…if you are 25 or younger, you’re probably already reading this on your computer screen. “And to put it in one bleak sentence, no medium has ever survived the indifference of 25-year-olds.”

PR stunt or the new journalism?: The titans of public relations are going direct to viewers and readers

In generating their own video and text-based digital content on behalf of clients, PR agencies are not only taking the bread from the table of a weakened advertising sector but encroaching onto the old territory of television and press companies.

So greedy have they become, the same adverts that run in the video are also displayed as static image adverts along the side of the page. The adverts aren’t even contextual. So you could be watching a story about the latest horrific bombing of civilians after your happy family chocolates advert. Hardly the sort of product placement I’d want for my brand or product.

Many of the large corporations seem to be at a loss as what to do with online video. The bandwidth and storage it consumes is costly. And so they are left scratching their heads as to how they can possibly turn a profit from it.

The must be long deafening silences in corporate think tanks until some bright spark comes up with the idea of let’s do it the old way because we don’t dare try anything new. Just ram it down people’s throats. Why we’re so big, the audience doesn’t have a choice.

Or do they? The coporations seem to be longing for the silver bullet fix to this nasty new media technology, that gives the consumer, god forbid, a choice. As I wrote in my previous post about Facebook overtaking MySpace, the quickening pace of innovation is threatening the very foundations of the business models that have dominated our modern media.

New upstart startups can quickly rocket ahead of lumbering Jurassic giants leaving them scrambling in the dust to catch up. This can be seen the make overs, widgets and other functionality features that MySpace quickly sticky taped on to their website.

And now there’s a new can of worms called mobile media. With expensive data transfer rates and limited screen space on hand held mobile devices, there will be even less tolerance from audiences for advertising bully boy tactics.

A growing thorn in the sides of these media moguls is the fact that the audience is no longer a dumb mute consumer. They have a voice and are willing to share their opinions and experiences amongst their social networks. Enabled by the immediacy of networked digital technology they can quickly inform each other of where better opportunities or offers are.

Oft of late have I read the of the media complaining of this citizen journalism, complaining how they are leeches that take their hard work and regurgitate it. These same voices fail to  then acknowledge the two way street where the “professional” journalists are now trawling social media networks for the latest events as they are proving more immediate than the standard news networks, as evidenced recently with the Twitter and Gaza and plane crashes.

Think it impossible for the status quo to be challenged? Ponder this. Neither Google or Facebook have been sold into established media hands. They both rose from backyard obscurity to being two of the most powerful companies on the internet. They could challenge establishment because of their willingness to innovate. Both have been shrewd enough not to opt for the easy path and attempt to force advertising on their users.

But the question often asked in the media circles today, is how and when will they turn a profit from their huge user bases? The answer to that lies with how innovative and useful they choose to be for the people who use their services and paying close attention to how they are used and giving people what they want or need.

In his white paper “The Black Gold of the 21st Century – Social Data Flows & Analytics”, Alan Moore states that it is expected by 2015, five billion people will be connected to the internet via a mobile device.

This won’t please Mr. Murdoch one bit after all of the money that his News Corp paid out for MySpace as it seems destined to slip in relevance. It appears to be typical old school media thinking, buy and dominate. The part of the story that the old dinosaurs seem to fail to understand is that given the pace of technology developments these days, innovation is the key to the game.

Why did Facebook rise to become so popular and overtake MySpace? Because it offered new and easier ways to connect with people, and manage those connections. The same will happen again as mobile media comes to the forefront of the consumer market.

Peoples needs and expectations continue to change as the technology they use changes, which at this point, is only quickening.

Users down under have noticed searches for the word "iPhone" can return pages of results for "priceline", "mustang" or simply a message saying "try again."

The number eight becomes a search for "ike", seven turns into "Clinton", and don't even try searching for the number six.

Google recommends the tool, which is available as a free download for the iPhone and iPod Touch in Apple's Application Store, works best with a North American accent.

It seems again a case that for anything outside of America, there be dragons. It is surprising that large "international" companies take this attitude. I recently complained of Goolge ignoring my browser language preferences.

Another great example is LinkedIn.com. Obviously if you want to do international business networking, you have to speak and write English. It seems all too hard for the Americans to comprehend that there is a world beyond their shores. Xing.com while developed by Germans, are very conscious of the need to speak multiple languages, hence the greater uptake and multi-lingual networking taking place there.

We may now live in the global village, but we do need to make an effort to reach out to each other and communicate in ways best understood by the people we engage with.

This is likely to result in a decline in expenditure on more traditional channels of marketing, the poll by Rackspace indicated. The survey found that out of 130 marketing bosses, 61 per cent will make the online medium their biggest outlet in 2009, despite 40 per cent saying they have had difficulties in the past due to technical problems, New Media Age reports.

However, the majority of respondents said they believed the effectiveness of social networking campaigns in an online strategy was limited, with only 35 per cent of CMOs stating that they thought the online medium offered the best results transparency.

Furthermore, the survey showed that not enough marketers are considering website performance when rolling out new campaigns – fewer than half (48%) of respondents said that they took steps to make sure their websites could cope with higher traffic levels when running an internet marketing campaign.

Last month, TNS Media Intelligence research found that US advertising spending was on the decline, with a 1.6 per cent drop during the first half of 2008.

However, online advertising was one of the few sectors that bucked the trend, with spend increasing by eight per cent. A recent eMarketer report suggested that spending on search marketing in the UK will rise to more than £2 billion by the end of this year. While in the U.S., a recent study commissioned by the American Marketing Association and carried out by the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University revealed that US business-to-business product marketers intend to increase online spending by 12.87 per cent in the next 12 months, eMarketer reports.

Dean DeBiase of TNS remarked: "It appears marketers are placing an emphasis upon enhanced efficiencies for their brands and the ability to engage with well-defined audiences to ensure ever greater return on investment."

“As social networking traffic has increased, visits to porn sites have decreased, young users spend so much time on social networks that they don't have time to look at adult sites.” Tancer said.

Tancer, in his new book, "Click: What Millions of People are Doing Online and Why It Matters", said analyzing web searches did not just reflect what was happening online but gave a wider picture of society and people's behavior. 

Tancer said the change in communication patterns was one of the most noticeable shifts in society in the past five years — a key point for marketers seeking to learn about their audiences.

In terms of behaviour, Tancer says his study also shows searches for anti-depression drugs spike around Thanksgiving, people are more interested in tropical storms since Katrina.

Tancer said the current obsession with celebrities was also reflected through web data, with celebrity websites garnering more attention than sites devoted to religion, politics, well-being and diets combined – and there is no sign that this is waning.

This celebrity mentality had also overlapped into the November presidential election in the United States with surfers looking for images of Republican vice presidential candidate Sara Palin rather than looking for her policies.

"A lot of the focus around the candidates in general is image based. People want to know how tall Barack Obama is and also to search for their families," he said.

Ever since news of 2Clix's legal action against Whirlpool founder Simon Wright first broke, the general opinion has been that it was, at best, a massive miscalculation. 2Clix's suit, which sought to have two threads discussing the effectiveness of its products removed from the site, instead resulted in global publicity of those threads. Those threads still currently dominate the top five search results for '2Clix' on Google, hardly a good outcome if you're seeking to minimise bad publicity. 

Companies that engage in such legal action against negative discussions need to also think about the flip side of the coin. If they can demand that negative comments should be taken down, then what if all of the positive comments go with them.

After being sucked into the Facebook vortex, I'm not seeking any further networks. Building these online networks is time intensive.

All of these social networks still haven't caught onto the idea is the user's information is their own, with people still being locked into their closed systems. Eventually an open source standard will come along and bust their model, allowing people to repurpose their data how and where they will.

Software company 2Clix is suing Whirlpool forum founder, Simon Wright for allowing two threads on his forum that criticize their software. Now the situation would be laughable were it not that Whirlpool, sometimes affectionately referred to as "Whingepool" amongst those who visit and post to the site, is run on a non-profit, voluntary basis.

2Clix develops low-end business accounting software fulfilling similar roles to more widely known products such as Quickbooks and MYOB. They are seeking damages of $150,000 plus costs for "Injurous Falsehood" and a demand to remove two threads "2Clix or Not 2Clix?" and "Anyone used 2Clix?" from the Whirlpool forums website.

The company in its statement of claim that it has suffered "irreparable damage to its trade and business" from the existing two threads.

2Clix's case is that because the people criticizing and complaining about their software, can not be identified as certifiable users, and maybe malicious competitors, that Simon Wright should take the threads down. Now what 2Clix and their legal advisors have not taken into account, is that some of these people might be genuinely by aggrieved customers.

Their heavy handed legal tactic looks set to blow up in their face. This is not the intended outcome they were seeking. Word spread fast amongst online communities, with 2Clix taking on the role of villan. Many people are pledging to support Simon with financial assistance should the case go to court.

Legal experts have made comment on the case and suggest that 2Clix's case is very shaky, as evidenced in the article, "Will the Whirlpool case wash?".

A win for 2Clix would set disastrous precedent for publishers and online communities, with no online critcizims of anyone or anything being permissible. End of discussion.