While We Have Been Away ...

If you followed our frequent blog postings in the past, you may have noticed that postings stopped in December 2010 with what amounted to an advertisement for the website of our sister company PendryWhite. We have let this stand for some eight months.

The truth is that we have become far more critical of the value of blogs unless they are integrated into social media so we diverted our energies - or rather the energy left over from dealing with our growing client list - into understanding and using other forms of internet-based media.

The blog was not killed off, merely preserved in aspic until the right moment. The right moment to revive it fully has not yet arrived but we will try to put in a few postings that seem relevant to our old readership in the coming months until our communications policy is in place.

But for those who are interested in how we are thinking about the internet as communications tool, these are some highlights of the last twelve months and some thoughts on where we go next ...

Internet Reputation Defence

We have been heavily involved in internet reputation defence working with legal counsel in multiple jurisdictions to make judgements on when it is resource-efficient to use the law and on when to engage in direct negotiation to deal with falsehoods or in positive PR through direct internet communication.

The process of monitoring the internet, evaluating threat, co-ordinating with other advisers, ensuring that negative elements do not drive client budgets and that client funds are invested wisely has been instructive. We hope, if the rules of client confidentiality permit, to say more on this in due course.

Online Media - Project Management

We have also been working on a project that has gone on for some four years but which only took flight at the beginning of the year.

This is at the other end of the scale of internet reputation defence and involves the project management of the business side and eventually promotion (with our sister company) of a ground-breaking attempt to use the internet to build an evidence-based subscription investigative operation.

Internet Marketing

The third area of interest is largely the territory of our sister company but we collaborate closely on intellectual capital, building shared alliances with service providers who can provide both the sophisticated security tools required by TPPR and the promotional flexibility required by PendryWhite.

This area is the effective integration of corporate messages with new social media platforms, a process that presents challenges in terms of internal understanding and risk (especially in areas of compliance). PendryWhite has been advising on techniques and work-arounds.

The New Identity Paradigm

The fourth area of engagement is more of an intellectual exercise than a commercial proposition but we feel it may come to be the most productive of all. This is our sustained study, using the social media as tools, of the changing nature of identity and what it means for reputation.

Our tentative opinion (with Google+ experimenting in precisely this area) is that the positive construction of personal brands will come to be integrated with a greater personal assertion of 'who one is' that will revolutionise 'corporate culture' and productive enterprise.

What Next?

These four zones of engagement are all works in progress and the next six months will see us:-

• integrate our experience of internet reputation management into a model that we can make available beyond our traditional client base
• oversee the launch of a challenging online media operation over whose actual content we will have no control (an exciting risk in its own right)
• integrate our defensive reputation management capability more effectively with our proven digital marketing support offer to create a rounded service for the new generation of wealth creators
• experiment with new and radical modes of identity that (we believe) will assist in promoting creativity and innovation at every level of society and allow challenge to old ways of doing things.

For Further Information: TPPR or PendryWhite 

KEEP LINKING FREE AND UNFETTERED, DEMANDS NEW INTERNET FREEDOM CAMPAIGN

With all our intellectual and analytical postings, we can sometimes forget to tell you that we have clients and that we do good work directly and in association with Pendry White.

This is the latest campaign that we are promoting and it is well within our libertarian new economy positioning - the Right2Link Campaign. Rather than comment here, you can read the official news release and go direct to the Campaign website where there is an explanatory video.

KEEP LINKING FREE AND UNFETTERED, DEMANDS NEW INTERNET FREEDOM CAMPAIGN

A campaign to ensure that linking remains free to all has been launched today. The Right2Link campaign (www.right2link.org) comes as the Digital Economy Bill and other market developments appear to be threatening the information-sharing freedoms afforded by the World Wide Web.

The campaign is adamant that online copyright is to be respected, but argues that it should not be at the expense of the freedom to create, circulate and follow links to online content.

Linking – referencing someone else’s online intellectual property with a headline, short quote or summary with attribution – is standard practice for users of the Internet.  Email and social networks like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and LinkedIn are often used to share links among friends, associates and colleagues.

Search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Bing, as well as other new economy businesses that act as portals and link aggregators, occupy a key role in identifying links that are of interest to be read and passed on.  They are a key part of the World Wide Web’s system of circulating information.

According to Right2Link, the free circulation of publicly accessible information is threatened if individuals, businesses and search engines cannot continue to do what they are doing today without restraint.

Recent months have seen a climate developing, in which governments and media owners have articulated an increasingly restrictive and repressive attitude towards Internet freedoms, and in which there have been a number of disturbing developments threatening to restrict the freedom to link.

First, heads of large media corporations, among them Rupert Murdoch of News Corp and Gavin O'Reilly of Independent News & Media, have accused search engines and link aggregators of stealing their content. They have ventured to suggest that publishing headlines and short excerpts, widely accepted as permissible under the law, should be made illegal.

Second, some industry members and commentators have voiced concerns that the Government's new Digital Economy Bill will threaten information sharing freedoms.

Third, the UK's major print media owners have sought to establish a counter-productive precedent by demanding organisations obtain permission to use links to the newspaper websites and for forwarding them on.  The danger in this precedent is that it threatens to give any media organisation or website owner the right to demand that permission be obtained before linking. They would be able to cherry-pick who they would allow to link to their web site and at what price. This would generate a climate of uncertainty about linking that would damage the Internet’s ethos of freedom of information exchange and restrict people’s and organisations' ability to conduct their business  freely.

Opponents of this trend towards restrictions on the freedom to link include online new economy businesses, search engines, portals and aggregators, enlightened new media publishers, members and representatives of the PR industry and organisations who already realise their online freedom on the World Wide Web is under threat.

However, Right2Link warns that any organisation, including charities and government departments, is open to being threatened with legal action or targeted for “license” fees by any website owner if the freedom to link is not enshrined in law and in practice as an Internet right for all.

The founding sponsor of Right2Link is NewsNow, the UK's largest news portal. The campaign is fully supported by others in the sector including Meltwater, Alacra and Zenark.

Ends

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