October 1st, 2006 by Wendy McAuliffe
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This morning I have been reading Mark Sweeny’s blog report on the first day of PICNIC 2006, the first-ever annual event focused on creativity in cross media content and technology, featuring luminaries of the bloggeratti such as Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, and Philip Rosedale, founder of 3D virtual world Second Life.
A comment made by Dan Gillmor, the founder and director of the Center for Citizen Media (US) and author of the book “We the media: Grassroots journalism by the people, for the people”, is pertinent to the social media-led PR that we’re striving to achieve at Liberate Media.
In reference to his views on citizen journalism, as demonstrated most powerfully around the London bombings, Gillmor talks about ‘trust quotient’ – that being an audience’s ability to measure the accuracy of a piece of journalism. While the impartiality of ranking site Digg has recently been called into question, he claims user-journalism might be threatened if systems developed to take into account the reputation of the story are not found.
From a PR perspective, we need to be considering now the metrics that will be used to measure ‘trust’. Is PR-led information more or less trustworthy, owing to its inherent subjective bias? In order for it to be ‘trustworthy’, it must be useful and offering a voice of authority to its network.
While advertisers’ exploitation of social networks such as MySpace etc is rife in headlines at the moment, we are trying to do something different for our clients, offering them ways to have two-way conversations with a network of receptive and consenting individuals. We want them to be contributing to the debate as a respected source, rather than hindering it through marketing-led puff.
The social media phenomenon is certainly raising the bar for PR, and it’s our job to make sure that organisations understand this.
