Wildfire Tech PR Blog – Business and Consumer Technology Public Relations

The Guardian’s editor-in-chief, Alan Rusbridger is always good for a quote or two. He also, in my humble opinion, speaks a lot of sense about journalism, digital and technology; how the three are coming together and what they each mean for those in the media industry.

So his Hugh Cudlipp Lecture looking at the future of journalism was obviously going to be an interesting read, and it is. You can read the full text here, but I thought I’d highlight the most interesting bits:

Paywalls

The paywall debate just won’t go away and was fueled yesterday by rumours that Murdoch is to sell The Times because he knows that paywalls just won’t work. Rusbridger himself has some very interesting things to say on the issue:

“If you erect a universal pay wall around your content then it follows you are turning away from a world of openly shared content. Again, there may be sound business reasons for doing this, but editorially it is about the most fundamental statement anyone could make about how newspapers see themselves in relation to the newly-shaped world.”

“The second issue it [paywalls] raises is the one of ‘authority’ versus ‘involvement’. Or, more crudely, ‘Us versus Them’… Here the tension is between a world in which journalists considered themselves – and were perhaps considered by others – special figures of authority. We had the information and the access; you didn’t. You trusted us filter news and information and to prioritise it – and to pass it on accurately, fairly, readably and quickly. That state of affairs is now in tension with a world in which many (but not all) readers want to have the ability to make their own judgments; express their own priorities; create their own content; articulate their own views; learn from peers as much as from traditional sources of authority. Journalists may remain one source of authority, but people may also be less interested to receive journalism in an inert context – ie which can’t be responded to, challenged, or knitted in with other sources.”

Rusbridger goes on to give an example of how a paywall would have presented a challenge for the Guardian in its breaking of the Google China story recently. It’s an example that is worth noting from a PR viewpoint as well:

“Had there been a universal pay wall around the Guardian that would have been a difficult story to handle.- Wait and publish in print? But we knew that Google was about to post the story on its own blog at 6pm Eastern.- Publish digitally and hope that people would buy a day pass to read it? But in the time it took to key in your credit card the essence of the story would have been Twittered into global ubiquity. It is one of the clichés of the new world that most scoops have a life expectancy of about three minutes. A valuable three minutes for the FT or the Wall Street Journal if it’s market sensitive information. Most people, with most information, and without subscriptions paid for by their companies, are happy to wait.”

Journalists v bloggers v readers

One of the themes he keeps coming back to is whether journalists can now expect to be seen as the gatekeepers or the voice of authority. In a social media world, this is surely impossible and futile.

“Many of the Guardian’s most interesting experiments at the moment lie in this area of combining what we know, or believe, or think, or have found out, with the experience, range, opinions, expertise and passions of the people who read us, or visit us or want to participate rather than passively receive.”

He mentions liveblogs, crowd-sourcing, Comment is Free etc. as ways in which the Guardian is innovating and changing the way it delivers content.

As for me, this is the key for journalism. Yes print will die and yes, the digital age is a real challenge for publishers. But, it is also an opportunity. Publishers like the Guardian that don’t just go for the quick financial win (think paywalls) and try to provide value not found elsewhere are surely the ones that will end up thriving.

I blogged last week about the new version of Forrester’s Social Technographics that has just been unveiled.

If you haven’t come across them before, Social Technographics allow you to identify how certain users or segments of users participate in social technologies. As Bernoff explains:

“Social Technographics was carefully constructed, not as a segmentation, but as a profile (that is, the groups overlap). That’s because the actual data told me that people participate in multiple behaviors, and not everyone at a higher level on the ladder actually does everything in the lower rungs.”

Now Charlene Li and Jeremiah Owyang (both formerly of Forrester and now at Altimeter) have released a really interesting presentation called ‘Understand your customers behaviours’.

The main thrust of the presentation, the slides and video of which you can see below, is to focus on a thorough understanding of your audience rather than looking at specific technologies or tactics. This is very much our philosophy when putting together PR campaigns at Wildfire, so is great to see it shared in such a clear and detailed way.

Li and Owyang suggest you ask the following questions before embarking on an online campaign:

1. Where are your customers online?
2. What are your customers’ social behaviours online?
3. What social information or people do your customers rely on?
4. What is your customers’ social influence? Who trusts them?
5. How do your customers use social technologies in the context of your products?

We’ve really hit the ground running at Wildfire HQ in 2010, so we’re now looking for a fantastic senior account exec to join our growing team.

We want someone who’s oozing creative flair, has a great sense of humour and is eager to work with a driven, but friendly group of PRs who really know their stuff. You’ll also need a minimum of two years experience, with strong contacts in the IT and business press and a passion for digital and social media.

In return, we offer a very competitive salary plus a range of benefits and training opportunities.

If you’re up for joining one of the UK’s brightest and fastest growing young tech agencies, send us your CV or drop us a line or a tweet to find out more.

A brand new Twitter client launched today, claiming to bring Twitter to the masses. Seesmic Look comes from the French company Seesmic who already have a number of desktop and web clients to their name.

Seesmic Look is a Windows desktop client (Microsoft are partners in the venture, in the same week that a certain Mr Gates joined Twitter no less!) that is essentially a slimmed down version of a Twitter client. It looks great: really slick and very 2.0 but without any of the scary features and long, tedious setup you might find on the more serious Twitter clients.

Seesmic has also signed up a number of other partners all of whom can feature their Twitter account as a ‘channel’ on the application – these include a number of media companies – including the Huffington Post, Kodak, Red Bull, CNN Money, SOTS, and Time.

Having had a quick play with it, the software is certainly very impressive. It is easy to do a number of different tasks, but the functionality isn’t what you would expect from a traditional Twitter client so does take a bit of getting used to. However, for Twitter newbies, this won’t matter of course.

Getting the application to the masses will be more of a challenge for Seesmic, but as long as they can overcome this not insurmountable, but cumbersome obstacle – I’m sure Microsoft will help – there is no reason why Seesmic Look won’t do the business.

Following various reports over the last few weeks about the state of Twitter’s popularity, today Hubspot has released its third ‘State of the Twittersphere‘ report.

The report is based on the 5 million Twitter accounts and 6 million tweets that Hubspot collects through its Twitter Grader tool and therefore is based on some fairly solid data. It also compares performance to its two previous reports released earlier in 2009.

So what does it tell us?

• Growth has fallen from a high of 13% in March of 2009 to 3.5% in October 2009, the most recent month for which we have data – note this is still growth, just not as fast as at the site’s peak in 2009
• In the last seven months, the average Twitter account holder has become “less of a newbie”. Why is this? The report suggests: “The change may be a reflection of the slowing growth rate. Because of the slowing growth, today’s population of Twitter users has been using the tool longer than the population several months ago.”
  • Today the average Twitter account has 300 followers; in July 2009, it had 70
  • The average account now follows 173 accounts; in July 2009 it was only following 4
  • The average account today has posted 420 updates; in July 2009 that number was 119
• There is better adherence to ‘best practices’
  • 53% of users had their bio completed (compared to 24% in July 2009)
  • 65% had their location (compared to 31%)
  • 41% had their web address added (compared to 20%)
• As with the previous Sysomos research, Twitter’s international reach is increasing; 15% of the top 20 Twitter locations in July 2009 were outside North America, now that figure stands at 40%
• In terms of user characteristics, there were some other really interesting stats:
  • 82% of Twitter users have less than 100 followers
  • 81% of Twitter users are following less than 100 people
  • Thursday and Friday are the most active days on Twitter, each accounting for 16% of total tweets
  • 10-11 pm is the most active hour on Twitter, accounting for 4.8% of the tweets in an average day – I’m assuming this is across time zones as it is not referenced specifically in the report