It’s good to see that the Twitter effect is not stifling the supply of new PR blogs, with my old boss Brendon Craigie embracing this Social Media malarkey with the Weekly World View.

I have to say that I agree with Brendon’s take on the currently non-existent tech PR recession. As he points out the Social Media bubble has proven to be anything but and nimble, hungry and experienced agencies in this space are certainly in a position to make the most of it.

It would of course be naive to assume that there will not be an eventual PR recession. Friends working in IT sales are reporting both small investments as well as £multi-million infrastructure projects being mothballed by clients, especially those in the financial services sector.

Those agencies who are as Brendon puts it still peddling “the same old, same old” probably have a 9-month window of opportunity (at best) to ensure programmes are making a real, demonstrable and above all measurable impact on the bottom line.

So I was asked by PR Week on Monday for my views on Gordon Brown’s Ask the PM initiative on YouTube. This was the latest foray into the online world by Downing Street, following its recent embrace of Twitter. My assessment that Ask the PM “smacks of gimmickry and desperation” led the article and there was a clear consensus from other industry commentators, that this project was a typical case of ‘too little, too late’.

I had a couple of interesting conversations on Friday in response to the piece. These boiled down to the argument that as a Social Media evangelist I should have welcomed the initiative, however imperfect, as a step in the right direction. Sorry to disappoint.

I have come to a view, which has hardened in recent months, that high profile examples of digital tokenism such as Ask the PM, are actually devaluing the real potential of Social Media. They are feeding a scepticism which makes the pioneering work we are doing unnecessarily difficult.

A couple of years ago, the medium was the message when it came to organisations adopting Social Media. This was typified by those endless stories in the national press, with leading youth brands like IBM and PA Consulting opening virtual offices in Second Life. Today, the filter I always use when assessing Social Media initiatives, my own and others, is whether the communication objectives and creative approach are actually more interesting than the digital platform(s) being utilised.

Using this filter, Ask the PM just doesn’t cut it. It’s not a genuine attempt by Gordon Brown to reconnect and really start listening to a disillusioned electorate. His comment at the end of his welcome video, where he states, “I’ll be back to talk to you at some point…” betrays a total lack of understanding of the two-way conversation that Social Media enables. You may as well write a letter and stick it in the post - you’d probably get a quicker reply!

In my mind the YouTube channel, the Twitter feed and whatever online gimmick is announced next, is primarily about metaphor, the hope that some shiny digital zeitgeist will rub off on an increasingly lacklustre Prime Minister. Equally, it’s a clumsy attempt by the new Downing St communications team to ‘get with it’ and reduce the gaping void between their digital approach and that of the Opposition.

As I have been saying a lot this week in new business pitches, Social Media is not a magic wand. Ultimately whatever Stephen Carter and his team try to do, Gordon Brown at heart, will always remain an analogue politician in a digital age.

Following a string of recent client wins the Diffusion team is growing! We are looking for talented and ambitious individuals to help drive and implement next-generation communication campaigns built around our media relations, Social Media and Search marketing core. Please see our current vacancies below. We’re always on the look out for the best talent across the industry so if you’d like an informal chat about how we could help grow your career, drop me an email at daljit.bhurji@diffusionpr.com.

You really need a fresh challenge. With over three years as a PR professional you have an address book bulging with media contacts across the digital media, marketing, technology and national press. You have a real interest in how brands are using the web to engage with customers and a real desire to represent the companies who are pushing the boundaries of marketing services innovation. As an account manager you have demonstrated you can build relationships with senior decision makers based on trust, honesty and confident and considered client counsel.

Now you’re asking yourself – what next? As a Campaign Manager at Diffusion we promise you three things: innovation, responsibility and real job satisfaction. By working with leading players in our Marketing Services practice, you will be given the opportunity to help shape and deliver innovative campaigns. These will use your skills and love of media relations enhanced through the latest techniques in Social Media and Search.

You will be given the responsibility to manage and grow your own team and portfolio of clients through extensive involvement in new business development. You’ll not only get job satisfaction from doing brilliant work with great colleagues for fantastic clients, though we think that always helps. Through our commitment to Talent Management we offer fast-track career development to the brightest and you’ll be rewarded with a progressive salary and benefits package. Is this the challenge you’re looking for?

To apply and for further information, please send your CV to daljit.bhurji@diffusionpr.com. For more information on our Talent Management approach and benefits packages click here.

Closing date: 5 JUNE 2008: No recruitment agencies please.

I thought PR was about more than just endless cold-calling? Well we think you’re 100 per cent right. At Diffusion we’re looking for a candidate who wants to build their career within a 21st Century PR and Communications agency. As an ambitious graduate with a strong academic record, you will have over a year’s PR experience under your belt either in-house or in agency. You’ll also be an enthusiastic ‘digital native’, with familiarity with all things Social Media second nature.

Working across our Digital practice you will have an insatiable hunger to get real results through both media and Social Media relations. You will have equal enthusiasm for both consumer and business campaigns, for household names and new start-ups, relishing the challenges they each present.

At Diffusion through our commitment to training we will future proof your career. You will be equipped with both the traditional and online skills needed to deliver communication campaigns that really connect, both today and tomorrow. As a crucial part of a new agency you will have a unique opportunity to rapidly grow your career in a dynamic, entrepreneurial environment and carve out your own niche. Or you could carry on updating that call-round report.

To apply and for further information, please send your CV to daljit.bhurji@diffusionpr.com. For more information on our Talent Management approach and benefits packages click here.

Closing date: 5 JUNE 2008: No recruitment agencies please.

Word reaches me of two new PR blogs – the first is from the self styled ‘Bad Boy of Tech PR’, Hotwire’s very own digital media wunderkind Tom Malcolm. The intriguingly named ‘Reflections in an Open Window’ promises to “not take itself too seriously” which given the author is just as well.

The second is ‘Pete’s PR Hall of Fame’, from consumer genius Peter Bowles. He has just left the warm bosom of Hotwire and is off to do some very exciting stuff at Red. The PR Hall of Fame has a great focus which is to each day identify the one story which has used/abused the power of PR to get to the top of the media agenda. Add them to your RSS feeds now!

There are a many things which inspired the launch of Diffusion, but perhaps the most important was reading back in May ’07 a now famous article by Paul Holmes entitled “A Manifesto for the 21st Century Public Relations Firm”. It was a seminal analysis of the opportunities and threats facing the PR industry from consumers empowered by online and Social Media. Above all it was a wake up call and in many ways confirmed what I had been thinking for a while. Diffusion is really the answer to the question the piece finally triggered – ‘What are you going to do about it?’ – so cheers Paul :-)

Almost a year since it was published, it is debatable whether as industry we have really grasped all the manifesto’s core messages. There is some brilliant and innovative thinking and amazing online work being done, much of it by the people listed to your left. But a bit like the board of Kodak saying ‘that digital photography thing is all hype, it’ll never catch on,’ vast swathes of the industry remain blind to the new realities. There is an inertia grounded in inflexible business models and working practices and the limited skill sets of staff, which many agencies lack the energy to overcome.

Much has been written about the threat facing PR from other marketing disciplines, but I agree with those that argue that it is PR which is the real threat to the hegemony of advertising as the ‘owner’ of the brand. The skills required today to help clients create two-way conversations, listen and engage with audiences and harness the power of word-of-mouth are part of our territory and it’s onto to this ground that marketing as a whole is moving. Do we really want to be evicted from that space now by failing to adapt?

If I am being honest I was very tempted by the offers to develop my vision for the future of PR inside the comfortable and reassuring corporate structures of some amazing agencies. Call me brave, or call me stupid but I was attracted more by the blank sheet of creating an agency from scratch. I wanted to build an agency with amazing media relations skills where digital, Social Media and Search expertise are part of the DNA and don’t just sit in a separate division or practice. Something tells me it was the right move.

I’m very privileged to be working with Ivan Ristic and Barney Jones again, two of the most talented individuals I know. We are also lucky to already have some great clients and we’re looking forward to building a brilliant team who will do amazing work for many, many more in the years ahead. It may have become a cliché to say it, but that makes it no less true - this really is the most exciting time to be working in PR!

The CIPR have teamed up with the MOBO Awards to offer a Press Officer internship to a final/sandwich year PR student or junior PR available between June/July and October this year. This is a fantastic opportunity for someone who would like to get into music/entertainment PR and could lead to a permanent job.

You’ll work directly with Kanya King MBE and the Board of MOBO, who are looking for:

• A genuine knowledge, passion and interest in music of black origin
• The ability to negotiate coverage in the national, music and communications trade media
• Endless ideas, energy and commitment to communicating MOBO’s messages to UK and international audiences
• The desire to put your learning into practice immediately and the confidence to start your career working on a high-profile campaign

The MOBO Awards are for music of black origin – soul/r&b, hiphop, reggae, gospel, jazz – and are screened each year by the BBC and promoted via their 1Xtra brand. They’ve been running since 1996 and are attended by both British and international artists. Last year Amy Winehouse, Ne-Yo and Kano performed and the awards were hosted by Shaggy and Jamelia. More details about last year’s awards: http://www.bbc.co.uk/musicevents/moboawards/2007/

Any interested applicants should submit up to 1500 words to - dawnc@cipr.co.uk - by the end of April. We’ll then shortlist and invite these applicants to the CIPR to present their ideas in more detail at the start of June. The successful person will need to be able to start work in London quite quickly.

More detail on what MOBO is looking for and some guidance in making the application is here: http://www.cipr.co.uk/ciprmobo/

Firstly I’d like to say thanks for the comments in response to my last post on Phorm. It’s clear there is a growing sense of public anger which is being articulated through a motivated and well organised grass roots campaign. From reading the 36 comments so far, I don’t think the same can be said of Phorm’s PR effort to date.

I think there are a couple of immediate observations that will be of interest for those of us working in Social Media relations. Firstly the tactic of instant-rebuttal, responding to every single negative blog post or forum posting written about Phorm has done little to endear the company to its critics. As Paul C puts it,”What an utter PR disaster. Trying to slashdot their way out of a storm, not realising how cynical an exercise responding to individual blog posts will appear to the community.”

There is also the perception that rule No.1 of blogger relations - be authentic and honest – has been broken. The backlash against Phorm began in the tech community in response to articles on sites like The Register. This prompted a series of postings, credited to the ‘Phorm Tech Team’ which were not seen by these communities as coming from genuine techies. As M. Bishop puts it, “In a dissertation about how not to run a PR campaign, pretending to be a tech bod from a company and engaging in a technical debate with experts, only to eventually have to admit you really aren’t a tech bod, or even a Phorm employee at all, because you got so out of your depth, is probably pretty high on the list of don’t do’s.”

If Phorm wanted to engage in a ‘Geek vs. Geek’ debate, why didn’t they get the CTO or a named member of the Tech team to respond? As the ‘Phorm Comms Team’ point out in a comment today, these spokespeople were used in ‘traditional’ press interviews but apparently not at the start when engaging with forums and blogs. I think these initial mistakes and the approach of hiding behind ‘Tech Team’ or ‘Comms Team’ umbrellas only reinforced the growing lack of trust in Phorm and did little to emphasise the key message that company had “nothing to hide”.

Taking a step back, the emphasis being placed on the technology powering Phorm is symptomatic in my mind of the fundamental misunderstanding at the heart of both Phorm’s proposition and its wider communication strategy. Phorm sees itself as offering a B2B product when in fact its service is profoundly B2B2C. There seems to have been a scenario underpinning the business model where ISPs around the world would quietly adopt the service with the hope that the majority of their customers wouldn’t care or notice, everyone would be happy and could rake in their share of the advertising cash. That was never going to happen.

The issue isn’t about Phorm’s technology and the long list of safeguards that are in place. It’s about the benefits of the service to the ultimate end customer, ordinary internet users. Basically ‘better targeted online advertising’ is not a benefit to the average person, most would be happier if there was no online advertising at all. It certainly isn’t such a life changing development that consumers would be willing to enter into a Faustian pact for it, through giving up their internet privacy (real or perceived). Phorm seem to have understood this in part, hence the red-herring focus on phishing.

It’s basically all about perception. I have no reason to doubt Phorm’s privacy claims, and having worked in online technology for a decade I can understand their technology arguments, but the average internet user isn’t going to give a toss about the intricacies of IP address tracking, selective cookies etc. They will simply distill everything down to the Costs vs. Benefits proposition being presented by Phorm and their ISP and most will say NO.

CEO web chats, sharing the code, having one to one meetings with Ged Carroll and other members of the great and the good :-) or (ahem) re-educating Tim Berners-Lee on internet technology is going to do nothing to address the fundamental scepticism of mainstream public opinion.

If Phorm were hoping that the ISPs would take on that mammoth task for them, they are delusional. So far BT has arguably not confronted the issue head on, presenting the service which its is calling BT Webwise, with a heavy emphasis on online fraud prevention. BT is currently planning to make the system opt-out, whereas Talk Talk has succumbed to customer pressure and has been forced to make the service opt-in. Online advertising is a numbers game and the Phorm business model is not based on millions being able to escape the system.

The real PR danger now shifts to the ISPs. For players like Virgin Media the problems could be acute, with disgruntled internet users not only shifting their monthly broadband subscriptions to other providers but their TV and telephone subs as well. In an increasingly commoditised broadband market, being able to claim that we don’t invade your internet privacy and sell your personal data on to advertisers would be a rather strong USP. I can see why Sky and Tiscali have had the foresight to keep their hands clean at this point.

How many different PR outfits should you hire in crisis? Well the answer seems to be three if you are Phorm, which according to PR Week has taken on Freuds, Citigate Dewe Rogerson and crisis guru John Stonborough to rescue its business.

For those of you who have missed the wave of negative coverage, Phorm is essentially an ad-serving company which has signed deals with leading ISPs including BT, Virgin and Talk Talk which allows it to track the browsing behaviour of customers and display better targeted ads - with the ISPs collecting a share of the ad revenues.

The current national media storm was triggered by claims from Cambridge academics at the Foundation for Information Policy Research (FIPR), that Phorm’s activities are ‘illegal’, as gathering information about site visits without a user’s consent could be considered to be in contravention of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, which prevents unlawful interception of communication. The FIPR has called on the Information Commissioner to investigate and his report on the service is due in the next few weeks. Phorm’s immediate fate rests on his verdict.

Hindsight in PR as in everything else is a wonderful thing. Given the scale of the controversy surrounding Facebook’s introduction of its Beacon platform last year, it was however entirely predictable that similar concerns about Phorm would be vigorously voiced by consumers and privacy groups in the UK. Good crisis comms is as much about prevention as effective cure - having the Information Commissioner on side before going public seems like such a no brainer. It would have given the service legal credibility and helped reassure the ISPs, publishers and advertisers on which the service depends.

Ultimately though Phorm’s fate rests with the ordinary consumer, the internet users clicking those banner ads. Taking the national ID card debate as an example, I doubt there is any amount of official reassurance from government and regulators which could overturn the deep scepticism of the British public towards having their online behaviour tracked in such an all pervasive way. The near 8,000 strong Downing St petition calling on Phorm to be shut down and the growing volume of customer complaints directed to the ISPs supporting the service could just be the start.

Let’s see what Freuds, Citigate and Stonborough can do…

The rise of Social Media, whether it be blogging, social networks or YouTube has created a new generation of consumer content creators. Individuals now have tools to publish and broadcast their views on your organisation, brand or industry and potentially reach an audience of millions with the simple click of a mouse.

As the content creation generation matures, what are the implications for traditional media? Will today’s news organisations whether in print, TV or online survive and more importantly retain their authority and influence? How are media outlets adapting to the rise in ‘citizen journalism’ and reaching out to the public to help create the news?

Above all, what are the implications of Social Media for the symbiotic relationship between the media and PR industry that has endured for so long? On Wednesday March 26th the Greater London Group is bringing together an expert panel to debate these fundamental issues and attempt to find some answers including:

- Pete Clifton, the BBC’s Head of Editorial Development and Multi-Media Journalism

- Shane Richmond, Communities Editor of Telegraph.co.uk.

- Stephen Davies, Webitpr, Social Media and PR blogger

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Cost: Tickets for this event are £20 for CIPR members and £25 for non CIPR members.

Booking: To reserve your place please email Marta Sadowska on marta@dapr.com. Payment in advance by cheque is required. Cheques made payable to CIPR Greater London Group should be sent to Marta Sadowska, Davies Associates, 95 York Street, London W1H 4QG quoting your membership number, email address and contact phone number. An electronic invoice or receipt can be supplied on request. The closing date for bookings is Wed 19 March 2008.