In 1861, the philisopher John Stuart Mill wrote: the exercise of any political function, either as an elector or representative, is power over others.

We live in tumultuous times. The United State Presidential Election is scheduled to take place on November 4 this year.

The question remains relevant today: Do voters have a moral duty to be informed about politics?

The majority of Americans rely on the television for their political information, not realising that most news networks are highly partisan, owned by corporations and biased.

John Stuart Mill argued that the impact of political ignorance should be offset by giving extra votes to the most highly educated portions of the population.

Who is responsible for generating an informed population? Is it the moral responsibility of the individual? Perhaps - It’s rarely (if ever) in the interests of the political elite or governing party to educate the electorate about its shortcomings and failings.  

Edmund Burke coined the term, the Fourth Estate. He is quoted in Thomas Carlyle’s book:

“Burke said that there were three Estates in Parliament, but in the Reporters Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important far than they all”.

Journalism is seen as having a critical role to play as an institution that holds the other institutions to account. Sadly, our society has lost faith in the media.

A Pew Research Centre Study found that 66 per cent of people consider the press “one sided” while only 9 percent of journalists are concerned with the media’s credibility.

Technology is challenging and transforming the Fourth Estate. 

The Internet is perceived to have democratised information. It has placed the means of production in the hands of the consumer, hence User Generated Content. It has enabled the audience to engage in conversation, to provide feedback and to challenge one sided arguments and vested interests.

The Internet presents fantastic possibilities and potential as means of sharing information and mobilising communities around a cause or issue but I don’t think its safe to assume that this potential will necesarily be realised to the benefit of all.  

I think we can draw parallels between free markets and de-regulation and the impact of the Internet on media and information. Recent events clearly demonstrate - if proof were needed - that a laissez-faire attitude does not always lead to a positive or sustainable outcome. Fundamentally, free markets (of information or finance) may be self correcting but often that process is too painful to bare.

We cannot claim that traditional print media has been effective in establishing an informed population (whatever one of those is) but my fear is that new media, digital media will have a downward effect on the degree to which the community as a whole is achieving an acceptable level of informed-ness.

Sure, it will expose active and aware audiences to a much wider and active array of content and opinion but that’s an echo chamber. A situation in which information, ideas or beliefs are amplified or reinforced by transmission inside an “enclosed” space. This was one of the primary objections to the role of the media in the lead up to the Iraq War.  

History tells us that the general public has no inclination and accepts no moral obligation to be informed about events in the world and in the world of digital media where the reader is the editor this concerns me. 

For the majority of the population, the Internet means memes, it means funny videos, it means games, it means shopping, it means entertaining news and opinion. It has little or no relationship with political consciousness.   

The following table captures the characteristics of traditional print media as I see them and compares them with that of digital and new media.

My fear is that if we move to a world where the characteristics of the media and the way that we engage with media reside in the right hand collumn we will utlimely become less informed and not more.

I don’t know what the solution is to this problem given the fact that media is moving irretrievably  along a digital path but I think it’s worthy of discussion.   

I recently posted on Yammer (a Twitter app for Corporates). This micro-blogging client came out on top at Techcrunch 50 2008. I took some time to have a look at some of the other new technologies in the running at Techcrunch and came across Tonchibot. 

Tonchidot is a piece of software for the iPhone, which allows users to capture and tag the real world. The user takes a picture of a a physical thing - be it a building, landmark, sculpture, place etc. They can then create an audio or written note to accompany that image. Other users can pick up the audio or written content if they later swing by and point their camera at the same location or thing.

You could, for example, point your iPhone at a restaurant to receive a review from another user or maybe at a bus stop to receive information about the next service. Its a very clever way to integrate the real world with the Web. Check it out…

Things are getting out of hand. Today’s move by McCain would be honourable if someone, anyone believed that he actually had something, anything helpful to say. We know he doesn’t.

The US election is very focused on the individual personalities of the nominees, almost to the extent of disregarding party politics and the recent past. But surely McCain tactics are so very Republican, it all feels very familiar.

McCain will have to deal with more than one thing at a time if he wins the Presidency, so why can’t he now? I think Palin should go up against Obama in the debate - she’s the veep and John is tied up (no pun intended).

In this video, Sarah explains that McCain is a pragmatic Maverick that is apt to talk about solutions while taking shots from his party and the opposition.

CBS News anchor Katie Couric drills Palin

One could argue that the current scrutiny of the global finance systems by regulators and enforcers is too little too late but I’m in the better late than never camp.

In an ideal world the punishment for our greedy financiers would be severe destitution and hardship but its not going to happen. These people are bound to remain wealthy and the industry as a whole has been provided a secuirty blanket as a result of the enormous financial bail outs by Governments and reserve banks around the world.

Someone needs to be held to account.

The FBI has launched more than 500 investigations into senior executives in the mortgage industry and is probing records relating to the failure of Lehman Brothers and AIG. This story is covered by The Indepdendent and MarketWatch, among others.

I reckon it’s only a matter of time until these authorities expose an Enron style pandemic of lies, inflated expectations, fictitious profits, non-disclosure, shady accounting processes and fraud across the industry.

Sadly, we’ll be adding LIES to the list of wrong-doings for the finance sector, which already includes greed and bad judgement.

But does this mean that the US Administration will effectively be bankrolling criminals if it is successful in rushing through the proposed US$700bn rescue package? Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the beneficiary of a multi-billion dollar Government buy-out, are both on the FBI’s watch list, along with 26 other companies. These investigations will take months and years while the rescue package could well be signed in this week.

The trouble is that Government and Finance are so intertwined and so inter-dependent that Government itself will have some difficult questions to answer if it holds the sector to account in a meaningful way.

This takes me back to an earlier post from January 2008, which included the following letter to the editor:

As a small investor, I’d like to wish all the Australian finance insiders - the fund managers, executives, merchant bankers and lawyers - a great year. Although I could never aspire to your earnings, it’s great that my investment funds let me assist your wealth by voting for ever rising executive pay and allowing more and more bonuses and payments to high-priced bankers and lawyers. That fact that you guys are all friends - and therefore know how to reward each other with my money - makes it even better.

OK, I want to start this post with a disclaimer. There are plenty of companies operating in Australia that are active in social media. I have seen some great case studies…

Examples include - wikis at Janssen-Cilag, BlueTube for the Victorian Police Force and the ever present case study: Now We Are Talking.

And I have worked with companies in this sphere.

As a side note: It seems to me that Telstra entered the social media space with a very specific agenda (T3) and objective. The approach delivered value and has since permeated other areas of their business in a positive way.

For the purposes of this post, I want to focus on externally facing social media projects by Australian corporates.

Laurel Papworth recently posted on the topic of CEOs that use twitter, as a follow up to a BusinessWeek story about tweeting chief execs in the US. The list is made up by the leaders of web 2 and tech companies on both sides of the Pacific.

Talk to any PR in Australia and they’ll tell you that the corporate sector remains unwilling to dip its toe into social media in a meaningful or strategic way. Maybe that’s an exercise in PR business development, either way I’d like to suggest a few reasons why this might be the case.

1. A small corporate sector which remains well connected via traditional offline networks
That sense of the old boys network in Australian business still feels very prevalent to me. That concept of mateship and personal connections comes through quite strongly. The people that run Australian businesses are not using social media as a prmary means of communication.

2. The retail sector has not led the way
Amazon and eBay were the Web pioneers in many ways. Their success gave the Web a lot of credibility in a market (the US) which has a very rich catalogue mail order retail culture. The Australian retail sector on the other hand has been very cautious and reticent when it comes to establishing an online presence, resulting in a lack of leadership.

3. The old chestnut: Australia the follower
Why would we expect Australia to lead the rest of the world or even be up there when history tells us that this market is typically a follower? Corporate Australia is watching to see what happens in the US and Europe before it dives in.

4. Abscence of high speed national broadband
Internationally, Japan leads the way when it comes to national broadband speeds. The NBN project in Australia has a long way to go still - a nationwide broadband network in Australia is five years away, at the very least. This has impacted the sophistication, the uptake of Web applications, interaction etc. Australia is way down the rankings in terms of broadband quality, as this study shows.

5. There has been no high profile reputational crisis on the Web in Australia
Corporates will only recognise the power of the Web when they see one of their peers suffer major reputational damage as a result of online activity. Until then, corporates will sit back and focus on the risk of getting involved.

6. Corporates aren’t being sold on the benefits effectively
Marketers, consultants, PRs have to accept some responsibilty for the current state of affairs. It’s their job to educate decision makers. It’s their job to prove the business case. Marketers and communicators in Australia aren’t strong on this stuff.

As I said at the beginning, there is activity out there. It’s happening but Australia continues to lag behind the rest of the world. My sense is that the multi-nationals operating in Australia are leading the way. It can only be a matter of time until we see the large corporates follow Telstra and usurp the telco as the outstanding Australian corporate in social media.

The Australian has launched a new blog. It’s called Wires and Lights in a Box and it describes itself as:

A daily, handpicked selection of the best news and opinion on social media, Web 2.0, new journalism and online advertising.

I will always distinguish between professional/ amateur bloggers with a passion and journalists and their personal web page under the banner of an established print title. It’s still a blog, sure; readers can leave comments - cool. There is a fundamental difference though.

Still, its reflects an increased focus on this area in Australia, which can only be a good thing for a country that is still a laggard in Web 2.0.

What do you think of the new Facebook design?

My first impression of the new new design was that it felt more like an enterprise application. I think the tabs have added a sense - imagined or real - of complexity.

I don’t understand the justification from moving from the one profile page to the tabbed format. A service which made a huge amount of information and interaction readily available has become much more cumbersome to use.

With the old version, you didn’t know what was new, but by scrolling down the page - the new content was revealed to you. Now users must click on tabs and literally find content and updates - it’s much less fun and much more effort.

Facebook won’t be supporting the two versions, unlike Yahoo!, for example, which continues to support ‘Classic’ and ‘New’ Yahoo! Mail. This is despite the fact that 1 in 4 users prefer the old design (Facebook data).

The Inside Facebook blog is a great source of info on - you guessed it - Facebook.

People have an emotional connection with Facebook and they tend to be resistant to change in general so it’s inevitable that there would be a kick back to the re-design.

This Facebook group ‘1 000 000+ to bring back old facebook’ has 369,810 members.

Recently I blogged on this campaign from Oracle, which will gather ideas from the user, customers etc. in the lead up to the company’s OracleWorld Conference.

This is now live after a delayed launch and looks like this…

Ok, it did look like that… now it looks like this… much less impactful and could easily go un-noticed.

There has been a lot of chatter on blogs and industry podcasts lately (and not so lately) about the value of PR.

It’s a discussion that has been going on for time eternal; PR people will be the first to admit that there are some very poor operators out there who fuel the age old acrimony between journalists and PR.

One of the prompts for this discussion was the Jason Calacanis’ ten point guide How To Get PR For Your Start-up: Fire Your PR Company. The guide was strenuously (over) analysed by Shel Holz and Neville Hobson during FIR #375 which you can download here .

There have been long discussions about the benefit of using the phone over other means of communicating with journalists. Jeremiah Owyang at Forrester provides more of a balanced common sense view here, as well as his observations as a target for PRs directly and as a networker with firms advised by PR agencies.

This post by Dee Barizo continues the theme with a post that begins with the following Tim Ferriss quote:

PR is now Personal Relationships not Public Relations.

Tim Ferriss is the author of a book called the Four Hour Work Week, which I am half way through - still! This must be why I am still working 45 hour weeks. That’s 45, not 4.5!

The focus on personal relationship is not a new thing and it almost sounds counter intuitive to say it but technology is facilitating a new level of personal engagement between PR and their target media, bloggers as well as other influencers.

At the end of the day, there is no right answer to the fire our agency/keep your agency question. Its an over simplification to try and find one.

Every organisation has different needs, different in-house capability and a different agenda. They are different sizes and they operate in different industry sectors.

There is no excuse for any PR to pitch a journalist by any means of communication with an untargetted suggestion or story idea or news items. But the fact that this occurs from time to time does not undermine the legitimacy and value of an entire industry.

The scatter gun meets blunderbuss approach to PR i.e. distribute your singular message as far as wide to as many people as possible is a thing of the past but this is a relatively recent development. The industry is going through a period of transformation for sure.

My view is that the impact of new technology on the industry will drive best practice, as well as a new type of PR. I don’t believe it’s dead, a view held by Dave Taylor. In 2005! he wrote:

But there’s a bit of a dark cloud hanging over true public relations too, because it’s built upon the assumption that the message can be controlled or crafted in the first place. One of the more interesting effects of the rise of bloggers and citizen journalists (and, for that matter, “citizen industry analysts”), is that the message is taking on a life of its own and that it’s more and more frequently getting into the public eye before the company is ready. In a world where messages are born, evolve and disseminate without controls, it does beg the question of what’s left for a public relations professional?

Side note I didn’t realise this post was so old - good post tho!

This is a great post but in my view, there will be plenty left for the PR. I agree with the premise that the audience controls the message but that message (in its original form and in subsequent story telling) must originate and be crafted somewhere still. Is Mr. Taylor heralding the end of all marketing industries? There will absolutely be a role for PRs in terms of advanced monitoring and ‘measurement’ (sentiment over volume), identiying issues and influencers, engaging these influencers and so on.

“… bitter, partisan fights and outworn ideas of the left and the right won’t solve the problems we face today. But a new spirit of unity and shared responsibility will.”

I couldn’t agree more with this sentiment.

To me, the way our two party democracies lurch from ‘left’ to ‘Right’ is insanity.

We must stop doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.

McCain didn’t see this financial meltdown coming. Great post on this at Liberal Values.