PR professionals Philip Sheldrake and Neville Hobson addressed the Wikimedia UK AGM at the Science Museum, London on Saturday. Wikimedia UK represents Wikipedia contributors in the UK.

“Wikipedia is a community and the PR profession respects the community’s right to set its own rules,” said Sheldrake.

“If anyone believes the rules should be changed, then the case has to be made in a public forum for open debate, and what better forum than the community’s own,” he added.

It’s in this spirit that Wikimedia this week agreed to host draft guidelines for the PR profession on using Wikipedia. The guidance which was written by the CIPR Social Media Panel, is now open for consultation before being finalised in June.

“We welcome this approach from the PR community in what is a very sensitive area,” said Jon Davies, chief executive, Wikimedia UK.

The move has support from across the UK PR industry.

“I’m delighted the PR industry was represented on Saturday. The mood in both camps is that strengthening the relationship between Wikipedia and the PR industry is beneficial for everyone,” said Francis Ingham, CEO, PRCA.

You can contribute to the consultation via the Wikipedia page.

Further reading:

• CIPR calls for feedback on PR guidelines about Wikipedia use, PR Week
• Reputation and Wikipedia, part II, Philip Sheldrake
• Your time, your place, your opportunity, Neville Hobson

• The final judgement in the Copyright Tribunal involving Meltwater Group, NLA, PRCA, and UKMMA, was announced shortly after 2pm today. It brings a conclusion to the three-year industry wrangle over web copyright licensing.
• The decision sees publishers rewarded for the third-party business-to-business web monitoring market for their content.
• The Copyright Tribunal set the 2012 starting price for the Web End User Licence Fixed Fee tariff at £100 per annum for new licensees, or £67 per annum for those without a current NLA licence.
• The average fee is approximately £450 per year, but the NLA expect this figure to fall as more small companies are licensed. See the final page of the judgement for the likely cost to your business (PDF).

Joint statement issued by Meltwater Group, NLA, PRCA, and UKMMA

The Copyright Tribunal has today delivered its Final Decision in respect of the Newspaper Licensing Agency’s (NLA) Web End User Licensing scheme (WEUL).  It draws to a close proceedings in the Copyright Tribunal where Meltwater Group, supported by the PRCA, challenged the NLA on the legality and reasonableness of its proposed licensing and associated fees for online news content.

Since the Interim Decision, published on 14 February 2012, Meltwater and the NLA have worked together in close consultation to reach agreement on the finer details of the licensing payment model.  Their joint proposals were agreed by UKMMA (representing other MMOs) and submitted to the Copyright Tribunal.

The NLA first introduced web licences on 1 January 2010, giving media monitoring organisations (MMOs), such as Meltwater News, and their clients the right to make commercial use of content published on newspaper websites.  Licensing affects those businesses who supply and receive headlines, text extracts and links to newspaper websites as a part of a paid for media monitoring service.

This decision by the Copyright Tribunal means that licensing can now begin, on terms accepted by all parties. The NLA will commence invoicing for these fees from next month, backdated to 1 January 2010.

In response to the final decision David Pugh, Managing Director of the NLA, explained that the “NLA suspended fees pending the Copyright Tribunal conclusion. I am pleased we now have clarity and more importantly certainty for clients.”

Jens-Petter Glittenberg, co-founder at Meltwater Group, confirmed that “the NLA and Meltwater are now committed to ensuring that UK end users of such monitoring services are licensed quickly, fairly and efficiently.  We are happy with the Copyright Tribunal decision. Our aim from the outset was to seek clarification of UK copyright law for both rights-holders and end users, particularly for content freely available online.”

Adding to the statement Francis Ingham,  PRCA Chief Executive said ‘The PRCA is proud to have been the voice for the public relations industry at the Copyright Tribunal.  We are pleased with the Copyright Tribunal’s verdict and the industry can be satisfied with the fairness and clarity of the outcome of the final ruling’.

Finally, speaking on behalf of media monitoring organisations (MMOs), the chairman of UKMMA Steve White added ‘The Copyright Tribunal’s decision has established the terrain for rights management for the foreseeable future and given UKMMA members security to serve their clients effectively with the NLA’s web repertoire’.

In the interest of their mutual clients, the NLA and licensed MMOs, including Meltwater, have agreed to co-ordinate client communications. This will ensure that the licensing process is comprehensive, efficient and straightforward.

- ends -

Watch out for the monthly print edition that will surely follow. It’s an ironic nod to a traditional publishing model by the real time network as it graduates into a fully blown media company and makes a bid to increase its relevancy to users.

The Twitter safety value
Twitter has an in built safety value. You’ve almost certainly used it.

It works like this: as the number of people you follow increases and time spent on the network increases the value shuts down and you naturally start to cull your network or use the network less frequently.

Too much Twitter is not a good thing. It gets too noisy and engagement levels fall rapidly.

My hunch is that Twitter has recognised that users don’t want to be plugged into their network round the clock. But they don’t want to miss out either.

Editors required
Curated content, served neatly once a week in an email will do just fine for most people. Therein lies a truism of social media. Only very tight networks provide a sufficient editorial function.

The lack of editorial rigor is apparent from trending topics. Mat Morrison tweeted last night that Justin Bieber was trending on Google+. No corner of the Internet it seems is free from Bieber-fever.

Bieber trends because lots of social media users want to share content about the young musician. But that doesn’t mean that he appeals to everyone.

Networks aren’t a form of mass media. They’re made up of tiny niches and they aren’t necessarily that smart which is why we need curators and editors. A one-size fits all trending topic simply doesn’t work.

Twitter’s solution is mechanical. It’ll work up to a point but only manual editing will find the really good stuff.

A couple of months ago I built Northumberland Social, a curated local media web site as part of a weekend hackathon. The goal was to explore the future of local media and see whether it was possible to generate an engaging hyperlocal site based on content sourced from media sites and social networks.

Social media as a source of local media content
Content from social media platforms such as blogs, Flickr and YouTube, networks such as Twitter and traditional local media sites such as The Northumberland Gazette and The Morpeth Herald was neatly summarised and republished.

It’s the model that The Week has successful developed to curate content from the national media and packaged in a weekly magazine, but applied online to an individual county using social content. Have a look for yourself.

The issue of copyright remains a work in progress for curated web sites. But I took the view that sharing small excerpts of content and linking back to the original source would help drive traffic for the original content owners.

I needn’t have worried. The response was incredibly positive. In fact several commercial photographers were more than happy to provide their original content with attribution.

An engaged community but what about the money?
I ran the experiment in anger for two-weeks in March. It very quickly generated a strong and loyal Twitter network of 450 people that was highly engaged and willing to share content. Traffic steadily climbed from a standing start to around 100 unique visitors a day with high levels of engagement.

The technology could not be simpler. A ‘news room’ built on Google Reader sucks in social content that is manually reviewed once a day and edited excerpts published to a Tumblr blog using a personal URL. New posts are pinged to search engines and shared via a Twitter feed using Hootsuite.

It’s a long way from being a viable commercial proposition but therein lies the challenge for hyper local media: developing a large enough community to be able to generate revenue streams to fund content development, whether that be a form of curation or original journalism.

The most successful sites combine ads with other forms of revenue generation such as affiliate sales, clubs and events.

No one has cracked the commercial model. It’s likely that in order to be sustainable in the future local media whether online or print, like other forms of niche online community, will require commercial sponsorship or public funding.

Moving the project on
Here’s the issue. I’ve proved a concept as a means of building a solid community but haven’t got the time to continue running the site. Social media is not only about sharing content; it’s about relationships. It needs to be nurtured and developed, and that takes time, in this case at least 30 to 45 minutes per day.

At the moment Northumberland Social is set to join the graveyard of social media sites that start with a flurry of excitement but die after a month or so. I would be delighted to hand over the site to anyone that has the vision and the time to take it forward. If you think that might be you please get in touch or maybe this project will inspire you build a curated media site of your own either around a location or a niche.

But as we attempt to modernise ourselves it seems like we are not so much reinventing ourselves as we are heading back to the public relations of yesteryear, although with vastly different media.

Public engagement via two way engagement is more similar than the PR of the 1950s than the 1990s and surely there are some lessons in the past that could be relevant today.

Speed’s Dan Howe has plotted a brief history of public relations back to 1000 on Speed’s Facebook Timeline.

You can browse the events by clicking on the dates on our page’s right hand column. We’ll keep the Timeline updated with more historical PR events as they catch our eyes.

Hit Like to follow along. You know how it works.

Ahead of the session I asked my Twitter network this morning for useful stuff to help PR graduate job hunters. Here’s what came back.

If you have any other recommendations please leave a comment. And if you want to take part in the conversation tonight we’ll be using the #raisingtheprofile hashtag on Twitter. You’ll be very welcome.

Recommended reading

• Seven tips: getting a job using social media by Elisabeth Gjosund
• The CV, one of PR’s biggest lies, may be dead. Honest by Steve Earl

Professional Development

• CIPR Continuous Professional Development scheme

Internships

• Enternships

Job opportunities

• Ben Cotton maintains a list of PR graduate opportunities
• CIPR job board
• MIPAA job search
• PRmoment job board
• PR Week jobs
• PRCA job board
• @ukyoungpr Twitter feed
  
  

Mentors

• CIPR mentoring scheme

Example online portfolios

• Michael White
• Alex Wilson

Useful social media groups

• PR Job Watch on Facebook
• Twitter hashtag #prjobs on Twitter
• PR Career Search on LinkedIn

Books

• Me and my web shadow by Antony Mayfield
• And of course Brand Anarchy – Chapter 10 deals with PR skills

Presentations

How to Stand Out by Samantha Glazer

Ernest Hemingway, Atlantic magazine, 1954

Much of the information created on the web, especially the social web, is utter nonsense. The Internet is the ultimate democratic publishing medium. Anyone can publish and share information, irrespective of expertise or motivation. Social networks don’t filter trivia or check facts.

Today we have seen misinformation shared about the supposed collapse of an underground tunnel in London and rarely a month goes by without a celebrities’ death being announced incorrectly on Twitter.

Verification of content online
News organisations such as our client The Associated Press are working hard to verify content sourced from social networks as part of their newsgathering efforts so that original content can be used as a source. Storyful is building a neat business based on this value proposition.

News organisations can invest significant effort in qualifying a source but what about an individual that spots an insightful message in their newsfeed? How should you verify it before sharing it with your network or retweeting the content?

Critical thinking
It’s an issue that Steve and I examined in Brand Anarchy and it’s how we came across Howard Rheingold, author of Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution, published in 2003.

Rheingold believes that social media literacy is critical for anyone using the Internet.  He cites five competences that he believes are critical for any Internet user, namely attention, participation, cooperation, network awareness and critical consumption.

It is this latter attribute, critical thinking, or what Rheingold calls ‘crap detection’, that we should all have when searching and assigning credibility to content that we consume online and detect information tainted by ignorance, misinformation or deception.

Checks and balances to test online content
There are series of very simple checks that you can use to check the likely accuracy of content published online.

1. Start by asking: who is the author? ‘If you can’t find one, or if the source is hidden behind a pseudonym, turn the scepticism meter to the top of the dial,’ says Rheingold.
2. Web domain web sites such as easywhois.com enable the registrar of a domain to be checked. If the source provides a means to ask questions, communicate or comment, it improves the chance that the content will be authentic.
3. The same rules apply for social media. Is the original source a real person with a photo, contact information and credible biography, or is it clearly an anonymous user, spammer or troll?
4. Next scrutinise the context. Does the author have prior citations on the Internet? Do they link to reputable sources? Do people link to their content? Who do they engage with online? And what sort of conversations are they having?
5. Finally use social media analytics tools such as Klout, PeerIndex and Kred (disclosure: I’m a member of the Kred Leaders program), combined with search engines, to interrogate the social media ‘capital’ of an individual.

Using social networks to get close to the truth
When we were researching Brand Anarchy we conducted a series of experiments to test the accuracy of reporting by mainstream news outlets and stories shared via social media around major news event such as the Japanese earthquake and the London riots.

We used our own social networks and basic search techniques to get as close to people close to the actual source of the news as possible. It rarely took more than 15 minutes to make a connection with two or three sources to interrogate a story via Twitter, email and Skype, and in almost every case we uncovered generalisations and inaccuracies in content that had already been published online.

It’s a fascinating exercise that you can read about in the book. We’ll blog and tweet a live example in the next couple of weeks to demonstrate the point. Keep your eye on the Twitter hashtag #brandanarchy.

Personal content authentication
While the network is the final arbiter as people will unfollow an unreliable source, my belief is that individuals have a responsibility to their networks to authenticate content before sharing it with their networks. Do not ever rely on spoon-fed information from the Internet. Everyone needs to be their own information analyst and be able to question the authenticity of content. Facts can be checked using your network but it also means venturing beyond the echo chamber of your immediate community to be exposed to alternative viewpoints.

It’s something I’m working hard to teach my kids.

Related articles

• Howard Rheingold’s Net Smart: living mindfully in cyberculture (boingboing.net)

The courier and taxi firm has told its drivers to ignore the rules and use London’s bus lanes, and company chairman John Griffin has penned a leader article in its Add Lib magazine calling for cyclists to be trained before they take to the roads.

Steve has blogged about the situation on the PR Week site.

Taking an authentic stance on an issue is a well-worked PR tactic that is guaranteed to generate headlines and conversation. But has Addison Lee pushed the issue too hard?

Almost certainly: overnight we’ve seen Addison Lee trending on Twitter, angry cycling blogs, an Addison Lee ‘Die-in’ event planned via Facebook for Monday, and a call by the RMT for its licence to be revoked.

But it could still turn the issue around if it is prepared to engage with road interest groups, Transport for London and cyclists.

Road usage is far from being a straightforward issue. At Speed we’re Addison Lee customers, cyclists, public transport users and drivers.

So far Addison Lee is keeping quiet.

PRs have been quick to recognise the opportunity to work with bloggers to connect their clients with highly targeted and engaged audiences, but often with limited success.

Here’s the issue. PRs have taken the media relations skills that they have used to pitch journalists and expected them to be directly transferable to bloggers.

They simply aren’t.

Making money
The motivations of a blogger are very different to those of a journalist. Bloggers typically fit writing around a career or childcare and are motivated by their own interests and typically a desire to generate an income.

The latest issue causing angst between PRs and bloggers is transparency around sponsored posts. Bloggers generate an income from payment to write a post about a product or issue, sponsored by the PR on behalf of its client.

The client gets a favourable blog post, third-party validation albeit sponsored, and access to the blogger’s audience. The blogger receives up to £100.

At its most crude it’s a form of advertorial but it’s a perfectly acceptable transaction so long as the blogger is transparent and follows best practice. Best practice in this instance means following Google’s guidelines, declaring interests and ensuring that all links are tagged as no-follow.

Google’s guidelines
As Escherman’s Andrew Smith says “Google’s guidelines are hardly news.”

Guidance posted on Google Webmaster tools couldn’t be clearer.

“Not all paid links violate our guidelines. Buying and selling links is a normal part of the economy of the web when done for advertising purposes, and not for manipulation of search results. Links purchased for advertising should be designated as such.”

SiteVisibility’s Kelvin Newman neatly summaries Google’s expectation of bloggers. “There is a basic rule that if the link isn’t editorial it should be no-followed,” he says.

Google will penalise sites that break these guidelines by reducing their Page Rank with the result that they are likely to fall from search rankings and their traffic significantly reduced.

“Google does seem to be a lot more proactive and visible in its spam efforts recently and so I wouldn’t be surprised to see them crack down on this again,” said Newman.

In a deliciously ironic story in January Google demoted the search results for its Chrome browser after bloggers were paid to promote a video about the search engine.     .

BlogCamp’s organiser Sally Whittle has written-up excellent guidelines on the TOTS100 community blog on this topic. It is well worth reading for blogger, brand and PR alike.

PRs misbehaving
But some PRs keen to benefit from the Page Rank of an influential blogger seemingly don’t like these guidelines.

“The problem is very few people buying editorial like this wants a no-followed link,” adds Newman.

I caught up with Whittle ahead of BlogCamp.

“There are a number of PR agencies actively saying to bloggers they shouldn’t disclose payment for posts, and one or two sneakily implying taking this post will boost your page rank but if you disclose, it might harm it,” she said.

If PRs are making such demands of bloggers its nonsense and surely breaks both the CIPR and PRCA codes of professional practice.

As Smith says “I would love to know who the PR firms are that are effectively requesting a suppression of disclosure. It is wrong on so many levels.”

Is the sponsored post dead?
Does this mean that the sponsored blog post is dead? It’s a question that Whittle asks in a related blog post.

My view is that it doesn’t.

The value of sponsored posts lies in the influence of the blogger, their audience, and third-party validation. Smart PRs will socially share and reference the content generated by bloggers.

If you are a PR that wants to have a long term relationship working with bloggers the reality is very simple. You need to follow Google’s guidance.

Related posts:

• How Mummy (and Daddy) bloggers make money, work with PRs, brands (speedcommunications.com)
• PR’s, bloggers and sponsored posts. (mammasaurus.co.uk)