I found out today that the Comedy Store in Sydney has closed down. This is a real shame as I have had some great nights at the venue including one that I posted on here. I went to the open mic night on quite a few occasions and saw a mate debut there - Alan Gernon. I created the prop for a topical Shark hunt joke.

‘Comedy’ on TV in this country leaves me cold on the whole so it was always a welcome treat to see some live stand. I did notice that the place was always half empty. It was a pretty nice set up even if the bar was a bit small. Too bad.

I recently blogged on the plethora of social networks. In recent weeks, there has been lots of chat about the threat that FriendFeed poses to the Twitter community and many high profile bloggers have moved from Tweeting to FriendFeed.

I feel that FriendFeed represents a big threat to Twitter.

I found out today about the launch of a new network; ’YouAre’ from Spain. I applied for beta access today. 

This is a micro-blogging platform with aspects of LinkedIN, del.icio.us and others combined with a secret sauce, which hasn’t been revealed as yet. Screenshots available here.  

I am keen to trial the new service and will cover it here. I have been told that my access will come through in a few weeks.

The beauty and irony of the social networking is that I found out about YouAre on FriendFeed via Duncan Riley’s post. That would be like the Sun newspaper in Britain running a story on the launch of the Today newspaper and suggesting I check it out or me placing a classified ad in the window of my local newsagents suggesting that passers by check out the newsagency down the road. 

Consolidation in this space is inevitable. We’ve seen it in most industry sectors, take the ERP market in recent years. Most industries mature before they consolidate but the social networking sector will get there much more quickly surely.

The issue of monetization is one spanner in the works still.

Duncan Riley asks; What’s happened to the blogroll?

I have also noticed that bloggers are dropping their blogroll.

Here are my thoughts on why this might be:

1. The blogroll has been superceded by Twitter and FriendFeed as the easiest and most information rich method of tracking and associating oneself with others that are active, interesting and influential in social media
2. Blogrolls were removed because they made it too easy for PR firms and marketers to identify bloggers and networks of bloggers. This means that those that want to influence bloggers actually have to participate. The blogroll in this context is the equivalent of an organisation publicising its top tier media list.
3. Blogrolls are simply too hard to maintain.
4. Blogrolls drive traffic away from people’s blogs.

I’d say that number 1 seems to be the most likely but it’s interesting that this trend has just occurred.

There doesn’t seem to have been an anti-blogroll conspiracy, as such.

There have been a few cases (that we know about) of social networks going wrong and high profile service providers have been found out for stepping over the line when it comes to privacy, Facebook’s Beacon being the most high profile example.

Now it’s my turn to experience a social networking glitch…

Plaxo (Pulse) is telling me I’ve done things that I haven’t done. It’s giving me credit for the content creation of my connections.

For example:

I see that I recently uploaded some pics from a trip to Paris. 

Weird!

I haven’t been to Paris since ‘97 but my colleague Ed got back two weeks ago.

I was also surprised to see that I had added a couple of notes to Facebook in the last few days. The first was a link to an NYT article and the second a post on the LaGrange Point blog (see below).

The funny thing is: It’s not my blog. It’s not my article.  

You can see what’s happening here:

Plaxo is BETA so maybe they are due the benefit of the doubt.

The network seems to be gaining traction with a professional audience. There is a gap here - Facebook falls short and is poorly positioned for business users.  These discrepancies only relate to Facebook notes and updates, so maybe it’s a Facebook problem. I have no idea.

The bad news is that glitches like this and the resulting coverage can un-do months of good work in  minutes and hours resulting in serious reputational damage to emergent brands.  

Anyone else experiencing this? 

For the two connections that I reference in this post - thanks. I hope you don’t object to the reference.

Here

Digital PR is still considered by many in the industry to be a novelty and by some, even a fad but most smart people realise that what’s peripheral for the majority of clients/organisations and specialised today will become mainstream and core in the relatively near future.

My agency has digital champions within a Practice but one of the primary objectives for the digital team is to upskill and help educate every single consultant within the organisation.

To that end, I wonder what skills PRs should acquire to get ahead. Having an understanding of the implications and impact of digital and social media is the first step but what technical skills will the PR of the Future require?

There are a couple of reasons why agencies will want to have these skills available in-house:  

1. Revenue and Relationships: Retain as much of the budget and contact as possible rather than involve third party Web developers and designers.

2. Advertising agencies: The fact that advertising agencies have the creative and delivery skills in house is, for me, their strongest argument when it comes to the issue of PR versus Ad Agency for digital communications strategy/execution.

3. Ability to execute = credibility. Related to the point above, I guess. A search optimised press release doesn’t require technical know-how but simple projects like a Facebook Page or Social Media Release do.

We are likely to see a rash of PR agencies acquiring or teaming up with firms that can provide the creative and technical execution.

I feel that there is a big opportunity for forward looking PRs here but where should they invest their time? HTML would be essential as a base, I guess, along with Flash. CSS and SQL would also figure. What do you think? What would you advise?  

This post by Stephen Ward for Read Write Web provides an overview of the ten most marketable Web development skills.

I am in the process of teaching myself Photoshop - using a combination of a Dummies Guide book and a lot of trial and error. It’s going well and I am quite pleased with the creation below, which is an interpretation of an original water colour that caught my eye in Melbourne last week.

What skills will the PR of the Future require?  

Burson-Marsteller (my employer) is sponsoring this event. 

The prediction markets are going to be really interesting. More on this a little later…  

MEDIA RELEASE:

A crystal ball for the media industry: Future of Media Summit connects insights between Silicon Valley and Australia   

The Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance (MEAA) put on event tonight entitled ‘Freelance Journalists and Blogging’. Laurel Papworth spoke on the topic in the glamorous surrounds of the Orient Hotel in the Rocks, Sydney.

Papworth’s presentation provided an overview of well known social networking sites and blogging platforms and instructions on how bloggers and content creators can promote their product via social media. It dealt with some of the implications for the freelance journalist community.

The content was relatively rudimentary but well matched to the level of knowledge and experience among the audience of freelance writers.

I have seen Papworth speak a few times. Tonight, I again learnt about some new stuff, fact and figures:

• The biggest concern for 50% of the journalists that participated in a PEW survey (State of the News Media) ranked economic concerns as their biggest professional issue  
• MySpace = the third largest country in the world
• More on corporate activity within Facebook: Salesforce has created an application that links Facebook activity with its CRM application. More on this here.
• Glassdoor: A site that provides an environment for employees to anonymously rate their employer. More from Ms. Papworth here.

The take away was basically: Freelances need to get theirs head around social media and learn how to use it to their advantage because in the future an editor is just as likely to commission a blogger with a ready made audience and some degree of authority on a specific topic.

I don’t think there is any doubt that this is true.

The evening got me thinking about journalism and how this compares to blogging. Surely good journalism is mainly but not totally about objectivity, as defined by Yahoo! Education:

The style of writing characteristic of material in newspapers and magazines, consisting of direct presentation of facts or occurrences with little attempt at analysis or interpretation.  

Clearly, journalists and publishers have biases and political leanings but famous papers got that way because they were objective. The skill in journalism comes from researching and understanding an issue before gathering credible sources together to present a balanced analysis of that topic.   

Bloggers have an agenda. They shoot from the hip and more often than not they promote themselves and their point of view. There is no requirement for objectivity. They know that their audience either already has an interest in their favoured topic or agrees with them or just finds their personal going-ons interesting. 

They operate within echo chambers (at least to some extent) and their success and the degree to which they entertain and inform is rarely determined by their ability to deconstruct relevant and topical issues.

This begs the question: Is it better to have an understanding of what’s going on or to know what somebody else thinks?

A combination of Opinion and Objectivity would be ideal but as Papworth said during her concluding comment the US newspapers are placing more and more blog content on their home pages and she expects this trend to be repeated in Australia.   

The last questioner of the night pondered the issue of time; where might freelance writers find time to blog and manage and extend their social networks? A valid question because now it’s my bedtime.

You’ll find the presentation from tonight’s event here (soon).

I spent a few hours over the weekend evaluating the Websites of the top 50 corporations in the 2008 Fortune 500 with one very simple question in mind: Is there a direct link from the home page to the Newsroom or equivalent? 

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.

Lee Hopkins has written a couple of posts in the last few days about the PR industry in Australia and its adoption / advocacy of the blogosphere as a critical communications tool.

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.