Fact and Fiction on the Web

13 05 2009

We tend to believe that we have a natural instinct for the truth but the web has many inaccuracies that are commonly held to be factual. We can follow the old journalistic principle of getting at least two reliable sources for important pieces of information, but much of the internet is a mash up of other bits of the internet. The resulting multiplicity of sources might suggest a breadth of knowledge but in reality if a factoid is convincing enough it can spread.

Wikipedia is amongst the most reliable of sources because the content is genuinely the result of multiple entries, sometimes hundreds of them.  Even Wikipedia has been guilty of significant errors – often the result of malicious editing.  Prominent US journalist John Seigenthaler  was  incorrectly named as a suspect in the assassinations of both President John F Kennedy and his brother, Robert for example.  The false information was the work of a man called Brian Chase, who said he was trying to trick a colleague at work.

A common error is that of the false obituary.  It has even been know for false obituaries to be published on on separate occasions. Pre-written obituaries of entertainer Bob Hope were accidentally released on news web sites on two occasions and Pope John Paul II was the recipient of three separate reports of his demise. Other widely duplicated falsehoods on the internet include a report that Barack Obama is a muslim and that Bill Gates is giving away his fortune. This sort of widely distributed misconception is not the preserve of the Internet, for example the Great Wall of China Is not in fact nor ever has been, visible from the Moon, but the internet provides a distribution network that spreads these inaccuracies more widely and more quickly.

It is not just facts that are manipulated and distorted, the prevalence of powerful image manipulation tools means that photographs can not necessarily be trusted either. Even the celebrated news agency Reuters came under fire for this when in 2006 it published doctored images of an Israeli air strike in Beirut.

This entry is adapted from ‘Public Relations and the Social Web’ available from Amazon.


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Categories : Social Web, User Generated Content

Is Blogging Right for Business?

27 01 2009

Businesses are often nervous about the naked conversations that take place in and around blogs.  They are right to be concerned,  careless comments can hit a corporate share price.  

The more common danger is that a corporate blog will be boring.  Many argue that corporate blogs should only be written by the Chief Executive because anyone else in the company will avoid any controversy and the end result will be anodyne.  Vetting, reliance on press releases and caution result in blogs that interest noone.  Blogs must really allow comments, but businesses tend to block any challenging comments or any that generate real debate.    

 “A lot of companies are making the mistake that blogging is publishing,” says Bob Pearson Vice President of corporate group communications at Dell. “Blogging is two-way and, crucially, it’s the audience that decides what’s read, what gets linked to and so what is deemed successful. So it makes sense to listen to the conversations your target consumers are having and then shape your blog around them.”

Should corporates blog?  The answer to this is a qualified yes but there is a real challenge.   We have to ask the question is the blog going to be interesting and is it going to be relevant to its target audience.  Once you’ve started the blog you will quickly discover whether the answer to these questions is yes.   If it’s no, stop the blog.


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Categories : Blogs and blogging

Are Bloggers Journalists?

22 01 2009

If blogging is citizen journalism then bloggers are citizen journalists, which by definition is a form of journalism.  Blogger relations might then have much in common with media relations.

I argued this case or something much akin to it in a lecture I gave for the Chartered Institute of Public Relations in May 2008 at Leeds Metropolitan University.  

I had pursued this argument before with little opposition but when the Q&A section came round my argument hit a wall.  Richard Bailey, an academic blogger and university lecturer at Leeds took me to task on this view and Chris Norton Account Director at Wolfstar supported his assertion that blogger relations and media relations are very different. 

The two points of view can be broadly summarised thus:

The case for the prosecution

  • Bloggers don’t like and seldom use press releases
  • Bloggers are generally of independent mind and blog because they want to express their own views and opinions and not those of others
  • Blogs are not edited in the traditional sense and therefore can not be considered to be media in the conventional sense
  • Many blogs simply don’t have an audience
  • We have to engage with bloggers in a different way involving more dialogue and discussion

The case for the defense

  • Journalists don’t much like press releases either and never did.
  • I’ve met some pretty independent minded journalists in my time.  If in doubt read Nick Davies’s excellent ‘Flat Earth News’.  He’s man of independent mind (although he describes others that are not). 
  • The difference between blogs and ‘traditional media’ on line is becoming blurred.  The process of editing creates authority but it does not mean that blogs can’t be authoritative.  

I modified my view after listening to both Richard and Chris but I do believe there is a significant amount of common ground in how we approach the most influential bloggers and how we have deal with journalists who fit the more traditional mould.  I imagine however that the debate will run and run.


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Categories : Blogs and blogging, Journalism, Newspapers

Beginner’s Guide to Blogging #2

13 01 2009

You have found a Blog platform and you have registered a blog.  You have also found a design template that you are happy with.  You might want to explore which features of the template you can adapt and alter.   You can often add graphics to the headline or background and this is a good way of  making a template based blog look a bit more individual.   Have a look at the widgets and see which ones will work best.  Have a look at your favourite blogs to get some ideas about which widgets to use.  Don’t worry to much about changing the look and feel of your blog even if it is ‘live’.  At this point it won’t be getting any traffic.  Work on the design and layout until you are happy.

Make sure you get the basics right.  There will be no separate proof reader and no grammar checker.  If you aren’t good at these things get someone to check your posts before you publish.  Most blog platforms have spell checkers, use them and proof read your work.  A blog with spelling mistakes or poor grammar will be the kiss of death, even if the quality of the writing is good.

The importance of the quality still can not be underestimated and it is our job to make the material engaging.  Some people find this easier than others but it can be learnt.  There are many blogs out there created by technically brilliant people who can’t or won’t write in a coherent fashion.

If it doesn’t come naturally then practise.  Read as much as you can learn what works and take advice from others.  If that doesn’t work then partner up with someone that can write.   If the content is poor then the blog is too.


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Categories : Blogs and blogging, PR

Beginner’s Guide to Blogging #1

12 01 2009

Blogging seems daunting for those who have never done it before.  The easiest way to get started is to use an online blogging platform like Blogger or WordPress.  Both are free to use, easy and need the  minimum set-up.  This blog uses the online version of WordPress and you can uses the links at the bottom of this page to find our more about how to use WordPress.

For Blogger go to www.blogger.com and click on the ‘Create Your Blog Now’ banner.  Use an e-mail address to create a Google account, this takes no more than a minute and click the ‘Create Your Blog Now’ banner at the bottom of the page.   Fill in a title and create a web address in the box below.   You then select a design template and that’s about it.  Well not quite, you have to add some content.  With both WordPress and Blogger is a text editor into which you can type directly and you can add photographs by clicking on the icon on screen.  It would be quite possible for you to have a blog online within 5 minutes of starting the process.

The ease of all of this means that quality sometimes gets forgotten.  Blogs don’t have editors and there is no quality threshold that the blog has to pass through in order to be published.   We can publish what we like.   Without editors, bloggers are solely responsible for the output.  The one measure that remains is that of popularity and readership.  If the blog isn’t good very few will read it, none of them will come back and they will recommend it to no one.  Never underestimate this.  User generated content has accelerated the growth of the Internet, which passed the milestone of one trillion unique pages at some point during the middle of 2008.  With so much out there most of it is going to be ignored.  If you want an interested audience for what you are publishing and the content has to be of real interest.  It may be obvious but search a few random blogs and you will see how often people forget.


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Brand on the Run

5 12 2008

 

Coca-Cola bottleThe growth in the power of brands in the 20th Century was partly achieved with the use of iconic visual imagery.  

A sugary brown drink became one of the most powerful brands in the world using visual cues.  There is a simple but distinctive colour palette, an immediately identifiable bottle and a logoscript so individual that you don’t need to read it.  The brand guardians at Coca-Cola ensured that nothing was ever displayed in a way that fell foul of the brand guidelines.   Brand guidelines are part of the culture in large organisations.  Rules on the use of the brand logo,  colour references, and how it should be displayed in monotone are ubiquitous. 

An  interesting ‘craze’ has arisen in recent years.  People looked at how brands in the digital world were copying the brand rules of the past and also how the web was impacting on the newer net-based brand logos.  For example the use of the word ‘Beta’ as a way of demonstrating how new a site was or the use of   unusual names corrupted by say dropping a vowel as in ‘Flickr’. 

People were starting to invent their own spurious logos or were using design programmes to reinterpret the logos iconic brands as if they were new web brands.  Logo 2.0 interpretations take iconic identities and play around with them.  My favourite is the one for ‘Quakr 2.Oats’.

This is harmless fun but what  is interesting is the ease with which anyone can go to the heart of what brands spend fortunes trying to protect and overturn all of the rules.


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Categories : Brands

Changing Communications

29 11 2008

 

at-image

We are experiencing a communications revolution that began in the 1960s with the birth of the pre-cursor to the internet, but entered a significant new phase in 2004 with the arrival of Web 2.0.  


This is an iteration of the web where ordinary users can add words, pictures, sounds and video.  A simple idea in theory which in practise signifies the transfer of control of the internet from the few to the many. It is the democratisation of the internet.    

The phrase web 2.0 was coined in 2004 but nothing fundamentally changed that year from a technological point of view.  The tools that were available to create Web 2.0 environments already existed.  What changed was the way that people started to view the internet.


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Categories : User Generated Content


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