Journos to sub own copy

London's freesheet City AM, a newspaper of 100,000 aimed at workers in financial services, is to dispense with the services of its entire sub-editing team.

A spokesman for City AM said "In assessing the editorial capacity and based on similar experiences in Europe, City AM is undertaking a reorganisation that will see it move away from a combined editorial and subeditorial model to focus on frontline journalism."

Replace 'frontline' with 'cost-cutting' and I think you get a better picture of the publication's position.

This is another sign of bloggers and journalists becoming increasingly similar in the way they work. Indeed, Roy Greenslade of The Guardian, commented "In future, writers will sub their own copy. This is how it will be on every paper one day - before there are no papers." But will this lead to a decrease in quality from traditional publications?

Most journalists, if not all, would have gone through some sort of formal training with a required minimum of language skills and so do a good job of effectively subbing themselves before they hand their work into the subs desk. Most bloggers sub their own copy and in most cases do a good job of it. In both cases, most people take pride in their work and writing, and so will want to make sure that their writing is error free before formally publishing it.

This is where bloggers have the upper hand. There is no formal publishing schedule. If they publish something which has an error in it, they can always update the content as soon as the error is spotted. And as they are subbing their own copy all the time at the moment, they will be more use to the future changes that journalism brings.

Greenslade hits the point on the head when he says "this is how it will be on every paper one day - before there are no papers." Perhaps that time isn't too far around the corner.

Update:

Dave Lee rather cheekily points out a piece of sub-editing irony:

"Ironically, in an article about freesheet City AM ditching its sub-editors, Media Guardian’s Leigh Holmwood faces a subbing error of his own:

London business freesheet City AM is to axe eight jobs, including its entire subediting, team as part of a streamlining of its operation.*"

Q&A with Paterson of Plebble

Following on from my previous post on Plebble, I managed to put together a quick Q&A with James Paterson, one half of the brothers who co-founded Plebble in early 2006 (the other being Will) .

The session took a bit of a PR spin (excuse the pun...) so that practitioners can work out how to get the most from using the site, how to interact with the users on the site, and any dangers they should be aware of.

Some pretty sound advice was given - advice I might add that can be applied to various other areas of PR activity. James even branded the questions with a special Plebble speech bubble!

Questions

1. What impact will Plebble have on the companies that PR agencies represent?

Web 2.0 has seen new communication channels are opening up all over the place.

However, I think that PRs have often had difficulty using these channels to convey their clients’ messages because, frankly, they’re usually not welcome. For example, people want to use their social networks for ... socialising. They don’t want brands to keep popping up all the time, saying “Hello, remember us?”

To get round this, some PRs/brands have resorted to subterfuge – pretending to be an ordinary consumer, when they’re not. This is a high-stakes game and, if they get caught out, it reflects really badly on them (eg Walmart).

What Plebble is all about is providing a place where both consumers and businesses can exchange views, messages, opinions in an open, neutral forum. We combine customers’ voices to give them a greater impact on the businesses concerned – but that also makes it easier for businesses to listen to, digest and react positively to what customers are saying.

2. Do you have any good examples of businesses using Plebble effectively?

Plebble is very new and so we are still in early-adopter territory. Nevertheless, some brands are already using it, albeit not to its full potential. Brands such as British Gas, B&Q, Littlewoods, Norwich Union and Standard Life Bank are in what you might call listening mode – they’ve signed up for alerts so that, when anyone rates them, they’ll be emailed. B&Q have also added all their stores to Plebble so they can see which ratings relate to which stores.

What these brands aren’t doing yet though is exploiting the possibilities of communicating with their customers through Plebble. If someone has a problem with British Gas, for example, if British Gas sorts it out publicly, through the site:

(a) They get 1 happy customer (i.e. the person who had the original issue) – the same if they sorted it out privately;

(b) They instantly show anyone else with the same problem browsing the site how to resolve it – thereby cutting down on people contacting them with the same problem; and

(c) They show the whole world that actually they’re a good company that is good at sorting out customers’ problems.

Businesses that already know they provide great service can also ask their customers to help support them on Plebble. People are incredibly willing to reward good service with a recommendation to other potential customers. At least 3 of our current top performers have reached out to their customers asking for support – and have clearly got it.

3. How do you think PRs can best use Plebble, e.g. reputation monitoring?

Plebble is definitely useful for reputation monitoring – and will be more so, as more consumers start using the site. We already provide various tools to help businesses/PRs make sense of what people are saying and will soon be adding more.

But our functionality is really geared towards reputation management and brand building – i.e. being proactive in engaging with customers and distinguishing yourself from your competitors on that basis.

In the end, what’s going on on Plebble is a living advert for each business and the values it stands for (for both good and bad). It’s up to PRs and the businesses concerned what they do with it.

4. Is there a way for Plebble to stop ‘Sock-Puppeting’, the practise of PRs posting fake comments to improve their client’s reputations?

We take data-quality extremely seriously – it’s the lifeblood of our business. We’ve got a number of security procedures in place (e.g. unusual rating monitoring, IP analysis, blacklists, etc), which I probably shouldn’t tell you much about ... and we’re adding to them all the time.

We’re philosophical that we’re never going to be able to eradicate fake comments completely. Plebble’s nature as an e-mocracy, though, means that, in the end the majority view prevails. If you’ve got a few comments that are favourable while the rest are really bad, then people are pretty good at working out that the good reviews are bogus. So, ultimately it’s not worth PRs posting fake comments because (a) people probably won’t be taken in by them and (b) it reflects even worse on the brand they’re supposed to be representing if it looks like they’re trying to game the system rather than engage with people’s genuine issues.

5. Any other tips and tricks

Be open, positive and honest. Deal with negative criticism, no matter how painful and shout about the good stuff as much as you can!

"The way to be interesting is to be interested"

I could write a really long post on how amazing Interesting 2008 was on Saturday, but I won't.

Instead I'm going to leave it to the others who have covered it so, well, interestingly (even though "interesting" doesn't really cover it at all) before I got the time to - but I will put up a few choice cuts and say a few hellos.

(Each photo is from Roo Reynolds, and is a link, so click away!)

There's a Flickr group, a timelapse video, SlideShare event and more discussion here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and lots more (thanks to Roo for collating all the coverage).

Here's a video of The Recorder Incident from Tom Taylor (spot me playing jazz flute front row centre) :

One from Jim Le Fevre and his Phonographantasmascope:

And the "Hellos":

Hi to @tomnixon @monkeyliz @willmcinnes @carlsonator @jopkins @r_c @special_noodles @alicebartlett @blackbeltjones @rooreynolds @herdmeister and the biggest thank you to Russell Davies for putting on the event in the first place!

And I was really very interested, so I hope I'm more interesting as a result!

PR Week's Redesign

Hot of the press, the latest issue of PR Week arrived on my desk this morning. And would you believe it, they 've had a redesign!

On first impressions, it looks a lot like its American counterpart. There's more white space and the fonts are bigger - prompting one of my colleagues to say "Wow, those fonts are big - it looks like PR Week for stupid people."

One interesting addition to the Technology page (still only one page...) is the "Best of the Tech Blogs" column, which features the choiciest cuts from three Tech PR blogs.

This week's column has a post from Jim Horton (the original PR blogger) on Barack Obama's new press spokeswoman and her opinion of PR practitioners, there's one from Stephen Davies (the current PR blogger) the fragile nature of relationships in social media, and lastly a post from Hotwire's own Drew Benvie, who looks at the Associated Press' anti-blogger stance.

Overall, it will be interesting to see how this column develops and who will be featured. It's no doubt a great way to position yourself as a online PR expert (as Jim, Stephen and Drew already are) and we may well see lesser known bloggers who are featured being swept up by the bigger agencies for their social media expertise.

It's good to see PR Week attempt to freshen itself up and keep up with the developments in the Tech PR space, but what about the bloggers in other PR spaces, like charity, property and government?

Also, the cover price is now £5 - is the redesign really worth charging an extra £1.40 for?

Take my advice: subscribe to Jim's, Stephen's and Drew's blog and you'll learn a mountain load more about Tech PR than paying £5 a week for a copy of PR Week. while you're at it, subscribe to this blog - you might even get a gem of wisdom or two from me!

Blogging for the real world

Last weekend, I was lucky enough to spend the weekend in Dorset doing some charity work. Much as I love London, it was great to get out of the City into the countryside for a bit of a break from the fast-paced city life.

As an added bonus, we were in the middle of nowhere and could barely get any phone reception, let alone an internet connection. This meant that there was no way of keeping up with the blogosphere, Twitter, or emails.

It was great to get away from it all - even if for just a weekend.

This sentiment rang even truer given the book I took away with me to read: We Think by Charles Leadbeater. It seemed to me, reading in the middle of a field in the middle of nowhere under a lazy blue sky, that Leadbeater could have done with stepping outside his office more often.

Don't get me wrong - We Think is a great book. It explores plenty of the issues surrounding the new ways of working that the internet has brought about and the challenges we will all face in the future in light of this. Leadbeater also avoids using overly complicated language for the sake of it and uses simple terms and descriptions to get across his ideas (a big tick in my box).

But - and I think this is a problem with academia in general - it seems to be less rooted in the real world with concrete examples of how to apply the theories put forward to the real world, and more as a piece of academia written for academia's sake.

You could argue that the same happens to the blogosphere - blog comments just come from bloggers commenting on each others blogs. Twitter is an extension of this; bloggers commenting on issues - not on each others blogs, but on Twitter (could it be argued that Twitter is a post and every Tweet a comment underneath it?)

Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody is a much better book - for me anyway. It is written ion the same simple language as We Think, but the ideas it puts forward are much more rooted in the real world, concrete examples and case studies are explored in depth, and - most importantly - it is discussed how these examples can help us in our everyday business and personal lives and what we can take from these examples. Shirky has stepped outside his office into the real world, but then brought it back to write the book, and finally tailored it to be put back out into the real world.

This is a lesson that I'm hoping to take to my blog. I'm going to try and root every blog post in the real world, giving examples of how readers can apply the ideas given to their work and personal lives. It may be a tall order - not every blog post will appropriate or useful - but it's a good ideal to work towards.

As for stepping outside the online bubble? I think I'm pretty good at that anyway, but will try to keep on keeping on and getting out into the real world. This may seem hypocritical coming from someone who's paid to do online PR, but to keep things even more in perspective, read this unbelievably true blog post from Jeremy Pepper.

The kids I was helping this weekend have gone through so much more than you or I probably ever will, so just bear in the back of your mind the next time you're still reading blogs at 2am that it just doesn't matter.

CIPR release a SMNR

The Social Media News Release (SMNR), derided by some as unecessary, has been given a new lease of life.

The Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR) has used WebitPR to promote their upcoming World PR Conference and Festival using a SMNR.

Based upon Todd Defren's original idea, the release has all the normal content of a traditional press release, but also contains images of senior executives, logos, related documents, related websites, tags, a range of social bookmarks, and feeds for other releases and comments.

You can view the Social Media News Release here, and presumably we'll see a lot more companies doing them - unless of course they bypass this angle and setup a social media press office or a blog, which some argue has replaced the need for a SMNR.

Truth and Transparency more important than ever

There are a couple of sites that have been launched recently that show just how much truth and transparency towards stakeholders is vital to the modern company - both in terms of customers and employees.

These two sites are Plebble.com and GlassDoor.com

Plebble was set up with one main purpose in mind - to improve the level of service and value for money provided by every business and other organisation in the UK. It does this by giving consumers a voice on customer service issues and by using the power of the internet to join together consumer voices in a powerful, easy to use and easy-to-understand format for other consumers and businesses themselves to use.

It's about sharing information simply and quickly - but highly effectively. It's about empowering you, giving you choice and enabling you to make the right decisions about which businesses to use. And, in the end, it's about making businesses more aware of and accountable for levels of service.

Plebble.com is a great example of how customer ratings can make or break your business. The more people use it, the greater attention will be focused on your company and how it compares to the others in your field. If you don't make the grade, even by a few points, it may swing potential customer's favour to someone else, losing you valuable business.

However, rather than seeing this as all doom and gloom and a threat to your company, Plebble should be seen as an opportunity for your company to gauge just how good your customer service is. If your rating is low, try speaking to the Plebble community about what went wrong and find out how you can improve. And make it personal - no one likes being spammed with corprate speak. Spending just one hour of your time with a few unsatisfied customers can really improve your service offering and give you plenty of insights that you otherwise would never get.

For more information on Plebble, take a look at their short introduction video here or read an article from James Patterson, one of Plebble's founders, on what Web 2.0 means for your business here.

GlassDoor is building a career and workplace community where anyone can find and anonymously share real-time reviews, ratings and salary details about specific jobs for specific employers – for free.

The idea behind Glassdoor is simple: You tell me your salary, and I’ll tell you mine. The site collects company reviews and real salaries from employees of large companies and displays them anonymously for all members to see.

The idea is to collect as much detailed salary information and feedback for every job title at a company so that job seekers can know how to evaluate an offer, and current employees can see how they are doing relative to their peers. “When the annual compensation review comes,” says CEO Robert Hohman, “you need to know what your market value is.” Or you can just live vicariously through others.

At the moment, the site only contains major tech companies and American corporations, but will undoutbedly expand in the coming months to include a much wider range of companies. For example, anyone can see the full details for four companies (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Cisco), but beyond that it is a give-to-get model. You need to post your own review to see the other reviews.

Each company and CEO gets a rating. Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s approval rating is 89 percent, while the overall satisfaction rating for Google as a company to work at is 4.2 out of 5. Microsoft’s satisfaction rating is exactly the same, whereas Yahoo’s is not surprisingly lower at 3.8. The more honest responses the site collects from any given company, the more accurate the results will be.

Beyond the ratings and salary information, Glassdoor can be used for companies to reveal just what their employees think of them through the in-depth reviews that employees give anonymously. Reading through all of them gives a nice cross section of attitudes at the vairous companyies and probably gives more realistic views than the painfully artificial employee feedback programmes that most companies implement.

If Glassdoor can get people to reveal their salaries and their thoughts about the inner workings of their companies, and Plebble can get customers to rate their experiences with a company's services, the internet’s culture of truth and transparency will claim another stronghold.

Is your company ready for the potential impact of these two sites? What other applications can these two sites have towards your company?