PR Week in Review 09-30-07

You say you want a revolution.

The uprising in Burma-Myanmar reached a fevered pitch this week and reminded us of how important blogging can be. Citizen journalists on the ground reported on skirmishes and posted graphic pictures of death and bloodshed as photographers were cut down by gunfire and monks were killed, beaten, corralled and confined. We may choose not to react, or we may find ourselves impotent against a far off military regime, but we cannot claim ignorance. When the junta cut Internet access I really felt their pain. I am tethered to the Internet at least six hours a day and life without it seems inconceivable. When Myanmar blogs went black it was a cruel reminder that there are still places in the world that can enslave its people and prevent the rest of humanity from peering in. See the rest of the story on Strumpette.

“Really good PR is so rare”

Those are the words of Jodi Kantor (left) of The New York Times.  She recalls few times when she dealt with a PR person who really made a difference in a story, someone who was able to ‘anticipate’ what the Arts & Leisure section, which she used to edit, might need. It’s a digitial world but it’s an old story. PR people aren’t reading the paper and thinking like journalists. Kantor now covers politics in general, and Barack Obama specifically, for NYT.

Kantor was on a panel called “The Era of Citizen Journalism” with Dan Gillmor, Director of the Center for New Citizen Media, moderated by Steve Rubel, Micropersuasion blogger with Edelman’s me2revolution.  The event, held earlier this week and archived with bios, links, and videos on this web page, were part of the Edelman/PR Week New Media Academic Summit.

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Google everywhere. Caveman crib. Architects yawn.

Google this, Google that. Google to add ‘universal’ search results. According to MediaWeek, Google will pull information from across the Web in all forms - web site links, images, video, blogs, maps or even from books - then present the results on a single page. There is also a new, updated version of Google analytics for your blog or website.

Fifty-five percent of global executives either currently use blogs as a business tool or say they plan to implement them in the next 12 months, according to a study by research organization Melcrum. Survey results indicate that 63% of executives use or plan to use online video, 43% podcasts, 51% RSS, and 41% social networks. Seventy-one percent of respondents say “improved employee engagement” is the top benefit of social media for their organization, while 59% name “improved internal collaboration” and 47% “creating a two-way dialogue with senior executives.” See press release.

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Jumping Off The Cliff

BusinessWeek’s “Virtual Life” Tech Special Report out today envisions a totally immersive 3-D web that offers a rich panorama of experience to rival our physical lives.

Much experimentation is already happening in Second Life.  Companies are realizing beneficial B-to-B applications - virtual meetings, showrooms, presentations. Products are planned to be launched and tested, stores are opening, real estate is bought and sold. There is elaborate entertainment, family reunions, all kinds of activity in a populated and interacting world of stresses, clashes and unabashed optimism for a bright and rosy future.

Gartner says the 80% of active Internet users will have a virtual life by the end of 2011.

Enter public relations. For a hint of where this is going check out Business Communicators of Second Life   -  about “how to communicate and participate in 3-D environments” and ”how to use and create 360-degree content for new online spaces and the emerging 3D web.” How do you create a word-of-mouth program for avatars? How do you mesh the virtual with the physical for a truly mashed up  PR program? These are questions we are not apt to ask ourselves now.

There is huge unrealized potential for public relations in the virtual world. But it requires tactics and strategies that are in many ways directly opposed to the way things are done in the static world.

I met yesterday with Adam Broitman, director of emerging & creative strategy for Morpheus Media in New York.  Morpheus is busy building its Second Life platform for the VirtuaLive.tv event at Canal Room, May 10. See previous PRBlogNews post on event. Adam gave me a tour around Morpheus Island in SecondLife. They purchased their Island, are sculpting and landscaping it. They created a cool little waterway with a grafitti splattered tunnel and a stage that floats in the air where Buddahead will play May 10.

It’s all an experiment in Second Life but the virtual web is inevitable. The pioneers will be prepared for it.

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“The divide between the publishers and the public is collapsing. This turns mass media upside down. It creates media of the masses.

How does business change when everyone is a potential publisher? A vast new stretch of the information world opens up. For now, it’s a digital hinterland. The laws and norms covering fairness, advertising, and libel? They don’t exist, not yet anyway. But one thing is clear: Companies over the past few centuries have gotten used to shaping their message. Now they’re losing control of it.

“Want to get it back? You never will, not entirely.” –businessweek 2006

Edelman Revolution At The Crossroads

“I still find some bloggers unwilling to acknowledge the positive role played by PR people; we are sometimes demonized as floggers or worse,” Richard Edelman says in the following interview with PRBlogNews.

Richard Edelman (right) is the CEO of the firm that bears the family name. Richard is the son of Daniel J., the founder and architect of the world’s largest independent public relations firm (by far), with nearly $325 million in net fees last year. In September 2004 Richard launched a blog called 6AM that secured his personal imprint on the firm, signaled a big move into the blogging/PR 2.0 space, and presaged the new era of Pioneer Thinking. From a branding and financial perspective, Pioneer Thinking has been a stellar success. Edelman net fees grew nearly 24% last year, three times the rate of the number two independent, Ruder Finn (according to O’Dwyer’s). Edelman is the hot shop in PR.

That success has come with a great deal of scrutiny, public analysis, and a constant stream of criticism. Richard Edelman’s drive to spread the mantra of the “horizontal conversation” through its many practices and 46 offices worldwide has been hampered by persistent questions about its tactics and operations. Edelman takes a thumpin’ in the April 2 story on Wal-Mart in the New Yorker, the latest in a string of stories that try to pierce the veil that cover Edelman’s strategies and tactics. Considering his constant posts that beg for understanding, it is curious that Richard Edelman is still widely misunderstood.

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Jay Rosen - I Can Do Whatever The F@#k I Want

“I am a tenured professor of journalism, I can do whatever the fuck I want,” said Jay Rosen (right), NYU tenured professor of journalism. Rosen was speaking at the New York Social Media Club meeting, at Edelman Worldwide New York headquarters, last Tuesday.  

Rosen was explaining why mainstream media would never undertake his current project of “Pro-Am” journalism fittingly called  Assignment Zero. The schtick is to combine ”citizen journalists” and “professional” journalists to collaborate on a giant, evolving story.  Rosen says he already has 700 people signed up for the project, nearly triple what they expected. Every edit, thought, revision is recorded on the web. All this is intended to prove … ?

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Blogging by the book & social media for the masses

Handbook for bloggers and cyber dissidents  (1.6 mg pdf) by Reporters Without Borders is an excellent guide to the blogosphere from the legal, ethical, and moral imperatives of bloggers to the nuts and bolts of how to choose and use a blog platform, and how to get picked up by search engines and aggregators. The Handbook is written with a world view, so there is discussion about technical ways to get around censorship. According to the report, China is the world champion in omniscient and effective Internet censorship,  closely followed by Vietnam with its cyber-police and spies in Internet cafes. 

Social media: An exhaustive list of social media platforms that can be integrated into websites can be found here on the ‘Web Strategy by Jeremiah’ blog. There are over 72 comments on this post so far and a lot of good feedback on how to winnow down the list of possible platforms to use.  Clearly, it is a crowded field with many contenders jockeying for competitive advantage, and still heated discussion about what qualifies as social networking. The post is so active that somebody suggested turning it into a wiki, although the author has had problems with wikis (vandals).

Who won the Vloggies? What, you missed it? Didn’t know there were awards for video blogging? See And the Vloggies winners are for the 2006 honorees in over 30 categories. The best female vlogger was Nontourage; best male was Josh Wolf. The Alive in Mexico vlog features stories of the Zapatistas in Chiapas, and links from Alive in Baghdad, which won best group vlog. There is no info yet on the 2007 Vloggies.

Citizen Journalism In Action

I published my first piece on OhMyNews, a Korean Internet news source that is pioneering “citizen-journalism.”

OhMyNews employs 50 staff reporters and editors plus 38,000 citizen reporters who submit app. 200 stories a day. Much of the professional staff time is spent on editing and fact checking these stories before they are posted.

I wrote my piece on the London bomb blasts late last night. I got an immediate response from an editor in Seoul. I emailed graphics and background. This morning I see the story on the front page of the web site, with some additional info added by the editor.

The story was selected for the main page, top (above the fold in print terms), and earns me 20,000 won in cybercash, app. $20 US. OhMy! - you won’t rake in the bucks like Carl Bernstein but the system works. | See Mark Rose Bio

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