PR and the Social Web

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 give 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.

Forget Rob Green’s fumble, the real talking point of the World Cup so far is the far from dulcit tones of the Vuvuzela.  The sound of the cup crowd has even made its way from the stadia to social media.  

In one of the most bizarre applications of twitter to date the B# Flat horn has burst on to the microsite in the form of @livevuvuzela which replicates, with disturbing regularity, the incessant drone all within the limits of 140 written characters.  The twitter account has amassed nearly 1000 followers in just a week.  Maybe that’s because it somehow succeeds in capturing the essence of the South African soccer sonic boom tube.  It is incessant, repetitive, irritating and in the case of its twitter incarnation, slightly brilliant.

The Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR) is the professional body for public relations  in the UK.  With over 9,500 members, involved in all aspects of communications, the CIPR is the largest body of its type in Europe. It develops policies, represents its members, and raises standards through education and training.

I am an executive board member and I’d been invited to form a social media panel which was launched this week.  Reassuringly there was a lot of online buzz with over 100 people using the hashtag #CIPRSM, people blogging about the initiative and lots of traffic to the announcement on the web site.   The reaction was overwhelmingly positive and their were even people saying it had prompted them to join the CIPR.

The panel includes people with considerable experience and reputation and we will we will use the tools available to us to facilitate discussions, develop ideas and to make recommendations public so that CIPR members and the profession can comment, suggest and input.  The full line up is as follows:

• Daljit Bhurji ACIPR – Managing Director, Diffusion (@Daljit_Bhurji)
• Mark Borkowski – Managing Director, Borkowski (@MarkBorkowski)
• Rob Brown FCIPR – Managing Director, Staniforth (@robbrown)
• Stuart Bruce MCIPR – Managing Director, Wolfstar (@stuartbruce)
• Dominic Burch – Head of Corporate Communications, ASDA (@dom_asdaPR)
• Simon Collister – Head of Non-Profit & Public Sector, We Are Social (@simoncollister)
• Gemma Griffiths – Client Director, Racepoint (@GemGriff)
• Katy Howell – Managing Director, Immediate Future (@katyhowell)
• Marshall Manson – Director of Digital Strategy, Edelman (@marshallmanson)
• Beccy McMichael – Head of Corporate & Technology, Ruder Finn (@bmcmichael)
• Danny Rogers – Editor, PR Week (@dannyrogers2001)
• Julio Romo MCIPR–PR & Communications Consultant, twofourseven (@twofourseven)
• Philip Sheldrake – Partner, Influence Crowd LLP (@sheldrake)
• Stephen Waddington MCIPR – Managing Director, Speed Communications (@wadds)

The panel is not the initiative but rather will facilitate and create initiatives and shape an agenda that will encourage open conversation on developments and initiatives that concern the public relations profession.

Read the CIPR’s announcement.

This video has been on Youtube for a month without generating a massive amount of interest but just hours before the Apple tablet launches it has been recieving thousands of hits because it looks very much like it might be the real deal. A couple of days ago it became clear that Apple had tested a new iPhone OS and there was much speculation that this would be the basis to the tablet.

If the video clip is genuine it makes it clear that this is the case. That means the iPhone App store named here as the Web Wonder of the last decade will become even more of a powerhouse in this one.