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It seems that the BBC website is about to get a makeover that will integrate ’social media’ to a much greater extent.

I think most people generally acknowledge that social media isn’t just a passing fad and that it’s here to stay, but further integration in one of the UK’s biggest and most visited websites will surely take adoption to new levels.

And to be honest, I’m surprised that it has taken the BBC so long to make this move. It’s not just the BBC either. Other major media websites have been slow to adopt social elements on their sites and I’m not quite sure why.

Even really simple elements are either missing or are cumbersome. Try tweeting about an article or sharing content on Facebook directly from a website – it’s really hard to do, and this makes no sense. [Brand Republic is one of my real bugbears - there is no option to tweet an article, no RSS feed and the URLs are ridiculously long!]

Surely the benefits of social media are clear – just ask a site like Mashable or Econsultancy. And whilst these sites are clearly ahead of the curve in terms of user adoption, the Facebook generation is well and truly mainstream.

Harnessing this ’social power’ is the challenge for the BBC and its competitors. And its competitors better watch out, because it sounds as though the new site developments could be yet another game changer.

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Our interview last week with Computing editor Bryan Glick highlighted the significant changes journalists have seen in the last 10 years.

And there have been further suggestions recently (as if any were needed) that the industry is in a state of flux and some tough decisions will need to be made to secure its future.

Firstly, London’s afternoon freesheet, The London Paper, folded citing poor advertising revenues and, with £12.9m losses, clearly a flawed business plan.

And then, despite the protestations from Rupert Murdoch that newspapers will have to charge for online content in the future, a Harris Interactive survey for Paid:Content UK finds that “if their favourite news site begins charging for access to content, three quarters of people would simply switch to an alternative free news source.”

Just five percent would choose to pay to continue reading the site.

So where is the money coming from? Advertising revenue is down. Print is dead dying. And in a country where we have a free news service provided by BBC, is anyone ever really going to pay for news?

From a PR perspective, we are seeing the changes too. Journalists are less and less willing to leave the office, with 24 hour news-cycles, fewer colleagues and the pressure to be the first to break stories.

News will survive, but PRs (and clients) and journalists (and publishers) need to adapt to the changing environment to survive and thrive.

Yesterday’s post revealed that Facebook is adding features that gives brands more access to users. But Twitter is still the place where brands seem to be dominating.

Some research from Penn University puts some figures on the trend:

“Results from the study found that users employ Twitter to inquire about product information. About 20 percent of the tweets contained product information in the form of asking and providing, thus giving companies a “rich source” of information concerning issues and questions that customers have regarding their products.”

The audience is clearly there and more and more, brands seem to be realising this.

The challenge for Twitter will be whether they can monetise this and begin to capitalise on the potential revenue stream.

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Exhibitions and trade fairs. The ideal opportunity to meet face to face with your target audience? Or a logistical nightmare that just uses up valuable time, effort and expense?

We sat down with three of our clients, each from a different market sector, to harvest their views on the role of the trade fair in today’s marketing mix, the key benefits to getting involved and their top tips on getting them right.

Round table participants:

• Graham North, Commercial Director, Humax
• Cliff Guy, Marketing Director, dotDigital Group
• Sean O’Connell, Head of European Marketing, Kaseya

WF: Why bother to get involved in exhibitions?

GN: We see them primarily as a networking event, giving us with the opportunity to meet up with customers and partners. It’s also a good way to show off our latest products.

CG: I agree with Graham, exhibitions allow us to set up extensive, face-to-face meetings and to demonstrate products.

SOC: For Kaseya, it’s more about generating a buzz, using product launches and conference programmes to demonstrate innovation and market leadership. Lead generation is also an important element.

CG: We also expect any exhibition we get involved in to capture leads for the dotDigital sales team to follow-up. Involvement in seminars and presentations also helps us to raise brand awareness and provide further lead generation channels.

WF: Do you think exhibitions and events are still important?

GN: I think you need to be selective. For us, some key trade shows are important for networking and showing your peers, partners and competitors you are fully involved in the market.  Not being there can quickly send out a negative message to the rest of the industry.

SOC: Exhibitions definitely have their place, but only once all the other marketing disciplines are working well for your organisation. There’s no point spending money on exhibitions if you’re a small company or start-up until you have a good number of customers and can spend the money required to get it right.

WF: What’s your top piece of advice about using exhibitions?

GN: Check out who is attending, from both an exhibitor perspective and also the target customer. If your main competitors are there and your target customers are attending, then you should definitely be there too.

SOC: Don’t expect to come away with “ready to buy” leads. An exhibition should be thought about as part of a long term lead generation and awareness strategy. The people who attend exhibitions tend to be influencers and not buyers, and they generally come to exhibitions to see what is ‘new’. As a result, it’s probably going to be 12 to 18 months before they are in a position to buy.

GN: That can also be the case with the digital TV industry. And going back to Sean’s point about spending money to get it right, I agree that if you can’t afford to do the show well, then you shouldn’t do it at all; a poor display will have the opposite impact to that you want to achieve.

CG: For dotDigital it’s all about being able to measure the impact – as should be the case with any marketing activity.  Make sure you carefully track the return on investment from every event you attend, so you can learn exactly which kind of activity and approach, at which particular events, reaps the best rewards for your business.

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Ten years in PR got me in a nostalgic mood this month. 1999 was a year of faxing press releases, sending out ‘trannies’ & wining and dining media contacts.

Now? The way we reach audiences has changed dramatically with immediate information, online news, social media, IM and exploding inboxes.

And it got me thinking about the changing way in which the world of a journalist has changed, so I asked Bryan Glick, editor of Computing, to give us his insights.

How has the job of a journalist changed in the last 10 years?

Louise brings back memories by mentioning faxed press releases! I remember the three-inch stack of fading, curled-up fax papers someone had to check in case there was a nugget of news we missed. Today, I couldn’t even tell you what our fax number is.

In 2000, I was one of 32 journalists on Computing. Our lives were dictated by the number of pages sent to the printers each day, and the copy deadlines that demanded. Computing was 100+ pages every week. About six months after I joined, our editor announced that VNU had purchased the URL www.computing.co.uk, and we would be launching a web site. With hindsight, few of us really grasped what that would eventually mean.

There were plenty of short-lived but well-paid online news sites emerging, but print was the place to be. Dot com magazines such as Industry Standard, Red Herring and Business 2.0 were 250 pages thick. There were ultra-niche titles such as Network News, Unix & NT System News, IBM User, DEC User, and plenty more. Within three years most of them had gone to the wall, and the longstanding, established brands such as Computing and Computer Weekly were the survivors, but in an environment that had changed entirely and has not stopped changing yet.

Stories came from getting out of the office and meeting contacts. Each reporter’s aim was to fill his or her quota of stories with minimal reference to press releases. Re-writing releases or regurgitating another publication’s stories was anathema.

The big brands are still here of course, and by comparison with some we are doing well, but Computing and Computer Weekly are both regularly 24 pages in print. Now we serve a bigger audience on the web than the economics of printing could allow in a magazine. I’m editing web stories to hourly deadlines, and the weekly print cycle fits around that when it can. I’m also running web seminars, filming videos, recording podcasts, writing and editing blogs, doing whatever it is we all do on Twitter, and on and on.

What impact do you see the internet is having on publishing?

So without a doubt the biggest changes have been the move online, the immediacy of news, the daily interaction with readers on the web, and most of all the fragmentation of the market. The changes have been exciting of course – I write about how technology is changing the business world, but the irony is that I work in an industry that is being changed more by technology every day than almost any other. Ten years ago you could pick up a meaty issue of Computing and find out everything you needed to know about the past week in UK IT and barely need another source of news. Today that concept seems fairly quaint to anybody who has entered the industry since that time.

And the role of the journalist?   How has that been impacted by the move online?

Traditionally, journalists were trained to be gatekeepers of information relevant to their readers – they used their privileged position to analyse all the information they could find, then using their judgement decided which was the most important to impart to readers.

But today, readers have access to the majority of that information through the web and share it through social media, increasingly bypassing “traditional” journalism. So, the role of the journalist must change from gatekeeper to curator; from news source to centre of debate; from purveyor of the facts to analyst or commenter.

A successful journalist in the internet era will be measured by the authority and opinion they have on their subject matter, and that will be gauged in part by the sphere of influence they have among relevant social media, as well as by the quality of what they write. A successful journalist is the centre of an active community of interest, not simply a passive observer with a notebook.

However, one thing that has not changed and is still the measure of the best journalists, is their contacts book. A top journalist with trusted access to the people that matter will still set the agenda.

What are the challenges that you face as a publication/ news outlet?

Not all the internet era of journalism is good. The pressure for web traffic means that it is difficult to resist the siren call of the Google search box. The agenda is increasingly set by quality not quantity – the more sites that write about the same news item, the more important an algorithm deems it to be in the search rankings. That just promotes the dreaded “churnalism”, press release re-writes and rehashing of rivals’ stories. Getting the balance right is a huge challenge for editors.

Today, my team on Computing is eight people. As we – and every other publication – face the perfect storm of low-cost online advertising on one side and the recession on the other, we have had to learn to live with the fewest resources in our history. There is no room for slackers.

Has the way you engage with tech companies and their PRs changed?

In many ways our relationship with PRs has not changed that much. There are more ways for us to communicate with each other – but that hasn’t reduced the number of press releases I receive (quite the opposite) nor does it make the phone ring any less; nor, unfortunately, does it make the value of most of those PR calls any better.

Do you think PR agencies are adapting to the changing media landscape?

I think PRs are often running to stand still in the changing media environment even more than journalists. PRs’ clients want to be seen to be using the latest trendy social media even before anyone knows what the latest trendy social media is – far before anyone can actually quantify the value it might bring. Trying to monitor, manage and (dare I say it) control the news in such a massively fragmented media space must be a nightmare.

Nonetheless, as with journalism, the basics have not changed. The best PRs are still the ones that take time to understand the publications they work with, and the needs of the audience that journalists serve. If anything, there are more opportunities now to show journalists how valuable PR can be in contributing to our supply chain, one whose raw materials these days consists not just of words and pictures but of video, audio and more.

Whilst traditional public relations focuses on targeting influencers (traditionally, journalists) to convey key messages to audiences, digital and social media channels allow brands to create and distribute content themselves.

Creating and distributing relevant content can be an extremely effective way to reach a specific audience, enabling brands to interact directly with their customers and prospects.

But these new channels require a new mindset that challenges businesses to re-evaluate their corporate communications strategy.

Transparency

Traditional corporate communications was tightly controlled, with official spokespeople making carefully worded statements. But this is a misguided approach for social media. Online, brands need to be prepared to be open, honest and transparent with their ‘community’ or risk damaging consequences, as Spinvox recently found out.

While the ‘anonymity’ of the web makes it easy to pretend to be something you are not, this approach can backfire in a big way. Wal-mart came unstuck a few years ago when they started a blog that was supposedly written by a ‘customer’ – the truth soon came out!

Interaction

In the digital age, marketing and PR no longer needs to be seen as a one-way dialogue (brand to recipient). In fact, social media marketing depends on two-way interactions. Ecnouraging conversation between brand and recipient (and between peers) is key to the effectiveness of any social media or ‘viral’ campaign.

The ‘Motrin Moms‘ fiasco is a great illustration of what can happen if a brand fails to properly consult or engage with its audience. While the company’s ads became the number one discussion trend on Twitter, it was for all the wrong reasons.

Asking your audience for feedback and being willing to take this on board can make any launch more successful – and social media can provide a great platform to begin the discussions.

Responsiveness

It’s worth remembering the traditional Monday to Friday, 9 to 5, doesn’t apply online. If a customer or prospect begins a conversation with a brand on a social media channel, it’s important to engage quickly and directly.

There are numerous examples of where brands have been slow to respond to backlash only to see the situation spiral out of control very quickly. Habitat is a good example. When the furnishings company let an intern loose on Twitter, there was a lot of anger directed towards the ignorant tweets the brand sent out and yet it took the company a long time to respond. The response itself was good, but just far, far too late!

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Facebook took another step towards Twitter this week with the introduction of @ replies. Similar to its utilisation on Twitter, this allows users to directly reference other friends in their updates. This action also sends a notification to the person mentioned and the post appears on their wall.

Facebook has called the process ‘tagging’ but this will fool no-one!

This will potentially signal the start of a new way for brands to interact more closely with ‘followers’ on the social network. Facebook is still very much a ‘closed’ system as opposed to Twitter’s more open approach, but the move is still significant. Users can @reply or tag brands they are fans of and the mention will also appear on the brand’s wall.

Facebook isn’t standing still at the moment and it’ll be interesting to see the other features that are added in due course and what the effect will be for brands looking to build relationships with Facebook users.

We are often telling clients about the importance of search engine optimisation (SEO) as they establish themselves as experts or leading companies in their fields. And as a PR agency, we see the benefits from effective SEO ourselves in our own high Google rank.

As Google dominates in the UK with its market share, having a website optimised for Google searches is essential in gaining valuable web traffic. But how often does an organisation suffer from unwanted attention due to its high standing search result?

The Toronto Ghosts & Hauntings Research Society (TGHRS) is the first I’ve heard of.

Yesterday, in my hometown of Toronto, a woman tragically fell to her death as she was ghost hunting in a Toronto landmark. As the news hit, many curious people went online to find more information. When you type in “Toronto ghost hunting” into Google, the TGHRS are the first couple results that pop up.

The TGHRS website surged in traffic from all the searches and they were inundated with interview requests from the media, despite having no connection to the case or without previously mentioning any ghost sightings in that specific building. They were so overwhelmed with attention that they had to post a press release on their landing page!

Although this is a tragic story, it is a good example of the power of being in the top high ranking results on the Google search engine.

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For the second year in a row, five Wildthings will be taking to the streets of London as part of Byte Night to sleep rough for a night (with quite a few other people in the PR/Media IT industry), all in aid of Action for Children.

We’ll be in the fortunate position of only having to do it for one night with plenty of warm clothes, hot drinks and brollies, but plenty of children sleep rough every night without such luxuries so we’d be really grateful for any support you can give.

Last year, our clients, partners, friends and family helped us raise over £5,000 which helped contribute to the £470,000 that was raised in total. This year we are hoping to go one better! We’ll be working hard to raise even more with car boot sales, car cleaning, face painting and cake decorating at the Surbiton Fair, amongst other things.

Donating is easy: just go to http://www.justgiving.com/wildfire2009/

Thanks in advance for your support.