Porter Novelli’s team featured Graham Roberts, Ralf Little, Shaun Dooley and Max Rushden.

Last Thursday the PNUK office upped sticks and headed for Dulwich. The local football club, Dulwich Hamlet, was kindly hosting the Omnicom Haiti Fundraiser, a benefit match for Haiti following January’s tragic earthquake outside Port-au-Prince. Our opponents on the field were Fleishman Hillard and we’re pleased to say that the evening was a huge success on and off the field.

Part of the challenge was to include some journalists and celebrities in each team, which resulted in an impressive array of names taking to the pitch. Ex-Spurs star Graham Roberts was joined by actors Ralf Little and Shaun Dooley, TV’s Tommy Walsh and Soccer AM presenter Max Rushden, and the Porter Novelli team came out on top thanks to Max’s tidy finishing and a sharpshooting ringer up front.

In the clubhouse, we were treated to a very successful auction and raffle hosted by Steve Trister, who managed to squeeze a few hundred quid out of the eager punters. The programmes sold well, having been lovingly created by Roger Chasteauneuf and Jon Brigden along with myself, and printed by our friends at MJ Impressions.

Overall, we raised in the region of £2,000 – very kindly doubled by Omnicom to a nice round £4,000.

PN open the scoring with a free kick that would’ve grace any match.

Huge thanks to Nat Agnew at Fleishman Hillard, Steve Trister, Sam Goode and Access Sport International, MJ, Diamond Football for the match balls, Greater London Hire for the coach, Lorraine and Dulwich Hamlet, and to all the players, helpers and supporters on the night. We couldn’t have done it without you. Special mention must go to Anna Svensson, who put in some amazing hard work to get this event off the ground, and to Jon Brigden and Laura Fields for putting in an impressive effort alongside here.

“It sets a chilling precedent.” So said Google’s chief legal officer David Drummond, one of three Google executives convicted in Italy of violating the country’s privacy laws. Along with Peter Fleischer and George De Los Reyes, Drummond was handed a suspended six-month sentence by Judge Oscar Magi for allowing a video of an autistic teenager being bullied to be uploaded to Google Video.

According to TechCrunch, Google removed the happyslapping video within hours of being notified. So what exactly did the three convicted Googlers do wrong? They allowed the web community to upload video content, and then removed objectionable content upon notification and worked with the police to identify the user responsible. How absolutely DARE they?!

Judge Magi’s ruling is beyond belief and Google is understandably unhappy as it prepares its appeal. The consequences could be dire. Firstly, the user-generated web in Italy would effectively be neutered by the over-the-top moderation necessary for the likes of Google to fully protect its employees from litigation. And secondly, privacy is a serious issue and should not be marginalised as the domain of the heavy-handed because of a frivolous case such as this.

Real-time search racks up the deals

You just can’t keep Google out of the news at the moment, but at least it usually involves progress and innovation. Following December’s launch of real-time search, the internet giant has taken a huge step with the tool. Already covering search results from Yahoo! Answers, Twitter, blogs, news sites and, since last week, MySpace, Google Real-Time Search will now return results from Facebook pages when you use the search engine.

IoW blogger banned from court

The Coroner’s Court in Newport, Isle of Wight, made a controversial decision recently which has rather unfairly called into question the position of bloggers in the justice and media process. VentnorBlog, a local blog authored by a group of local news enthusiasts, has covered news across the island for four years and is recognised by the National Union of Journalists.

Coroner John Matthews declined to recognise the blog as a member of the press and told the site’s representative that they were not welcome in the court. The blogger was then refused entry as a member of the press, and threatened with eviction from the court by security.

With the local news media in its current state, the value of local or hyperlocal bloggers is to be admired, not ignored. That includes in spaces traditionally occupied by print media no longer capable of fulfilling its role in the political, legal or news-gathering processes.

Twitter developments

It’s no surprise, but Twitter’s getting bigger – at least in terms of tweets. 140Char reported last week that Twitter is now servicing a mind-blowing (and numbing?) 600 tweets a second, adding up to 50 million messages a day. It’s a great achievement for the site but it might be worth noting that the amount of spam on Twitter is large and growing, if anecdotal evidence is anything to go by.

And while Twitter is of value to real-time search and other forms of integration into better established areas of the web, it’s also becoming ever more attractive to advertising folk. At the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting, Twitter’s head of product management and monetization didn’t exactly quash chatter of an advertising launch from the site.

I think the official endorsement of an advertising service on Twitter is inevitable – but have you seen any clandestine ads already? Let us know!

Take me down to Partenope City

People do some really cool stuff online, and it can still be seen as a real force for good. Partenope City is an online community of people who use geo-tagging technology to populate a Google Map of the historic and charistmatic city of Naples, Italy.

The city’s founder, Claudio Agrelli, wants Partenope City to reflect the values he believed in existed in the real city in its previous incarnation of the same name. In a nutshell, everyone’s really well behaved.

But the pie-in-the-sky moral compass of Partenope is far less interesting for the likes of me (apart from the ‘town hall’ forum, which is supercool) than its innovative approach to news consumption and sharing. Using the Google Map, the 2,000 ‘inhabitants’ of the city can drop in content, most notably blog posts and items of news. It doesn’t get more hyperlocal than that.

Even better, the online city “produces a daily online newspaper bringing together local news and views from the online community”. If I had the time, I’d do one for Tooting!

We decided that we’d like to contribute to Omnicom’s fundraising effort for the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund after an earthquake struck outside Port-au-Prince back in January. The charity football match idea came up, and with some amazing work from staff at PN, the willing involvement of Fleishman Hillard and Omnicom’s agreement to extend their deadline for doubling fundraising contributions to include the match, we’re all set.

But the game isn’t all about agency v agency rivalry on the pitch. The secondary challenge is to put together the most impressive array of celebrities, ex-pros, employees and journalist contacts as a squad of 22. With our team including ex-pros Micky Hazard, Graham Roberts (Tottenham Hotspur) and Kerry Dixon (Chelsea) - alongside actors Ralf Little and Shaun Dooley, and Soccer AM presenter Max Rushden – we’re confident of securing those particular bragging rights.

We’ve also got the UK’s top football freestyler Billy Wingrove on board, and PN has a secret weapon known only as “Geordie Paul” – no, it’s not Gazza.

If you’re in London this week, come down to join us. The price of your ticket plus any purchases or donations on the night will be doubled by Omnicom, meaning 200% of every penny you donate will be going to the charity.

Click here to buy your ticket for £5.

The details:

• Kick Off: 7.30pm, Thursday 4th March 2010
• Venue: Dulwich Hamlet Football Club
• Champion Hill Stadium [MAP]
  Edgar Kail Way, Dog Kennel Hill
  SE22 8BD London
  United Kingdom

Food and drink will be available on the night, along with some fun chances to win some goodies. Please click the link above and buy a ticket. It’s for a great cause.

One of the reasons that we dislike the word viral so much is that making something viral is actually not that easy. There’s a lot of content out there, a mere 20 hours of content is uploaded very minute to YouTube, and that’s just on one video platform, albeit the biggest. Another thing to bear in mind that there is a myth around user-generated content going viral, have a quick peak at the the current top watched videos of all time on YouTube and you’ll see mainly music videos, some extracts from Britain’s Got talent and a a couple of videos that can truly only be described as WTF? Achieving cut through is often difficult, and normally expensive, which is why we were impressed when we first heard about the Sussex Safer Roads Partnership (SSRP) video which apparently had gone viral, with over two million views in a month.

A review of the case study on Direct Traffic Media claims that it has been showcased at TED in front of James Cameron and Bill Gates, and that there have been calls from around the world to have it shown on national TV in the USA, Brazil and others. So a roaring success all round?

A discussion on Twitter today with some social media peeps, including ex-PNers Mat Morrison and Brendan Cooper concluded with the thought that perhaps, while a very worthy campaign, Embrace Life, had been chasing the wrong goals. Turns out we were being overly cynical as this interview with Neil Hopkins, the communications manager for SSRP reveals, on Osocio.

Was it meant to be local campaign?

Originally, yes. The creative brief stated that we wanted the PSA to run at shows/events, on our website, in training sessions etc, all within Sussex.

This is because we are limited by our geo-political boundaries and can only really develop something for use within our own borders in order to justify the spend.  We were all aware that the campaign might grow and become something bigger, but had to concentrate on our local market initially.

Reassuringly, Hopkins also states that:

We will be evaluating Embrace Life locally through face-to-face surveys, online polls and questionnaires etc. In the future, we will be monitoring casualty statistics to see if there has been a decline in the number of people killed and seriously injured through not wearing a seat belt.

Which means SSRP is evaluating the success of its strategy and not of the tactic, something that’s easy to get carried away with – particularly when you have a very successful video. What’s also refreshing is the inclusion of offline elements to drive the campaign, which mainly took the form of graffiti and banners around Brighton. Again SSRP will be asking people how they came to know about the campaign, and gives one anecdotal account of the success of the offline tactics.

One person I spoke to had seen the first artworks created and visited the website (when the website just showed the logo and a countdown timer).  He then revisited the site later and saw the logo at the end of the PSA, which reawakened the recognition of the artworks.  He told me that he sees them everywhere now and they act as a reminder to the message of the campaign.

It also created great images for use by the traditional media, and obviously the story of how the video has gone global is quite news friendly too.

This is just a personal view on the BBC cuts announced today and doesn’t represent any opinion of Porter Novelli other than mine. But I’m saying it anyway as someone who worked at the Beeb for 10 years and who left in disillusionment at the lack of direction and mucking about with the system that John Birt undertook (eg if you were working in Birmingham and wanted to hire a CD from the music library in London they would charge you 20 quid – cheaper to go and buy it. Absurd).

After Greg Dyke showed such signs of promise we’ve now had the spectacle of the BBC first swamping everybody else’s market with public money and now, suddenly, and with an eye on the elections and historic budget deficits, trying to rein it in sufficiently as to ensure they can remain publicly funded and not have to get their hands dirty with – perish the thought – the private sector.

The problem is that they’ve now got so many fingers in so many pies that they can’t make decisions as to what to keep and what to lose without being accused of double standards. Why cut the Asian network, for instance? It’s a true public service that the commercial sector would really struggle to provide. Why not lose BBC 3, or Radio 1, which are precisely the kind of things that others can do, and already do, just as well.

There’s a large part of me that agrees with James Murdoch that the way in which the BBC swamped the internet with its news sites may in part have caused the great decline in commercial local news – why pay for it when you can get it for free – and there are still dozens of jobs advertised in the BBC magazine which sound like something out of Stalinist Russia.

I just don’t think it’s that difficult. It’s a bit like the banks in one way – what is their core purpose in life? With banks it’s to serve customers and to keep their money safe, not muck about in derivatives markets. With the BBC, it’s to make TV and radio programmes which are IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST and which add something to the sum of human knowledge and the gaiety of the nation. Back to basics, please. Lose the lowest common denominator stuff and keep the quality. After all, it’s not as though they have advertisers to please, like the rest of the media.

Last week Portsmouth and England footballer David James’s regular column in the Guardian blamed what he calls an ‘army of PR people’ operating in the industry for the recent football-related media storm. He claimed that their role is to ‘dupe’ the public into holding ‘unrealistic expectations’ about their role models.

James claims he is ‘too honest and open to have PR help’ and goes on to list a number of instances in which he feels PR has attempted to promote an idealised image of him, rather than who he really is. There are those who would argue that the England goalkeeper is missing the point here. At the highest level, footballers are paid a lot of money to perform a skilled job in the public gaze. Isn’t it reasonable then to expect interest in the lives of players when they step off the pitch?

As long as this interest remains, there will be a role for PR to support the image of footballers. James is perhaps a rarity in the modern game as he is considered to be intelligent, well-spoken and thoughtful; however, it’s worth bearing in mind that many of James’s peers are twenty-something millionaires who might not share the same mature outlook on life. It is for this reason that footballers must embrace PR for the best interests of all concerned – after all, we have seen enough in recent days and weeks to confirm that careers and even marriages can suffer when the public get too close to the truth.

It might be worth clarifying what the role of PR is. Done properly, PR is not, as David James suggests, a platform for misinformation, nor is it a facility for distorting the truth for personal gain. Equally, it is not a means of protection from journalists and their difficult questions. What PR can offer is constructive, carefully planned and targeted media opportunities which can help to raise a profile in the right areas and at the right times. The public’s thirst for information relating to public figures in this country has never been greater, which means that one thing is for sure – you can never be too honest or open to benefit from good PR.

One of the major concerns about location-based social networking has been hitting the headlines lately. Whether it’s people telling others what they’re up to through sites like Twitter, or saying they’re “going out” through specific location-based tools like Foursquare, the threat that people know where you live and when you’re not there is a very real one.

And that’s just the users who aren’t stupid enough to check in to Foursquare at their home!

That’s why the Flavour of the Week in social media has been Please Rob Me, a site by Forthehack, an outfit whose stated aim in launching the controversial site was to raise awareness of online privacy issues. Mission accomplished.

The site essentially comprises a Twitter search for ‘4sq’, revealing a handy list of people who are out and, therefore, not home. And by providing the list in reverse chronological order by check-in time, it’s possible to make assumptions about who will be out for a while. If you checked into work 15 minutes ago at 9.20am, chances are you’re likely to be out most of the day.

So, if you make your address known online, you’re knackered. But this is all nothing new – as Mashable notes, burglars can always just go around calling houses from telephone boxes. And in online privacy terms this is pretty basic stuff. I guess the interesting point comes where the creative potential of Foursquare meets our desire to be safe. Are we really ready to take the occasional risk to pick up some movie’s Foursquare location badges?

Apps, mobile editions and the future of news consumption…

Following the hype around Apple’s iPad launch, the inevitable showing off of iPad’s possible uses. The first big media name to reveal its iPad plans was Wired. With the likes of GQ, Esquire and Maxim already operating iPhone editions, Wired made a big play in Chris Anderson’s appearance at the TED Conference last Friday. The ace up his sleeve? Wired’s iPad edition.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the iPad version looks rather like a magazine on a screen. But the back-end is where things will get really interesting, and will likely change our understanding of how a media title is put together. There is no front or back cover, no natural flow, no (gulp) centrefold. That’s just the tip of the iceberg, and the possibilities are intriguing. Financially, a magazine or newspaper’s ability to carry media-rich advertising is a particularly promising possibility – for them, at least.

If you’d like to see Wired congratulating itself, here’s the video.

Meanwhile, the BBC is stepping up its iPhone presence. From April, the corporation will offer free applications for its news and sport content on the iPhone, with BlackBerry and Android apps to follow. The value and benefits of the apps have been questioned but the BBC understandably wants to be involved in a market which consumes its news as and when it’s required.

However, it will have to do a good job to compete with the many existing unofficial apps which (I have it on good authority) are available already.

…and social networking

From news to networking, perhaps 2010 really is the routinely predicted ‘Year of the Mobile’ which its predecessors have failed to live up to. We already know about high-end mobile apps for sites such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, but what about those of us who don’t want to waste mobile operators’ bandwidth by trawling through Facebook photos?

Facebook is targeting the 100 million users who now access the site on their mobile phones with a low-bandwidth version named ‘Zero’.  From the BBC:

Data from industry body the GSM Association recently revealed that Facebook accounts for nearly half of all the time people in the UK spend going online using their phones.

The data showed that people in the UK spent around 2.2bn minutes browsing the social network during December alone.

Facebook said the new site “omits data intensive applications like photos”.

I suppose there’s an element of competition with Twitter here, and another sign of just how important Facebook considers its status function’s development to be. Not my bag, but each to their own.

Retail and social media

British retailers are rubbish at social media, according to a dotCommerce study (the word rubbish is mine, not theirs – sorry, retailers). The top ranking British retailer on Facebook is the Body Shop – unsurprising – but it’s presence there is weak compared to some retailers overseas, particularly in the US.

The Body Shop is 23rd on All Facebook’s Facebook page leaderboard, but is behind better engaged brands like The Cheesecake Factory, Starbucks, Best Buy and Target. The problem is not the strength or otherwise of The Body Shop’s brand, it’s the execution of its tactics within social media.

Having an effective Facebook page may not be crucial to the success of a business, but used cleverly it can be a great tool for contests, customer service and public relations. It seems silly not to grasp the nettle.

By now, you’ve heard of Google Buzz. Buzz is Google’s new service for “sharing thoughts, multimedia and your social media feeds” (Mashable) through Gmail. While the tool is undeniably powerful and is technologically impressive, it actually doesn’t seem to have gone down too well.

Concerns and doubts seem to have centred on two areas. First, what’s the point? We already have Twitter, Facebook and FriendFeed – well, some of us have FriendFeed. So while Google’s arguably doing the right thing by trying to own this space, the service it introduces has to offer a lot more than the ones already in place. Neville Hobson identifies the key difference: search.

And second, what it does – or rather did – offer, was a staggering lack of privacy. Buzz was launched last week and automatically connected users with their most frequent contacts in Gmail. This is clearly a slightly dim idea, and this is why. I use Gmail in my life as a football blogger. Therefore, most of the mails I send from my account are responses to crap PR pitches. So why on earth would I want to ‘connect’ with these people?

The more sinister problem comes when Buzz compromises someone’s physical safety. This became real when an anonymous blogger (I would link to the blog but it’s now protected – I’m sure that’s Buzz-related), who uses Gmail to talk to her boyfriend and mother but receives regular messages from her abusive ex-husband, became connected to him and to contacts from her anonymous blogging role within Buzz. Bad form, Google.

Google’s now tidied up much of the mess, but all in all it’s been a poor week in reputation terms. Google took a hit at the end of last week when it killed some leading music blogs (hosted on Blogger) due to copyright infringement. Fair enough, but some warning might have been appropriate. And following the death of Georgian luger Nodar Kumaritashvili before the Winter Olympics in Vancouver, Google had to pull its luge-inspired logo thanks to an online backlash.

Prisoners kicked off Facebook

Facebook has been praised for its co-operation in a UK government crackdown to have abusive prisoners removed from the site. 30 inmates have been ejected from the site after using smuggled mobile phones to access Facebook and leave abusive, intimidating messages for their victims.

These charming chaps all had their Facebook access removed within a 48 hour period according to justice minister Jack Straw, who said he was reassured by Facebook’s willingness to help and acknowledged the need for further measures to be introduced. Several high-profile prisoners have used the site to brag about their crimes, life behind bars, and their release. Nice.

Paperchase takes a beating

UK stationer Paperchase is the latest big brand to have discovered itself in the eye of a Twitter storm. After allegedly using the work of an independent artist for a marketing campaign without permission, the brand quickly became a global trending topic on Twitter. Paperchase’s response was painfully slow and rather weak, though it has now been fleshed out. After originally ignoring the artist’s request for her work to be removed, big name involvement was inevitable. In this case, it was Neil Gaiman who kicked the storm into overdrive.

Although many other brands have been in the same position, Paperchase had/has special circumstances to consider. They’re in a competitive market where people can buy from another brand at the drop of a hat. So while the storm is online, and the crime very much offline, the social media issue had to be addressed.

As always, the whole problem could have been avoided simply by not being stupid and NOT BEING UNDERHANDED!

Speed v Truth in the race for news

Will Sturgeon at The Media Blog reported on the reporting of yesterday’s tragic train crash in Brussels. He noted the difference in accuracy between ‘breaking news’ tweets from @BreakingNews and @ReutersFlash. The former reported (via the Associated Press, mind) that there were no casualties. Five minutes later, the latter reported that sadly there were 20. Reuters was five minutes slower, but infinitely more accurate.

It’s all part of a pet topic of mine, namely how social media can affect the way we consume news. The march of Twitter as a news-breaking force seemed unstoppable, but its speed now looks fallible thanks to @BreakingNews, a primarily Twitter-based channel and its necessity to beat the likes of Reuters to the punch.

The London 2012 logo

By Simon Spencer, Commercial & Legal Counsel

PR Week’s article concerning “payment in kind” as a remuneration mechanism to reward successful bidders for the Olympic Games PR work is a space worth watching.

Whilst non-money trading or barter is hardly something new and many billions are bartered across the globe annually, it is not often that it raises its head in the business world on such a scale and with such profile.

Nevertheless, it’s a model that London 2012 Olympics have been including in all their supplier contracts and one that appears to be working in practice as they seek to firm up working relationships, indeed they have successfully brought aboard advertising company McCann Erickson in return for tier three sponsorship, worth a reported £10 million.  But is this a feasible way of doing business? Can a payment-in-kind model be used effectively for accounts of this scope and size?

A major shortcoming with barter is that you are likely to have to compromise on what you receive in return for what you offer. In short, it isn’t that likely that you will find precisely what you are looking for, whereas cash gives you the freedom to seek out that elusive ideal item.

Whilst it is a basic principle of negotiation that you should seek something of value to you at a cost of little or nothing to your trading partner, the tendency in a situation like the one now looming for the would-be Olympics PR agencies is not to treat it as a mere opportunity to splash your name across advertising hoardings or programmes, or worse still see it as glorified pro-bono work.

As any seasoned PR professional knows, it’s of ultimate importance that real value is sought out in return for PR support. Will, for example, an attempt be made by agencies to secure work for clients with the London Organising Committee for the Olympic Games (LOCOG) , in return for direct fee generative work or commission from those clients?

Time will tell. And, as we say, it’s a space worth watching.

Immediately flagged as a potential FaceBook or Twitter Killer, Buzz was launched with minimal fanfare this week, well minimal compared to last year’s Wave hype, and purports to bring social networking straight to your inbox. It enables you to share your photos, RSS, twitter updates and other content directly from your Gmail inbox with your contacts. Your network is automatically built as Buzz will follow the people you email the most.

There’s been quite a mixed reaction to this, industry commentator Jason Calacanis immediately declared that FaceBook’s stock and traffic would drop by half, others have pointed out some major flaws, such as exposing your entire email list to others, might be an anti-privacy step too far, which is supported by raw accounts of people who are now fearing for their physical safety after Buzz was introduced Indeed, one day after lunch thankfully Google has already started to backtrack and is making it possible to limit what profile information is shared and to block potential followers.

Personally I switched Buzz on and then switched it back off about an hour later, I didn’t like that I was automatically following everyone I’d ever emailed more than a couple of times. While Google thinks it will be better to add social networking elements to your inbox, I prefer using my inbox to populate my social networks. This may be harsh, but just because I’ve emailed you doesn’t mean we’re friends, even virtually. I also don’t like that emails are so easy to find, not everyone hands out their contact details willy-nilly, I don’t pass on your details without checking its OK with you. I’d like Google to do the same for me.

I also don’t like how Buzz says it will skip showing the things it doesn’t think I’ll like and will add in recommended content from those I’m not following. Though I’m less against the latter, I feel that the skipping process might well increase the filters we’re so effectively building through social media.

As with everything new and shiny on the interwebz, we’ll just have to wait and see how useful it is and what the take up will be, it’s far too soon to call how