PR and the Social Web

It’s one of the joys of the Social Web that people now and then, through social networks, are able to overcome the ambitions of media barons.  It sickened me when Simon Cowell and his acolytes for years dominated the nation’s Christmas music fayre.

I was  foursquare behind the struggle to have Jeff Buckley’s cover of Leonard Cohen’s climactic masterpiece Hallelujah on the top spot ahead of the X-Factor version, but the public was split and that allowed the Burke cover to prevail.  Last year it was different we were united in our Rage Against the Machine.

This year the crowd may face another split.  The obvious choice is the original Biffy Clyro version of Matt Cardle’s anodyne exhortation of the sanitized and renamed ‘Many of Horror’.  I’m fan of Biffy Clyro (really, I’ve seen them four times including once in Pontypridd), although I’d take ‘Blackened Sky’ or ‘The Vertigo of Bliss’ over ‘Only Revolutions’ every time.

There has also been a groundswell behind Surfin’ Bird by The Trashmen, a slightly grating ditty popularised by Family Guy.   However if we are going to do it again there is a clear front-runner,  John Cage’s 4’33.  Composed in 1952 the musical score instructs the performer(s) not to play the instrument during the entire duration of the piece.

A Facebook page is in place to promote a new recording of 4’33 by Cage Against the Machine which includes Suggs and Imogen Heap amongst others.  Let’s make December 25 a silent night.  Join the group and more importantly, buy the single.

If you’ve had to sit through the X Factor this year I’m sure that you’ll agree; silence is golden.

On Twitter this morning, the ennobled Lord Sugar took the Daily Telegraph’s consumer affairs editor to task in an extraordinary on-line exchange.

Harry Wallop had been bemoaning Sugar’s endless plugs for his autobiography ‘What You See is What You Get’ when @Lord_Sugar did what it says on the tin. Seven minutes after Wallop called him a “shameless self publicist”, Sugar posted “@hwallop p*** off and follow others then”.  The asterisks, in an uncharacteristic show of restraint, are Sugar’s not mine.  Harry, who seemed a little taken aback, tried to engage in some peer to peer discussion but Sugar wasn’t playing.

Perhaps The Apprentice boss was feeling a little raw as David Cameron has just announced Lord Young as Sugar’s successor in the post of ‘Enterprise Tsar‘.   The Tories certainly got it with both barrels a few minutes later when Sugar posted “New figures today reveal gvt cuts & VAT hike will actually cost 1.6 million jobs! No wonder Tories behind in polls, 1st time since 2007″.  Not strictly true as the Tories fell behind Labour in September and were briefly behind the LibDems pre-election.

I’ll be taking part in a debate on CIPR TV next week as part of the Chartered Institute of Public Relations presidential election.

CIPR TV is regular show hosted on the CIPR’s website and by Marketiers4DC.  It’s live but also available to watch again.  Sally Sykes is the other candidate and we’ll both be taking questions live on Tuesday.

Hosting the half hour show will be presenter Philip Sheldrake and the CIPR’s new CEO, Jane Wilson will also be on hand.  Jane will introduce the proceedings and ask the first question.

You can take part in the debate by submitting a question in one of the following ways:

• Using the form on the dedicated CIPR TV web page
• Using Twitter with the hashtag #ciprtv
• Or by emailing ciprtv@cipr.co.uk.

As well as the CIPR President-Elect position for 2011, in the biggest slate for several years, there are eleven candidates contesting seven CIPR Council seats being contested.  You can see the full list and the candidates statements at the CIPR website.

CIPR members have until noon, 19 November to cast their votes.

For the last two years twitter has been the poster child of the social web.  The growth has been both phenomenal and relentless as this chart taken from the twitter blog graphically shows.

By the end of June this year the 20 billionth tweet had been posted and the number of tweets had grown from 45 million a day in January to 80 million a day.  Twitter had become an unstoppable juggernaut, changing the way that news is delivered, socialising prime time television and altering the way that organisations and people engage with each other.

But the unstoppable appears to have stopped, or at least dramatically slowed.  Over the last two months the number of tweets posted per day has barely increased and is still hovering around the 80 million per day mark as this graph from Gigatweet shows.  There has been a modest increase but nothing compared to the growth of the past.  Efforts to reduce twitter spam may have had some impact but the spike in usage during the world cup may have masked the fact that underlying usage has peaked.

We’ve been here before, but previous claims that twitter was flat-lining were based on visits to twitter.com and that was due to the adoption of other Twitter apps and clients like Tweetdeck or Hootsuite and the move from pc to mobile.  This time we are talking about the volume of tweets so the data is platform neutral.

If we look at the time that it took to reach major volume milestones it bears out the observation that the period of rapid growth has either stalled or come to an end.

Milestones in 5 billion increments (time taken to reach):

5 billion tweets                                   3 years, 4 months

10 billion tweets                                 136 days

15 billion tweets                                  87 days

20 billion tweets                                  62 days

25 billion tweets (forecast)                   50 days

30 billion tweets (forecast)                   54 days

If Twitter has reached its zenith it suggests that despite the media hype it may not achieve true mainstream penetration. Currently there are 44.4 million users in the US and whilst that’s a big number it only represents 14% of the population.

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.