PR and the Social Web

Eighteen months after publication my book ‘Public Relations and the Social Web’ has become the best-selling PR book on Amazon UK.

The chart gets quite volatile near the top and after a spell at number 2 this morning it dropped to number 4 before hitting the top spot at about 6.30pm.  I expect the reign to be brief so I’ve posted a screen shot here.  I genuinely didn’t expect it to happen and thought the opportunity had passed after the first few months in print.  I’m thrilled that people are finding it useful and if you’ve bought it then thank you.

This blog was always intended as a companion to the book, but although I should probably quit whilst I’m ahead, I think I’ll keep it going.

Last week a list appeared on David Brain’s blog of the most influential PR people in the UK on twitter. Let’s set aside the methodology; whenever lists like this appear their veracity is challenged, much as night follows day.  What struck me most was the relative absence on women on the list in a profession that is dominated by women.  There was only one female in the top ten – at number 10 as it happens.

According to Alexa there is only a very slight male bias in twitter usage. My view is that the quest for influence is more of a male characteristic and therefore on average men are more interested building followers than women.  The language even suggests that networking has been a male dominated activity and if the old boys did it why should we be surprised that the new boys do too.

In the light of this imbalance it is excellent news that the Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR)  has appointed a woman to be its first ever Chief Executive Officer.  The Director General post which it replaces had been a male preserve. When Jane Wilson joins on 4 October to sit alongside CIPR President Jay O’Connor both the top permanent role and the highest elected office will be held by women.   Jane, originally from Glasgow, has extensive experience in PR and marketing, including leadership roles at First Ford in Scotland, Scottish Media Group and Capital Radio.  ”Jane is an exceptional communicator whose experience spans media, public affairs, investor relations, internal communications, policy and marketing” said president Jay O’Connor. “Jane is a strong leader with an innate understanding of PR and the experience and enthusiasm to lead the Institute on behalf of members and the profession.”

Apple today launched a full-scale foray into social networking by announcing Ping,  a music based social network built into the latest version of iTunes.  With millions of loyal users of iTunes already in place that’s a fairly solid base from which to launch.

Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO said at the press launch “With Ping you can follow your favorite artists and friends and join a worldwide conversation with music’s most passionate fans.”  The ability to link to artists who have a clear interest in building a relationship with fans through one of the biggest online revenue streams makes commercial sense and taps into the celebrity factor that has been a major driver for twitter in the last couple of years.

With your Ping profile you can also follow friends and let them follow you with the a link to what you’re all listening to and concerts that you’re going to. Ping will also be available on iPhones and the iPod touch.

“Ping is going to be really popular, very fast, because 160m people can turn on as soon as they want, starting today.” said Jobs.  It is available immediately as part of iTunes 10 that can be downloaded at www.itunes.com.

So I wrote a book about digital PR but I’m not a social web expert, I know fair bit about it but if my expertise is in anything, it is in PR.  Full stop.  I worked in PR before the web existed.

The time has come to stop drawing a distinction between on-line and off-line, between digital and analogue.  Sometimes it doesn’t matter that much if the message is carried by pixels or ink.  The reason that the web, and now mobile is so important is because of the surge in consumption of information via those  channels.  That doesn’t mean that they exist in isolation.   There’s an interesting letter in Campaign this week from Tess Alps about the power of TV (just in the print version I’m afraid) but it almost shouldn’t need saying.  Niche channels will never replace broadcast, although the platforms will change as they have always done.  We need to integrate channels based on reach, consumption and characteristics.

So if you are in a digital communications expert your days are numbered.  It is time for PR agencies and communications businesses of every hue to close their digital departments and reassign their experts.  They need to ensure that everybody advising on communications knows about and embraces digital channels. With apologies to Marshall McLuhan but the message is the medium now.

Social media has become an essential companion to event television and the Big Brother swan song the Ultimate Big Brother is a case in point. 

Within minutes of Josie Gibson quitting the goldfish bowl the official twitter feed for the show broke the news and a few minutes later the information was trending.  Over at PR Media Blog we broke the news just over 18 months ago of the first ever TV twitter companions. In those heady days (so very long ago) the number of followers for even the biggest ratings busters was in the dozens.  Coronation Street had just 41 followers.  The Official Big Brother feed today has touching on 100,000 TV addicts hanging on its every character.

Let’s also not forget the importance of the hastag to prime time tv.  At the time of writing, and the programme isn’t on right now, the Big Brother tag #UBB is being tweeted approximately every two seconds.  No self-respecting show should be without one.

This weekend somewhere in the world the 20 billionth tweet will be posted.  That’s quite a staggering volume of content in just four years.  Even more arresting is that fact that it took three years and eight months for the first 10 billion and just four months for the second 10 billion.

Big numbers can be a little difficult to get to get your head around so to five some sense of scale there are approximately on average over 1000 tweets posted every second and over 80 milllion a day.

Tweet number twenty billion will be posted some time a little after 3pm UTC tomorrow, 31st July 2010.  You can follow Gigatweet if you want to see exactly when.

The original name for the service was twttr, inspired by sites like Flickr (and the five character length of US  SMS short codes) Co-founder and current chairman Jack  Dorsey published the first Twitter message on the 21st March 2006 it said  ”just setting up my twttr.”   Four months later twitter went public.  Twitter’s popularity took off after the 2007 SXSW event and it’s popularity was boosted by mainstream TV presenters like Oprah in the US and Stephen Fry and Jonathan Ross in the UK.

The official trailer for the much anticipated Facebook movie ‘The Social Network’ has just been released and it doesn’t look bad.   It took me a few moments to place the haunting theme.   It’s a cover of Radiohead’s Creep (by Belgian act  Scala as it turns out).

“I’m a creep, I’m a weirdo”.  What kind of portrayal of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg is store I wonder.  The film is released on the 1st October in the United States and on the 15th October in the UK.