PR 101

Bloggers note: I am aware that sometimes typos show up in the blog. I lost my proofreader to a better job. Please have some patience. No one should ever edit themselves. I do appreciate when any of you points out a typos so I can make a correction.

An interview with City University of New York Associate Professor Jeff Jarvis on National Public Radio last week actually made me pull my car over so I could listen carefully and take notes. He was talking about the French Prime Minister’s Nicholas Sarkozy’s suggestion that governments regulate the Net.

While I normally confine my blogs to marketing, public relations and social media, Jarvis reported on something that could affect all two billion Net users worldwide. So I felt I had to write about it. We all need to stand up, take notice, and in my opinion, oppose any effort by any government attempt to control the Web.

Jarvis is the university’s director of the Interactive Program and director of the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism. Among his many accomplishments, Jarvis is a national leader in the development of online news, blogging, and other forms of collaborative journalism, blogs at Buzzmachine.com and is the is author of the book, What Would Google Do?

In short the man is an Internet expert.

Prior to the regular G-8 meeting, Sarkozy held an “e-G8” meeting to which the German news site Der Spiegel said he invited three of the world’s most powerful Internet luminaries to a forum in Paris: Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google, the world’s largest search engine; Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and head of Facebook, the world’s largest social-networking site, with more than 650 million users; and Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, the world’s largest online retailer. Many other Netizans, including Jarvis, went to the event.

Incidentally, note that the power trio is all Americans.

The gist of Sarkozy wants to do is having governments control the Internet. In his view, governments have a legitimate right to regulate the Web as they are only representatives of a country’s cititzens. He argues that things such as child pornography and terrorism have to be dealt with by governments.

“More than three years ago, Sarkozy declared war on the Web,” Der Spiegel reported. “At the time, he referred to it as a “Wild West” and characterized it as an ‘extralegal zone.’ In the style of an Internet Napoleon, he announced his intention to ‘civilize the Internet.’ Since then, he has pursued regulation with nothing short of missionary zeal.”

Curiously, I saw no coverage of this in the U.S. media. I guess they were too busy eating canapés and hobnobbing with dignitaries to notice something this important.

Jarvis said he attended the meeting as an Internet citizen.

“The net is also a new society,” Jarvis wrote in a Huffington Post blog. “That idea is confounding to nations of laws because the net’s own sovereignty depends upon no one having sovereignty over it. That is how it was designed. That is its core principle.

“So it doesn’t behave like a new land that, in Sarkozy’s view, needs civilizing.”

Sarkozy’s argument about crime on the Internet is, in my view, a Trojan horse. Once government can regulate any part of the Net, it will try to regulate it all.

That’s why we has marketers should be worried. Many countries are particularly protectionist. Suppose you have a client based in Ireland that wants to market its products in Singapore. But for whatever reason, the government of Singapore decides it doesn’t want the Irish marketing in their country. If they can control the Net, they can block any attempt by that Irish company to market its wares. Do you want a government telling you how you can market?

Give a government official control of the Net and free access to information will end. Frankly, I think governments are worried that the Internet is causing them to lose control. If they cannot control the sources of information, they have less control over their people.

Think about the Arab Spring. It was pushed and helped by the Internet. Think about what China and other repressive countries would do if their efforts stifle free expression were granted legitimacy.

We all need to oppose what Sarkozy is doing. He says he is just trying to help.

I am not a big believer in anyone offering to help me if I don’t ask for it. As Henry David Thoreau said: “If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life.”

I intended this week to write about an entirely different subject .Two things changed my mind: I love the blues. As I write this I am listening to Son House sing “Government Fleet Blues” on iTunes. It occurred to me that the reason I can hear a Blues song recorded over 80-years-ago is because of a technology perfected in the 1920s – phonograph records. It seems quaint now, but the record was a huge leap from the waxed cylinder previously used to record music. It democratized music distribution. Social media is having the same effect on information distribution,

Second, I was a reading the Socialnomics Blog. It contained information that just blew me away. I read a lot of social media blogs written by some of the best: Simon U. Ford, Chris Brogan, Brian Solis, Sarah Evans, and others. They are all saying that Social Media is taking over. I know they are right. But the following information underlined that fact in a way that surprised even me. Did you know:

(If you prefer the information in video form, here’s the link to the Social Media Revolution.)

• Because of the speed in which social media enables communication, word of mouth has now become world of mouth.

• In the near future we will no longer search for  products and services – they will find us via social media.
• Successful companies in social media act more like Dale Carnegie and less like David Ogilvy – listening first, selling second.
• Successful companies in social media also act more like party planners, aggregators, and content providers than traditional advertiser.
• Twenty-four of the 25 largest newspapers are experiencing record declines in circulation because the Web is now the primary news source.
• By 2010 Gen Y will outnumber Baby Boomers – 96 percent of them have joined a social network.
  • Generation Y and Z consider e-mail passé…In 2009 Boston College stopped distributing e-mail addresses to incoming freshmen.
  • Social Media has overtaken porn as the number one activity on the Web.
  • Three out of eight couples married in the U.S. last year met via social media.
  • Years to reach 50 million users:
    • Radio – 38 years
    • TV – 13 years
    • The Internet – four years
    • iPod – three years
    • Facebook added 100 million users in less than nine months.
    • iPhone applications hit one billion in nine months.
    • If Facebook was a country it would be the world’s fourth largest – between the United States and Indonesia.
      • More than 1.5 million pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) are shared on Facebook – daily.
      • The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females.
      • Some sources say China’s QZone is larger with over 300 million using its services (Facebook’s ban in China plays into this).
      • Facebook USERS translated the site from English to Spanish via a Wiki in less than four weeks and cost Facebook $0.
      • comScore indicates that Russia has the most engaged social media audience with visitors spending 6.6 hours and viewing 1,307 pages per visitor per month – Vkontakte.ru is the number one Russian social network.
      • A 2009 US Department of Education study revealed that on average, online students out performed those receiving face-to-face instruction. One-in-six higher education students are enrolled in online curriculum.
      • Percentage of companies using LinkedIn as a primary tool to find employees – 80 percent.
      • Eighty percent of Twitter usage is on mobile devices…people update anywhere, anytime. Company reputations are often killed before the company even knows it is bleeding.
        • Ashton Kutcher and Ellen Degeneres have more Twitter followers than the entire populations of Ireland, Norway and Panama.
        • There are no secrets in social media – ask any job applicant who didn’t get hired because of those college party pictures on Facebook or Flickr.
        • The second largest search engine in the world is YouTube.
        • Wikipedia has over 13 million articles…some studies show it’s more accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica…78 percent of those articles are written in languages other than English.
          • If you were paid a $1 for every time an article was posted on Wikipedia you would earn $156.23 per hour.
          • There are over 200,000,000 blogs and 54 percent of bloggers post content or tweet daily.
          • Twenty-five percent of search results for the World’s Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content. Thirty-four percent of bloggers post opinions about products & brands.
          • People care more about how their social networks ranks products and services  than how Google ranks them.
          • Seventy-eight percent of consumers trust peer recommendations
            • Only 14 percent trust advertisements.
            • Only 18 percent of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive return on investment.
            • Ninety percent of people that can skip ads using TiVo do so.
            • Hulu (the online video site) has grown from 63 million total streams in April 2008 to 373 million in April 2009.
            • In the past month, 25 percent of Americans said they watched a short video – on their phone.
            • According to Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, 35 percent of book sales on Amazon are for the Kindle when available.

It takes a lot to surprise me. I was a newspaper for 25 years. I have pretty much seen it all. These facts, though, amazed even me. Social media isn’t taking over, it has taken over.

Traditional marketing, public relations and advertising are dying. They just don’t know it yet.

Note: Two weeks ago, I posted a blog about how the kindle could save newspapers. I thought it was an original idea. Well, I was wrong. In 1994, the old Knight-Ridder newspaper chain came up with the same idea. They called their reader The Tablet. What stopped them was technology had not moved far enough along to make it viable. Check out this video to see what Knight-Ridder planned to do.