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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

When Facebook made changes to its privacy policy back in December I commented on how I felt this was a sign that the network was attempting to take advantage of some of the success that Twitter had been achieving of late.

Yesterday, Facebook introduced a new feature that essentially allows its users to ‘retweet’ information that has been shared. This doesn’t apply yet to status updates or pictures for example, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see this coming in the future.

This is yet another move in Twitter’s direction, so why is Facebook worried?

• Twitter for business – Twitter is the opposite to Facebook’s walled garden – it is totally open, anyone whether you are a pigeon, a brand or even a bridge, can join. This is in contrast to Facebook’s previously strict joining rules. Facebook fan pages and groups are the key battleground here as Facebook looks to get in on the ‘business action’
• Real-time – Twitter’s inclusion in Google and Bing real-time search results will possibly be a defining moment for the company. Facebook will be eager to get in on the real-time bandwagon, but it has real problems with privacy…
• Privacy and openness – users on Twitter are encouraged to keep their updates public and the vast majority do. Facebook again is polar opposite here with the majority of users traditionally keeping their profiles hidden and viewable only by friends. This opt-in model presents real problem for Facebook

So does Facebook need to be worried? Not yet.

Facebook is still growing and its user figures world wide are substantially more than Twitter (indeed in some areas, Twitter’s growth is slowing quite quickly).

But Facebook is at a junction in its development. It needs to decide whether it continues to cherry pick the best bits from other ‘pretenders to the throne’ or whether it sticks to its guns and innovates and develops with its loyal user base front of mind. And with the attraction of real-time and local-search, choosing the former path might be appealing.

However, I can’t help but think the latter is the best option and that merely trying to dumb down to match Twitter and whoever comes along next will just end up infuriating users and creating a ‘Myspace’ like network where no one is particularly sure what it is and where they are…

Leading analyst firm Gartner has revealed it’s IT and technology predictions for 2010 and beyond.

From social networking and green computing to mobile and marketing, the predictions are wide ranging and varied. Here are the headline findings; more detail can be found in the press release:

• By 2012, 20 percent of businesses will own no IT assets.
• By 2012, India-centric IT services companies will represent 20 percent of the leading cloud aggregators in the market (through cloud service offerings).
• By 2012, Facebook will become the hub for social network integration and Web socialization.
• By 2014, most IT business cases will include carbon remediation costs.
• In 2012, 60 percent of a new PC’s total life greenhouse gas emissions will have occurred before the user first turns the machine on.
• Internet marketing will be regulated by 2015, controlling more than $250 billion in Internet marketing spending worldwide.
• By 2014, over 3 billion of the world’s adult population will be able to transact electronically via mobile or Internet technology.
• By 2015, context will be as influential to mobile consumer services and relationships as search engines are to the Web.
• By 2013, mobile phones will overtake PCs as the most common Web access device worldwide.

picture credit

There has been a lot of noise in the last few weeks about how Twitter’s growth, particularly in the US, has levelled off.

But new research from Sysomos reveals that in the rest of the world at least, the micro-blogging service is as popular as ever.

The study, conducted during October and December 2009 found that the number of US unique users was 50.8%, a sharp drop from 62.1% in June 2009 – suggesting that there has been significant growth elsewhere in the globe:

“For location, the most significant difference in users was a surge in Brazil, which accounted for 8.8% of unique users, an increase of more than four-fold from 2% in June. Twitter users in Indonesia accounted for 2.4% of the population, compared with less than 0.5%, while Twitter users in Germany rose to 2.5% from 1.5%.”

When cities were examined, London still leads the way with the biggest population in terms of unique users (2.08%), while Los Angeles has 1.63%, Sao Paulo (1.47%), New York (1.44%) and Chicago (1.2%). Despite London’s lead in terms of users, the UK capital is pipped by New Yorkers when it comes to the number of tweets generated – make what you will of that one!

These are interesting statistics, but what can we learn? It seems that the rest of the world is really getting the micro-blogging bug and usage is certainly increasing outside the US. Detractors point to the fact that usage in the US is actually slowing quickly, but as all good PRs know, it’s not necessarily about the numbers, but the power of the influencers in the audience that really matters.

At times of extreme weather and travel disruption, the issue of remote working for business owners and workers alike jumps to the forefront of our minds.

GMTV are touting the stat that £600m per day is being lost by the disruption to UK business due to the snow. And research that Wildfire is promoting this week on behalf of our client Citrix GoToMyPC, highlights that while 78% of small and medium-sized business thought they were prepared for the snow, 57% have still suffered.

No one can argue that we don’t have the technology to enable remote working these days. VPNs, smartphones, Webmail, remote access software are all widely available.

So what’s the problem?

Well, it’s often largely down to the culture of the business you work for and the still present lack of trust in employees to actually be productive when bosses aren’t there to keep an eye on them. Or perhaps concerns about security and sensitive data. But until today I wouldn’t have even thought that the ISPs themselves would get in the way of effective homeworking, as the internet is the key enabler of the shift to more flexible working.

But not Sky it seems. After a lot of deliberation, I bundled all my home communications with Sky at the end of last year, and since then have been puzzled why I can’t get access to my VPN, so have struggled through with Webmail. But today I discovered that Sky maintains its service is solely for domestic use and therefore blocks all VPN ports.

WTF?!

For someone who is juggling raising a family with running a business, working from home is an absolute must, so clearly I will not be letting this matter rest. My IT guy is looking for a way round it and today I will be trialing GoToMyPC for Mac (which launches today) and hopefully getting some work done.

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Julian March, executive producer at Sky News Online, has revealed to Journalism.co.uk that Tweetdeck (the leading Twitter desktop client) will be installed “on all staff machines within a month”.

Sky has been slowly increasing its use of Twitter having appointed a ‘Twitter correspondent’ last year and rolling out the @skynewsbreak account.

March states:

“The big change for us in 2010 is evolving how social media plays a role in our journalism. We no longer ghettoise it to one person, but are in the process of embedding throughout the whole team…”

At Wildfire, we’ve seen a huge increase in the number of journalists using Twitter over the last year or so. There are a number of reasons for this. We’ve seen journalists using Twitter to publicise their recent articles, communicate directly with their readers and also, increasingly, to source stories or find spokespeople.

For a PR, this is a really exciting development. I now talk to journalists on Twitter every single day. Not just about work-related issues, but anything that comes up – from cricket to snow. This enables us all to build closer relationships with the journalists we work with.

In the tech sector, where technologies like this are adopted quickly by journalists, this has been a common exercise for a while now.

The move by Sky suggests that more and more journalists will soon be on Twitter, which can only be a good thing for all of us in the PR industry.