Social media has a fun side. It works for business - look at LinkedIn and Facebook. Now check out what scientists are doing with it. They are sharing knowledge and research. This should not a real suprise - after all the internet itself came out of academic networking needs.

The Press Gazette has announced Citizen Journalism Awards to be presented in March 2008. Rather than award a prize for photos or videos from private individuals they are looking for examples of ways that journalists and publications are collaborating community groups to develop what they call “hyperlocal” level of coverage. 

Once a year the PR industry celebrates with awards for outstanding work by in-house and agency PR teams. The Chartered Institute of Public Relations, Thames & Chilterns New PRide Awards was celebrated last week.

This was my first time at such an event as an 'agency person'. It was great fun. A good excuse to dust off the DJs and Glam' Frocks and have a good time. Check out the BOTTLE PR team pictures.

Forrester Research recently held its Consumer Forum 2007 in the USA.

They have posted video extracts of some of the presenters. Well worth watching to listen to explanations from companies like Playboy Enterprises, MTV and Edelman PR.

The message is companies have to consider consumer engagement or conversation marketing. With social networking increasing in scope and importance the old 'command and control' marketing mantra needs to be replaced by 'let go and participate'. It is scary. It can be rough. But it can be rewarding. Ask Dell, GM and Lego.

ABC News and Facebook have just signed an agreement to co-operate in future around politics as a subject area. (Thanks to New York Times for source of story)

This is a smart move for both parties. Facebook gets some serious news content and ABC News gets an 'in' with a major social network platform. For those users of Facebook interesting in following politics it provides a direct feed.

Interesting post by Tom Glocer, CEO of Reuters on why he feels that fellow CEO's should be blogging and participating in social media.

To quote from his post

'...I believe that unless one interacts with and plays with the leading technology of the age, it is impossible to dream the big dreams, and difficult to create an environment in which creative individuals will feel at home.  This does not mean that the ceo needs to program a third-party app on Facebook, but I believe it is ultimately more useful in understanding business concepts like viral marketing, crowd-sourcing or federated development to use a live example rather than wait for the Harvard Business Review article to appear in three years time...'

I would also add from personal experience that a CEOs blog keeps them in touch as much with their employees as it does the market place generally.

Look at any report on employee satisfaction at work and you will always see communication is rated poorly. Over 1/3rd of employees feel they are badly managed and motivated. To employees the senior management appears detached from the reality of 'day-to-day' work at the coal face. Decisions, that seem clear in the boardroom are just not understood or are miscommunicated through 'Chinese Whispers' of cascade communication. A blog provides a platform for two way dialogue - management to employees and back again. It allows a CEO (assuming they are not surrounded by corporate communication specialists and legal people who massage every word) to use their own words and express their views of the business and what motivates them.

Look at Tom's blog. Not only do you get to learn about what he thinks and feels about a number of subjects but via his blog we see his taste in music and books. 

Primark recently turned down the opportunity to create a presence on Facebook. (Thanks to InternetRetailing for the story). With a customer created 'fanbook' of almost 100k people the company realised there was no point in trying to compete. What is equally important is why bother? If your customers care enough about your company, service and products that they want to self organise and write about you what more could you want?

Certainly you should treat the 'fans' as you would any other important source of communication. Here is where most companies mess up. The PR department and their PR agency know how to deal with traditional media but what about 'online' social networks? Primark should engage with their Facebook based fans and treat them just like the important group they are. Invite the Facebook administrators along to media and company events. Ask them what, when and how information should be delivered to them so that the administrators can keep their 100k members looked after.

What should companies not do? Talk to customers in a patronising way or think they know best. For a great example of what NOT to do read Jeff Jarvis.  

Coca Cola are to start a corporate blog - so says Paul Gillin in a recent post.

A great post by Saad Saraf in Brand Republic on media consumption in multiethnic communities. One very interesting statistic is that internet usage is 50% higher than for the UK average.

Check out the top 100 list from Virtual Hosting on bloggers about Web 2.0, blogging and social media.

Whenever the studio crew do a location shoot it is a big logistics exercise so the amount of pre-planning is big. They have to worry about people, kit and back-up kit. If working on a countryside shoot they have to take generators as well as lots of pre-charged battery packs (not to mention bacon butties!)

The crew are always checking and double checking they have everything including if they have remembered the checklist and checked everything.

Then comes the big moment of setting off and then setting up. In this case it was filming Iolo Williams, the presenter on Llangorse Lake in Wales.

That’s when you realise that with all brilliant project management skills there is one think we just cannot control....

....the weather....

I spoke to an official in the Department for Business Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR) earlier today about the current status of the UK’s implementation of EU Directive 2005/29/EC – The Unfair Commercial Practices Directive (UCP)

This Directive aims to harmonise legislation across the EU and improve consumer protection.

The issue for bloggers is that fake bloggers or bloggers who recommend 3^rd party products and do not disclose they have a contractual agreement with that company, could be in breach of this new law.

I asked the BERR official two direct questions:

     Q:  If a blogger promoted a 3^rd party product or service and did so without

          disclosing any financial or contractual relationship would that be a breach?

     A: Yes. For example if a hotel employee or an agent or other 3^rd party wrote a review of a hotel and posted it on a forum or user comment site

         like TripAdvisor without declaring the business relationship it would be a breach.

     Q: If a blogger recommended a book on their site and provided a link to an e-merchant and in turn received a commission then would it be a

         breach?

     A: Maybe or maybe not. This is a grey area. In the UK it would take a court action to determine if it was a breach. For example a person may

         write a review of a book and link it to Amazon and receive a commission. There is no contractual relationship per se but it maybe deemed that

         by the blogger signing up to be an Affiliate and receive commission on sales it is in effect a ‘commercial practice’

The UCP legislation is being implemented to stop unfair behaviour towards customers and make business clearly identify ‘advertorial’ or ‘misrepresentative’ marketing by misleading consumers.

Misleading commercial practice is defined as:

• Contains false information
• Deceives or is likely to deceive the average consumer

And

• Causes or is likely to cause a transactional decision that would not have been otherwise take

The two watchwords that bloggers need to take into account – transparency and disclosure. At all costs they should avoid ‘advertorial’ without disclosing the fact.

The EU have provided a useful guide.  

Directive 2005/29/EC should have been enacted into UK legislation by the summer of 2007 to be in force by December 12 2007 but it is late and not expected now until the Spring of 2008. The UK will be repealing and updating a number of consumer protection laws and this has delayed matters.

For a status of other EU country implementations of the Directive see the EU site.

The latest figures show the continuing decline of newspaper revenues. They make painful reading (thanks for link to Podcasting News)

They say a picture is worth a 1000 words. So what does the fact that Flickr has 2 billion pictures uploaded and Facebook has over 4 billion mean in terms of quantity of communication. (Thanks to Michael Arrington of Techcrunch for his post detailing the numbers).

  MIKE ARRINGTON AND HIS FATHER

As Marshall McLuhan (1911 - 1980) said in 1967 (when refering to TV) '...we all live in a global village...' We like to share our experiences and our view of our section of the global village. Social media platforms help that process. The pictures we choose to upload (silly and serious) says a lot about us. Take a look at what Michael has to say himself about a picture he has chosen to show on his bio page. Does that not tell us more than the posed PR shot that maybe on his company bio?

    MARSHALL MCLUHAN

Marcel Mauss (1872 - 1950) in his book ,The Gift, explores what drove exchange and obligation to reciprocate in ancient and native societies. Much of his pioneering work has relevance today in how people undertake social exchanges - the gift of information about ourselves. With ever more powerful communication tools how and why are we 'sharing' ourselves so much?

  MARCEL MAUSS

So the first football club to be run by fan share holders will be Ebbsfleet United. See the announcement at MyFootballClub. Shame that the voters on the site never got one of their choices as shown on the site.

However to get £1.375m in funds and 50k people participating was a great result in its own right.

Now the real experiment will be to see just how good the Wisdom of the Crowds will be each week as they will be picking the players as if they were the manager.

As the site says there will be no manager as such - just a head coach. So how is the team picked?

"The Head Coach will brief members. This will include a review of the previous match, reports from the training ground and views on the forthcoming opposition. He will also give his thoughts on players, their form and fitness, as well as possible selections and tactics.

Members will then submit their preferred 11, formation and tactics. A database will calculate the most popular choice. This will be handed to The Head Coach to instigate."

In the future will fans vote for substitutions during the game using some sort of mobile technology from the stands? Now that would be fun - a real interactive football match? Will the site also provide a video stream from the games so fans can watch the games online?

Peter Day, the BBC's Radio 4 Business Correspondent has been covering business issues since joining the BBC in the mid 1970's. The podcasts of his programme are among the most popular that the BBC does. See what Peter has to say about his career and podcasting.

If you are interested in seeing what BBC podcasts are most popular in terms of donwloads and plays then check out the BBC Site statisics.

Hitwise have just done an analysis of the age of online surfers and their retail destinations. It shows that Silver Surfers (55+) are now just as likely to be online as young people. Whilst many of the online retailers visited are common across all age groups some are very different.

The older age group now even has Saga Zone, a social networking site for the over 50's.

For retailers this is a group that tends to have more time on their hands to spend online and often a higher disposal income as they have usually a lower mortgage than younger people.  

Here is the picture of the team....

Sorry - should have made it clear. This is the team I have joined to head up their Web 2.0/Social media programmes. It is a very exciting and challenging time. Most companies are trying to get a grip with the whole area of social media and conversational PR especially within the blogosphere.

Advertising agencies are wrestling with two big issues. Declining audiences and fragmenting media. The old methods of blasting out ads using broadcast and national press and hitting a big percentage of the target audience is not a simple option - as if they ever were.

A couple of years ago I was talking to a CEO who said he had decided to use overseas ad agencies and off-shore production to cut costs. They were using India and ended up with a great set of TV ads. Creative and beautifully exectuted. I met him again a few weeks ago and asked about his plans for the next few years. He said he was not sure but he did not see the value of repeating the ad campaign again - even if outsourced - as he could not really see them affording the media coverage to reach the same type of audiences again. He was wondering about social media but was unsure how to make it really work.

Here is AdAge's take on the subject.

A quick round up of good posts on the subject of planning your 2008 marketing stategy.

Before you plan read what

Seth Godin  thinks in his latest book (thanks to Sally Falkow)

P&G are going and why they are letting people build their brand (thanks to K. D. Paine)

Brian Solis has to say about engaging with bloggers 

Every marketing person that is not considering using social media networking as a communication platform should read this Hitwise report from Robin Goad (above).

Universal McCann CEO, Nick Brien (above) discusses the brave new world for marketing agencies and client marketing departments (Thanks to Advertising Age)

What are the marketing strategy 'buzz words' for the future? User generated content. Conversations. Engagement.

Interesting data from IPC Media's 'Women's space' research group into what women do online and how often (Thanks to Brand Republic).

Key findings:

• 71% online each day
• 105 minutes per session
• 9 sites visted per session
• Photosharing, dating and social networking top applications

For more details see the IPC press release

Just incase you are not reading the Facebook blog hers is a copy of their posting about their announcement yesterday from Leah Pearlman.....

A sample Social Ad.

This is the notification you'll see whenever another site wants to send a story to Facebook.

I have been working on a project for an award winning provincial PR agency – BOTTLE PR (www.bottlepr.co.uk).

Over the last 6 months I have been working their team of PR consultants on all things new media and Web 2.0 and how best to help their clients engage in conversations in the blogosphere and via social media. We are now seeing the results of their work with their clients and have launched a new team – BOTTLE 2.0. This will provide clients with a full range of consultancy and programme support for all areas of online media. They have asked me to head up the team and I have accepted. I am really looking forward to helping them develop the team and expand the service to more clients. They have a great team of experienced people covering B2B and B2C clients.

Over the next few months I will start to post case studies of projects we have been working on so those of you interested in social media, blogging and podcasting for marketing communications and PR can follow what we are up to.

I will still continue my interest in audio and video podcasting with Focus (www.focusbiz.co.uk). They are working on some very interesting projects helping clients use podcasts for internal employee communication, training and also external marketing communication.

Facebook has launched a new service for advertisers using profiles and 'social recommendations'. 

I subscribe to the blog by Richard Sambrook, Director of BBC Global News. His update on how the BBC is opening up its programme content to its audience is very interesting. The news teams are not yet at the stage of using 'citizen journalists' (and not sure they ever will) but their use of blogs and podcasts to supplement traditional news programme production is very interesting.

Later today Facebook will make announcements on how members can use its social networking links to help advertise and promote products (thanks to Advertising Age for the article)

This is unleashing the power of 'soft touch' social networking connections. If you are a member of Facebook you will know what I mean. People in your circle of friends keep in touch by posting details of what they are doing. You can join groups and from there cross connect to others outside your immediate network.

This is where personal recommendation added to a rebate coupon has real marketing possibilities.

For us consumers it means relevant and targeted recommendations. For advertisers it means the sort of targeting normally associated with the direct marketing industry and then some more. If I was Experian of similar data profilers and list suppliers I would be starting to get concerned.

The BBC is conducting an experiment using blogs to decide the content of the PM radio programme. They call it iPM.

I checked out the details with Chris Vallance of the BBC today what they are doing with it.  

The idea is to add real interactivity to the programme. As one of the team, Rubert Allman says,

iPM is a weekly programme as well as a podcast. The “i” stands for interactive and “i” as in something personal. You can discuss ideas with the production team on this blog and during the course of the week you can view and comment on stories that are being lined up for Saturday's programme.

Chris explains that the ideas for content comes from two sources – conversations on the blogosphere (which the team is tracking and monitoring for potential news stories) and listeners suggestions. Comments on the blog influence the content of the programme although the ‘editorial’ team do the final selection.

At the moment there are no plans to engage ‘citizen journalists’.

There is no set end date for the experiment (although Chris mentioned the end of December) and no pre-agreed measure of what ‘success’ will look like. It will be up to us as listeners to influence the programme and ensure the experiment is continued.

The 10^th of November at 5.30pm is the date of the first programme.

If you have an idea for an item drop the team a comment on their blog.

There is also a Facebook group page.

John Chambers, CEO of CISCO has done a video podcast. Check it out on the Cisco blog.

I have long been an advocate of a CEO and the senior management team using audio and video to help get their message across to internal and external audiences. While there is always a place for the corporate ‘state-of-the-nation’ video with a full crew and studio in use, there is a lot to be said for a straight forward conversation. Look at John in his formal 'suited and booted' picture on the web. Now look at John in the video - just like you would see him in a staff