Techcrunch editor Michael Arrington believes that the era of trying to manage one’s online reputation is almost over:

Trying to control, or even manage, your online reputation is becoming increasingly difficult. And much like the fight by big labels against the illegal sharing of music, it will soon become pointless to even try. It’s time we all just give up on the small fights and become more accepting of the indiscretions of our fellow humans. Because the skeletons are coming out of the closet and onto the front porch.

I can kind of see what he means. Yes, it’s quite likely that bad reviews of you, your business and your dog will appear on the Web, and there won’t be very much that you are able to do to prevent or correct that. Indeed, we will need to become thicker skinned and more forgiving of people’s indiscretions.

However, there are multiple flaws in the argument.

Pretty much the show-stopper for me is the total confusion between ‘online reputation’ and ‘bad things some people say on the Web’.

What is (for example) TV chef Jamie Oliver’s reputation?

His food and restaurants tend to get fairly good reviews. He’s campaigned to improve the nutritional value of children’s school dinners, a popular move in the eyes of pretty much everyone except pie manufacturers. His shows keep getting commissioned, so are presumably popular. Recently, he’s apparently been having a hard time convincing the US of the virtues of healthy eating, but got sympathetic stories and an appearance on Oprah as a result.

But then… it took me about two seconds to find this, this and this (sweary, not-so-positive websites about JO). And quite a lot more where they came from.

So what to make of that? Chirpy chap or mockney tw**?

The main way we gauge someone or something’s reputation online is by Googling them. As Clive Thompson wrote ages ago in Wired:

Google is not a search engine. Google is a reputation-management system. And that’s one of the most powerful reasons so many CEOs have become more transparent: Online, your rep is quantifiable, findable, and totally unavoidable. In other words, radical transparency is a double-edged sword, but once you know the new rules, you can use it to control your image in ways you never could before.

So, if you’ll allow me to take Google as the arbiter of reputation, when you search for Oliver then the top result, after the news, is his own site, followed by his restaurant’s sites, followed by his other brands. There are no negative references on the first four pages of the Google search for his name. And having discovered that, if you then bump into one of the bad sites, then you’ll take what they say with a pinch of salt. They still exist, but it is the mix and sum of the data we can acquire, their provenance, their credibility and how Google sorts them which goes to form an online reputation.

What Oliver is doing by creating all these sites and content is called managing your online reputation*. And it quite clearly still works.

picture credit: tommatsch

*Oliver’s been blogging since 2003, which is pretty impressive by any measure.

Dramatic Hamster: 19mn views for the version that went viral; maybe 40mn from the spin-off versions. But why?

There are four parts to the solution (the one to the question about how things become viral and influence spreads; I have no idea about the hamster):

• the nature of the spreader or influencer(s);
• the nature of the audience;
• the nature of the network or media through which the information is moving;
• and the nature of the information/content itself.

So how do you get stuff spread on the Internet?

1) Through very influential people

Some people are more influential than others, it seems. If I tell you to buy a Blackberry rather than an iPhone, I’m not – on the face of things -  likely to achieve as much of a result as if Brian Lam (the editor of Gizmodo) said it. Why? Because he’s more of an influencer on this subject than I am. He has a rather larger audience. He runs a site that is acknowledged as an authority for this sort of information. And because he’s being reviewing mobiles and other gadgets for some time. If you were a marketer working for RIM, you’d probably be inclined to take Brian out for a nice lunch and send him some Blackberries.

You might call this the ‘old-fashioned’ model of PR and marketing. You want a story about your product/services/company in a big publication – so you take the editors out to lunch, give them access to information not available elsewhere, such as an interview with the CEO and send them free stuff.

This old model has been somewhat reinvigorated in recent years with the realisation that the most influential people might not be working for the FT or even Gizmodo, but might work for what seem smaller publications or websites that are read by or otherwise reach all the other editors. These ideas stem from those published by Katz and Lagerfeld in Personal Influence (1955). Malcolm Gladwell’s influential 2002 book The Tipping Point revived this, suggesting the existence of thought-leaders (Mavens and Salesmen in his parlance) who – if they recommended something – will lead to that item spreading like wildfire – the spread of hush-puppy shoes in 90’s New York is his most-cited example. It didn’t come from fashion columns or fashion magazines. It came, Gladwell says, from a small number of eminent dudes (to use the scientific term) sporting this footwear brand.

That’s when things get tricky. Finding these ‘quiet influencers’ is difficult since you (as a marketer) haven’t got access to other people’s reading lists. Where do the editors of the FT and Gizmodo go to for their information? Where do they find their stories, outside of their Inbox? Where do other people go for their footwear and mobile phone advice? On the Web, you might look at the blogrolls most people publish on their websites – if you find the people that lots of others read or cite, then they are most probably very influential, whatever their apparent profile or position. (Tim Hoang wrote some interesting stuff about this at the start of the year).

Even greater access comes through Twitter, where following/follower lists are visible to any user of the service. I went to a seminar last week about online influence where Andrew Walker from digital agency Thin Martian described some work they did around the UK release of the film Anvil last year. They wanted to find out who the most influential rock-music twitterers were. But rather than looking to the likes of Coldplay (2.5mn followers) or Lily Allen (2mn), they traced back from the people who talk and write about rock, publishing blogs and zines. It emerges that the most influential rock-twitterer is shock-jock Howard Stern, with a mere 67,000 followers. Why? Because the people who talk, write and otherwise publish about rock all follow him. (Mat Morrison has done some analysis of the UK social media twittersphere that you may find interesting).

2) By finding influence-able audiences

That last finding, about the extent of Howard Stern’s influence, despite relatively modest audience figures points towards the second part of the ‘finding influence’ equation – finding audiences that are willing to be influenced. Stern’s read by people who are looking for stuff about rock music to publish on their own sites and publications. They’ll be receptive to all sorts of tidbits that wouldn’t necessarily be seen as interesting by other audiences. Back to the Blackberry example, if gadget-review magazine Stuff (ABC circ. 95,000 pcm) publishes a 10/10 review of the latest model, then that could well be more influential than Lily Allen giving it the thumbs-up, despite 20-times the reach. Give people the recommendation in the context they want it and it will carry. Otherwise, it probably won’t.

Research into influence and virality suggest that finding these audiences is far more important when it comes to spreading information than the apparent influence quotient of the person passing it on. Yahoo chief researcher Duncan Watts has poured scorn on The Tipping Point’s idea of key influencers:

“It just doesn’t work,” Watts says, when I meet him at his gray cubicle at Yahoo Research in midtown Manhattan, which is unadorned except for a whiteboard crammed with equations. “A rare bunch of cool people just don’t have that power. And when you test the way marketers say the world works, it falls apart. There’s no there there.”

Academic research into modelling the spread of ideas through the simulation of epidemics has supported Watts’ beliefs. Instead, Watts’ approach is far more akin to traditional – albeit well-targeted – advertising. Get the thing out there to lots of people who may be receptive. Watts recreated the famous Milgram experiment (not the one about following orders, the one about six degrees) and found that, yes, anyone is separated from anyone else by six-degrees-of-separation or fewer (just three for the population of the US). But furthermore, there weren’t key links in the chain – the alleged especially-connected people or gatekeepers. Accidents and apparently unrelated environmental variables were just as important to the spread. See Watts’ 2007 paper Viral Marketing in the Real World for more on this. These ideas should give marketers heart, though: even if you can’t get the editor of the FT to look at your company/thing, getting a few bloggers on the case may well result in the same amount of real-world influence.

And that brings us on to the next part of the equation…

3) By using media and networks that spread quickly

This helps to explain the importance of websites like Twitter, YouTube and digg when it comes to spreading the news. People go there for distraction. These sites are all about finding cool, new stuff you can either re-publish or pass on. An article that reaches the front page of digg can expect to receive 100X its normal level of readership, not because it represents world-class journalism, nor because it comes from a terribly influential site, nor even because the person proposing it is especially influential (though there are cartels of diggers and influential diggers – something the site has fought to curtail since its establishment). Rather, because it caught people’s attention as something worth passing on – I’ll go into the reasons later.

Marketers certainly can and do attempt to get hold of some of this. Ask bloggers to write about your stuff. Make short-form videos instead of microsites. Write and give away handy guides and white papers. Submit your stuff to all the social bookmarking sites. Get people to join their Facebook groups.

This can work spectacularly well. But, as most agencies and clients have found to their cost, it’s rather hit and miss. Tens of thousands of videos, groups and bookmarks are created every day. People can only take notice of a limited amount of cool, new stuff each day. Your stuff is likely to be missed. This is particularly invidious when working under the constraints of a time-limited campaign or project – items on the web can and do accrete considerable value over months and years, but that’s not much use if you’re being judged on figures to be delivered in six weeks’ time.

One important lesson here. You can’t do any of this stuff in isolation. Making a great video is all very well, but you also need to give it velocity through straight PR and marketing; social media strategy and positioning.

It’s so annoying that most efforts fail that you might be sorely tempted to cheat – get your entire staff, your client’s staff, their friends and relations, plus a load of made-up accounts to vote for your stuff in the hope of it either (a) being noticed by a larger audience because of your apparent popularity or (b) that this pseudo-popularity is enough to assuage your client. There are downsides to this, though, because people will notice. Then you will look inept, your client’s brand will suffer and it’s bye-bye social media budget.

So, as well as all the above, you’ll want to make sure that your stuff is both good and spreadable.

4) Creating stuff that’s good and spreadable

The ‘spreadable’ part is the easiest to deal with and has already been mentioned above. Make sure that people can email it in some way. Attach social bookmarking links to your items. Put it into contexts, like YouTube and delicious that encourage sharing and spreading. Instead of regular press releases, use the SMNR model to make them blogger (and journalist) friendly. Make artefacts remixable to help generate spin-off variants.

That’s all quite common sense and mechanical. Good is where the difficult part lies.

There’s already plenty of advice on creating linkbait – make something that’s either useful, surprising or controversial. (‘Linkbait’ is web content that people are likely to link to, share or otherwise transmit elsewhere). Unfortunately, everyone on the Web has already read those articles and we’re swimming with ‘Top Ten Ways to/Resources for X’, ‘Why Y will be the Z Killer’, zippy flash games and mind-blowing visualisations. There’s an SEO arms race afoot and while there is a lot of success to be had with these formats, there are thousands of people going after the same top slots.

To be more positive. A recent academic paper – Social Transmission and Viral Culture by Jonah Berger and Katherine Milkman – analysed the virality of 7500 items from the New York Times, monitoring the most-emailed list from the site. They focused on the psychological characteristics of the items, rather than their actual content, which provides some useful prompts. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, awesome is good: “content’s ability to inspire awe is strongly associated with its virality”. But awesome doesn’t mean – here – some sort of Bill and Ted mind-blowing. In a more classical sense, it means something bigger and wider:

One emotion we focus on in particular is awe. Stimuli that open the mind to vast and often unconsidered possibilities can inspire awe, a unique human emotion that expands a reader’s frame of reference (Keltner and Haidt 2003). Awe is the emotion of self-transcendence, a feeling of admiration and elevation in the face of something greater than the self (Haidt 2006). It occurs when two conditions are met (Keltner and Haidt 2003). First, people experience something vast: either physically vast such as the grand canyon, conceptually vast such as a grand theory or finding, or socially vast such as fame or power. Second, the vast experience cannot be accommodated by existing mental structures. Intellectual epiphanies, natural wonders, and great works of art can all make people feel a sense of awe (Shiota, Keltner, and Mossman 2007). Similarly, news stories about a treatment that may cure AIDS or a hockey goalie who continues to play even with brain cancer may both inspire some level of awe.

The other values tested, all of which indicated likely virality, though to a lesser extent, were:

• practical usefulness (e.g. how to get a cheaper mortgage)
• surprisingness (e.g. dog drives owner to hospital)
• positive stories vs. negative stories (e.g. X is great vs. Y is terrible: positive stories get greater word-of-mouth, which you may find surprising)
• emotional content (e.g. anger against X; tragedy of Y)

Awe-inspiring ought to be the goal, then. Hmm you’re thinking that’s all very well. But my client makes sprockets for Acme. Where does that leave me? In all honesty, it probably means that you aren’t going to achieve virality for a story without considerable imagination. A great example would be liquidiser manufacturer Blendtec who converted drab kitchenware into a runaway viral success with its Will it Blend videocast. The Best Job in the World campaign by Nitro converted a run-of-the-mill ‘Come to Queensland’ message into an awe-inspiring adventure to attain an idyllic lifestyle. Diet Coke and Mentos turned two totally familiar supermarket staples into boy’s-own science fun combined with Bellagio spectacular. Yes, that sounds bloody hard to emulate, but that’s the nature of this territory. Sorry.

To sum up

Four ingredients to spreadiness. None of them are totally foolproof, but each reinforces all of the others, so it only makes sense to work on all four. In essence, it’s not very different to a traditional media plan.

• Involve influencers (if you still believe in that tack); but don’t mistake volume for influence.
• Work out where your audiences are (who and where are the people who want to talk about this stuff?) and go after them with the best & most sources you can reach.
• Do blogger outreach (but don’t be a dick); social media sites; making it spreadable; etc. Get broad exposure as well as targeted. It can produce the same results, if not better.
• Take a long time to think up the ideas. Be really imaginative and make it awesome.

picture credits: jiparis and wikipedia

On the other, crikey, there are an awful lot of digital folk working in PR nowadays. And digital outfits that ‘do’ PR. And journalists who’ve crossed over to both, for that matter.

So I am less biased than you might imagine.

Last night’s NMK event – What Happens to Online PR? – covered a lot of bases. What exactly is PR; what is Online; and what is needed for the industry to gain some leadership in the online space?

The room was heavily dominated by people at the forefront of reinventing PR. People who are already moving well beyond press relations into the guardianship of reputation and the formation of real relationships – both in digital and analogue. Or is that backwards in time? Panellist Stuart Bruce maintained that PR was never about the press, and always about looking after and promoting reputations and establishing and growing relationships.

There is, as everyone knows, a land-grab going on. Everyone in the marcomms space, from designers to planners, is on their toes (unless they’re rubbish) to find a reason to suggest that it is they who should lead in digital. The people who gain a credible early lead will probably be able to maintain that, and the people who don’t will wither away.

For pure digital agencies, their case is clear: we grew up in this space; we know and understand it best; we’re the geeks that you used to call the back-room boys (and girls). But now things have changed. Now online isn’t something separate, it’s everything. If you want the best skills and insight in everything, then call us.

On the PR side the case is clear but muddied by 100 years of history and culture. At its purest, Public Relations is about reputation management and relationship management. It’s about the strategy behind communications policies as much as executing those policies.

At the execution level, it’s about crafting, creating and sustaining stories which will work with those relationships and bolster or protect that reputation.

At its not so pure, PR is about coverage and column inches; it’s about billing on AEV; it’s about hitting the front page of the FT; it’s about whacking out a press release every 2 minutes about anything that you can loosely associate with a client (I received about 10 budget-related press releases today, most of which were totally spurious).

As everyone who works in media knows, sadly, you get ten times as much contact from the bad end of the scale than you do from the shining knights. That’s how spam works: if the conversion rate is 0.000001%, then you send 1,000,000 emails. If it’s lower, you simply send more.

As both sides of the panel last night agreed, this is not sustainable. Maintaining relationships and building reputation depends on adding value, not taking it away. There are agencies that I (and presumably a lot of other journalists) have blacklisted – and they will never be able to recover from that.

So, the way forward for PR agencies: stay still, integrate, specialise or outsource?

Stay still: you die. And you deserve to. You shouldn’t be on this blog. Go away.

Lots of agencies are integrating. Bringing in digital media people, or hiring PR graduates with that inclination: bunch them together and call them the digital team; maybe bringing in a heavy-hitter who’s well-known in the pure digital space; maybe even buying out a digital agency to call their own. (You know I could name and shame here, but I won’t). Problem: 80% of your agency has no clue what the hell you do. They won’t be able to sell, explain or justify your projects to clients. You’ll be working 24/7 to stay still.

Or specialise. Become an online PR agency. Lots of geeks; lots of analytics; project managers. This has been a good model for the last couple of years. The problem? The people who hold the purse strings don’t trust you johnny-come-latelies with your flip-flops and skateboards one bit. Especially when it comes to reputation. A bunch of internet guys? Are you having me on? Sure you can do my website, but corporate reputation? Yeah, riiight.

Or outsource. You do your bit on strategy and then outsource the bits you haven’t got the skillz for to the best pure digital players available. This agency for your SEO, that one for your design and the other for your social strategy. There’s lots of danger here, too. Your outsourced agencies are also your competitors. Because they all want your lunch money. Also, you’ve increased your costs massively in most cases. You’ve also got a whole bunch of communication issues to resolve – not easy ones, either, because everyone in marcomms has an ego the size of a planet.

So not any of those things, really.

Start again. No, really.

Start again.

Integration, specialisation and outsourcing aren’t going to work as plausible business models in the long term. I think we all know that. You need an agency that is Digital and PR. An agency focused on relationships and reputation, but wholly grounded in today’s arena of communications. Then you win.

I’m not an entrepreneur, I’m a hack, but I hear all the arguments, all the time; I hear all the stories, every day. A lot of you have already started again. The rest of you will not survive except through brute force and a lot of that will involve layoffs.

Start again.

[I'll create a post on NMK collating discussion so far, but in the meantime:

Steven Waddington published before the debate but agrees "real threat is not the contraction of the industry but the army of new digital agencies that is capitalising on the disruption in the market"

Gerel Orgil offers the two-minute version - very useful indeed - I'd forgotten half of what she recorded.

Roger Warner great summary and a real call to learning and education - you risk losing the opportunity to learn! "the threat to a traditional PR agency isn’t just in losing a slice of Online business, it’s in losing the right to learn about it."

Lloyd Gofton says the winning agencies will have the right blend of skills.

Jo-Rosie Haffenden condemns "an industry which is not as excited as it should be about change".

Danny Whatmough didn't turn up but favours a media mix: "no one group will dominate and that there will be plenty of new tricks to learn and plenty for everyone to practice".

Jed Hallam promised to help with the hats and coats, didn't, but instead offers a great post on "influence and social mechanics".

Peter Hay crikey - old media loves us too.]

I never quote Seth Godin. I find his stuff far too happy-clappy for my comfort zone (ach- another americanism!) Yet here I am: Seth on America choosing Neil Armstrong as their ‘moon landing guy’:

NASA did what many organizations do when picking someone to act as company spokesperson. They avoided risk, played it safe and chose someone who wouldn’t make a ruckus.

What a shame.

Armstrong could have taught the world about science. He could have done work that would have won him a Nobel Peace Prize. He could have had a huge impact on his country and the world. Instead, he mostly disappeared.

Many organizations worry that if they put their clout behind an individual, he or she will gain notoriety and power and eventually double-cross the organization. So, instead, they go for bland.

Bland is a tad harsh, though I wish they’d chosen Buzz for the first man on the moon. He’s got a much cooler name. There’s another reason as well – because I continually get to tease my wife for confusing him with Buzz Lightyear on one occasion. (Buzz Lightyear apparently trained on Lanzarote’s volcanos for his moon trip).

Speaking in my capacity as a has-been journalist, bland won’t get you a headline in a magazine or newspaper. But hang on… Neither will the out-spoken fool.

No journalist is going to publish a story that says ‘Dave Colossus, mega-spokesperson for XCorp, today said they’d be curing cancer within a year using the power of social networking’. Dave Colossus (not his real name) is out of a job within a week, and the fools that did print the story, well, probably they keep their jobs in my experience.

Stick to bland, and true. And bollocks to you, Godin: I’m not sure I’ve come across a better quote in the last forty years than ‘One small step for man; one giant leap for mankind’. If that’s bland (and even if he got it wrong), it’s still pretty magical.

But I still wish it was Buzz.

My staff writer at NMK – Tim Hoang – works for the PR company, Rainier, as well. That’s always something we’ve made very clear. I was (and remain I’ve calmed down now – and DW was very charming.) absolutely furious to learn that he has been banned from using the Response Source service today on account of his PR background.

For those who don’t know, Response Source allows journalists to poll PR agencies for help – “do you know any experts on mobile apps?”, “got any case studies on businesses making successful use of MySpace?”; that sort of thing, in our case.

One of our key anxieties in the initial decision to employ Tim – who is a paid & taxed employee of the University of Westminster in this role – was making sure that his PR job would not infringe on his duties as a reporter for NMK. It’s an issue we’ve discussed and thought about for a long time, believe me. There are clearly opportunities for abuse, but they’re ones that Tim and I are very well-aware of and perfectly able to execute professional judgement over. Of the dozens of sources he’s used over the last two months, two were Rainier clients – to add differentiation and substance to stories, when he couldn’t find other people keen to comment. (Ironically, getting more of these other voices was one of the reasons he used Response Source). I agonised about both of them for a little while – I edit all his stories – but concluded that the extra comment had justifiable merit. In both cases, Tim informed me freely of the connection; we were transparent about the connection in the stories; and I approved it. After all, I have very little compunction about using people I’ve met in previous roles as sources: that’s what you do as a reporter.

The reason for the ban isn’t known to me in full and was not disclosed, but RS has apparently perceived a conflict of interests, in response to complaints from some other PR agency(ies).

How exactly would this work? Tim polls other PR agencies for input into a story, and that would be a problem for them for what reason? Do they think that he wouldn’t include input from competitors? So why ask the question in the first place? That he would sneak questions like ‘fancy a new agency?’ into his interviews? I think the yellow-pages might be a better source.

One more thing annoys me about this. I am the editor and publisher of NMK. Why didn’t anyone take whatever concerns they have to me, rather than a third-party? Or to my boss, the director of NMK?

F**king infantile. I will not use Response Source again while this situation continues. I have forwarded this info@dwpub.com – if anyone has a better contact, let me know.

Anyway, it’s about when companies embrace all this nakedness and transparency and conversations idea. If they do, where does the PR company’s role lie? What’s the logical outcome of this ‘cluetrain‘ railroad? It’s aimed at PRs, mainly, but everyone is welcome to come, as always.

I’ve heard some fascinating answers to that question, ranging from ‘get them to shut up quick’ to ‘embrace and dance’. If PR is reputation management, then are these power-ups, loose cannons, guardian angels, friendly fire or bulls in a china shop? Can you think of better metaphors than me? Have your Say!

Are you personally affected by this issue ? Then e-mail us. Or if you’re not affected, can you imagine what it would be like if you were ? Or if you were affected by it but don’t want to talk about it can you imagine what it would be like not being affected by it ? Why not email us ? You may not know anything about the issue, but i bet you reckon something. So why not tell us what you reckon. Let us enjoy the full majesty of your uninformed ad hoc reckoning, by going to bbc.co.uk…clicking on “what i reckon” and beating on the keyboard with your fists and your head”.

(Thank you, Jem Stone)

If you’re in London and can come along, it would be great to meet with you, share a few beers and talk about this stuff. With less beating.

On with the doom and gloom, though, and one presentation that I really enjoyed came from Marco van Veen, a manager at the Innovation & Collaboration Center at Heineken on why they said ‘no’ to Second Life.

Heineken obviously does a lot of advertising and sponsorship and isn’t remotely afraid to try out new forms such as product placement in films like Casino Royale. They could very easily imagine a Heineken bar or vending machines in SL, as could all of us – heck, why not a Heineken lake? – and obviously developers and marketing agencies kept coming to them with metaverse ideas. Initially, they had a lot of enthusiasm for the possibilities.

As they started to think through the business value of the project, though, several adverse factors dawned on them…

• They wouldn’t be the first beer brand to enter the world. The press and publicity that was showered on companies like Toyota, IBM and Starwoods when they debuted in SL wouldn’t be likely to be repeated for the third or fourth beer brand to enter.
• They found research from Market Truths (March 07 – costs $100 or L$12,500) which said that if brands fail to position themselves correctly in SL, they can expect a backlash from residents. This led the company to conduct its own research among residents. It turned out that almost half thought that the Heineken brand would not be a good fit within Second Life. Only 19% said they thought it would. Don’t ask me why that was the case – as I understand it, there was something of a backlash against all commercial brands in the world earlier this year and it may just be part of that.
• It didn’t sit very easily with the company’s CSR policy. Heineken wants to be seen as promoting the socially responsible use of alcohol. Clearly, if they made Heineken bottles and kegs available in SL, it would be reasonably likely that residents would play-act drinking to excess. What else is there to do with a keg of virtual beer? (or errm… real beer).
• Hand-in-hand with this came worries about the age of SL residents. It’s company policy at Heineken not to sponsor events where the proportion of adults is lower than 70%. Linden Labs’ own figures suggest that this is comfortably so, but the company had an alternative report created by ComScore that suggested that only 68% of SL residents are 21 or over. This made them fear that Linden’s figures were unreliable. Again, this wouldn’t sit well with their responsible drinking policy.
• Joined with this was some anxiety about litigation. It seemed a reasonable supposition that there are ambulance-chasing US lawyers sitting in SL and waiting for a beer brand to give some of their product to a minor. Such a suit could well seem newsworthy to a technophobe press keen to sniff out any suggestion of child abuse online.

Yes, I am an SL naysayer, but that’s not the only reason I found this a refreshing presentation. There’s such wide-eyed bollocks talked about virtual worlds that Heineken seem like geniuses for sensibly and thoroughly assessing the opportunity and turning it down on this occasion. As van Veen said, however, this is a very new medium, and the company has far from closed the door on a virtual existence.

Update: I’ve written two posts so far on VWF at our NMK site. One on the basics you ought to know and one on business models and possibilities. Also, this post is being discussed by listeners to the FIR podcast here.

First a round-up:

Social media press releases are designed to give journalists and bloggers the elements of a release in a mix-and-match format. You get the key facts, a selection of quotes and pictures and contact details. The release itself acts a little like a blog post, with its own feed, comments and trackbacks.

It’s generally felt to be a good thing because (a) EVERYBODY hates traditional press releases; (b) email, post and fax are all broken and (c) their format is inappropriate to the online, interactive news environment that has developed over the last couple of years.

Steve Rubel – announces StoryCrafter and the idea behind it. He says: “Most importantly, every press release gets feeds, tags, del.icio.us/digg buttons, trackbacks and comments”.

Edelman – publishes its press release about the product using the StoryCrafter service itself as the vehicle.

PRSquared – notes that the product is for Edelman clients only, which he finds disappointing. Also that StoryCrafter isn’t a million miles away from the (currently free) PRX Builder or indeed the Shift Communications template. [Comments I've seen elsewhere have included the words 'blatant rip-off'.]

The Bivings Report – hopes this won’t lead to floods of haphazard releases and wonders why companies don’t just stick their press releases on their own site.

Tony Hung – hopes companies don’t think this is some sort of magic bullet for getting attention from the social web and is particularly concerned about the ‘digg’ button which rather encourages companies to spam digg.

From my own perspective, there are pros and cons. First of all, when I get a traditional press release, it’s the same as reading any other news item. It needs to grab my attention. I get about 20 a day. Most of them get marked ‘read’ and forgotten, even though I didn’t read beyond the first paragraph. I’ll pay attention if either (a) the item fits in with something I’m already writing about or planning to write about, or (b) it tells a compelling story in itself which I want to pass on. The ones I like, I put a flag on and come back and try to find it when it’s time to put the news together. It’s not a great system from anyone’s perspective: there are constant interruptions, messages go unread, get lost, cause me hassle.

So there are some great positives here in this approach. For example, one difficulty with the traditional press release is that the facts are normally wrapped up in a bunch of hyperbole about some ‘unique, world-leading and innovative product/service’. I have to strip out all that guff to work with the story (I’ll also attempt to get some more information – I’m not that lazy). This format works the other way round. They give me the facts, and I put the meat on it.

I also like it that the template shows companies what ingredients journalists are going to ask for – you need the key facts and links to more; you need a selection of pictures, ideally at different resolutions; you want quotations, and not just from the CEO saying how wonderful it all is.

Lastly, I’m really into the idea of subscribing to RSS feeds instead of having releases pushed at me. If I could reliably set up a Google Alert Feed (or similar) on the keywords ‘education IT release UK’ I could consign most email releases to the spam bin. Plus, they’d be a lot less likely to be lost in my inbox somewhere come press week.

However, the wrapping around the story is not always a bad thing. When it’s done right and the release’s writers have thought through why you and your readers would be interested, it helps journalists to see the news angle. ‘X releases new widget’ is not news. Click – delete. ‘New Widget Could Reverse Global Warming’ might be. Click – flag. Since I get around thirty times as many releases as I can actually write about, it’s obviously the ones that stand out as best fitting my news agenda that get through.

That shows a potential problem with the StoryCrafter format. If you send me a bag of flour, butter, onions and beef chunks, and tell me that I can make whatever I like with it, then I might get stuck if I haven’t got a recipe, and end up chucking the whole lot in the bin. If I’m busy, I might have preferred it if you sent me a steak pie ready for me to stick in the oven. Sure, there’s lots of times when I’ll make my own, but who knows, you might have a better recipe than me, or a great idea for a different dish I could make with those things.

Two last thoughts.. sorry this is a bit random…

Journalists and publications are competitive. I don’t want the same ingredients as my competitor. I want some special herbs and spices that will make my story better than theirs. In other words, just as the traditional press release doesn’t give journalists everything they need, nor does the social media version.

Very lastly. The submit to del.icio.us and digg buttons in the Edelman service don’t seem like a good idea. If you’re saying these new-style releases are some of the ingredients of a news story, why are you also treating it as though it’s a finished piece? Press releases aren’t the same as news pieces, though they may share many elements. And as Tony says in his comments (linked above), it smells strongly of spam when such releases are put onto these systems. But it also points to another issue. There’s no obvious way to find the releases in the first place. The problem with it being a proprietary solution rather than a centralised co-operative venture called prdel.icio.us or something is that if you deal with a 100 different agencies, each with their own service and a different feed, finding these releases is going to be as random and inefficient as the bad old days.

Some 78% of people turn to their friends as a basis for decision-making; as opposed to 38% of people saying that they turned to advertising. [Very different from the 14% figure for advertising from my previous post, which tells you something about trusting research stats. However, both show the declining role of advertising.]

Taking into account other forms of word of mouth, 92% of people use it as a basis for decision-making. This has risen from the 67% found in a similar study conducted in 1997. As the amount of ‘noise’ increases, the more important the information our friends can give us becomes.

Where does this word of mouth take place? According to research from the Keller Fay group, the outlook looks bleak for web evangelists.

Face-to-face communication accounts for 71% of word of mouth recommendations and criticisms. 21% takes place over the phone; 3% comes from mainstream media editorial; 2% comes from instant messaging. Just 1% of word of mouth advice comes from informal web sites like blogs. (but read on…)

Among younger audiences, there’s less need for face-to-face which sinks to 61% while instant messaging rises to a 10% influence. I take instant messaging to mean SMS messages from mobile phones in most cases.

These initial figures might make it sound as though we should all pack in our blogs and take to the streets if we want to have any influence. Brands would seem to be chasing a chimera if they think starting blogs will help them. However, Steve’s later presentation on how people choose financial services sheds a ray of hope.

Generally speaking, you can divide people into broadcasters and followers when it comes to financial services. Most of us are followers. Thinking about which mortgage to buy, insurance policies and the like is a massive headache. We want to get the choice out of the way as quickly as possible. We’re panicky and frightened by the choices and worry that we’ve made the wrong decision. We’re not likely to recommend things explicitly, because we suspect we’re probably wrong. What we really want is someone to tell us the right decisions to make.

Broadcasters are the experts. They’ve researched the subject and are keen to share their expertise. They trust the word of mouth of their peers, though. Broadcasters tend to look for information that no-one else knows – the inside track. They probably won’t talk about the information that appears on a company’s adverts – because everyone knows that – they want the specialised information that reaffirms their position as expert. Other broadcasters are seen as trusted suppliers of that knowledge.

This makes the information spread by broadcasters subversive. They won’t talk about brands’ mainstream messages, that there’s 0% interest on this credit card like the advertisement says. Because of this behaviour, lesser-known facts are more likely to travel.

And because they want specialised knowledge, broadcasters are more likely to pass along information gleaned from privately consumed media. They won’t talk about information they saw on a TV program, but they will talk about information from the Internet.

That information means that the 1% figure for blog influence I gave at the beginning of this post is slightly misleading. Maybe only 1% of the population will use blogs as a decision-making tool, but they are exactly the sort of people who will want to spread the information they learn to the other 99%. That 99% being sort of people who are desperate for guidance from experts.

Translating this research into web policy, brands should be aware that it isn’t the mainstream that’s likely to read their blog. It’s the informed enthusiast influencer. They are looking for the stuff they can’t learn from mainstream media, the information that gives them an edge over their uninformed neighbour. This means hints and tips, detailed technical information and links to other resources are useful to the sort of person who makes it to your blog or website. What they certainly don’t want is the same information that’s in your brochure and adverts.

Professor Robert East of Kingston Business School has been researching the impact of word of mouth. He’s of the opinion that there’s a lot of hypothesis and speculation around the subject and has recently finished conducting some proper empirical research about it.

First of all – how do people make decisions about new products and services? Surveying people to create over 10,000 data points about their purchasing decisions on matters ranging from restaurants to ISPs to cars and supermarkets, he found that on average:

31% make their choices through recommendations from other people.

22% say they conduct a personal search, which might include newspapers, magazines, online and sampling. [East suspects this number may be higher than the reality. We like to think we make our own decisions, don't we?]

14% agree that they are most influenced by advertising. [Similarly, this may be an under-estimation, for the same reason]

The remaining 32% fall into the ‘other’ category. This might mean, for example, that there’s no choice. If there’s only one supermarket in your town, or someone takes you to a new restaurant, then your choice is pretty proscribed.

These percentages vary, of course, depending on the type of product or service being chosen. Your choice of car and beauty products is more likely to come through advertising. On the other hand, choosing restaurants is very likely to come through recommendations.

Positive word of mouth is much more common than negative word of mouth. Perhaps up to a 3:1 ratio. The reasons for this are unknown, but perhaps people just prefer to recommend things than slag things off.

In addition, contrary to what most people, and perhaps most marketers, believe, positive word of mouth has a stronger effect than negative word of mouth. On average, PWoM has a 22% effect, while NWoM has a 16% effect. In other words, if you start from a position of 0% – that is to say, you have no intention of switching from your established restaurant, for example, then it will take just under five recommendations or six-and-a-bit criticisms to make you change. The warmth of the criticism or recommendation will obviously change that percentage, but we’re talking averages here.

Most people actually start from an average position a little over 50%. We’re not especially averse to making a switch or trying new things. Therefore, two recommendations or three criticisms are enough to make Mr/Ms Average jump.

What does this mean for marketers involved in using social media to help their brands? It is a lot more effective to encourage supporters than it is to try to convert or discourage critics. You only need to create two evangelists to win new customers, whereas you’ll have to convert or discourage three critics. In addition, your brand evangelist is likely to recommend three times more often than your brand assassin is likely to criticise. Add those two together and the evangelist has four times the power of a critic. Take marketers and PR people engaging with blogs, for example. Going along to a critic’s site and countering all their objections is arguably a lot less effective than going to a neutral observer’s site and thanking them for their work and feeding them with new information and other rewards. In an ideal world, of course, they’d be able to do both, but most companies have limited resources in one way or another and this research gives a valuable steer to what might be the best use of their time.

This is quite counter-intuitive. Companies are terrified of “bad PR” but maybe, while it’s not true that there’s ‘no such thing’, it’s not actually what they should be focused on.

One last point. According to Professor East’s research, solicited word of mouth – e.g. I ask you which phone to buy – has around 1.5X the effect of unsolicited word of mouth e.g. you tell me I *must* see this film. That is good news for marketers interested in viral campaigns. Even if I’m not asking for your opinion, your words have only 33% less power than if I was.