ITV hits corner flag while aiming for web 2.0 goal

“We can’t afford things not to be taken up en masse so we launch safe new features. We have a very practical approach to innovation. I wouldn’t say we’re not innovative, but that we’re only innovative in areas that we know will work.”

So said Jon Clark, the head of the ITV-owned Friends Reunited. And it’s an odd thing to say.

“We’re only innovative in areas that we know will work…”

That doesn’t sound all that innovative to me. Whatever happened to suck it and see?

I doubt Mark Zuckenberg thought along those lines when he launched Facebook. I doubt he knew it would work. It was simply an experiment conducted by a budding entrepreneur with no one to answer to other than himself. Success came by accident.

I heard Carolyn McCall, the chief executive of the Guardian Media Group, give the keynote address at an AOP event last year. She said that only one in 10 of the online experiments her company conducts pays off.

That’s a luxury the Guardian can afford, thanks to its ownership structure. No shareholders you see. And it works – the Telegraph’s beginning to catch up, but the Guardian leads the pack in the online newspaper space.

So is ITV prevented from experimenting in new media because it’s a listed company? Could be. The same could be said of Emap, which has pretty much missed the web 2.0 boat.

Then again Rupert Murdoch’s publicly listed media empire has done a better job of riding the zeitgeist, even if that has been achieved largely by acquisition (it bought MySpace in 2005). So maybe it’s just that ITV doesn’t ‘get’ this stuff. And looking at FriendsReunited these days, it’s clear that it doesn’t.

You want me to pay nearly £8 to get in touch with my old friends? No thanks. I’m off to Facebook.

Social media vs MSM (it’s 1-0 at half time)

FT.com has just covered a report that compares the news agendas of the so-called mainstream media (MSM) with the sorts of story that rise to the top of the rankings on social media sites such as Digg, Del.icio.us and Reddit.

The report (which was carried out in the US by the Project for Excellence in Journalism) makes for an interesting read, as it finds that there is little overlap between the content of the two.

To quote the FT’s piece:

“For example, in the week in question the biggest story for traditional news providers was a debate in Congress about reforms to immigration policies, accounting for 10 per cent of all news stories. It appeared just once as a top-10 story on Reddit, and not at all on Digg and Del.icio.us, the study found.

Mainstream media sites also tended to focus on a handful of big issues, while user sites rarely returned to stories.

In addition, the analysis showed that coverage on the user-generated news sites focused more on domestic US events and less on news from abroad.”

The next sentence is crucial. It reads: “Technology and science stories were the most common on the user sites.”

That’s no surprise – the early and most enthusiastic adopters of services such as Digg tend to be geeks (and I don’t mean that in a pejorative sense. Some of my best friends are geeks). The communities that these sites attract are therefore disproportionately interested in science and technology.

The most interesting thing to consider is what happens when or if these sites go mainstream (and it almost certainly is when). The penultimate paragraph of the FT.com story reads:

“The findings will fuel concerns about the situation of the mainstream media, especially as more people switch attention to the web and as advertising spending follows.”

I hope the writer of the article doesn’t mean that MSM should start covering more science and technology stories. It’s the geeks who really dig Digg at the moment, so as far as subject matter goes there’s no desperate need for MSM to change what they’re doing. They’re serving a different audience. The analysis also assumes that the users of Digg have reduced their consumption of other media. They probably have, but I’d like to see the numbers.

Regardless of that particular debate, the crucial point is whether MSM truly understand why these user-driven sites are so appealing. Power has been put in the hands of the people. We like being in control. The wisdom of the crowds should not be underestimated. And a lot of people don’t trust MSM.

Science and technology stories are attracting most of the attention on social media sites today, but next year it could be science and technology and the environment, then it’ll be science and technology and the environment and politics, then it’ll be science and technology and the environment and politics and sport, and so on, until MSM have no audiences left.

If they are to survive (and I think some of them will), the ‘old school’ crowd will have to let readers/viewers shape the news agenda. Channel 4 News has started along this route by becoming more transparent and blogging its news meetings, so at least we can find out why certain stories were covered and why certain angles were taken. That’s a bold and laudable move.

But the Project for Excellence in Journalism study suggests that even that may not be enough in the future. We need to be allowed to get even closer to, and shape, the decision-making process itself.

What does this mean for the PR community then? I’ve rambled on long enough for one post so won’t pontificate about that in depth right now, but it may be that we end up spending more time communicating directly with the ultimate consumer, and less time schmoozing journalists.

* UPDATE (13 Sept, 12:05pm): Roy Greenslade has just posted his thoughts on this report. Not entirely sure I agree with his analysis.  

On measuring PR and the ‘silo-isation’ of new media

E-consultancy recently hosted a roundtable discussion on online PR and has just published a follow-up report on it (thanks to Stephen Davies over at PR Blogger for the link).

The (free) publication is well worth a read.

Among its many sections is one on the thorny old topic of measurement. The roundtable participants agreed that “the benefit of online PR is not always immediate and it can therefore be difficult to measure – like traditional PR”.

Hear hear. I don’t think many of us would argue with that, even if it is worth having a go at measuring everything you can and demonstrating ROI wherever possible.

Yet there are undoubtedly clients out there who think that online PR activity is inherently more measurable than offline. That’s possibly a legacy of many marketing managers’ perception that online advertising is more measurable than offline, just because you can get stats on click-through rates on banner ads and the like.

That’s one of the great marketing myths of our time. Click-throughs rarely tell the whole story – for example, banners can have branding impact even if no one clicks on them. Who clicks through can be just as important as how many. So online advertising is just as hard to measure as offline. The same is true in PR circles.

Fortunately, the e-consultancy report goes on to suggest one way of keeping the stat-obsessed client happy – namely, to write outcomes into requirements. That’s very sensible advice. An outcome could be a certain number of downloads of a pdf document, or the number of people who engage with a piece of rich media (again, I’d suggest adding a ‘who’ into the equation as well, but that’s by the by).

One of the participants in the roundtable also highlighted the need to distinguish between actual behaviour (ie. what is clicked on, downloaded etc) and inferred behaviour.

That’s all well and good. But it set me thinking about why online PR practitioners are tyically under more presure to demonstrate ROI than the offliners. There’s the association with the click-through rates of adland of course, but another (related) explanation could be that online PR is seen as a separate discipline from ‘traditional’ PR by many clients, and therefore subject to its own forms of measurement.

The e-consultancy report found that online PR budgets are typically coming from ecommerce departments rather than from PR, and that organisations who want to make the most of this area usually employ specialist online PR agencies or search agencies.

Why? SEO and online PR are not the same thing (even if they are not-so-distant cousins), so using the ecommerce budget to pay for online PR is ridiculous. And loads of ‘traditional’ PR agencies are perfectly capable of delivering effective online campaigns (I know I would say that, given that I work for one, but I hope I’m not being overly biased here). When did you last hear a PR firm say that they can only get their clients print coverage, and if you need broadcast exposure then it’s best to go elsewhere?

This silo-isation of online PR (sorry for the made-up word) does no one any favours, least of all the clients themselves. Online campaigns work best when they’re integrated with offline activity. They require specialist knowledge for sure, but the techniques (and measurement methodologies) aren’t so very different from those deployed in the offline world. The ultimate purpose of PR – to increase brand awareness/drive sales/create ‘buzz’ or whatever – is the same wherever the activity takes place.

I’m still waiting for the day when the phrase “new media” drops out of common parlence. It’s just media really, isn’t it? 

World in shock as survey finds that social networking sites don’t deepen friendships

From a story on the MediaGuardian site this afternoon: 

“Social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace do not help you make more genuine close friends, according to a survey by researchers who studied how the websites are changing the nature of friendship networks. Although social networking on the internet helps people to collect hundreds or even thousands of acquaintances, the researchers believe that face to face contact is nearly always necessary to form truly close friendships.”

 Tomorrow’s news: Pope is Catholic, finds survey. And while I’m at it, could someone tell the Guardian subs that there’s a difference between ‘like’ and ’such as’?