Well in the case of a Facebook fan page this can literally be true!

Read my latest Birmingham Post column to find out why.

I can help but think that if Sky add three celebrity judges, a premium rate phone vote and put on a ‘results’ show, an hour later to remove the worst ‘candidate’ from the next debate- they could have a seriously good game show on their hands!

Admittedly the studio audiences are not allowed to heckle or clap, but the x-factor-meets-blind-date format is starting to disturbing me.

Judging by the subsequent plethora of posts on PR agency blogs after each debate, the election will be won and lost on the best performer in these debates.

But judging the acts, sorry I mean ‘priministerial candidate’ on how well they listened to their PR trainers is not a good way of choosing a government.

We all seem to be obsessed with discussing this charisma contest rather than the future of the country – perhaps that is because it is too hard.

Old media has long since turned elections into personal popularity polls, where the personality of the candidates and how good looking their wife is, seems to become more important factors than the policies of their parties.

Meanwhile the real political debate is happening in social media. Follow the tag #leadersdebate on Twitter before, during and after the final debate and you’ll see real enguagment and quite a few expletives too!

During last nights show alone, 117 thousand live comments were tweeted featuring the above hash tag  (source @Tweetminster).

And a real debate – i.e with more than the half dozen carefully fielded questions and only three people allowed to speak – is happening on Facebook too, but not on the parties official pages.

The Conservatives seem to be winning the Facebook war, with 53K fans to their official page, the LibDems close behind with 50K and Labour languishing with a megur 27K ( as of 22/4/2010).

It is worth visiting these pages just to see which of your friends’ mugs appear as fans divulging their political persuasion. Note: I have become a fan of all three parties while researching this blog – in case you see mine.

However, in true X-factor style the ‘We got Rage Against the Machine to #1, we can get the LibDems into office!” unofficial discussion group out trumps them all with 134K members so far, where a lively pro Nick Clegg debate is raging.

However, given that the original RATM campaign gained 500K+ followers you could say that more people cared about getting Simon Cowell off the Xmas #1 spot than getting Nick Clegg into number 10! Which is an interesting measure of the nations interest in the election outcome

(More election fun can be found at Facebook’s own ‘Democracy UK’ page where there is even an App to help you decide whom to vote for!)

With UK electoral turnouts on the decline, some argue that the TV debate will improved the population’s engagement with the political process and records turns will result on election day.

But if they are voting on superficial style, not policy, this will be a hollow victory for UK democracy.

Since last August, Mr Murdoch has been threatening to charge for access to The Sun and Times Online by erecting a so-called ‘paywall’ around the online versions of his publications.

Read: Simon Heath’s blog Murdoch on the defensive (6/08/2009) for background.

So why has he not done so yet?

The question is – given so many free alternatives, the BBC and Google News for instance, will people stump up the cash? Even Mr Murdoch is not sure of the answer.

The likely scenario is that if a paywall goes up, no one will visit the sites and advertisers, the major source of News Corps’s revenue, will go elsewhere.

The crux of the matter is this: old-fashioned newspaper moguls are used to having their cake and eating it.

Back in Jurassic era, they could monetise news and monetise audiences at the same time. They charged their subscribers for content then sold them, or at least their attention, to advertisers.

The industry blames tight consumers for not wanting to pay for “quality” journalism, but perhaps they have just wised up to this double wammy.

I personally think paying £30 a month for Sky Sports to watch England play cricket is a bit steep. But then to be subjected to an advert between every over is taking the mickey.

Murdoch understandably hates the BBC because they don’t have to make this choice between subscribers and advertisers. They don’t need advertisers because UK law makes anyone who owns a television their subscribers.

His gripe against Google is even more understandable, they being the rather large cuckoo that has taking over his media nest. But to prevent people from finding his content via search engines would decimate traffic to his websites and devalue their advertising real-estate.

No, the only way Murdoch can safely put up a paywall and bar Google, is if all his competitors do so at the same time and that is unlikely to happen.

Related links : Anna Blackaby – Problem with great paywall of News International

Update: 19-Nov-2009

Seems Rupert hasn’t taken my advice – further plans for the Murdoch paywall have been revealed according to Brand Republic article.

However, how many people do you know would be prepared to pay £1 a day to access the Times Website ?

friend has created a jargon free online PR guide for busy MD’s.

“Thanks to social media, good public relations (PR) has never been more important for your business.

People now listen to each other rather than your advertisements; good corporate social responsibility has moved to the top of the political agenda and thanks to the blogosphere, everyone is now a publisher!”

Read more here The Reluctant MD’s Guide to Online PR

Who are you going to call?

Well, if you can’t get hold of Ghostbusters, there is always Wragge & Co!

The leading Birmingham law firm has setup a Cyber Tracing team to bring those heinous bloggers, who are hiding behind the anonymity of electronic communication, to justice.

Using their special powers, sorry, I mean UK legislation, to force ISPs to handover the real names behind the anonymous blogging accounts.

Well, if that sounds too expensive, you can always take the PR approach to online reputation management.

Most sensible people will always take a ranting blogger with a pinch of salt and if they are posting anonymously their credibility will be especially low.

Of course some bloggers are incredibly influential and cannot be ignored.

We can assess the influence of a blogger in many ways. The number of readers he/she has. Our the number of comments and contributors to their blog and perhaps most importantly the number of people linking to it.

If the latter is high, their blog might start to appear at the top of Google when people are searching for you – then it’s time to act.

Now let’s assume defamation has occurred. If they are telling the truth, better apologise and promise to do better in the future. However, unlike traditional media, inaccuracies can be corrected.

Leave a comment on the blog, pointing out the mistakes or offering a rebuttal wont require a visit to court.  Many bloggers will edit or update their post in the light of new information.

If you regard a blog as the start of a discussion or the beginning of a conversation, rather than a published work, suing under defamation laws seems less appropriate.

However, if a blogger refuses to publish your side of the conversation, perhaps it is time to call the team at Wragges!

Be warned, though, true online anonymity isn’t that hard to achieve, unless Wragges know something the serious crime squad and the anti-terrorism people at MI5 don’t.

And let’s not forget that, despite its many misuses, online anonymity is usually regarded as a good thing – ask anyone who lives in Iran for instance.

Actually what am I saying, the woman deserves no sympathy. This is she who wrote an article in Friday’s Daily Mail, sensitively titled “Why there was nothing ‘natural’ about Stephen Gately’s death”.

Cutting to the chase, she concluded that Gately died of being gay – a terrible ‘unnatural’ lifestyle, his death being confirmation of this and that all gay marriages end in disaster, and quite possibly – death.

I won’t get into personal opinion any further you’ll be pleased to hear (however, read Charlie Brooker’s view for a particular angle!).

This story vividly highlights the effectiveness of social networking for galvanising public opinion towards particular issues, in this case homophobia and bad journalism!

More specifically, it demonstrates the power of Twitter not only as a platform for creating campaign content, but also as a channel and mechanism for distributing it.

Within hours on Friday “Jan Moir” and #janmoir were both rocketed to the top of the trending topics on Twitter, and stayed there almost all weekend.

How did this happen?

I can explain it as social media and online PR in action: the result of the interactions of a combination of content creators and retweeters – individuals (you and I) and relevant influencers (bloggers, organisation reps and mainstream online media predominantly).

These individuals and influencers were sharing their retorts while retweeting others’ content at a ferocious pace. More and more people joined what, in effect, had become a focused and successful campaign against Moir.

Influencers like Stephen Fry and Giles Coren added explosive fuel to the campaign.

At one point, Fry retweeted a humourous comment by a blogger which immediately sent thousands of visitors to his website resulting in the said blogger asking Fry not to do it again as it crashed his server!!

The effect of even one influencer can be immense in social media, driving vast amounts of website traffic (as long as your IT can handle it!).

Mainstream online media lent a hand too, in particular The Guardian who were supremely fast to react, putting editorial about it online right as it was happening – creating yet more content to be commented on and retweeted.

Another feature of this campaign is how it evolved and diversified. It often went beyond the initial Moir article, turning heat on The Daily Mail itself for publishing it in the first place (and its record of homophobia, racism, xenophobia and so on).

At some point around midday on Friday a separate campaign evolved on Twitter and now on Facebook, targeting Daily Mail advertisers like BT and Marks & Spencer.

It was pointed out to these brands that they had display ads on the same webpage as Moir’s piece and so were aligning themselves with right-wing bigotry and they should do something about it. And guess what – they did.

And this is the crux of the matter.

This example could easily be interpreted (as social media has so often been in the past) as a flash in the pan. But this argument against social media is wearing thin these days, and this case study proves why.

It was actually Jan Moir herself who summed it up correctly on Friday (wait for it!).

Not in her original article (phew!) but in her virtually unrepentant response to the furore, she blamed the whole thing on a “heavily orchestrated internet campaign”. Well done Jan, it was indeed such a campaign and the results speak for themselves.

Today it has been revealed that The Press Complaints Commission (PCC) has received 21,000 complaints about the article – that’s more complaints in ONE weekend than the PCC has received in the last five years! They are now investigating the matter.

Display advertising from some of the biggest brands in the UK was removed from the webpage. Even when the Mail desperately tried to claw something back by changing the headline of the online article, the advertisers stuck to their guns. (Great brand effect by the way, well done guys!)

The key features of this example are speed, content, opinion, engagement, interaction and of course influence – highlighting again that influence really does now live and breathe online.

You may not have any desire to inhabit the digital world but are starting to worry that, if you ignore social media any longer, you’re likely to be put on the endangered species list.

You’ve listened to the ‘kids’ in your marketing department rabbit on about consumer-to-consumer engagement and you’re wondering if they also speak English.

But strip out the technical jargon and the marketing double-speak and you’ll probably find it’s a more familiar world than you thought.

Firstly, you’ve been doing social networking all your professional life, just offline.

As every SME knows, in the absence of a large marketing budget, the best way to get new business is to “network”. By that I mean going to events where people you know introduce you to people they know, business cards are swapped and food is eaten on sticks.

You’ve spent a lot of time making friends and influencing people in your local business community. Recommending your business partners in the hope they will return the favor or at least buy you lunch sometime. It takes years to build an effective network and you’ll probably turn into an alcoholic by the time it’s complete.

Thanks to sites like Linkedin, this can be achieved in less time, with less geographical limitations and significantly less liver damage.

Secondly, you didn’t get were you are today, without taking every opportunity to be in the press.   You know editorial is far more powerful than advertorial.  The problem is fewer people are reading newspapers these days, especially local press but choose to get their news and insight online.

The press release is replaced by the blog post, mailing list by the Twitter feed and success is measured by the number of readers rather than by column inched, is about all you need to know about online PR.

Finally, personal recommendation has always been your goal. It’s customers that get you more customers if you treat them right. Now ,thanks to social media, this word-of-mouth has turned into word-of-mouse.

friend

“If you’ve no desire to go on Facebook, think Twitter is full of twaddle, haven’t got the slightest inclination to write a blog and ignore all invites from Linkedin, you’re probably a director of a successful company!”

Read more: The Reluctant MD’s Guide to Social Media

friend has been appointed HDC’s social media and online PR agency for the life of this project, to maximise project coverage, generate ‘buzz’ and deliver a specific video content seeding campaign.

Research and strategy

The climate change audience is vast, ranging from the man on the street to campaigners to businesses to architects and on and on.

So first, friend carried out a research and strategy project to understand and define key audiences, influencers and channels, as well as the ‘rules of engagement’: conversation topics/themes and sentiments.

Social media and online PR campaigns

friend will develop social media and online PR activity to target key influencers and audiences to maximise coverage, conversation and buzz for the project.

Online Reputation Management

friend will be working with HDC to monitor the online space for conversations, mentions and interactions – spotting opportunities for HDC input or any negative voices we can rebut.

Measurement and reporting

On a monthly basis friend will be closely analysing and measuring all activity and results to ensure the activity is in line with the strategy.

Video seeding

friend are also working alongside HDC’s video production agency to deliver video content seeding activity.

I can see most employers embracing it as a fantastic new concept, despite get-mugs-to-work-for-free being a well-established business model!

But you wouldn’t expect the Guardian, with its socialist ideals, to engage in social exploitation, yet they seem to be giving crowdsourcing a go.

Instead of paying for professional photographers to cover last week’s 2009 Climate Camp, the Guardian setup a Flickr group to encourage people to upload their photos to document the event – I’d never heard of the event either!

We’ll assume it’s a bunch of hippies in tents, who need some Taser-wielding police action and possibly a death to raise their profile, but that’s enough free PR advice from me.

So is the Guardian’s journalistic crowdsourcing a breakthrough in democracy or simply a wage cutting exercise?

Given they are already at loggerheads with the National Union of Journalists for stopping the image reuse fees they paid photographers, I’m suspicious.

I personally never understood why when you bought a photograph, you couldn’t use it at liberty. Would you buy a chair if you had to pay a fee every time someone sat in it?  No, but I digress.

Citizen journalism, be it photographic or written in the form of a blog is an increasingly important part of the changing news landscape.  Although breaking news will often be distributed by Twitter and analysis delivered by the blogopshere, it is usually through traditional journalism that the initial story is unearthed.

In my mind, there is no question that society needs professional journalism, just how it will be funded in the digital age seems to be in doubt.

Paying for news online is an anathema that is unlikely to change.  However, charging for investigation, insight and expert opinion on that news is more likely to survive the social media revolution.

We also have to understand the difference between reporting news and investigative journalism. One documents news and the other makes it.

It may be possible to crowdsource the former using social networks, but almost certainly not the latter.