The Rocky Mountain News is one of many newspapers closing around the world today.

Reams are being written as to why newspapers are closing, whether bloggers can replace them and what can be done for newspapers to stay open.

But this is just a documentary about all of that.

And on none of the progamme pages where there any communications either. Nada.

Not good. Have the BBC not learned anything from the Brand affair about using its blogs and forums and pages to communicate to the public?

According to the message boards there is a work around. Listen through the stand alone Real Player.

TV viewing is - besides for coverage of live events -  in slow decline. Sites like YouTube on the other hand is generating thousands of streams daily but very expensive to run.

But videos on YouTube and elsewhere online are very difficult to monetise. Users don’t like their viewing interrupted.

Enter ZunaVision, a technology based on an academic research project. In fact at an artificial intelligence lab at Stanford University by three researchers and an Assistant Professor and funded by Stanford professor David Cheriton.

Techniques to monetise online video have included pre and post roles, overlays and interstitial, but this is different - its overlays yes, but overlays in disguise. Techcrunch explains:

“an algorithm first analyzes the video, subsequently alters different aspects of embedded images or videos (such as the lighting, color and texture), and then attempts to fit the advertising into the physical space of their videos without appearing like a blatant overlay.”

ZunaVision claims on their site

We enable content owners to assign ad-spaces inside the physical space of their videos, ready for advertiser branding.

• Fully self-service, and fast
• No pre- or post-production, no screens
• Dynamic, resellable ad-spaces

The result: natural, uninterrupted viewing; unskippable impressions; and increased monetization for producers and sites.

Here’s another video of ZunaVision doing video inside video. Pretty slick.

Techcrunch is sceptical, calling it pop-ups for video. I don’t think its as annoying as pop-ups. In fact, did not spot the overlays in the first two scenes, probably because I expected something far more intrusive! Oops!

Still, all these Stanford whizkids still need to do is brainwash media buyers that reach ain’t everything.

It addresses things like whether mobile advertising is finally making headway, whether the operators will become dumb pipes, whther the internet giants will dominate the mobile space, and much more.

What does it do? It allows you to sign in super easy with your name and Facebook password, and then leave a comment. Facebook automatically includes a pic from Facebook as an avatar as well as your name, linked to your Facebook profile.

What’s the implications of this?

If your a commenter and blogger:

…like me I’d be weary.

I want people to come to my blog, not my Facebook profile. Facebook is after all designed and best used with real friends.

Secondly, I’ll loose the chance of scoring a bit of Google juice via the link to my blog. The Facebook comment’s links have nofollow attributes (I guess implemented on the Techcrunch side), meaning they can’t pass on PageRank, not to your blog and not even to your Facebook profile.

If your Facebook:

I’d be pretty dissapointed that were not getting all that PageRank form all those comments with links. Still, its an opportunity to cement Facebook as an identity repository standard.

If your a Facebook user: (Like me)

Well the downside is your much more likely to be found by people that find you interesting and that you don’t know. If your egotistical and accept all those invitations, in no time your Facebook experience will be boring. Facebook works best with real friends.

But it also an opportunity to show your friends how clever you are with no extra effort. Your comments go straight to your Friendfeed. They also might just think your an opinionated twirp, or really not interested what you think of the Springbok rugby team.

If your Techcrunch (or an implementing site):

Excellent. This is great marketing. All the people leaving comments are effectively word of mouth marketeers for your blog. The comments will appear in hundreds of Friendfeeds. A marketing dream come true. And you don’t loose any Pagerank to pages you don’t want to. Bonus.

Sam Leith is fired, pending appeal.

On Facebook I was greeted by a stream of disbelief from other fiends. One pointed us to to an official confirmation.

On this blog I have written a lot about the shake up of traditional media by new media like Facebook. Now new media (social media) is beating old media with the most authentic news of old media’s own demise.

Sam is a gifted journalist and was the Telegraph’s literary editor. He once wrote about Facebook and its News feed:

“Then there’s the “News Feed”. Facebook is the Reuters of irrelevance, the AFP of inanity. Look at it now. The “top news line”, as we call it in the trade, is that at 10:51, Larushka Ivan-Zadeh became “undecided”. Just three minutes before that, Toby Young added Rio Bravo to his list of favourite movies. Mo Kanneh, I discover, became “chill” at 11:59pm, 3:01am, and 5:04am. Presumably he now resembles a fish-finger after a big night out in Aberdeen. Update! 11:11am: Ben Price removed Dirty Harry from his list of favourite movies.”

Just earlier this week Facebook’s newsfeed was deadly serious.

If you read the English press you might be aware that there’s some bad things going down in South Africa (yes again).

An old school friend updated his feed just this week. It read:

“A J…is sad. His best friend was shot dead in a robbery last night :(.”

The Financial Times recently reported a surge in sales. In times of crisis people turn to quality reads. Social Media is no different.

Update: Sam on being made redundant.

“Like much-criticized PayPerPost for blogs, German/UK startup Be-A-Mapgpie will pay you to insert advertisements into your Twitter stream.

Advertisers pay on a cost-per-thousand-impression basis, and the ads are promised to be delivered to relevant audiences based on keywords. That means Be-A-Magpie will analyze the content of your Twitter messages to see if there is a match to particular advertisers.”

Be-A-Mapgpie does not disclose that a Tweet is an ad either, except for adding a #magpie hashtag into the post. To be fair, any explanation will eat into Twitter’s limited 140 character numbers and the possibilities of creative copy writing for the add.

I have already blogged about undisclosed payment for blog posts. It’s a no no. Social media directness, it’s emmediacy its connection to individuals gives it immense credibility. But undisclosed payment for endorsements can destroy social media’s credibility.

Of course all links inside Twitter have nofollow tags. So there’s no transfer of valuable Google Pagerank happening here (unlike with blogs that are great for transferring linkjuice). It’s pure advertising dressed up as recommendation.

Now ZuluZulu would be surprised if Twitter is not considering inserting ads into Twitter stream as an option to monetise their service. They are in a better position to differentiate between Tweets and ads than a third party, since they could do so in their interface presentation.

Be-A-Mapgpie, allows users to monetise their Tweet stream. How a Twitter user’s followers will view this remains to be seen.

The CEO of Be-A-Mapgpie Jan Schulz-Hofen, responded to some of the criticism on Techcrunch. It’s an interesting response so you can read it in full below. But it’s also interesting to note how tech companies as a matter of course are ready to respond directly in the blogosphere to comments about their companies. There’s another lesson for PR in that.

Jan Schulz-Hofen - November 24th, 2008 at 1:33 am PST

Dear Mike,

thanks for writing about Magpie and for sharing your feedback.

There has been quite some discussion about it lately with both negative and positive comments. We’ve tried to stay in the loop and we’ve learned a lot. After all, we’re still a very young company, but we’ve built a follower base of 600,000+ tweeps in only a month. So there are some people liking it.

Three major points have been addressed in yesterday’s update to Magpie:

- Pre-approval of ads. Tweeps can now pre-approve whether they want to air a specific magpie-tweet or not. Thus, users can move from mere ads to personal endorsements, if they like.

- Customizing the disclaimer. Mike, you also mention that ads weren’t clearly marked as such. We started by using #magpie as a disclaimer to both tell followers that this is not the Twitterer’s own tweet and to build our own brand a little. We’re allowing users now to use their own disclaimer like “ad” or “sponsored”. However, a lot of people (not referring to advertisers here) were asking to omit the disclaimer. We believe that, combined with pre-approval, this may as well be a way to go.

- Less frequent ads. We’ve always let people choose their tweet/ad-ratio but we didn’t allow really low amounts of ads. But as some people earn more than €50 (~ $63) per tweet, they’d be happy to have them come in less frequently. You can now choose to have as few ad 1 ad per 200 tweets.

I recognize that you don’t like the service as it is. I would love if you elaborated more on your objections, as this is the way we can improve the service.

In the end of the day, we believe that you don’t break your follower’s trust as you assumed before, Mike. Just as you, a lot of people are using Twitter to really provide a service to their followers. They’re breaking news, telling us what’s going on or are just making us laugh. As a blogger you can put up ads and be rewarded for what you do. As a Twitterer you should be as well, we think.

Again, I would love to hear more about why you don’t like Magpie and what we can do better!

Thanks again, kind regards,

Jan
CEO Magpie & Friends Ltd.

“The app, like most Twitter-related applications, is fairly simple: you enter a tag, and Tweetag will show any public Twitter messages that contain that particular keyword, but more interestingly also a list of other tags that are related to it.”

Then of course there is Tweetscan who also keeps a database of historical ‘Tweets’ which you can download and search to your hearts content.

Don’t you think it’s surprising that you don’t really read about or hear people talk about web 2.0 and social media and what the difference between the two are.

But today the formidable Techcrunch blog did pronounce - in passing - on relations between the two. They are kissing cousins!

“Adobe’s play is with developers, primarily those reaching the broad consumer playground known as Web 2.0 and its new kissing cousin Social Media. Of course, cloud computing is in there too, but..”

Smootch!

Say what? There ain’t much of a difference, that’s what.

And just in case you were also wondering what the difference is between web 1.0 and 2.0, don’t. Just click the link.

The Wikipedia definition of PR is -

“Public relations (PR) is the practice of managing the flow of information between an organization and its publics. Public relations - often referred to as PR - gains an organization or individual exposure to their audiences using topics of public interest and news items that do not require direct payment. Because public relations places exposure in credible third-party outlets, it offers a third-party legitimacy that advertising does not have. Common activities include speaking at conferences, working with the press, and employee communication.”

Social media is all about communication. The so-called conversation. Tools like blogs, micro-blogging (like Twitter) LinkedIn, YouTube and social networks are a heaven sent for communicators.

PR people should have an instinctive feel for this brave new world.

Press releases have always attempted to be more ‘content like’. They had to be newsworthy and authentic to make it into the media. To achieve word of mouth the message had to truly interesting. Good communication with a businesses’ “publics” have always been more like talking - a conversation - than shouting (advertising).

Sponsorship - also a PR preserve - can be seen a form of ‘content funding’.

One has to look no further than Barack Obama’s recent election campaign to see how social media can be used for things that look a lot like PR. The NY times enthused:

“But by using interactive Web 2.0 tools, Mr. Obama’s campaign changed the way politicians organize supporters, advertise to voters, defend against attacks and communicate with constituents.”

Mind you PR have not done too badly of late. Some of the decline in media spend, away from TV, radio and print has in fact shifted to PR. And PR is often rightly seen as a cheaper way of getting your message out.

Why? As less and less advertising occupies column space in the press, hard pressed editors with less and less staff are looking for easy copy to fill their pages. PR releases have found some fertile soil.

Can PR rest on its laurels? This PR renaissance could be short lived. Without advertising, many magazine titles, papers and even TV channels will cease to exist (at least in their current form) and the available column inches with them.

There are skeptics. During my talk I was either told that the blogs and the like are not as popular in the UK as the US. And the Brits have an enduring love affair with newspapers was another retort.

But just today the Media Guardian reported:

Two of the biggest regional newspaper publishers, Trinity Mirror and Johnston Press, issued interim reports last week detailing how their advertising revenue was crumbling faster than they had expected. They each recorded falls in property advertising of almost 50%, against a general ad slump of over 20% and 15% respectively since the end of June. Trinity Mirror has closed 44 local titles because of the advertising downturn and the switch to the web, where profits are harder to come by.

Dear (of the NUJ) thinks further cuts will damage the industry, and expects more titles to close in the months ahead. “It’s a false economy to make such deep cuts. I think the cuts are already deep but I can see more on the horizon. The warning signs coming out of a number of companies about their ad revenue makes it clear to me that there will be further cuts. The problem a lot of companies are creating for themselves is that, post-recession, many of them will not be in a position to take advantage of the opportunities because they will have lost so many readers and advertisers because of cuts [to staff].”

Dear’s assessment tallies with that of Richards, who thinks the worst could be yet to come for consumer titles in general.”

The closing of local newspapers and many consumer titles will hit PR hard.

In the same Guardian Rupert Murdoch was quoted as saying that journalism will not die. But he added:

“Our real business isn’t printing on dead trees. It’s giving our readers great journalism and great judgment.”

“At a time when new printing technology was making other papers around the world more efficient, newspapers in Britain were forced to rely on a technology that had not changed much since Gutenberg’s Bible. The costs were destroying hundreds of jobs and crippling what is now the world’s most vibrant newspaper market…”

Echoing the impact of social technologies that Li & Bernoff describe so eloquently in their Groundswell book he says:

“Today editors are losing this power. The internet, for example, provides access to thousands of new sources that cover things an editor might ignore. And if you aren’t satisfied with that, you can start up your own blog and cover and comment on the news yourself.”

ZuluZulu thinks blogging is the PR tool par excellence.

It is an easy to use, powerful and flexible platform for companies with a complexity problem to conduct their brand PR (PR that shifts products) efforts. It allows a company to speak to customers in the middle of the funnel.

But so to does almost all corporate public relations (PR that builds reputations) benefit from using a blog. (Corporate public relations are almost always complex in nature.)

You can see the whole presentation I gave here: