Talking Point

Crisis Sourcing is the way to channel your inner zombie

By Craig Regan

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. 

Questioning Kony doesn't make you a baby killer

By Craig Regan

Unless you’ve been living under Uluru you’d know that a relatively low-profile, not-for-profit called Invisible Children is running a campaign to lift awareness of a murderous Ugandan warlord using YouTube as its main vehicle.

Now, this blog was going to be a Kony Free Zone but it’s an important public affairs and communications issue, so resistance seems futile.

The YouTube figures alone are amazing - 72 million “viewings” of the documentary in six days. It’s a long video by online standards which makes you wonder how many of those hits were for the full 30 minutes.

Facebook “likes” have rained down like Sydney’s dysfunctional wet weather. Links to the video, news articles and blogs have been passed around faster than a ticking package in a Middle Eastern market.

In communications terms, you can track the life cycle of almost every public affairs issue.

Given the right elements, media seize on a cause and drive its profile before a backlash sets in and its legitimacy is questioned.

For social media, simply increase the speed of the process many times over.

Weekend commentary expressed amazement that after initially embracing the Stop Kony campaign, so many people were questioning it.

To which you have to say: it’s the Internet, stupid.

Why not question something that rose from obscurity and seek evidence?  If you do, it doesn’t automatically follow that you support evil tribal gangsters.   

Invisible Children haveachieved one of their objectives of building broad awareness of their cause, even if most people are still light-on for detail. They've harnessed emotion and they've made millions of people feel empowered.

In public affairs, however, you need to go beyond bald metrics and look for results.

If the end game is stopping Kony by any means possible, the neutral but mildly supportive reaction from the US Government suggests a solution like that is already in the works.  

The question will be that if Kony is terminated “with extreme prejudice” will it be because millions of people clicked on a link on the Internet or because US covert operatives have been on the ground in Uganda for a long time?

If and when it happens, the scramble for the moral high ground will be frantic. 

 

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.

When porkies and dodgy research combine to do a brand in

By Craig Regan

Mark Twain wrote: "Everybody lies—every day; every hour; awake; asleep; in his dreams; in his joy; in his mourning." Bearing that in mind, you have to wonder about the sense, or lack of, behind some PR campaigns.

An academic blogging for The Guardian in the UK recently laid bare an agency’s use of silly research to gain its client some media space.

Online insurance company einsurancegroup.co.uk paid for an online poll to ask people how often they lied.

Its PR company used the results to tell the world that the Welsh were the UK’s biggest liars, averaging 47 fibs a month.

You can imagine the brainstorm that came up with that gem – and how many policies the company’s now selling in Wales.

Besides the fact that what a fib is to one person is an abominable lie to another, there's the possibility that the answers respondents gave were in fact lies.

A cursory Google search shows 3600+ online stories about the campaign, most of which use the terms “dodgy science” and “cynical bid for publicity”.

That puts a “lie” to the myth that all publicity is good publicity. Any PR company worth its salt would have told the client as much and warned them about trashing their own brand. 

Anyway, everyone knows the UK’s (and world’s) biggest bullshitters come from Cumbria in north-west England.

 

 

Black and white WikiLeaks boosters miss some points

Is it the year’s biggest story or much ado about not much at all? The WikiLeaks brawl is dividing media watchers, PR professionals and just about anyone else with two cents worth of opinion to impart. As the Festive Season is all about giving, here are a few free thoughts from this modest corner of cyberspace:

News is supposed to be something you don’t already know.

By that definition, there hasn’t been a lot of news in the stream of so-called revelations being channelled (in Australia) by WikiLeaks via a deal with the Fairfax press.

Yes, multinationals exert influence in third world countries like Nigeria. Burma wants a nuclear capability. Kevin Rudd has an ego. World War II might even be over.

Notice a pattern? Conventional media channels broke all of the above long before they were raised by WikiLeaks.

Not all the WikiLeaks material can be dismissed but let’s get things into perspective. For the most part the story (cue Marshall McLuhan) is the way the leaks are being broadcast, not the content.

Leaking government information is fine – if the information relates to someone else.

The other definition of news is something you know that you don’t want other people to know. Elected Governments are granted executive powers to use with discretion.

For the most part, they do exercise care – or they pay for it at the ballot box – and some of their dealings are confidential because unintentional (or wilful) misinterpretation hampers their ability to function.

The issue of balancing the public need to know against national interests (by naming, say, Taliban informants and lives at risk) has been well-canvassed.  

But if it’s fine to leak “in confidence” communications between officials and the elected leaders why wouldn’t it be OK for WikiLeaks to broadcast the tax file numbers and personal details of citizens? Or is that sort of leak off limits because it doesn’t undermine a government?

 Is “citizen journalist” a misnomer?

There’s a difference between raw information and the stuff that’s been analysed and interpreted – that’s when it becomes intelligence.

Conventional media is full of intelligence. Its relevance comes from the process of journalists putting pieces information in order of importance and providing analysis, without straying into subjective opinion (unless it’s marked as “commentary”.)

At a risk of being seen as a booster for the declining “old” media, two points should be made about Internet citizen journalism.

Firstly, it’s an extension of word-of-mouth. The conversation around the water cooler every Monday morning is important human interaction but who’s to say the juicy piece of hearsay isn’t baseless gossip that’s just being perpetuated?

Secondly, citizen journalism is only as credible as the person generating the online copy and when you accept the work of a blogger or online columnist you’re putting a lot of trust in someone you don’t know.

Of course a citizen journalist would never be tempted to create mischief or do the bidding of a rival government to destabilise.