Well apparently I’m a guru. I never told people I was a guru. I don’t walk around wearing a loin cloth. I never held my arm in the air for 50 years until it atrophied. Nor have I sat on a windswept mountain and heard the sound of one hand clapping (actually I did once hear that, but it’s a long story).

So, when I was a web designer, pre-FrontPage and Dreamweaver or even basic HTML editing utilities, I was called an HTML guru. Then I became a designer, and was a design guru, apparently. Then I became a copywriter and I was an apostrophe guru (no, really). Then, when I got into social media, I became – you guessed it – a social media guru. I never called myself that. I was introduced as that. People would say, proudly, “And here is Brendan, our social media guru” as if touring the museum of curiosities. I would smile politely then return to picking nits out of my fur.

So Mark Ragan is right. We need fewer gurus. I agree. I’ve said so too in the past (good grief was that really so long ago?)

But I think there’s another trend I’m seeing this year, which is a bit more pernicious. There seems to be a general movement to ‘kick out the gurus’. This anti-guru movement seems to boil down to the following argument: social media was taken up by early adopters who don’t really know how to ‘do social media properly’; social media is essentially marketing; so now, it’s time to bring in the real marketeers, people who know how to ‘do social media properly’.

Again, I’m all for driving out the snakeoil salesmen – but hang about: who called us gurus in the first place? It wasn’t us!

Think about this. Who did you first employ as a social media specialist? Or who did you first ask to look into social media within your organisation? Were they fully qualified marketing types? Were they measurement addicts, or management specialists? Were they, in short, the kind of people we all seem to be asking to come in and sort out the social media house?

Or were they people who seemed to ‘fit’ naturally into this strange, new, online space, and bring a variety of skills to bear? So, some of you might have hired someone because they used to be a web designer and they’re comfortable with the web; or maybe they were copywriters who can identify stories and carry messages; or possibly they were web-savvy PR people who wanted to see how to port PR across to the web. Or some, or all, or none of the above but something much more exotic and interesting.

And then you called them gurus. And now you want to get rid of them because they’re gurus.

Social media is far from a settled issue. Networks are being born (Quora), growing (Foursquare), or even getting a bit creaky (dare I say Google?). It’s still messy out there. You still need a native curiosity about it, otherwise you’ll just get left behind. Most of the people who I know working in social media today are simply that: curious people, who try their best to make sense of online conversations to the benefit of their organisations or clients. Calling them gurus is doing them a gross disservice.

So before you demote them to the social media helpdesk, having brought in some big shiny new gun who’s going to wrestle it from the gurus and turn social media into dollars, don’t forget: they were the ones who you turned to first, and tried their best to make it work. It would make much more sense to help them succeed rather than kick them down. And to help them do this? Don’t call them gurus.

In an effort to get myself back into blogging habits, and to make sure I’m up to date with everything I need to be up to date with, I’ve decided to set myself a schedule. So, today is tech day – that is, I post about something a bit techy, a bit digital, a bit wey, a bit wah.

So, PCs. How fast do they really need to be nowadays?

I ask this because I was looking through my bookmarks the other day and found a video of some guys at Samsung putting together a PC that used Solid State Drives (SSDs).

In one respect this is a very cool thing. Hard drive storage tends to be a big bottleneck in most systems, so if you can speed up data access, you speed up the whole system. Hard drives are fairly clunky old things, in that they need to find data on the (rotating) physical medium, and this takes time. But SSDs are, as their name suggest, solid state: nothing in them moves, and the data is accessed directly, exactly as it is with your PC’s memory. Which, in fact, it pretty much is.

In another respect, it’s not a cool thing. But take a look first:

Apart from the slightly self-congratulatory nature of the video, it’s pretty good. And the speeds are astonishing (although they’ll be commonplace before too long).

But the reason I’m not sure about it is this: do we really need those sorts of speeds?

Before you accuse me of being like the guy who said we only need four computers in the world, or the other guy who said everything that could be invented has been invented, or the guy who said any given program will expand to fill all available memory (I think his name was Moore) I do have a reason for saying this.

And my reason is: everything is going into the cloud. Already I have access to a super-fast computer with super-massive storage. It’s called the web. I can run seriously complex queries online through systems like Pipes (or at least I could before it went a bit crap, and I’m hopeful that it’s going to get better soon). I can – and have – uploaded spreadsheets that freeze my PC but which Google Spreadsheets handles easily.

So given the choice, I’d rather have greater upload and download speed, but do I really need a faster PC? I’d argue my PC is fast enough now. I wouldn’t have argued that about five years ago when everything was local and I needed oodles of power and storage at my fingertips. Yet today, the power and storage exists ‘out there’, in the stuff of the web.

So, it’s an impressive video if you’re impressed by that sort of thing (which frankly I am – I’m never happier than when up to my elbows in bits of kit). But do we need it? Do we? Do we really? If you’re one of my three regular readers, let me know what you think.

The blogosphere is no garden of Eden. We can try to self-regulate, but in so doing we’re only exposing our own naïveté. 

In the beginning, there was the web.  It was beautiful. It was perceived – and conceived – as a nirvana, a democracy of thought, in which money held no sway.

Then, money woke up. Banner ads became commonplace. So much, in fact, that people stopped clicking them. Our reaction at Sharepages? Flip everything around. Put the banner ads at the bottom, then people won’t realise that’s what they are.

On the day of relaunch, our stats skyrocketed, and stayed up. We even had someone call us telling we’d ‘got our web page the wrong way up’.

That was some time ago. Sharepages has since changed back to a more traditional layout, under more traditional advertising thinking.

Fast forward to today. It’s not about sites and surfing: it’s blogs and browsing, or social sites and, well, socialising. And so it’s natural that, given we expect the people – yes, people – we interact with, we have certain expectations of them. We want to believe them.

Who do you believe? What do you believe? Do you really think that the columns in trade magazines are really written by CEOs? Do you really think that documentaries are made by the people who appear in them? Do you think Kathy Sykes had an overwhelming need to understand alternative medicine?

No. That CEO had his or her thoughts organised and rationalised by a copywriter. Those people in documentaries were sourced because they fitted the demographic. Someone somewhere had an idea for a documentary that would appeal. They had a list of candidates that would be good to front it. Kathy Sykes was perfect. A sexy physicist with a fairly open mind.

Media is built around demographics. The web and now the social-media-sphere will follow suit. So the nirvana - the belief, the expectation – that we have of social media is about to change. Everyone is chasing the big advertising dollar.

When you read so-called ‘soft’ news, you’re probably reading something ghost-written. That is, something interpreted and publicised and syndicated through an agent, or agency. Virtually everything in Metro, for example. So it follows that, more and more, what you read online will follow suit.

There will be a time, a year or two or three hence, in which we look back at the arguments against ghost blogging, and laugh. It lacks transparency. It lacks integrity. It lacks authenticity. Gimme a break.

In a year or two or three hence, the big money will be savvy. It will be pushing messages out in every digital channel available. The people you think are saying things, will not be saying them. Other people will.

The beautiful thing, in a way, is that consumers will become more sophisticated in their consumption. And the dynamic therefore follows that the ghosts – the PR people – will have to up their game in putting across their message.

I used to argue against ghost blogging. I used to think it was heinous. But that belief is changing. I’m coming to realise that the blogosphere – the beliefosphere – needs to step out from the garden. Big bucks are on their way, and we all need to understand and recognise this.

Is this a bad thing? No, not really. The web is a massive force for good. Advertising and PR are massive forces for communication. Is communication good? Comments please.

It seems to be a reaction to a letter in PR Week, which in turn was a reaction to an announcement of the formal launch of a social media division. Unfortunately it refers to a previous post without linking to it, so the full thread is hard to define.

I find it interesting/amusing/strangely saddening in equal measure.

• Interesting in that I think the “what do we call our separate ‘bits’” discussion encompasses a lot of what we do, not just how to treat the ‘digi bit’. There was a lot of debate around this when I headed up the project to give the Porter Novelli UK website a facelift. In the end I just went with the American model – Industries/Disciplines/Specialities – but that still perpetuates the idea that tech PR is a ‘discipline’ separate from, say, healthcare or consumer, which I’m not sure is entirely healthy.
• Amusing in that spats are so easy to detect! You could probably put a ‘spat-spider’ out there to find arguments. The pattern is generally that of a ping-pong ding-dong between two participants, in which each one points out the hypocrisy of the other, who in turn claims the previous post misunderstood his point – ad inifinitum ad…
• … nauseam. This is the strangely saddening bit. I remember conversations like this on the Computer Music forum years ago. I’m sure someone famous once said “Have we learned nothing?” If not, they should have done.

I’ll further qualify that last point. When ‘Web 1.0′ tipped into mainstream consciousness, many PR agencies formed New Media divisions to handle the ‘new type of journalist’. Then the bubble burst (I know, cos I was there), and all references to New Media suddenly disappeared, from company portfolios and individual CVs.

So the hype/unhype model is probably just human nature after all. The more things change, the more they stay the same. I’m sure someone famous said that.

First, the web. My feeds have thrown up several interesting posts over the past week, which I have shared, on the subject of web 2.0 and its soon-to-emerge successor, web 3.0:

• Micropersuasion argues that even though Web 2.0 appears to be in the hands of a few players – Google, Yahoo, IAC, etc - it’s far from a monopoly in this era and nothing to be concerned about.
• New Media in the Land of Manana showcases a fascinating video in which Eric Schmidt (Google CEO) gives us his thoughts on how a Web 3.0 movement might further alter the online universe. His view is that the future of media is in content aggregation and community, and will be built using these types of viral applications.
• Rough Type offers a brilliant discourse on different ideas of what Web 3.0 – and beyond – could be. The Googleplex approach could be ‘Web 3.0: web as universal computing grid replacing PC operating system and hard drive’, while the semantic approach is ‘Web 3.0: web as machines talking to machines’. His consolidation of both viewpoints is: ‘Web 3.0 involves the disintegration of digital data and software into modular components that, through the use of simple tools, can be reintegrated into new applications or functions on the fly by either machines or people.’ He concludes: ‘Stick that in your Yahoo Pipe and smoke it.’

It was the last comment that made me sit up and take notice because Yahoo Pipes was going to be one of my projects this weekend. To take the ISO model, I’ve always believed Web 2.0 is the online delivery of the application layer, and it strikes me that Yahoo Pipes perfectly encapsulates the ideal of people being able to build their own online apps in the Web 3.0 environment.

So, let’s look more closely at Yahoo Pipes, which I came across when looking into feed filtering recently. This enables you to create your own feeds, and how. Not just merging but filtering too, and taking the output from one feed and mapping it to another. So for example a simple pipe could bring together several disparate feeds, filter in/out, and produce an output that you can in turn subscribe to. More complex examples can take news items and attach Flickr images to them: a photo editor’s dream. I have a strong suspicion the Google Report I recently came across could be built using similar technology.

So Yahoo Pipes offers a way to zero in on the web-as-personalisation and web-as-machine-communication. So might Pandora, the online radio service. It takes the results of the Music Genome Project, in which the musical characteristics such as pitch, harmony and rhythm of thousands of tracks have been analysed to provide a ‘DNA’ for a track. This means you can specify an artist – say, Flaming Lips if you have any taste – and Pandora will come up with ‘similar’ music. You can give tracks the thumbs up or down if you like or dislike them – very Digg-like – and you end up with your own station, essentially by matching your own DNA to that of music. The results are astonishing.

Now, this is where it all comes together. I see Pandora as a serious exercise in tagging: adding extremely sophisticated meta-data to characterise content. Now, I know there are bazillions of people tagging content in a massive exercise in Folksonomy right now, but wouldn’t it be great if somehow online documents could be automatically tagged to a similar degree of sophistication? Not just sentimenting, but semanticising (is that a word?). This would be the blueprint for a cool search engine which I’ve discussed previously.

So, get this. Imagine you could take feeds and do the same with them – thumb up or down and increase the useful hits from them. Slowly, a ‘DNA’ profile of the news you’re interested in is built up and matched to the DNA of items floating around. You could then link or subscribe to other sources with similar profiles – other blogs, forums, groups, wikis. It would be an incredible vertical search engine, and if you could then route that through Yahoo Pipes for extra tweaking, and you’ve got yourself a great news engine. Surely this is exactly what a PR practitioner needs? In fact, there seem to be pipes that already do this and I’m busily setting some up for myself right now.

But where’s the serendipity? How do you come across great ideas out of the blue? Well, Pandora for one is offering me entire new areas of related music to find out about, so it would work the same with other content types. And don’t forget, for PR, you could always read the newspapers in the traditional fashion or even just surf the web (remember that?).

There you go: from Web 2.0, to Web 3.0, to Yahoo Pipes, to Pandora, and back to Life 1.0. Don’t ask me about Life 2.0. I may be a ghost but I’m not quite there yet.

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This morning, on Today on Radio 4 – yes, I listen to it lots – I overheard an interview between the rottweiler of a man John Humphrys and, it turned out, the British Ambassador to Afghanistan, Sir Sherard Cooper-Coles. A short way into the piece, with Humphrys trying his best to put him off his stride, my ears pricked up because Cooper-Coles (or ‘Sir’ to his friends) suddenly said “You only to have to see your own website this morning where quoted on it is an Afghan villager on a superb feature on the BBC website saying the Taliban is the biggest threat to the future of Afghanistan.”

“That’s brilliant,” I thought. “He’s saying ‘this is what you’re broadcasting on your own site – and I’ve been prepared enough to read it. I’m using your own techniques against you.’” To my mind it seemed to phase Humphrys who could only grunt in response. No mean feat.

You can hear it for yourself, a minute and 30 seconds into the interview here.

I have never come across this before. I know interviewees can use all sorts of bridging and blocking techniques but this was different. Both the form and the function were pretty devastating. He managed to wrap it into his speaking so well, and it was highly effective in bringing absolutely relevant and up-to-date information to an interview as well as showing preparedness and initiative.

I told our Media Director about it this morning who also heard it, and we agreed it would make a great addition to any media training. The message: if you have a spare moment before an interview, check out the interviewer’s website/ blog/ forum/ chatroom. You might just find something to your advantage.

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Firstly, the software. There are some pay-for services out there, such as Yahoo’s Overture, Google Adwords and the big daddy of them all, Wordtracker. However for my purposes I used the nifty – and free – Good Keywords application. It’s well regarded as an effective way to isolate and manage keywords.

As my methodology I used its Web Page Explorer feature to extract and count the keywords from the pages on a selection of ten major UK PR agency sites that described what those companies did, usually the ‘about us’ page or similar. This meant I used copy representative of general descriptions of PR rather than specialities. It would probably have been better to identify keywords from entire sites but the software doesn’t have this ‘crawl’ feature.

I then just collated the results across all the pages, removed the really generic words that could apply to any site, and here are the results, for keywords that appeared at least twice:

So, what does this tell us? Well, you could simply stitch the top five keywords together and state that ‘PR people are in the business of client communications’! What I find interesting however is that PR didn’t come top: communications did. Indeed, it didn’t even come second: clients did, with people fifth, showing how important people are in communications, as opposed to, say, technology or finance.

I also find it interesting and illuminating that web is so low! This could show that PR companies still don’t see online as a key speciality, or simply that I need to make my survey more comprehensive.

What this means practically is that I can now pepper my copy with these keywords and, whereas I know this isn’t by any means a panacea for search engine optimisation, at least I’ve taken a small step towards giving my copy a chance by building these words into it. The Good Keywords software also offers alternative keyword suggestions that might get better hits, so I’ll be using this study as a basis for that, although I suspect the top keywords will work fine.

One final observation: actually, the keywords that came top for every site were ‘us’, ‘we’ or ‘our’ (as I said, I stripped the generic stuff out). Does this mean that PR people like to talk about themselves a lot, I wonder…?

I’m going to extend this quick survey to include more sites and move on to double keywords. Meanwhile, if any PR copywriters are out there needing a quick SEO resource, feel free to use this for inspiration.

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When I was young I remember having difficulty quite getting the point of summer and winter time, ie ‘spring forward, fall back’. Which one meant I got an hour more in bed? I used to get quite anxious about having ‘lost’ an hour. What if I never got it back? What if I died with that hour less in my life? Would that mean I’d have died an hour early?

Google Web Accelerator does essentially the same thing as the Onspeed service I used for a year in the old days of dial-up. Instead of receiving content directly from a website, it is first routed to the provider’s servers, compressed, then forwarded to you where software decompresses it, the idea being that the difference in transmission time is negligible while the difference in processing time isn’t. Google Web Accelerator seems to use several techniques to speed up your connection such as (it says here):

• Sending your page requests through Google machines dedicated to handling Google Web Accelerator traffic.
• Storing copies of frequently looked at pages to make them quickly accessible.
• Downloading only the updates if a web page has changed slightly since you last viewed it.
• Prefetching certain pages onto your computer in advance.
• Managing your Internet connection to reduce delays.
• Compressing data before sending it to your computer.

Clever. And, the best thing about it, free, unlike Onspeed.

The only problem so far has been with Windows Update, which didn’t like it. But, in a similar way to pop-up blockers, you can simply tell the accelerator software not to accelerate specific web addresses. Sorted.

I have to say I haven’t really noticed that I’ve saved 23.3 minutes but I suppose I’ve been busy doing something else while saving that time. I just have to trust that the Google Web Accelerator isn’t lying.

I just realised, it took me about 23.3 minutes to write this blog post. So I saved enough time for one blog post, Google got a free plug, and you found out something new (I hope). Everyone wins. Except I am now living in the present. Or am I? It now says 23.4 minutes.

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Google seems to have finally decided that people are also bots: check out this post, in which it’s claimed that searching for a description of a Spam Assassin rule yielded the above response. It’s doing the rounds at digg right now.

I just posted about this on Seamus McCauley’s Virtual Economics blog, and, on submitting my comment, was told an error had occurred that involved me typing a challenge/response code to prove I wasn’t a bot either! So be careful if you comment on this one: if, like me, you find these bot-proofing systems difficult to read then I wonder what happens. Does Google/Wordpress/Blogger ‘ban’ you?

The idea of intelligent search engines – more intuitive than keywords – is a fascinating one. Check out my post on the subject.

Can you just ‘relaunch’ a website? FG thinks not. There has to be a reason for doing it.

I’m in the middle (I hope) of a website relaunch. Where I once was a copywriter, I am now also a web producer and project manager. Part of me thinks this is ok – I have done both in the past, although as my sole occupation at the time – but part of me wonders whether people have a true appreciation for what’s involved.

So, this is what’s involved:

• Before you do anything work out a brief. This will be very similar to a copy brief and, as I’ve said before, it is at the heart of everything you’ll do. It asks questions about what you’re trying to achieve, who the site’s for, the amount of resource you have to achieve this and the timeframe. You cannot spend too long on the brief. Even if you get the sense that people “Just want it done” rather than “Just want it done properly”, insist on the brief and…
• The messages.  Whereas your brief outlines the strategy, the messages form the basis for your content. Essentially these are the brand values (if there any – you may have to go right back and figure them out)  written as, say, four or five bullet points that get across key messages that you want to press home at every opportunity. So, if one message is “We provide great customer service” then try and get that element across whether you’re talking about your HR, your operations and your sales team as well as, of course, your service team. Make sure you can back this up too. Your messages are promises.
• Your messages then form the basis of your copy brief and graphics briefs. As I’ve said, your copy should press these home but so should your images. Try and get your graphic designer to produce one image per message. Then, in the same way your copy constantly refers back to the messages, so do your graphics. Take them as ‘position zero’ every time and you’ll be assured that you won’t wander too far from them.
• At the same time you obviously need a plan. Make sure everyone knows what the plan is and what’s required and when. This is where the project management comes in. You will necessarily need to keep reminding people of their responsibility. Try and delegate work. I’m convinced that the essence of good leadership is not “All these people depend on me” but “I depend on all these people”. This way you’ll get the best out of them and not drive yourself into the ground.
• OK, so things might not always go to plan, so update the plan as you along. A plan isn’t something you produce because you feel you should, then forget it. You need to know whether one element has come in late so that you rearrange other dependencies so that you go live on time.
• I would also recommend keeping a log of things that have caused problems along the way so that you can improve things next time around. If the content management system isn’t up to scratch, then make a note that it should be upgraded or replaced in future. If there is no documentation for processes then get someone to write them up (or do that yourself too).
• Finally, when this is all completed, take a good hard look within the company and ask whether the values and the messaging that you worked out to begin with are really communicated well internally. If no one knew what they were to begin with then chances are, they’re not. This is a big thing: everyone needs to know how they should be working and what they’re working towards. This is where the brand permeates a company inside and out. This is where a company really starts working in a consistent, effective way.

So you can’t really just launch a site as an independent project. It will necessarily involve talking to lots of people and working out the real reason for the launch. Everything is connected. If it isn’t then it’s your task to connect them.

There is more involved and I’ll probably have more to say on this matter as things develop. When it finally does go live I’m hoping I’ll have time to talk about PR and copywriting again.