Talking Point

Why the Olympic social media police won't come knocking

By Craig Regan

Lawmakers often overlook the unintended consequences of their actions. Take the London Olympics for example, where the self-declared “first social media Games” could turn decidedly anti-social.

The Brits have pushed an Act through Parliament to ensure the intellectual property rights of the London Olympics are protected.

Nothing unusual about that – it happened in Australia long before Cathy Freeman went anywhere near a naked flame. It’s just part of the price countries pay to hand over a city for a fortnight to the private company called the International Olympics Committee.

The Guardian newspaper reports that the British legislation goes much further than existing copyright protection. Legal opinion is that someone in the London crowd uploading a photo or footage to Facebook could be prosecuted for breaching criminal law.

The Guardian says using “2012” in connection with terms like “London”, “medals”, “sponsors”, “summer”, “gold”, “silver” or “bronze” is another likely breach. An event called the "Great Exhibition 2012" was threatened with legal action over its use of "2012" but it was later withdrawn.

With ambush marketing in mind, Twitter has agreed to work with the London organisers to ban non-sponsors from buying promoted ads with hashtags like #London2012

Back in the years BS (Before Social), the Australian Government was so sensitive to its own legislation that it referred to the 2000 event as “the Sydney Games” and avoided using The O Word in official communications.

Owners of the Olympic Hotel in Sydney’s Moore Park, located a short stumble across the road from a Games venue, were threatened with prosecution unless they changed its name, despite having long known by the O name.

Common sense prevailed and the dogs were called off.

Much of the same will probably apply in London, even if the draconian law looks, sounds and smells like an ass.

It might say on your ticket that you agree not to “license, broadcast or publish video and/or sound recordings, including on social networking websites and the internet".

But does anyone think the Olympic Police are going to knock on the door after you go home and confiscate your smartphone?

Unless you’re working for a non-Olympic sponsor, the PR consequences would be dire.

More on the games and social media here if you're interested (and that's where we borrowed the image.) 

What's a hipster worth? About $33, it seems

By Craig Regan

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. 

Smith finds defence tough when an enquiry comes back to bite

By Craig Regan

There’s an old saying in political circles: Never have an enquiry unless you know the outcome. It’s rubbish of course, even if that’s the outcome most pollies would want.

So it wasn’t a surprise to see Defence Minister Stephen Smith up to his neck in mixed messages and furore last night following the release of the so-called Skype Sex Scandal report.

Smith’s refusing to apologise for criticising the way the head of the Australian Defence Force Academy treated the alleged victim.

On the face of media reports at the time, the academy chief’s actions looked insensitive. Smith acted as many in his position would have, but probably didn’t have the full facts.

He isn’t the first and won’t be the last Minister to go head-to-head with Defence and come off second best. Did he know how the enquiry would go? Of course not.

You can bet your house that Smith was praying for the PM to drop the Bob Carr option and parachute him into the Foreign Affairs job, not only because he wanted the gig but so he could be overseas when the findings became public.

Speaking of enquiries, the one certainty about the Finkelstein Report into regulating Australia’s media industry is that most of its recommendations - in their current form and converted to legislation - will never see the light of day.

As worthy as His Worship’s intentions might have been, the report handed to the Government by former Federal Court judge Ray Finkelstein last week had more holes than a parsimonious pensioner’s string shopping bag.

You have to question how “independent” a $2m a year media regulator with beefed-up powers of direction would be. The complaint systems we now have are feeble and choking in red tape but isn’t the solution simpler than a bigger stick?

Political payback theories aside, the original terms of reference seemed to be about making media organisations and their employees more accountable. The catalyst was the phone hacking scandal 20,000km away and any connection to Australia was tenuous, at best.

While making media organisations more accountable is a great idea, no sensible Government that supports a free press but already has lots on its plate wants to be picking a fight with people who buy newsprint by the container shipload.

Another own goal by the sport that never learns

By Craig Regan

We all have our sporting biases so let’s not pretend otherwise. As hard as it is to be objective when supporting your own team or code, it’s even more difficult to find anything good to say about the people running soccer in Australia.

The feet of Australian soccer are riddled with self-inflicted bullet wounds. It’s a sport that’s massively popular at junior levels but shuffles one step backwards every time it takes a pace forward.

Sacking the Clive Palmer-owned Gold Coast United team four rounds out from the finals is a big step. It puts a bunch of players out of work and creates a hole in the competition draw. But it’s more momentous when the axed club’s owner has immensely deep pockets and a legal team that’s busier than a one-armed bricklayer on a time-based performance bonus.

The public media war between Palmer and Frank Lowy hasn’t been pretty, but that’s the stuff of dreams for journalists charged with filling the back pages. Coach sackings, threats and protests. Chequebooks at 20 paces. This story’s had it all with more to come.

There’s a funny thing about court cases. They go on for ages and take up massive amounts of print space and airtime. A legal stoush will be the story that keeps on giving.

You have to wonder about the Football Federation of Australia. Palmer’s experience in owning and operating a soccer team was zilch. So why go into business with him, just a season after an equally ill-considered North Queensland franchise folded its tent?

Gold Coast United has been pulling an average home crowd of 2500. Clive Palmer was on AM this morning saying that this was a good result in proportion to the local population.  

Excuse me? I’ve been to funerals of immensely unpopular people that have pulled more heads.

It was great to see the Socceroos punch above their weight in the World Cup, especially as the professional commitments of leading professional players almost always mean lead-up games are marked by their unavailability.

By the way...there’s something about calling a sporting match a “friendly” that rubs me the wrong way, but I digress...

You don’t need a long memory to recall the ill-fated, taxpayer-backed campaign to win Australia the rights to host the World Cup in 2022. That amateurish bid cost $45m. We scored one first round vote from a possible 22. That well-known soccer heavyweight Qatar won.

There’s always the 2030 event - we’re not eligible to run for 2026 - by which time Frank Lowy will be 100-years-old. At the present rate he will have survived another 50 PR disasters by then.

 

Press Gallery influence and coming up the middle in a two-horse race

By Craig Regan

The political parlance is “coming up the middle” and it refers to a dark horse candidate taking advantage of the inability of front-runners to muster a majority of votes.

Like jockeys riding Melbourne Cup prospects, Bill Shorten and Stephen Smith both want to sit off the leaders and only make their run when the finish line comes into sight.

Are Greg Combet and Simon Crean credible alternatives? Or Wayne Swan, who for now is Gillard’s deputy. That’s getting way ahead of the game.

Right now it’s all about Gillard and Rudd. That’s Julia, who can’t cross the road without causing a 10-car pile-up and Kevin, the comeback kid whose evaluation of his self worth is much more substantial than his Parliamentary support base.

There’s supposed to be a hard-core of 40 Caucus members who will vote ABR (Anybody But Rudd) while Ruddster’s own bloc of votes is widely accepted as sitting around 30. That leaves 30 backing Gillard - plus most, if not all, of the ABRs.

With a comfortable majority of seats, Gillard could bring on a spill, send a vanquished Rudd to the backbenches and get on with the job of being a Prime Minister. A comfortable majority, of course, is one thing she lacks.

Pushing that button could provoke Rudd to resign from Parliament, bringing on a by-election that Labor would be hard-pressed to win. Talk about a rock and a hard place – and there’s that looming Queensland State election that’s shaping as a Labor bloodbath.

Resolving the leadership issue before then – even bloodlessly - isn’t going to reverse ingrained perceptions of divisiveness. A messy change could make it worse.

Gillard’s leadership never got out of the starting gates and is dying a death of a million cuts. Rudd’s Prime Ministership was riddled with mistakes but his popularity with men and women in the street is strong – mostly because he’s not Julia.

One under-reported factor is the role of the Press Gallery. Media love colour and movement and leadership changes are on every correspondent’s bucket list.

Some Gallery reporters have obviously been targeted by political operatives with leaks that talk up the prospect of change. One prominent Canberra scribe has even been berated on Twitter for his use of limited off-the-record sources.

It’s a harsh assessment because “off the record” is the lifeblood of political reporting in Australia. If newsrooms followed the US practice of not publishing a story without independent corroboration, we’d be living in a political news vacuum (which some would consider a good thing.)

Kiss this: Presidential primaries are an expensive anachronism

By Craig Regan

In an era of instant gratification and attention spans on par with a gnat, the US system of primary presidential elections is an anomaly that defies explanation for someone not brought up on it.

Like Disney movies, the late Michael Jackson’s plastic surgery and Whitney Houston tributes, you can’t miss the primaries. They run from January to June and dominate Australian news coverage. Estimates for how much they cost go as high as $US5 billion.

That's far less than the $US3.2 trillion the Iraq war is supposed to have cost but not exactly small change.

The idea about bringing party delegates together to pick their candidate for the “real” election has only been around since the 1820s.The primaries rely on an insanely complex formula and has no real foundation in the US Constitution.

As the US Government’s own website rhetorically says: “How many times do we have to vote for president, anyway? Why can't we just go to the polls once in November and be done with it?”

I won’t bore you with all the answers but they’re mostly motherhood statements about giving people a chance to question candidates and feed into the democratic process.

They could do the same online and then cast a vote at the poll.

If the primaries are so good for democracy, how come only 48 percent of eligible Americans cast a vote? Of other countries where voting isn’t compulsory, Malta (94 percent), Chile (93 percent) and Austria (92 percent) rank much higher.

Australian has primaries. They’re called candidate pre-selections. You may not get to vote for the PM when you cast a vote, but the option is there to join a party and play a role in who becomes leader.

The US primaries are public blood-letting that provide media content, cost a bomb and reduce policy debate to the politics of the personal. 

Americans should be kinder to their kids, ditch the primaries and let the baby-kissing start when the polls get really serious. 

Cold snap or brain snap? Someone had their head in the clouds

 

By Craig Regan

 

It probably doesn’t rate as highly on the PR failure scale as an Italian cruise ship captain claiming he’d fallen into a departing lifeboat, but it’s a clear case of not looking before you leap.

The BBC reports that an advertising agency for car maker BMW last week took up the naming rights for a weather system on their client’s behalf.

The idea was that everybody talks about the weather so they’d mention a cold front called “Cooper”- and give the BMW-manufactured car model some profile.

Berlin’s Free University uses the “Adopt a Vortex” sponsorships to fund its meteorological service.

Their outlook probably didn’t foresee the severity of Cooper contributing to more than 100 local deaths.

BMW was forced into a defensive apology and is probably still counting the negative PR cost of their $250 outlay.

That damage won’t be lasting but you have to ask why an ad agency would recommend a sponsorship where the outcome was uncertain and any brand association upside negligible.

A bit of risk analysis never goes astray. Closer to home, if you plan on placing ads on an edgy FM radio breakfast show or sponsoring an accident-prone NRL or AFL team you might want to call us.

 

Telstra Australian Business Awards bring PR and insights that money can't buy

By Marcela Balart

On top of $500,000 in cash and prizes, two of the free benefits entrants in the prestigious Telstra Australian Business Awards can walk away with are increased profile and insights about their business performance. 

The Awards are in their 20^th year and Lighthouse is rapt to be a part of them. It gives us a chance to work with “the best of the best” among Australia’s small and medium businesses - and hear some amazing success stories.

Our brief is to assist past winners and current entrants work with the media to showcase their businesses and point out the support the Telstra Awards give. 

The profile really is PR that money can’t buy – as this print ad that’s running nationally from today underlines.

That other benefit – insight – comes from a free 70-page Business Health Check that each entrant receives. The detailed analysis, undertaken by the NSW Business Chamber, covers seven key areas and assesses their performance against international benchmarking, current legislation and industry best practice.
 
Some of the things it’s telling us about Telstra Business Awards entrants from last year are:

• Ninety-three per cent of them have a website and the websites (70 per cent) were the second most popular marketing channel after the sales force (80 per cent);
• About one in five of their customers (19 per cent) were 100 per cent satisfied with their current level of service while 72 per cent had satisfaction levels above 90 per cent;
• Ninety-seven per cent of businesses could clearly differentiate the benefits of their products and services from those of their competitors;
• Forty-one per cent offered incentives or bonus programs to all staff, and nearly 90 per cent reported no industrial issues.

Of course these businesses aren’t typical of all Aussie companies with 200 employees or fewer. They’re industry movers and shakers who are setting the pace, but the focus they have on seizing the challenge of digital marketing and sales, customer satisfaction, branding and staff retention are telling.

You can enter the 2012 Telstra Australian Business Awards here. Entries close on April 2.

 

Operation Global Black-Out - a stunt or real?

By Elizabeth Coad

The internet activist group ‘Anonymous’ plan to take down Facebook at 12am eastern standard time on 28 January 2012. Or maybe not.

Alleged members of the group posted a You Tube Video overnight calling for people worldwide to join the ‘Greatest Internet Protest - the first official Cyber War’.

In the YouTube video they provide instructions on how to disable your local Facebook server. They claim that if enough people participate and simultaneously disable all 60,000 worldwide Facebook servers the system will collapse. They also claim you can’t get caught!

 

Called Operation Blackout this latest call to join their protest action or ‘hacktivism’ by members of the online community. As they profile in the You Tube clip, the group have previously hacked the CBS and Warner’s Bros websites amongst other sites.

Anonymous is a decentralised community that employs leaderless resistance which is a political resistance strategy in which independent groups and individuals, challenge an established adversary, such as a government.

In this case their protest is centered on the now-stalled US Government's Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and their desire to uphold the Internet rights for people worldwide. As their You Tube video states “An online war has begun between Anonymous, the people, and the Government of the United States”.

This latest video posting could be just a splintered subset of the community or in fact a hoax. Other members of Anonymous also tweeted from their @AnonOps Twitter feed that they would not attack Facebook. Although as their motto states: "We are Anonymous. We are Legion. We do not forgive. We do not forget. Expect us."

Regardless of the outcome, the YouTube posting last night and other recent videos are some of the best entertainment on the internet – bring on the cyber war!

 

           

You've been Quick Rolled: Tonight With Julian Assange

By Craig Regan

Today's news that Julian Assange will host his own chat show reverberated around media circles today. Rove went to LA and couldn’t manage to make a fist of it so maybe this eminent Aussie expat can.

While Assange is undoubtedly high profile, there’s an old maxim in journalism that if the subject of a story is worthy of a descriptor, they shouldn’t need to tell you so. Assange’s declaration that he is “one of the world’s most recognizable revolutionary figures” probably says a lot.

Digging deeper, a search on the domain registration of Quick Roll Productions, the company licensing the chat show, opens this can of worms about the people taking care of their website.