To concisely re-cap: from early 2010, anyone copying and supplying UK newspaper web content to others for a fee (monitoring or press clippings agencies to PR agencies, for instance, and from those PR agencies to their clients) must acquire a license from the Newspaper Licensing Agency (NLA), a body that’s owned by the mainstream media.

Software and services company Meltwater (which provides media monitoring services to PR agencies and others) filed a legal challenge at the end of 2009; the Court of Appeal in London ruled on that challenge earlier this month, the detail of which they’ll publish soon.

Now, Meltwater and the Public Relations Consultants Association (PRCA) have prepared a template letter (which I’ve  uploaded to Scribd and embedded below) that anyone with an opinion on this issue can use as a means of raising its profile with their MPs.

Here’s a recent blog that I wrote with background on the issue.

This Summer Social session will explore why it’s never been easier for PR professionals to build relationships or personal reputation.

Social media provides the opportunity for an individual to build a personal network like never before. It used to take a graduate several years of lunching journalists and boozy after work drinking sessions to build up a network of contacts.

But no longer: face-to-face meeting remain invaluable but now armed with Twitter anyone can build a network of journalists and over the course of a few weeks learn about their likes and dislikes. That’s one small step away from engagement and developing a relationship.

Social media is also enabling savvy individuals to build their personal reputation by showcasing their work whether that’s words, photos or video. It takes no more than 15 minutes to create a blog or an account on Flickr or YouTube to share with your network and peers.

Professional networks such as LinkedIn and personal web sites have become the modern portfolio. They’re almost certainly the first place that an employer, potential business partner or prospect will go to check you out.

In the meantime I’ll be following tonight’s #CommsChat at 8pm about online influence, hosted by Neville Hobson, communicator and blogger, with guest Azeem Azhar, founder of PeerIndex, to make sure my content is up to scratch.

Hobson and Holtz recently recorded a special show with two communication professionals involved in the response to the BP Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill arguably one of the largest crisis communication efforts of the last year.

It’s a candid discussion of BP’s communication effort around Deepwater Horizon with two of the senior professionals involved in the response; Neil Chapman, a BP staffer that has spent much of his career working on high profile public affairs issues, and Gerald R. Baron, president and founder of Baron & Company, a US marketing and public relations firm in and author of the Crisisblogger blog.

Here’s what I learnt.

• BP lost credibility early in the crisis through the action of its CEO Tony Hayward. The response to the crisis was led by the business and not by the communication team who had to work with the decisions made by the business.
• You can’t PR away a crisis. The emphasis has to be on good accurate and timely information. In BP’s case it set up a crisis site and local state sites. BP made a massive amount of content available to the media and responded to every incoming email, SMS and phone call.
• BP holds regular crisis communications activities but nothing could have prepared the organisation for an event this large. 45,000 people have been involved in the response effort including an estimated 300 in communications.
• This was a crisis it wasn’t a PR crisis. It’s an ongoing oil disaster that resulted in the tragic loss of life and unprecedented damage to the natural environment and livelihoods.
• In evaluating the PR response Chapman said that crisis communication fundamentals haven’t changed with the emergence of social media but now more people want to be involved in the response.
• Spoof Twitter feeds such as @BPGlobalPR with its 180,000 followers are an inevitable part of a modern PR crisis according to Baron. Managing how you deal with these has to be part of your crisis planning.
• BP didn’t challenge any of the misreporting. Baron said that organisations should consider rebuttal as a means of correcting errors in media reporting. He suggested that organisation implement a web-based fact checking system.

They raise some interesting issues about the role of traditional media and social media in reporting on a major news event.

Their conclusion is that we shouldn’t be surprised by less than savoury conversations that take place on social networks as they simply reflect society. I’ll watch the follow-up discussion with interest.

Philip Sheldrake makes a related point in a post on Marcom Professional.

“[…] perhaps we should focus on the net impact [of conversations on social networks], accepting that regardless of the net outcome significant attention must be paid to any extreme negatives.”

Are extreme views inevitable online in social networks and a small price to pay for the benefit of wholesale engagement? Its almost certainly the case and Hobson, Holtz and Sheldrake think so.

As the battlelines are drawn (dialogue is combative not constructive) for the strike later this week businesses are looking for alternative means of getting post and packages to their customers.

Kelkoo published data last week that said online retailers would be among the worst affected with losses expected to reach £220 million.

Amazon has reportedly sought alternative services. Online retailers such as espares, Figleaves, Firebox and Lovefilm are preparing alternative arrangements. TNT wants to set up a rival postal service.

Neville Hobson has an incredibly sensible call to action:

“Messrs Hayes and Crozier, get yourselves into a room together and don’t come out again until you’ve solved this. While you’re talking, no strike.”