Hat tip T’internet PR & Advertising

Gaming is one of those subjects it is so easy to have an extreme and uninformed view on. I love this from Australia, via ZeFrank. Edelman works for Xbox by the way.

What are the big technology trends that will affect the relationship between companies/organisations and their customers/stakeholders over the next five years? Not the new applications, or individual start-ups, but the big trends. Here is my first go at this (with due thanks to my colleagues) and would love to know yours.

• The arrival of the first digital generation into college and the workforce. My daughter started using the net at age five when she could manipulate a mouse well enough to play Club Pengiun. The internet only really began to be useful to non-techies or academics in about 1994. This means that those born in 1989 are the first truly digital generation in that the net has been there from the start for them. They are now 19 and only now beginning to make their presence felt in the business and political world. We have not seen anything yet in terms of on-line participation and activism…it has only just begun.

• More stuff and more useful stuff. To read the popular press’ take on technology, you might get the impression that we are at the end of something in terms of how technology has become part of our lives at home as well as at work and that it is all a bit of a fad and normal service will soon be resumed and geek stuff will revert to the background again. In reality, we are only at the beginning and there will be more applications, platforms, programmes and gadgets not less and the rate of their development and launch will increase not decrease. One of the first outcomes has to be even more ‘intrusion’, ‘interaction’, ‘conversation’ or ‘relationship’ between consumers and stakeholders and the organisations those consumers and stakeholders think are important to them (rather than the other way around).

• Mobile. We are tantalisingly close to a time when pretty much all we can do via broadband and a laptop could be done via mobile devices. When these two worlds collide (notwithstanding the totally different business models of mobile service providers and ISPs) we will have the potential to be always on and super-local (I’m think with GPS and geo-tagging here). One small example of what this means to companies is that we will be able to see consumer reviews of restaurants on our PDA as we stand outside looking at the menu.

• The reinvention of TV and the couch as the family control centre. Given that the technology to link the TV with the internet is here already and in gaming and music there exist two applications in addition to old style TV programming and movie viewing that are capable of driving us back together, it seems natural that families will choose to project themselves as a unit to companies and organisations in the future. Purchasing items like holidays probably already occasions family clusters around the PC, but these would become much easier if the couch more routinely boasted a remote mouse as well as a TV remote control. Family video conferences at Christmas and holiday time to relatives and friends around the world are one use (again, technically doable now) and imagine the power of a whole family lined up on coach to complain on-line in video about a duff service they had all received.

This appeared in the latest issue of Profile magazine, the CIPR’s (Chartered Institute of Public Relations) venerable organ. I’ve linked here but for some reason it is behind a firewall. We are still looking for all levels of talent in China and in Asia so if you fancy going to where the action really is, contact alan.vandermolen@edelman.com. Working in Asia was about the best thing I did for my career and it could be for yours too. Here and here for previous rants on the subject.

A practitioner’s life in a People’s Republic
Jacquie Kane MCIPR

If you had asked me a year ago if I thought I’d be swapping the gentle grandeur of Edinburgh’s New Town for an office on the 29th floor of a skyscraper overlooking downtown Shanghai, I’d have said you were daft. But here I find myself; a trailing spouse who landed a job working for an international PR firm in the world’s most talked about economy, China.

Moving from the comfort of a mature public relations market with a free press to a still developing market where government influence over media is ever-present, I wasn’t entirely sure how much this would impact on the day-to-day job of a PR practitioner. But I’ve been pleasantly surprised.

The Chinese professional communications marketplace is a complex beast. There are multiple players and it’s highly competitive. PR firms operating here range from sophisticated international firms like Edelman, offering strategic counsel on the digital media space and stakeholder engagement programmes, to smaller domestic start-ups that focus more on execution-level work. Durable differentiation is critical.

The key differentiator is intellectual capital - investing in research and people to understand the drivers of reputation, and the trusted information channels in an incredibly complex and dynamic market.

Understanding how this diverse sector works has been one of my biggest challenges.

China is the largest newspaper market in the world with 75 per cent of the 100 top selling dailies. It has 2,200 newspapers, 7,000 magazines, 700 conventional TV stations, 3,000 cable TV channels, 1,300+ radio stations, and with 173 million broadband connections, an estimated 55 million internet users are actively blogging on BBS. The statistics are simply staggering.

And news-values are completely different. State-influence changes the nature of what is considered to be newsworthy, the well-known cliché of celebrities attending the opening of a paper bag, sometimes rings true for China. There is an insatiable media hunger for opening events, unveilings and promotional shows for all manner of products.

But the media is gradually westernizing, not only through more investigative and in-depth reporting in quality business journals but also through increased financial independence. Drastically reduced financial support from the Government is being supplanted by advertising and sponsorship although their ownership and influence remains. Thus there is an increasing need for media to capture and retain audience through compelling and entertaining news.

Another major difference is the quality of some of the journalism. There is a high turnover among journalists making durable, deep relationships difficult to develop. This is in part because journalists are young, generally inexperienced and poorly paid. This lack of journalistic experience, industry knowledge, discipline to fully investigate all sides of a story, in combination with reliance on single unsubstantiated sources can lead to frequent, major errors in reporting. ‘Cut and Paste’ journalism, often relying on online sources, is common practice.

As befits a financial and commercial hub like Shanghai, my work engages me with many foreign multinational companies already operating in China. But there are also an increasing number of Chinese firms seeking to expand internationally that come to us for strategic counsel.

Educating international firms about how best to build reputations for businesses and products in China and vice versa for Chinese firms looking to break into overseas markets, is a key part of our communications offering. And one I really enjoy as many domestic companies have never felt the need for strategic PR until now.

At the moment, the Beijing Olympics are a priority and we work for three of the 12 top sponsors helping them to gain the reputational benefits that come as a result of association with the Games. But it’s not all commercial brands, there are a growing number of overseas government agencies beating a path to China hoping to attract inward investment; the Mayor of Chicago and the Canadian Province of British Columbia to name but a few that we advise. With the Shanghai World Expo in 2010 just around the corner, no doubt this will continue.

So the client mix is as diverse as in the UK but one of the noticeable differences is the pace - demanding. Because China is in the throws of such rapid economic growth, speedy responses and breakneck turnaround rates on client work is what’s needed, and can make the difference between winning and losing a new piece of business. 24/7 truly means open for business around the clock here.

But despite all these challenges, China is a new frontier for public relations. I am relishing every moment of it.

Thanks to Forrester Research for this chart. It confirms previous Edelman data about the leadership of France over Germany and the UK in participation of ‘blog culture’. Germany and UK are strikingly similar in their habits it seems.

Nice chart from Valerie Maltoni. Someone please tell me I do not have to know what all these things are or how they are different. Apparently something called fubar.com grew by 3,272,217% in the last year. Who knew? I was spending too much time hanging out with just 629,530 other people on Twitter, a comparatively intimate little group it now seems.

Hat tip: Conversation Agent

BBC’s revelation of security issues with Facebook:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7376738.stm

Few can have escaped the Rick Roll – Rick Astley video viral meme. How an earth did that start? Here’s a new one (to me) below. And here’s Anthony on the subject.

I realised this morning that my feed aggregator had moved into my very short list of mission critical tools. I cannot work without my laptop; my mobile (I can easily do without the landline); Microsoft Office – email, Word, PowerPoint and Excel and regular top-ups of tea. To this list I have just added Netvibes which has been down for ‘improvement’ for the last two mornings.

The thing is, I (actually Edelman) pay for all of the items on that list except for the aggregator which like so many other things in the ‘cloud’ is free. And as an old colleague commented on Twitter ( which like Facebook is definitely not mission critical just addictive/vaguely useful) “that’s what happens when you rely on free services for work: there’s no one to blame!” Free services do not come with the same commitment and there is very little real customer service beyond a blog and F&Qs for most of them and let’s face it, they do go down a lot or suffer ‘improvement’ periods frequently.

It’s a timely reminder for all the talk about everything going into the ‘cloud’ and the fond idea that we will not have to pay for any of this, that I quite like the comfort of a service contract and phone number to call so I can shout at someone and hopefully get things fixed . . . I know I know, very old school and 1.0 but is anyone from Netvibes really going to ‘listen’ to this post and do anything useful now? Of course not. Contract and payment still means a commitment to service and reliability I just don’t believe in yet from most free web-based services (Google might be an exception).

So because I am too lazy to look up all those urls I will go into the day not knowing:

What the brilliant Colin Byrne has read and thought about on his train into town this morning
What’s happening at Microsoft courtesy of Steve Clayton
What Tory middle England thinks via Ellee Seymour
What’s really happening at Manchester City with Sven Goran Eriksson
What the Obama and Clinton campaigns are claiming and counterclaiming
the latest darkly funny comic creation of Hugh MacLeod
Mark Borkowski’s view of the entertainment industry and what the tabloids are dishing up
If Jonny has published another fiendishly clever paper on influence or analyst league table

And many, many more things …