It’s been a busy few months – not only did I become a dad but I also launched a new PR agency in Sydney under the brand Encoder Public Relations.  The feedback so far has been really positive.

Our approach is to provide clients with a distinctive range of PR services. These services are designed to help clients navigate the changing media landscape, understand their audience and communicate in a way that is relevant and effective in the digital age.  We’re focused on delivering audience insights and executing through visual and rich media communication. We sit under the WPP Australia banner and are based in North Sydney.

A lot of people – marketing media included – have intepreted the new offering as a digital agency, this isn’t quite right.  We’re digitally-led but we’re very much focused on integrated strategy and execution across traditional media and events.  When we talk about media in Encoder PR terms, we’re talking about the broadest possible definition – traditional, digital, social etc.  We belive that clients need to challenge their assumptions about their audiences and media consumption, it’s all very well to talk about engagement and social media but we need to drill a bit deeper than this.

We have set up a group blog on the website, which will provide us with an opportunity to share news, insights and clients updates/case studies.

I am really keen to meet with any interested parties in Australia with a view to form partnerships (we’re referring to ‘collaborators‘) and as a chance for me to explain what Encoder PR is all about and gather feedback.

I will still blog here.  I’ve added the Encoder PR web link to the blog roll.

Julian posed the question: Is Google Sidewiki a threat or an opportunity? I think that it is both and made the point that active participation in conversation via Sidewiki provided another PR opportunity for organisations to communicate with their customers.

I also suggested that businesses develop a policy for Sidewiki and that they publish this so that customers know what to expect when using this form of feedback. Brian Giesen makes a great suggestion when he says that companies should ‘claim’ their Sidewiki by making the first comment (if possible).

A quick scan of major corporate websites highlights the fact that Sidewiki is yet to take off in a big way. Potential commenters need the latest version of the Google Toolbar and they also need to be aware of the service. The digerati set will be well aware of this but I am not convinced that Joe Bloggs has this on their radar. There is more activity around social media related news sites and social networks, check out Facebook as an example of a active Sidewiki.

Google Sidewiki is an extension of an existing service from Google; which is the ability to place comments on search results.  This didn’t take off or hasn’t taken off as yet (it continues to be available – check out the speech bubble icon below organic search results in Google).

Radian6 announced last week that it now offers the ability to monitor Sidewiki, an important development for businesses that need now to be aware of conversation in a wide range of digital tools.

I think Sidewiki represents a major PR opportunity for small businesses, who may not necessarily want to invest in discussion boards, recommendation and feedback mechanisms for their websites but are provided a free infrastructure for exactly that via Google Sidewiki.

Sidewiki causes a PR headache

ALREADY struggling with the mountain of blogs, forums and social networks, public relations consultants are weighing up whether a new Google tool that enables consumers to leave comments next to a brand’s website is a threat or a challenge.

Google Sidewiki gives a new and very transparent avenue for disgruntled customers to air their grievances against companies.

Travel websites already carry customer reviews of hotels and resorts.

Google says it is all about ”facilitating the conversation on the internet” between general users and experts but the PR industry is watching closely to see if Sidewiki will become as popular and as powerful a tool for opinionated internet users as Twitter and Facebook.

Gabriel McDowell, the managing director of Res Publica, said companies that failed to understand Sidewiki risked damage to their image and reputation. ”This is going to sort out the wheat from the chaff when it comes to managing corporate reputation,” Mr McDowell said.

Although Sidewiki presented ”yet another channel for them [corporations] to manage”, Daniel Young, the digital director of Burson-Marsteller, said it could be a useful tool. ”If one person has a complaint and you respond to it then, in a way you are answering others before the question has even been asked,” he says.

Brian Giesen, who heads the digital consultancy in the Asia-Pacific for Ogilvy PR, says Sidewiki could prove to be a handy way to spot potentially hot issues and the pressure groups pushing them.

”It just reinforces the need for brands to listen to such media. This is also a useful way for companies to find out who are the people who are making the comments and then to reach out to them,” said Mr Giesen, who recommends companies race to be the first to make a Sidewiki comment on a page, a privilege Google extends to website owners.

Mr McDowell said Sidewiki could also provide an avenue of redress by corporations that felt they misrepresented in the mainstream media. For example, a public relations consultant could post the entire statement given to a journalist, rather than the truncated version that might appear in an article. ”One of the major complaints about the media is the time it takes to get a correction up. This could go some way to rectifying that.”

But there are concerns that because Sidewiki is ”completely unregulated and uncontrollable”, as Mr Young put it, it will be harder for companies to sort out the legitimate complaints from the serial sledgers. Deciding on whether to answer was going to be key, he said.

Mr Giesen said Google ”needs to take greater responsibility for the comments that appear on Sidewiki”.

A spokeswoman for Google Australia said it had not received any concerns from Australian publishers. ”Website owners and publishers here and abroad have told us that they see this as another way to connect with their users, similar to conversations they’re already having on their blogs, YouTube channels, Twitter feeds and Facebook pages.”

This graph shows the Traffic Rank for the three biggest international social networks since mid-2007, courtsey of Alexa.

Traffic Rank compares all websites and ranks them from number 1 up in terms of traffic figures. Facebook has been the fourth most Trafficked website on average over the last 3 months.

MySpace has gone from 6 in mid-2007 to 11 today. Twitter has enjoyed a steep ascent from around the 3,000 mark in mid-2007 to 15 today.

Google.com is number 1, at the time of writing. The number 1 spot rotates between Google and Yahoo.

This graph shows that total social networking activity peaked in Q308.  It shows the percentage of total daily page views for each of the three sites.  MySpace has been on a steady decline since then.

The MySpace experience suggests that social networks have a limited lifespan or that they need continual re-invention to motivate their members.  The challenge lies in making changes and re-inventing without alienating users, as Facebook has found to its cost.

News Limited is about to embark on a new strategy for the loss-making site . The site will re-cast itself as an “entertainment portal” following a spate of redundancies and cut backs.

In 2008, U.S. ad spending on MySpace was $585 million, up 15% from 2007, and on Facebook was $210 million, up 50%, according to eMarketer.  Facebook generated $210 million in ad revenues in the same period.

Ad spending on Facebook is expected to surpass that of MySpace in 2011. This will be a good indicator of the overall health of the social networking market.

Twitter has dominated the headlines in 2009 thus far. Facebook – which was today valued at $6.5billion – continues to be the star of social networking but I feel that there are signs that it’s star is waning.

Anecdotal feedback from friends suggest that the novelty factor has worn off. Photo sharing seems to be the primary function of the site for most users who tend to interact inside Facebook with the close circle of friends that they hang out with in real life.  The re-design hid many applications and services behind tabs meaning that users have to go and look for content rather than have it come to them.

There are signs of an emergence of editorial ruminating about the future and usefulness of Facebook. In this article for Mac World, Hillary Rhodes asks: Is Facebook past its prime? Hillary makes the point that ‘the quality of the content that people share at Facebook may contribute to the longevity of the site far more than the sheer number of people who connect with each other’.

Negative editorial can only serve to speed the deterioration of the Facebook brand as a cool go to place. We always knew it was geeky but perceptions of the site seem to be edging into ‘un-cool’ or at least ‘old-hat’.

A recent study covered by The Australian identified a reaction to digital lifestyles. It found that the younger demographic longs for simpler times, it interested in retro and vintage (comes as no surprise if you live in Surry Hills) and has a desire for more authentic real-world relationships. The study found declines in the time spent on the Internet amongst 1,600 young adults (16-30 years old).

My view is that Twitter has a relatively sustainable lifespan because of its simplicity and its diversity.  Twitter seems to have m0re potential due to the fact that it connects people that don’t know one another creating many more opportunities for users to refresh, grow and evolve their networks, exposing them to new sources of information and opinion.

It seems inevitable to me that the traditional / new media pendulum would swing back towards the reality of physical offline media.  Like the dotcom bust, this process will redress the balance and bring a sense of reality to what has been a massively over-hyped area. I’d be a nut to argue that social media has had its day. We’re still in the formative phase of social networking and the chances are that Facebook will be superseded by something else in the short to medium term, in the same way that it has overtaken MySpace.

What does this mean for marketers?

Firstly, for online campaigns leveraging social networks and the Web. Marketers must ensure they have a presence within all major social network. Do not put all of your eggs in one basket.  It must be possible for the customer to engage with the brand and participate in the campaign within the social network of their chosing. This ensures maximum reach. Post campaign analysis will provide some interesting insights as to where  your audience participates, which can be weaved into future campaigns.

Secondly, social networks will come and go. What’s important is that brands interact with their target audiences online in an authentic and credible voice.  Its not about Facebook, MySpace or any other social network per se, its about understanding your customers and engaging them via the Internet and other forms of media in meaningful and valued interactions and conversations.

My new bike

A friend who recently returned from a holiday in California was talking about the Critical Mass meeting that he saw in San Francisco.  The Critical Mass movement uses blogs, forums and wikis to mobilise bicycle riders in cities around the world to stake their claim for road rights.  Critical Mass have varying levels of respect for the law – my understanding is that the San Francisco Critical Mass ride is quite confrontational to the point of disrupting traffic and closing roads.

The following information is taken from the Worldwide Critical Mass Hub:

The name “Critical Mass” is taken from Ted White’s 1992 documentary film about bicycling, “Return of the Scorcher“. In the film, George Bliss describes a typical scene in China, where cyclists often cannot cross intersections because there is automobile cross-trafic and no traffic lights. Slowly, more and more cyclists amass waiting to cross the road, and when there is a sufficient number of them — a critical mass, as Bliss called it — they are able to all move together with the force of their numbers to make cross traffic yield while they cross the road.

The origins of the Critical Mass movement:

The first Critical Mass ride was in September 1992 in San Francisco. There were 48 people. The ride increased in size by about 75% each month so that by the time 1993 came about, Critical Mass had almost 500 riders and was becoming well known among bicyclers in the city–although city officials still hadn’t registered its existence. A couple months after that people in other cities started noticing and began other Masses. Also in 1993, San Francisco police and Mayor Frank Jordan noticed us and struggled with how to deal with us. It took until June 1997, when Critical Mass was almost 5 years old, for the “new” mayor Willie Brown to make any special note of us: He proved he had no idea what we were about when he made comments that motivated the big July 1997 ride and police riot.

Here is the home page for the Sydney Critical Mass Group, which meets at 5:30pm on the last Friday of each month in Hyde Park.

Dealing with the YouthForce

The Millenials and Gen Ys are an increasingly important segment of our workforce. This demographic has had the luxury of a prosperous economy during their teenage years and adult life. They haven’t experienced an economic downturn or heaven forbid – an R!

Accenture coined the term user-determined computing. The relates to the increasingly tech savvy workforce and the dramatic increase in the availability of free, customisable and easy to implement software.

The Accenture argument goes that new technology within the workforce is just as likely to be deployed by users as it is by the IT department, which poses the question: How much control should IT (the business) exert over its users in the Web 2.0 world?

In recent years, we’ve seen social networking applications, instant messenging, RSS readers and so on enter the workforce in a big way. They may or may not be being used for work related activities.

Companies are presented with four options:

Get Back to Work Make a Phone Call!

BLOCK: Prevent access to social networks, sites and services that aren’t obviously related to work.

TRUST: Allow access and leave workers to discover their own professional uses for the technology.

APPLY: Work with employees and third party consultants to identify ways in which the technology can be applied to work. Lay down guidelines for the use of social media and other tools in partnership with staff and communicate these guidelines.

MANAGE: Tap into workers enthusiasm for online communication by rolling out a Facebook-like platform for internal (and external with trusted partners) company communications.

Telstra and Channel 7 are two companies in Australia that have received negative media coverage for blocking access to social networks (Facebook in both cases).

It will be interesting to see how the issue of the tightening economy and the use of social networks in the work place converge during the next twelve months. We’ve seen a rash of retrenchments in Australia and around the world, which looks likely to continue.

Recent research by the people at Wikinomics found that 50% of the Net Generations surveyed spend more than 2 hours every day using work technologies (Internet, IM etc.) to complete non-work tasks. 

My bet would be that corporations will increasingly opt to BLOCK as staff are cut back.

The forward thinking companies will respond to this issue by trying to find ways to use new technology to increase productivity in the workplace rather than adopting the punitive BLOCK mentality.  

Here are the results from Wikinomics:

Disclosure: Accenture is a client.

By Newsroom, I mean the area within a corporate Website that hosts press announcements and other types of news content – Just to be clear.

You’re probably asking yourself why?  

The Newsroom is a basic, low maintenance and inexpensive way for corporations to share content with journalists, analysts and bloggers, so you’d think that the most successful companies in America would make it as easy as possible to get access to the information, right?  

Second, the Internet has placed pressure on corporate communications to engage in a conversation with the audience and this, in turn, places pressure on newsrooms to change. The one directional communication (i.e. the press release) is increasingly irrelevant. As a result, the traditional newsroom is out of sync with what most major corporations are doing now in social and digital media. 

Out of the top 50 corporations in the Fortune 500, 42 do have a direct link to their newsroom i.e. it’s one click away.

Of the 42, ten have direct links to their most recent media announcements.

The ten are:

Ford Motor (Fortune 500 rank: 7); Bank of America (9); JP Morgan Chase & Co (12); Verizon (17); Goldman Sachs (20); United Health Group (25); Boeing (27); United Parcel Services (46); Time Warner (49).

These companies have brought news to their home page.

The eight that don’t have a direct link and which force users to go via the ‘About Us’ section (as an example) are:

AT&T (10); Hewlett-Packard (14); Home Depot (22); Costco Wholesale (29); Dell (34); Wells Fargo (41); Microsoft (44); Lowe’s (48).

These companies are effectively hiding their news from journalists, bloggers and also their customers.

It seems odd that only a small number of companies are bringing their news to the forefront of their Web presence, since this is the content that changes most often.

One of the disconnects that I see in corporate communications is between the conversational and authentic voice that companies are adopting in social networks and social media channels and their persistent use of gobbledygook in news announcements.

I continually see examples of big corporations putting out media releases, which flout the basics of press releases writing and are more or less meaningless due to the heavy use of marketing speak and jargon.

Some organisations are responding to this disconnect and re-working their newsroom in way that becomes more useful for bloggers and journalist. 

Ford is a high profile example of this. For major products, Ford is breaking content into snippets which can be re-purposed and re-compiled by the receiver in any way they like. You can find out more from Ford here; commentary from Geoff Livingston and Jason Falls.

The newsroom is going to change shape and form in the years to come as it gels with and responds to the demands of social media and an ongoing increase in rich media, such as video. The companies that take the lead will be desirable places for corporate communications execs to work and they’ll more effectively engage their audience groups, resulting in better exposure.

I think we’ll see News content move up the site map to corporate home pages in the years to come. 

Finally, there are some noteworthy sites within the Fortune 50. 

I think the Goldman Sachs site is outstanding, it very succintly tells a story and has a clear message unlike many corporate home pages. 

At the other end of the spectrum, Berkshire Hathway with a market valuation of $206,976 million dollars has a Website that would do my local community centre proud. I’m guessing they don’t pick up a lot of clients via the Web.

He says that the PR industry is:

Lee has a point that the Aussie PR industry is, in general, behind the rest of the world when it comes to engaging with customers, prospects and communities via blogging channels and representing clients in the blogosphere. There re some exceptions with the larger agencies leading the way with strengths in consultancy, products and services. I would put Burson-Marsteller (my employer, my team), Text 100, H&K and Edelman in this bucket.

As an agency, Burson – like many of the other global firms – has made big strides globally to develop its service offering, educate clients, up-skill staff and bring in people to strengthen our proposition. 

It’s more a challenge for the small local, independent and boutique firms to add social media as a core competency and I have heard Principals of well known boutique firms state that they have no interest in making this leap. I think that’s dangerous because in time digital PR will become a core competency for every PR consultant, it will be part and parcel of strategy and tactical execution – not a fancy smancy add-on, not a cool factor and not a nice to do, as it can be perceived today.

The PR industry clearly has a responsibility to educate clients and earn trust, it will, after all, create new revenue opportunities for agencies. We (Burson) are very focused on this part of the process and have landed some great projects as a result.  

There is a long way to go until Australia catches up with the rest of the world – particularly corporate Australia – and we need more people on-side to shorten the journey.

I am returning to blogging after a lapse caused mainly be a lack of time, which is another big barrier for agencies that need to develop new service offerings.

Note: Like one other big agency in Sydney, we’ll be rolling out a new website in the very new future.

I watched a bit of TV and saw Richard Branson talking about the environment. He said that all Virgin Atlantic profits for the next ten years would be invested in research into clean fuels. I did a Google search but couldn’t find anything on this – did he just announce it? Surely not. Not on Australian TV!

Let save this and see if the Google Map worked…

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The objectives of the research were to:

• Capture data on the frequency and type of new media used by Australian Federal politicians, parties, interest groups and activists
• Provide an analysis of the new media used to identify the range of viewpoints and the level of interactivity and community engagement attempted or achieved

Overall, the level of engagement achieved had been minimal due to the failure of the politicians to use the power of social media to engage and interact. Only one of the 226 politicians studied allowed negative comments to appear on their site (this was Malcolm Turnbull). In all other cases, comments sections were either not available or carried purely fan mail i.e. positive/supportive messages. Very small numbers replied to questions submitted via Websites and social networks, completely missing the opportunity to engage in conversation and drive advocacy.

Some figures:

• Less than 6% of selected Federal politicians had a new media presence assessed as “fairly interactive” (i.e. involving links inviting people to comment, ask questions or leave messages)
• 185 elected Federal politicians had new media sites which were completly one-way information dissemination with no opportunity for comment or input by members of the public
• Web and other sites of 70 elected Federal politicians comprised a single page and were judged to be a ‘token effort’
• Only three (1.3 per cent) were classified as “very comprehensive”, assessed on the basis of multiple pages plus links to other information such as blogs, podcasts or YouTube. The Kevin07 site was one of the three.
• Two Websites were judged to be amateurish and the majority were based on templates
• There were just 15 blogs but on average Federal politicians used 2.24 types of digital media

One of the key conclusions drawn from all of this is that “new media have not created a new public sphere of political discussion and debate where citizens can participate as equals as envisioned by Habermas (1989)”.

I take issue with this conclusion. It’s clear from the data that new media hasn’t been given the chance to create ‘a new public sphere of political discussion’ because it has been poorly applied and executed. In other words, new media hasn’t failed but our politicians and their advisors have. John Howard provides a case in point. He made little or no attempt to adapt his message or presentation for YouTube and opened his maiden YouTube appearance with ‘Good Morning!’.

There was much talk after the presentation about the fact that the majority of people that visited these types of sites where politically active and that it’s not actually these people that influence the outcome of elections.

My colleague, Ed, made a good point after the event. He said that he agreed with this conclusion but that the experience of US pollies had shown that social media could be used effectively as tool for mobilising a community of politically active advocates and supporters i.e. it does have an important role to play/does add value.

I would argued that politicians, in general, need to change the tone of their message and the way it is presented (Infotainment). This would help to engage the politically apathetic and help voters feel that they were interacting with a real person with a personality.

The report touched on the contribution of prosumers or citizens in terms of video commentary and other types of media. Macnamara made the point that much of this content was spoof material and he said that the jury was out as to whether this represented genuine political discourse. I don’t think there should be any question that it does.

My other observation related to the number of times that the audience made a point based on an assumption that only young people use social media.

Overall, it was an informative session in an academic setting and food for thought.