretense of completeness. Lacking editors, reviewers or critics, the Internet has become a wasteland of unfiltered data. You don’t know what to ignore and what’s worth reading.

The online landscape was very different back in 1995,  there were only 16 million online, access was far far slower, and more expensive and places to communicate were limited but yet it still seems familiar. Today there are over 1.6 billion people with internet access. We have countless more ways of expressing our opinions online, but we have got better at curating  the content that we, and others, produce. We’ve also got better at filtering out the noise and identifying the people we want to listen to, which is not necessarily a good thing.

Stoll covers other topics with varying accuracy but his final point;

What’s missing from this electronic wonderland? Human contact. Discount the fawning techno-burble about virtual communities. Computers and networks isolate us from one another. A network chat line is a limp substitute for meeting friends over coffee. No interactive multimedia display comes close to the excitement of a live concert. And who’d prefer cybersex to the real thing? While the Internet beckons brightly, seductively flashing an icon of knowledge-as-power, this nonplace lures us to surrender our time on earth. A poor substitute it is, this virtual reality where frustration is legion and where–in the holy names of Education and Progress–important aspects of human interactions are relentlessly devalued.

Still rings true, if it didn’t then there’d be no such thing as Twestival, CozyTweet Up, Tuttle or any of the other hundreds of organised or casual offline meet-ups that happen every day. Obviously the internet hasn’t failed, even the Stoll didn’t argue that it would, however neither it is any form of nirvana. It does have a dark underbelly,  characterised by sites like 4Chan and GenMay and even in the carebear areas like Twitter. Perhaps the one thing that Stoll should’ve forseen was that the vast increase in noise would lead us to be less questioning and to accept the news that slips through our carefully crafted online filters.

Twitter advertising

Hurrah, finally Twitter has lifted its skirts ,shown its ankles and revealed that it’s anticipated ad platform will be much like Google’s. Roughly:

• Ads will be tied to Twitter searches, in the same way that Google’s (GOOG) original ads were. So a search for, say, “laptop,” may generate an ad for Dell (DELL). The ads will only show up in search results, which means users who don’t search for something won’t see them in their regular Twitterstreams.
• The ads will use the Twitter format–140 or fewer characters–and will be distributed via the third-party software and services that use Twitter’s API. The services will have the option of displaying the ads, and Twitter will share revenue with those that do.
• Twitter will work with ad agencies and buyers to seed the program, but plans on moving to a self-serve model like Google’s, down the road.

Twitter’s Ad Plan: Copy Google, Peter Kafka, All Things Digital

The idea is that this will be less intrusive for users than appearing having ads appear directly in their stream. This is a smart and sensible move by Twitter, of which perhaps FaceBook and Google should take note. The question then of course is how effective will adverts be on a search page?

It is tempting to be dismissive and say that they will be easily ignored, as many online ads are – the rough average for Google Ads is about two percent(ish), even lower for most banners. Also people currently using search are usually looking to track a conversation, around an event or a news story not for information on a product. Personally I think it is quite likely that this behaviour will change. I think smart advertisers will link their ads to their existing Twitter accounts, the value of Twitter is the ability to make a seemingly more human connection and the ads will lose value if they do not capitalise on that.

I also think that the danger for brands advertising is that their ads will be potentially served up directly next to 140 character reviews of their products. So a search for ‘Laptop’ might bring up a Dell ad, it might also bring up a tweet praising or slating a Dell laptop, Micromanagement of your customers on this micro platform is going to be increasingly key.

Pitching bloggers

It struck me at some point in the late week just how 2007 my last posts are, are we were really still seriously discussing whether or not we should approach bloggers as PR ppl in the brave new world of 2010? I’m sure we would have all thought that by now blog relations would be a well established and standard part of a PR’s box of tricks. That said, we’re still royally cocking up journalist relations and that has been an industry mainstay for decades.

So what, if anything, have my two recent polls, on whether PR’s should pitch bloggers and if bloggers want to be pitched, revealed? Mainly that it depends. I assume that it depends on whether the pitch is actually relevant, timely and decent. The original impetus behind my exploration of blog relations was an idea that perhaps we should accept that they cannot be done successfully unless part of a ongoing, long term relationship. The results seem to indicate that it’s actually the PRs who are more bothered about this than the bloggers, with only 17 per cent  of bloggers stating that a pitch to them should never be a one off, compared to 23 per cent of PRs. I should point out that the respondent numbers to both polls did vary and neither should be regarded as statistically valid, but they can be regarded as indicative of current attitudes.

And the indications are that bloggers are actually happy to hear from us on a one off basis, as many journalists are. However as with journalist relations, it works better if you’re not strangers and have a relationship. Likewise I suspect  it  also probably pays off more to do your homework and stop sending out BCC emails featuring irrelevant press releases and thinking the job’s a good un. Somewhere along the line PR has substituted quantity for quality and are happy to play a numbers game in order to secure some coverage, rather than spending time in cultivating more meaningful coverage and relationships.

We’re constantly asking how we can measure Social Media, yet we’re still to work out how we can measure PR. The temptation with Social Media is to count the success of the tactic, not the strategy. So huzzah, you have 10,000 FaceBook Fans, don’t worry that sales in the target audience of 40 plus mothers haven’t increased as we can show the client a tangible outcome. The temptation with more traditional PR, which is carrying over to our new realm with unsurprising ease, is to use activity to prove to the client our worth. We’ve targeted 150 journalists is something they can get their heads round and pay for.

Perhaps the answer is that the PR industry needs to do a PR job on itself to raise awareness in clients about what we can do, what the success looks like and what sort of metrics we can put in place. We could use those weird ones, that are measurable and then demand that we get judged on those, not on the incidentals.

In conclusion, I end where I started this particular thread of thought, agreeing with Darika that PR needs to be fixed and no-one is going to do it for us.

Poll: What Bloggers want

Yesterday I asked the general world of Twitter if public relations agencies should approach bloggers on a short term basis. The votes are currently fairly evenly split between

• Yes – but never for a short term campaign 23%
• Depends 28%
• Yes – period of intended engagement makes no difference 33%

I’m leaving that poll open and will report on the results tomorrow. However, one of the comments, mainly ‘What is in it for the blogger?’ made me think I should solicit the viewpoint of bloggers. So another poll, if you’re in PR, please answer with your blogger hat on, much like Chris did yesterday in his post on being approached, or not at all. Again results will be verified by an independent body and reported back on by the weekend.

Poll: PR agencies & bloggers

Between Mr Hallam, Ms Ahern and myself, we’ve raised a little bit of discussion around blogger relations this week – mainly about whether it can be done on a short term basis or if indeed it can be done at all.

I’d like to get a wider opinion on whether PR agencies could, would or should proactively target bloggers. So please take two ticks and record your thoughts in the poll below. Results post will follow.