Thursday, January 08, 2009

Some ideas quickly seep into the public consciousness so that they seem always to have been around. Yet Crowdsourcing (not to be confused with Crowd Surfing or The Widsom of Crowds) is a new book based on an idea first published in a 2006 Wired article (following in the slipstream of The Long Tail).

The writer Jeff Howe is careful to point out that he is not describing a new concept. He cites a long cultural tradition and Adam Smith's ' the invisible hand' as precedents. Yet the book inevitably draws its examples from the Web 2.0 economy of 'user generated content'.

In summary, it's cheaper, smarter and less risky to involve the crowd in solving problems and in developing products than relying solely on employees. Examples are drawn from the Open Source movement, music and entertainment (American Idol and computer games), and commercial photo sharing ( iStockphoto). In this, Howe agrees with Clay Shirky, whose Here Comes Everybody (now out in paperback) has stolen some of the attention away from this book.

Like Shirky, he's an optimist, though corporate suits will find much to be gloomy about (there's a chapter called 'The rise and fall of the firm'). But Howe is at his best describing the failures and false starts, and we learn most from these contradictory case studies. For not every community takes off, and not every vibrant community acquires a viable business model. (He gives us ten tentative rules for community building in the conclusion to this book.)

For there's a 1:9:90 rule of user engagement (called participation inequality by Jakob Nielsen, though he's not cited in this book). For every hundred people on a site, only one will actually create content, another nine will comment on what has been created while the majority will simply lurk. The maths works out for Wikipedia (though a small few create most of the content) and for American Idol, though most communities will struggle to gain critical mass.

There are lessons in this for so-called citizen journalism, though Howe takes a balanced view: 'We are all better served when the crowd complements what journalists do, rather than trying to replicate it.' There are lessons for marketing because co-opting the crowd into research and development creates by this process a ready market for the resulting product (eg Threadless t-shirts).

Lessons for public relations are not made explicit, so I'll suggest them. One is that the crowd is the public, so we should by definition be experts in forging relationships with them. Another is that we need to focus on the quality of these relationships - public engagement in Richard Edelman's phrase - and community building brings many potential benefits. Last (not least), Google is now the key player and so links - the key to PageRank - are themselves a form of community and a benefit of community building.

Posted by Richard Bailey at 04:24 PM in Books, Business | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Wednesday, December 31, 2008

On the last day of 2008, here's my pick of the most interesting and provocative books about - or of relevance to - public relations published this year (first posted at PROpenMic).

1. Here Comes Everybody, Clay Shirky. Well-written, thought-provoking and optimistic account of human ingenuity and community-mindedness. (My full review).

2. Crowd Surfing, Martin Thomas and David Brain. Two PR consultants describe how to survive in a world that seems out of control. Important and prescient (and consistent with some of Clay Shirky's themes); this book was written just as the world was about to tip into a recession. (My full review).

3. Groundswell, Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff. There's definitely a theme emerging in my selection; Groundswell deserves its place because it's less optimistic, more realistic and better-researched than other books about social media. (My full review).

4. PR: A Persuasive Industry? Trevor Morris and Simon Goldsworthy. In some ways it's an odd book: more of a guidebook than a textbook; though written by two British PR lecturers, it's anti-academic in approach and written in US-English. But it's written for students and practitioners, and even where I disagreed with it I found it thought-provoking. (My full review).

5. Flat Earth News, Nick Davies. A British journalist's account of the declining power of national newspapers and the unstoppable rise of public relations. It's a bleak assessment on both counts, but too important a book to ignore. (My full review).

UPDATE: I'm aware of three more books coming out in 2009 on a similar theme (surprisingly, two are from the same publisher): 

• Brian Solis and Deirdre Breakenridge: Putting the Public Back in Public Relations: How Social Media is Reinventing the Aging Business of PR; 
• Rob Brown: Public Relations and the Social Web: How to Use Social Media and Web 2.0 in Communications;
• David Phillips and Philip Young: Online Public Relations: A Practical Guide to Developing an Online Strategy in the World of Social Media.

Posted by Richard Bailey at 01:18 PM in Books | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Wednesday, November 19, 2008

Prapersusasiveindustry I'm enjoying Trevor Morris and Simon Goldwsworthy's new book on PR ('PR is perhaps the ultimate postmodern industry. No one knows what it really is, but it sounds interesting!')

The authors have an easy style and theirs is a lively, intelligent - but not academic - style of writing. A review should follow soon at Behind the Spin.

But having paid £25 for a new hardback, I'm dismayed by the number of proofing errors. Here's the third one I noticed in the first 25 pages, quoted in full:

"Subeditors become an costly luxury."

Evidently, as Carrie would say in Sex and the City (a programme frequently cited by the authors).

Posted by Richard Bailey at 12:24 PM in Books | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Monday, October 27, 2008

I'm keen to start a regular 'bookshelf' column in Behind the Spin magazine. This will give PR practitioners a chance to say which books they most often consult. In previous issues, Lord Chadlington has mentioned his admiration of the novels of Anthony Trollope. Currently, Karl Milner praises Drew Westen's The Political Brain (a timely read about the pyschology of US presidential campaigns).

They could be books on politics, business or society; textbooks, style guides, self-help manuals or novels. They could be standards or surprises. Either way, I think it will help today's students and young practitioners.

Here are the groundrules. Choose up to ten books, and write up to 100 words explaining each choice. Send these to me with your portrait photo in JPG format (email address on right). You're also welcome to cross-post to your own blog.

To get you thinking, here are the top ten books I most often refer to (space does not allow descriptions):

1. The Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell
2. Strategic Communication Management, by Jon White and Laura Mazur
3. The Empty Raincoat, Charles Handy
4. The Economist Style Guide
5. Here Comes Everybody, Clay Shirky
6. Journalism: Truth or Dare?, Ian Hargreaves
7. Naked Conversations, Robert Scoble and Shel Israel
8. Permission Marketing, Seth Godin
9. Evaluating Public Relations, Tom Watson and Paul Noble
10. The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR, Al Ries and Laura Ries

Toby Young's How to Lose Friends and Alienate People came surprisingly close to being picked and this morning I found myself recommending Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene whilst admitting I've never read it myself...

Posted by Richard Bailey at 10:58 AM in Behind the Spin, Books | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBack

Tuesday, October 07, 2008

Crowdsurfing Book review: Crowd Surfing: Surviving and thriving in the age of consumer empowerment, by Martin Thomas and David Brain, A&C Black, 2008

What are consultants for? Whether they're PR, marketing or management consultants, their role is well described in Tony Benn's parable about prophets and kings, as retold by Charles Handy in The Empty Raincoat:

"What prophets can do is to tell the truth as they see it. They can point to the emperor's lack of clothes, that things are not what people like to think they are. They can warn of dangers ahead if the course is not changed... Most of all, they can offer a way of thinking about things, a way to clarify the dilemmas and concentrate the mind."

Consultants, in other words, help clients cope with a disorganised, complex and chaotic world (paradox is the word used by Handy). Crowd Surfing is the metaphor employed by two UK consultants, Martin Thomas and David Brain, to describe the new world of consumer empowerment.

This is a familiar narrative with some brilliant insights. They talk of the complexity of message control in a post-advertising age, and in doing so present Naomi Klein's No Logo from 2000 as a dated analysis of a historical phenomenon - the high water mark of corporate control of brands:

"This manifesto of the anti-corporate movement [No Logo] depicted a world in which consumers were under the thrall of global brand owners. Consumer freedoms were under attack; global brands were too powerful; too controlling. She talked about how 'in ways both insidious and overt, this corporate obsession with brand identity is waging a war on public and individual space; on public institutions such as schools, on youthful identities, on the concept of nationality and on the possibilities for unmarketed space'."

'It is an image of the world that, in hindsight, seems almost charming in its naivety,' the authors add.

Crowd Surfing builds on key texts such as The Wisdom of Crowds, Wikinomics and Naked Conversations, and fits alonside two other recent books on consumers, corporates and social media - Groundswell and Here Comes Everybody.

Where it differs from all these is in asking questions about the type of leader best suited to this changing world. The authors quote historian Niall Ferguson describing good leaders as 'the ones that realise (a) I'm fallible, and (b) the world is chaotic. Insecurity is ... an important part of being a good leader. You have to be aware of your vulnerability.'

They quote WPP's Sir Martin Sorrell echoing this: 'In an increasingly networked world, the 21st century is not for tidy minds. I think - certainly in our business - trying to simplify complexity actually ends up in destroying value.'

'Leaders such as Sorrell appear to be the ones most likely to thrive in this new world', according to the authors, because 'they are comfortable with ambiguity and uncertainty, possibly even chaos.'

Here's another paradox: in a fragmented world where people are increasingly 'meeting' via screen and keyboard, how do you expain the popularity of live events? For the authors, 'the crowd is, in effect, our new family, and sporting events, political rallies and rock concerts provide the platforms for the crowd to congregate and the sense of community that we all need.'

Who will succeed in this chaotic world: 'interesting' companies and brands. 'Interesting businesses such as Unilever, Innocent, IKEA, 42 Below and JetBlue keep the crowd engaged and involved by always being interesting... They benefit from a virtuous circle in which the more interesting they become, the more likely they are to attract interesting people with interesting ideas, to recruit the most interesting employees, to be written about in the most interesting media and talked about on the most interesting blogs. They save millions of pounds on advertising because they can rely on positive word of mouth to maintain their profile. Now that's interesting.'

So much for leaders and businesses; but what of consultants and their consultancies? The book addresses the implications for marketing services agencies. 'To marketing heads and senior advertising professionals, PR has been accused of being unsophisticated, lacking strategic and empirical rigour. It feels 'fluffy'... This is changing. Smart advertising and media agency heads are putting aside their prejudices and applying many of the practices and principles of PR to the way they plan their campaigns.'

This small book successfully describes a big topic: how to cope with chaos. It's an excellent and intelligent commentary on what's changing and where we're going. I'm a picky proofreader but only spotted one small error: the suggestion that Robert Scoble (famous blogger and co-author of Naked Conversations) is a Microsoft employee, when 'was' would have been more accurate.

It successfully fuses the corporate and technological perspectives (presumably supplied by David Brain) with the consumer and brand marketing perspective (Martin Thomas's speciality).

It even addresses the biggest paradox of all. How come Apple is so successful when it breaks all the rules? 'Apple is an enigma - a business with a rebellious, freewheeling persona, run by a brilliant control freak... We decided in the end that Apple was the exception that proved the rule.'

Perhaps rules are too rigid and inflexible a prescription for coping with chaos. I'd say this is more of a guidebook than a rule book, and it's a recommended read. To answer my question about the role of consultants, we need them to show us the way.

Posted by Richard Bailey at 03:50 PM in Books | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Monday, August 18, 2008

The_fame_formula Mark Borkowski writes that 'in the media world, very few genuflect to the past - the zeitgeist is all.' Yet he's rather different ('I fell into publicity because I failed to get into university to read history' he says) and has written this history of the Hollywood publicity machine in follow-up to his previous book, Improperganda: The Art of the Publicity Stunt.

It's full of stories: Barnum's elephants, a Tarzan publicity stunt involving a tame lion, and the hilarious tale of how a publicist protected the reputation of actress Tara Tiplady and her co-star after an incident involving oral sex and a hot frying pan required medical intervention. Tiplady was starring as the Virgin Mary in a film about the birth of Christ at the time, so publicity would have been a bad thing.

But what does it tell us? 'The great skill of the publicist in this era [ie 1930s Hollywood] was making journalists think they had the measure of power they craved when in fact they were simply desperate for access to be granted.' Not perhaps so different then from the world of sport, entertainment, politics and even big business today.

There is a special case to be made for Hollywood, of course. Since show business manufactures make-believe, why should its publicity be held to higher standards of veracity? Is it such a bad thing to tell white lies to conceal the sexuality or height of a leading man? Note how this 'entertainment industry exemption' is the defence used by Max Clifford to this day - the 'Freddie Starr ate my hamster' school of entertainment PR. It's all about the stories; if you want to keep something out of the media, feed them a better story.

These ethical questions are not Borkowski's main concern; he's also interested in the stories. He quotes a newspaper report on two celebrated publicists, Harry Brand and Russell Birdwell: 'Lots of people can run a publicity department, but it takes a peculiar man to think up ideas... Harry and Russell are primarily idea men - each with a different approach'.

This is revealing: to succeed in publicity, you need to come up with big, bright ideas. What's the word for people who deal in ideas? Intellectuals. Students will find this surprising; they sometimes complain that their lecturers over-complicate things and seek to take the moral high-ground. But the implication is that celebrity PR is itself an intellectual activity: let's call it 'cerebrity PR'.

The topic was also rehabilitated recently by one of the UK's best known public relations academics. Jacquie L'Etang's latest textbook considers celebrity PR worthy of academic study.

Borkowski's isn't an academic study, but it's a lively account of some large characters written in an appropriately Chanderlesque style. 'Jim Moran was a large man with a penchant for wearing a big beard - unonventional in clean-cut mid-century America - and a fez. He was one of the biggest personalities in an industry rife with larger-than-life personalities, so much so that his personality wound its way inextricably into many of his stunts.'

Some of these large characters gained positions of power over matters of life and death. Referring to Howard Strickling, MGM would advise its stars: 'If you get into trouble, don't call the police. Don't call the hospital. Don't call your lawyer. Call Howard.' The murder of 'platinum blonde' Jean Harlow's film director husband by a former lover became a much more convenient suicide at the hands of the publicists in order to protect her reputation.

In a less troubling example of the publicist's art, Jack Tirman invented a non-existent exotic dance duo in order to promote a Manhattan nightclub. He gained plenty of publicity for the dancers but was surprised to read a stinking press review of these performers, 'who for obvious reasons hadn't put a foot wrong'. Two wrongs don't make a right.

Yet publicity had started a slow journey towards becoming a respectable business. Henry Rogers played a part in this: 'He hosted parties for his clients, put himself into the social whirl of Hollywood and made sure he was well read enough to be able to talk anything but shop when he was out on the town.' He focused on relationships with the studios and thus offered his clients more than press agentry. His business, Rogers & Cowan (formed in 1945 and later acquired by Shandwick) became a recognisably modern public relations consultancy, able to adapt to changes in business and the media. 'Dog food and movie stars are much alike because they are both products in need of exposure', as Rogers said.

We're now into the short-attention-span television age in which anyone can seek their '15 minutes of fame'.  But we're given a useful distinction: 'Publicity is about noise and the excitement of the moment, whereas public relations is more about planning and carefully structuring a series of events that build to a bigger picture. The successful public relations merchants...are as much media strategists as press agents.'

One such strategist, Pat Kingsley - a useful counterpoise to all the male publicists featured in the book - realised the value of less publicity in a media-saturated age and rewrote the rules. 'If you can't stop celebrities making mischief, she reasoned, then at least you should try and stop the journalists from making mischief.'

The formula of the book's title may be an awkward addendum; the book may be more concerned with answering 'how?' than addressing 'why?' - but this is an entertaining read and a valuable contribution to the history of public relations.

If this review is brought to the author's attention, he may enjoy this. In the same year as Borkowski began his career in theatrical publicity, your reviewer was accepted to read history at an ancient university. Perhaps as a result, his career has never reached the same heights as Borkowski's.

Posted by Richard Bailey at 08:01 PM in Books, Celebrities | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Monday, July 28, 2008

Mark Borkowski has a new book coming out called The Fame Formula and he's written an article on this theme in today's G2 section of the Guardian newspaper.

I take the science with a pinch of salt (it's a classic publicity stunt), but Borkowski is worth listening to on fame and celebrity publicity as he updates Andy Warhol's concept of 15 minutes of fame:

Madonna is an excellent example of a celebrity working the fame formula to perfection. From her early days as a sharp-witted 80s party girl, she has moved onwards and upwards in her quest to stay famous, creating controversy through videos of her kissing a black Jesus, her Sex book and her flirtation with lesbianism, changing style for every album, acting parts in movies, adopting children, writing books for children and becoming a member of the English landed gentry by dint of marriage and money. Even her sporadic film roles, lambasted though many of them have been, are part of her success. Each new innovation has caused her fame to spike and kept her in the media spotlight.

Posted by Richard Bailey at 10:00 AM in Books, Celebrities | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Wednesday, May 21, 2008

Groundswell Richard Bailey has a problem. This middle aged public relations lecturer struggles to keep up with all the latest thinking affecting his subject area. Books, articles, podcasts, academic journals, blogs. The answer? He listens to the groundswell. The word on the social media street said 'you must read Groundswell by Forrester Research analysts Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff.' So he has.

There's much to admire in this book but the formulaic American-business-book-style parodied in the paragraph above becomes rather grating for this reader.

The book's strong central concept - the groundswell - is a strength. It removes the focus from technology (eg blogs, podcasts, videos) and turns instead to relationships. 'The groundswell is a social trend in which people use technologies to get the things they need from each other, rather than from traditional institutions like corporations'. This scares marketing managers, scares PR practitioners and makes chief executives very, very afraid. Hence the need for this book.

Groundswell could be the one book these senior people should read to cover the trend emerging from a succession of books following in the wake of The Cluetrain Manifesto. Here's my pick: everything written by Seth Godin, We the Media, Naked Conversations, The Corporate Blogging Book, The Long Tail, Wikinomics, Punk Marketing, The New Rules of Marketing and PR, Now is Gone, Here Comes Everybody. I'm also looking forward to Chris Anderson's forthcoming Freeconomics.

Groundswell provides a good summary of what's gone before, and contains some valuable case studies. But fileting the book for lean new ideas, I've only found the following.

The 'Social Technographics Profile' (chapter 3) is a useful tool for assessing the stage of engagement with social media in a target community. How many are content creators, how many are critics, collectors, joiners, spectators or inactives? This tool will become an essential step in assessing whether organisations should engage in social media activities.

The other idea I liked was the concept of 'psychic income' (the authors acknowledge that this idea has been around since the 1920s, but it has a new significance now). This is a way of explaining why some people are willing to devote so many of their spare, waking hours to contributing to social media forums when there's no payback in terms of salary. One contributor to a Dell support forum has been logged in 'for an equivalent of 123 working days a year... He has read nearly a quarter of a million of other people's messages, and he has posted over twenty thousand times.' These super-users are the people you want to enlist - not enrage - in your social media activities.

The international, research-based perspective is useful too. Broadly, Europe lags behind the US; and everywhere lags behind South Korea. But in such a well-researched book, calling Hugh McLeod 'an American blogger' is a bad - if minor - lapse (page 234). His biography shows that he has worked in New York, but like many creative Madison Avenue types McLeod is British (specifically, Cumbrian).

You guessed it, McLeod is menioned for his role in the blog-based Stormhoek wine promotional activities. One of the many mostly-familiar case studies in the book.

Groundswell is a useful book with some helpful tools. But if you want an exciting read with big ideas on almost every page, then I recommend Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody.

Posted by Richard Bailey at 10:16 AM in Books, Social media | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Tuesday, May 06, 2008

Wired editor and The Long Tail author Chris Anderson has a new book coming out. It addresses the paradox of free market capitalism in the internet age: that to make money, products and services will often have to be offered for free (think of Google). The book is trailed in a long interview-based feature in The Guardian (free registration), that doesn't shy from turning to another paradox: will the book be given away for free?

Posted by Richard Bailey at 01:11 PM in Books | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Friday, April 18, 2008

Hceuk One side-effect of falling ill is the need to slow down and the opportunity this gives to catch up with reading. Clay Shirky's new book Here comes everybody is a delight from first page to last, so that's some compensation.

But where does this book belong? Is it about economics; social science; or technology? Yes, and a bit more too as it's also about politics and publishing.

Why publish a book? Because books are slower and more reflective than online publishing, and Shirky gives us a wide-angled view of the effects of social software on society. It hardly matters that Twitter took off after he started writing, as he'd adequately covered the convergence of the internet and mobile technologies in forming groups and supporting conversation and collective action.

The book, subtitled 'the power of organizing without organizations' tells some familiar and some unfamiliar stories in lively language. There's Linux and the open source software movement; Wikipedia, the reader-edited encyclopedia; and many ordinary people gathering for a variety of social purposes. Shirky's central argument is that humans are intensely social animals. While technology doesn't determine our behaviour, we will adapt technology tools to our purposes. So he charts the transformation of the social web from (mainly male) geeks discussing programming languages on bulletin boards to (mainly) young women using Facebook to facilitate their real-world social lives. In doing so, he proclaims the death of cyberspace (since the social web is now so well adapted to our social lives and is no longer another place).

The economic insights are arresting. Open source software has become the greatest threat to a well-organised company like Microsoft not because it's a better way to produce software for the market, but because open source removes the costs of failure and so encourages inventiveness. Companies have to manage for consistency and so will aim to reduce failures; open source projects will most likely fail. But the ease of coming together and collaborating can occasionally produce something of lasting value (think of Linux and Wikipedia again.)

And the economics of publishing have changed. The model used to be filter, then publish (so only a few books made it into print through layers of agents and publishers and shelf space in bookshops and review pages in newspapers). Now the model is publish, then filter. The barriers to publication are negligible, but most web pages and blogs have very few readers, with a few gaining a disproportionate amount of attention (Shirky's famous power law distribution).

His perspective on the convergence of digital technologies is memorable. Phone calls (private, personal) used to be completely distinct from broadcasting (one to many, public). The internet supports both forms of communication simultaneously, so a few blogs have become recognisable as newspapers (a broadcast model), but most are closer to private conversations among a tight circle of friends (the phone model). He dismisses the supposed benefits of interactivity since the most famous bloggers don't have time to maintain conversations with their many readers.

At heart, the book is about mass amateurisation and the effects this is likely to have on recognisably professional areas (such as journalism, marketing, public relations, management.) The message is likely to appeal to two hitherto distinct groups: champions of free speech and free markets on the one hand, and anarchists and anti-corporate activists on the other. I suspect there's a 'middle majority' who won't read this book, or who will reject its arguments (just as they've always said that Wikipedia won't work).

They will miss the optimistic message of this book. That humans are inventive and sociable, and that technology serves the needs of individuals and groups. While scarcity remains a factor in many aspects of life (time, space, food, water, fuel), the removal of scarcity in our communications tools is unleashing a new era of creativity.

Posted by Richard Bailey at 05:26 PM in Books | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack