Crowd Sourcing on the Internet is so hot right now. In simple terms, it means outsourcing a job to a group of people, raising financial backing or tracking an event or cause.
Upheavals in Libya and Egypt are great examples of how to use crowd sourcing to map a crisis. Think of it as social media for activists, where plotting actions on a map mobilises protesters or shows the extent of an issue to raise public support.
We’re going to see a lot more of Crisis Mapping in world hot spots as access to wireless broadband explodes. Wireless broadband is cheaper than cable Internet in much of Africa.
The ubiquitous TV aerial that’s a part of every shack in even the poorest shanty towns in South Africa is fast being replaced by less visible smartphones as a prime communications channel.
It’s probably not far off the mark to say that we’ll soon have billions of digital media users on social media but lack access to fresh running water or a toilet.
One issue that needs to be explored is how reliable as a source of information Crisis Sourcing will be. Crisis Mapping is as easy as signing-up for online software and galvanizing people with the same interest.
Hackers accessing back-end software is a daily event and who’s to say the servers these databases run won’t become the target of operatives spreading disinformation.
In military parlance, this is “black ops”. Where winning hearts and minds used to rely on leaflet drops or foreign language radio broadcasts, the digital world is the new theatre of warfare.
You can read an academic’s view on Crisis Sourcing here.
If it’s all too hard, you can always watch how the world is tracking the zombie apocalypse here.
Pondering the Federal Budget? Concerned about the prospects for peace in the Middle East or simply pondering the existence of a god? Worry no more. The single most important issue in the world today is Facebook’s lack of a Dislike button.
For anyone cut off from modern society and technology – and I’m thinking people who are Amish, strict Methodists or members of The Australian Greens – you need to know that Facebook users view the world as a blue-themed stream of comments, pictures and videos on a computer screen.
People used to interact with friends by phoning or dropping by their house for a drink or a coffee. Now they do it through acknowledging a post on their Facebook wall by clicking a button called Like.
The lack of a Dislike button sticks in lots of craws - and fair enough. It’s very limiting.
Nobody in the real world walks around “liking” everything unless they’ve been lobotomised, inducted into a hippy commune or live in Nimbin. All of which are more or less the same thing.
It’s oddly uncomfortable to see a Facebook friend mourn the loss of a loved one on their wall and have “liking” what they posted as the only option. Unless, of course, callous Aunt Millie also left you out of her will or Iggy the axolotl was particularly ugly.
Assuming they ever became “friends”, would Tony Abbott ever like anything on Julia Gillard’s Facebook wall? There’s more chance of Bob Katter’s Far North Queensland electorate freezing over – although judging by some of his past statements, Climate Commissioner Tim Flannery might say it’s on the cards.
No, if Abbott’s really Mr Negative he’s going to use that Dislike button more often than a disgraced MP plonks a trade union credit card on the counter at a knock shop and says: “Charge me!”
Every few months someone threatens to bring a Dislike button to Facebook - and it always turns out to be a scam or a lame browser add-on that’s only visible to worshippers of Google Chrome.
Disliking is simply not part of the Facebook World. Social media is about connecting "friends” and encouraging interaction. A Dislike button would mayhem.
If Google Circles was meant to be a place for fights it would be called Google Boxing Rings.
So if you see this blog piece on a Facebook feed, don’t forget to “like” it and pass it on. And if you dislike it – suck eggs.
You are what you watch, apparently. The New York Times carries “news” (termed applied loosely) about market research claiming your choice of movie reveals your personality.
“Fans of ‘The Avengers,’ for instance, are 18 percent more likely than the general public to…try new experiences,” research company Meebo says.
“People looking forward to…’The Amazing Spider-Man’ are 34 percent more likely to be optimistic than the general public.”
Who makes up the “general public” and why they’re so down on the world remains a mystery.
Meebo has even compiled its research into a pretty picture (they are called Infograms these days and they’re the hot online PR trend in the US) to make it easy to digest.
A couple of things to note here: Meebo isn’t really a research company. It’s another social media platform that pulls together a number of channel feeds in one place.
Apart from some cursory media reportage, there’s scarcely any information available about how Meebo reached its conclusions other than it conducted a survey.
Going on these lines, fans of 'Titanic' probably have a liking for holidaying in West Africa (there's no ice there) and people queing for 'The Hunger Games' need to go on a diet.
While all this makes a Today Tonight phone poll look like an admission exam for Mensa, you have to question how it's going to sell movie tickets - if that was ever the intention.
More likely, it's a stunt to get people talking about Meebo. Getting them to join the platform is goign to need a whole different script.
“Newsjacking” is a colourful American PR term that means hijacking a breaking news story and inserting your own angle. In the Australian context, many try and few succeed and here are the reasons:
Despite what they might tell you, most Australian PR consultancies aren’t very nimble or responsive. Awakening at dawn and diving into the media to find out what news is breaking isn’t second nature unless you’ve worked as a political press secretary or journalist.
Once a rival story is running in the mass media, it’s almost certainly too late to seize the moment unless you jump ahead of the agenda and define where the issue’s going.
Even at the breaking stage, your story has to be more than good to change the news agenda. It must be newer, more unusual or a bigger game-changer than what’s already out there. That’s a judgement call based on experience and some gut feel.
If a client thinks their angle is the greatest story since 9-11 and it’s not, you need to have an honest relationship that lets you tell them it’s not. The same applies if buying into an issue isn’t a good idea.
Your PR company needs to know its way around the media. It’s no good firing out an email to an over-crowded or unattended in-box. Talking to someone senior on the newsdesk is imperative.
Newsrooms are chaotic places. A phone will ring out or be answered by a reporter’s neighbour who has no idea where their colleague is. That’s no time to be passive – it’s time to go up the line or find a roundsperson on their mobile.
Social media can be a useful tool here but it's no good tweeting if no-one's following.
Lastly, the client needs to be prepared. Can they talk to the angle if journalists pick up on the angle and come calling? If they’re part of a large local company or multinational do they have authority to act without sign-off from someone else? Pre-agreed messages make all the difference.
In a variation on the “build it and they will come” theme, a radio station in Puerto Rico wants to turn around the island’s rampant murder rate by not reporting bad news.
Starting next Tuesday, the program "Noticias OK," will only report good news as a way to minimise violence on the streets.
The program’s host says "the distribution of news with a positive focus will be a balm that will improve the quality of life on the island".
The one-hour show will include segments called "Aplausos,” which will recognise people helping their communities, and "Musica OK," which will only play songs with positive messages. That rules out playing Led Zeppelin records backwards to reveal all those subliminal Satanic blatherings.
“Noticas OK” is basing its plan on market research with just 100 people in low-income communities.
Plenty of people have tried to launch good news media outlets in the past and have failed miserably. News, by definition, is something that changes the status quo.
The old saying in journalism: “If it bleeds, it leads” means the most dramatic news is what’s most prominently reported.
Puerto Rico recorded a record 1,136 homicides in 2011. Between 1980 and 2005 the average annual homicide rate was 19 per 100,000 people.
Yo - listen up: Dead American rap stars may soon be coming to a stage near you.
One of the biggest hits/creepiest moments of last weekend at Coachella, the world’s biggest music festival, was an appearance by Tupac Shakur who joined recent Australian visitor Snoop Dogg on "Come With Me”, "Hail Mary" and "Gangsta Party."
This was a surprise to almost everyone at this show in the middle of the Californian desert because Tupac died in a hail of bullets 15 years ago.
The appearance was at night so there’s no blaming sunstroke.
Another Tupac song, “"I Wonder if Heaven Got a Ghetto", went unperformed.
Tupac got the virtual gig on the strength of being a computer generated image. You can watch the video here. It’s a stunning example of augmented reality, where a live view of a physical, real-world environment is supplemented by computer-generated sensory input.
It’s one of the fastest-developing new media frontiers and has the potential to take news and entertainment off our TV flat screens and onto a coffee table or living room floor, in 3D.
There's some technical discussion here (and an explanation why it wasn't a "hologram".)
There’s no word yet if Dead Tupac will take to the road and play venues around the world. This takes Madonna and Milli Vanilli's miming to another level.
Presumably Tupac’s image projection equipment will need a first-class airline seat. At least promoters can rest easy knowing his backstage food, booze and drug requirements will be light on.
The Urban Dictionary defines “hipsters” as “a subculture of men and women typically in their 20's and 30's that value independent thinking, counter-culture, progressive politics, an appreciation of art and indie-rock, creativity, intelligence, and witty banter”.
Tight jeans, thick-rimmed glasses, shaggy or androgynous haircuts are a trademark of this mainly white grouping. Hipsters yearn to be “effortlessly cool”. The label has its origins in the jazz scene of the 1940s and in the ‘50s and ‘60s you might have called them “Bohemians” or “beatnicks”.
Why does this matter to a blog that’s about PR and media? It’s about Facebook buying Instagram.
Instagram is a free smartphone app that applies a filter to a user’s photo to make it look vintage, shadowy or a faded pastel colour. Yes, it’s that useful.
Instagram is like an extension of an arm for a hipster, smartphones being a pre-existing part of the same limb.
Many people are wondering why Facebook would pay a billion bucks for a company with no discernible revenue stream and barely more than a dozen employees. A company that still hasn’t worked out how to moneytize its service.
It’s about engagement.
Instagram has 31 million users. They upload an estimated five million photos a day. All of those users have email addresses and have given away snippets of information to use this free service.
In a digital economy information equals money.
You still have to wonder if Instagram users are somehow a premium commodity.
Thirty-one million people is a substantial customer base to build on in anyone’s language, but a back of the envelope calculation puts the value of each of those users at a tad over $33 each.
Even the dialect of Facebook - where they regularly deal in numbers with strings of multiple zeroes - that's a massive chunk of change to reach pretentious tossers in thick-rimmed glasses and ironic slogan T-shirts.
You can tell a lot about a sporting club from the way it markets itself for new members. Take the Magpies of the AFL, Collingwood Football Club, 120 years old this year.
It brags that it’s the biggest and most famous sporting club in Australia. It’s won 15 premierships. It’s contested 43 grand finals, more than any other club. It’s also lost 26 grand finals (two draws), more than any other club.
Its club song ends embarrassingly with Oh, The Premiership’s A Cakewalk For The Good Old Collingwood. It’s said that Collingwood supporters believe the last words of Advance Australia Fair are Carn the Pies.
But all this, like pointing out its premiership droughts from 1958 to 1990 and 1990 to 2010 is nitpicking. Where Collingwood excels is rabid cradle to grave supporters, a record membership base of almost 73,000 and a financially astute club management led by Eddie McGuire that, like AC/DC, is strongly Back in (the) Black.
For 2012, it introduced a clever piece of membership marketing that draws on Collingwood’s reputation as the club other clubs love to hate. “It’s Us Against Them. Now is the time to decide. Are you with us?” the ad asks as new coach Nathan Buckley, ‘side by side’ with his players, faces the opposition hordes like William Wallace and his army in Braveheart.
Collingwood’s masterful ad has fine heritage. The voice-over is by Jack Thompson (They hate the sight of black and white that fills the battleground; and they hate our army chanting its intimidating sound).
Our Jack starred as coach Laurie Holden in the classic 1980 movie The Club, the Bruce Beresford/David Williamson homage to Collingwood and football club intrigues everywhere.
Marketing the Australian Football League’s newest team, the Greater Western Sydney Giants, has been a different kettle of fish. There is no tradition. No century of history. An untried team of teenagers based in rugby league heartland.
A confusing name: try GWS and you’ll get Melbourne insurance brokers or a Sydney recruitment company. Or worse. At least, there’s nothing to match the scores of tasteless jokes about Collingwood supporters. Yet.
The marketing saviour for this multi-million dollar AFL investment is one man. Kevin Sheedy. The former plumber, Richmond champion and Essendon super-coach over three decades, he is the voice, the face, the historian, the sage and the stuntman of this new club.
He’s brought his media smarts, his guile and tricks, his play-acting with Eddie McGuire, and above all, his deserved reputation as an innovator of the game and a leader in recruiting indigenous players, to Sydney. GWS membership is 7755. The membership drive features coach Sheedy as much as his largely unknown players.
Sure, the billboards feature rugby league import Israel Folau but, in Western Sydney, he’s hardly a giant alongside Nathan Hindmarsh.
It’s been Kevin Sheedy on the front cover of glossy mags, Sheedy in front of the 80-year-old Harbour Bridge, Sheedy the newspaper columnist and TV guest. And it will be Sheedy who commands the headlines until tomorrow night when they play the club song, described by one wag as backing music for a dancing Boris Yeltsin.
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That’s when the youngsters of GWS hit the turf at Sydney Olympic Park against the ‘Moneyball’ team of the AFL, the mighty Sydney Swans*, with the AFL hoping for a crowd of 40,000. That’s when the nation’s top draft picks play their historic first game and maybe then the GWS marketing can move from the coach to the players’ achievements.
To rework Channel 9 Melbourne’s famous 6pm News promo of the 1980s ("Brian Told Me"), it was Barrie who told me about Kevin as leader.
Three words will long be remembered from Julia Gillard’s Adelaide media conference: chaotic, paralysis and sabotaged. They described, in order, her leadership rival’s work patterns, the state of the government he led and, by implication, his role in the 2010 election campaign.
Some media took up the ball. The Sydney Morning Herald’s David Marr said: ‘No Kevin. This isn’t a breakdown in civility. Your colleagues are at last telling us why you were sacked.”
As pro-Gillard Ministers add fuel to the bushfire, and letter writers draw on Monty Python’s Life of Brian (Perry Gretton, Tumbi Umbi: "Kevin Rudd is not the Messiah. He’s just a very naughty boy"), it is true that formerly unnamed sources are finding the courage to be quoted by name.
But the story is not new.
Take Barrie Cassidy’s 2010 book "The Party Thieves, The Real Story of the 2010 Election." The ABC Insiders host and former Hawke press secretary didn’t miss in his account of the coup against Rudd – who had been labelled Captain Chaos by John Lyons as far back as 2008.
Firstly, on chaos and paralysis, Cassidy records Rudd summoning senior public servants for urgent meetings and keeping them waiting for hours, Ministers discovering major decisions in their portfolios only after the PM told the media first, the interfering nature of the PM’s office and a manic emphasis on winning the 24-hour cycle and its impact on governance.
He wrote: “That Kevin Rudd was cut down by Labor factions because of bad opinion polling is the great myth of 2010. The faction leaders took the initiative – that’s all. The support came in an absolute torrent. That’s because Rudd himself drove them (the numbers). His own behaviour had caused deep-seated resentment to take root.”
Cassidy added: “The coup was happening in part because Rudd had hijacked the party, and either ignored or abused key people within it for too long.”
Gary Gray bemoaned the blame lumped on Peter Garrett for the home insulation debacle: “For Rudd and his office to position Garrett as the fall guy was disgraceful, weak, sneaky, unprincipled and just plain wrong.”
Barry Cohen told Cassidy: “If Rudd was a better bloke, he would still be the leader. But he pissed everybody off.”
Take sabotage. Cassidy called the internal campaign against Gillard relentless, vicious and driven by some powerful media support.
Recalling the fallout from Laurie Oakes’ ‘exclusive’ that Julia Gillard had opposed in Cabinet a pension increase and paid maternity leave, Cassidy wrote: “It left few people in the Labor Party in any doubt that the source was either Kevin Rudd or somebody acting on his behalf, with or without his consent. It was now clear Gillard was going to be tested in a way that few leaders had been in the past.
"There was, undeniably, a rat in the ranks, to use a favourite Labor Party term. And that ‘rat’ was determined to bring down the government.
“Rarely before in an election campaign has a leader had such a fight, against an invisible yet real and potentially poisonous insider.”
So as we digest Kevin Rudd’s plea for an end to ‘vicious personal attacks,’ on the grounds they are ‘un-Australian,’ maybe the ABC will introduce Barrie Cassidy’s Insiders next Sunday with an update of Channel 9’s promo for the late Brian Naylor.
It’s a blip in the scheme of things but a clear case of Do As I Say, Not Do As I Do. I’m talking about Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s ticking off of a journalist at her Adelaide media conference this morning.
Press Gallery journalists rightfully praised Gillard for giving one of her strongest performances ever in front of a media throng. That was until the final moments when The Australian’s Michael Owen asked about her role in the downfall of Kevin Rudd.
"So you just fell into the leadership?" he said at one stage – and kept going. Her response showed what not to do in front of an otherwise benign media pack.
"I’ll answer your question but, ah, just ... I’m not listening to this rudeness, I’ll answer your question and then I’ll give a question to your colleague, thank you very much... “I’m not going have you just speak to me like this. End of sentence. I’ll answer your question and I will take a question from your colleague.
"Your question is internally inconsistent. Let me answer it...well, I’ll answer it thanks very much... If you stop talking then I’ll give you an answer, but I can’t give you an answer if you keep talking.”
The appearance of Angry Julia not-so-deft sidestepping an issue might have been a play aimed at presenting her as a PM with renewed authority, but went dangerously close to portraying her as out of control.
That the reporter has since apologised doesn't quarantine footage fo the incident making the nightly news.
It wasn't quite on the scale of K Rudd’s Unhappy Little Vegemite YouTube video, mind you, but it's still not a good look.
At Lighthouse, we use media training to enable clients to handle questions exactly like this. So here's some free advice.
The most graceful response is to pause, stay silent until the questioner has run out of steam, acknowledge the question and answer or re-direct it, on your own terms.
Remember, it’s a reporter’s job to ask hard questions and probe. Ripping strips off them just distracts from the messages you were trying to convey.
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