Do you own your social profile?

January 5th, 2012

Recently the issue of social profile ownership has come to the fore with the very public case
of Noah Kravitz, a blogger based in California who is being sued by his former employer, PhoneDog,  which is seeking damages because he failed to relinquish his Twitter account when he left the company to work for a rival.

This probably sounds ridiculous, but we have already experienced a similar case in the UK as far back as 2008, when a recruitment consultant working for Hays,  Mark Ions, was ordered to give the rights to his LinkedIn account to his former employer. The court ruled that information of a confidential nature was collected during his work and that the company deserved to have full access to his account. Conversely, last year the BBC’s chief political correspondent Laura Kuenssberg moved from the BBC to ITV and took her Twitter account, which had 58,000 followers with her. The BBC did not seek legal ownership of her account, although there was discussion of the issue elsewhere.

You may think this is a crazy conversation considering the social profiles were in the individual’s name, but the employers have a good argument if the profiles were used solely, or at least for the majority of time, for work purposes, contain work-based contacts and in effect represent the individual’s record of work-based conversations.

That’s not to say I agree with the ruling, far from it, but we need to be aware of the slow moving legal response to fast moving technologies. In other words, the law doesn’t move as quickly as social media, so expect rulings to be based on the most sensible work-based comparison, which generally would have remained the property of the employer after the employee left, e.g. customer files and or contact books. That being said, one would hope that in most cases our social profiles represent a mixture of personal and work-based discussion, so we should not see ownership battles ongoing between employers and employees, and of course this issue could have been avoided if relevant social media guidelines were in place.

It would be interesting to see the outcome of a similar case in a PR, digital or social agency, and how that might affect future norms between employers and employees across the sector. However, so far it seems common sense has prevailed, or perhaps policy has won the day.

In the current PhoneDog case, the company has said that it is taking the action because it had invested in growing the number of followers that Mr Kravitz had on Twitter and the account was its property, alleging that those followers are, in effect, a customer list and PhoneDog’s property. The company wants Kravitz to pay $340,000: $2.50 per follower per month for 18 months.

PhoneDog was quoted in the New York Times saying: “We intend to aggressively protect our customer lists and confidential information, intellectual property, trademark and brands.”

Jon Rettinger, President, TechnoBuffalo (Noah’s current employer) responded with the following statement: “I have remained silent on the issue, privately supporting Noah, hoping that this issue would be resolved. However, further reflection and consultation has made me realize the time for silence is over. TechnoBuffalo is a news outlet, and this situation quite clearly has become news. We stand firmly behind Noah, disagree with the frivolous suit PhoneDog has filed, and hope swift justice will be served. This equates to school yard bullying, and should be met with disgust by the world. We stand behind our employees as we would family. Noah has the full support of the Herd. I urge you all to speak up!”

A hearing in the case, PhoneDog LLC v. Kravitz, is scheduled for January 26 in San Francisco and I expect some interesting responses from organisations across the world, in terms of tightening up policies, whatever the outcome.

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Apple announce one day shopping event - 25th November

November 22nd, 2011

Do you want an iPad, iPad, iPhone or any other Apple product? This could be you best chance to bag a bargain for Christmas.

Apple has announced that it will be holding a one day holiday shopping event on Black Friday which is this Friday, November 25^th.

From the Apple website:

“The special one-day Apple shopping event.

This Friday, 25 November.

Mark your calendar now, and come back to the Apple Online Store for the special one-day event. You’ll discover amazing iPad, iPod and Mac gifts for everyone on your list.

Until then, browse the Apple Online Store for great ideas.”

Apple has not yet given any details about exactly what discounts will be available. Last year, Apple held its Black Friday event on November 27th and discounted a number of its products, cutting the prices of its iMacs and Macbook Pro laptops by up to 7.5 per cent

You still might be able to get better deals elsewhere, but if you’re buying direct from Apple you get that added confidence of a respected supplier.

Below is a video of the iPhone 4s to whet your appetite.

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UK internet advertising spend grows 13.5%

October 5th, 2011

The Internet Advertising Bureau’s (IAB) released its latest half-yearly update today, which shows that the UK internet advertising market is still buoyant, even in the face of the global economic slowdown, as the sector has achieved a 13.5% year-on-year growth.

The IAB figures show £2.26bn was spent on all forms of internet advertising in the first six months of the year, compared with a growth rate of about 1.4% across traditional media such as TV, newspapers and radio. This continues the growth trend over the last few years that has seen 11% growth in internet advertising in the same period last year and 4.6% in the first half of 2009.

The IAB attributed this growth to continued spending from fast-moving consumer goods companies, (FMCG) such as Unilever and P&G, citing digital display and online video advertising as the key growth sectors.

The report also put online spend ahead of TV for the first time since 2009, albeit marginally, with digital accounting for 27% of all ad spend and TV 26%.

Breaking down the online figures: Online display advertising accounted for almost a quarter of all digital spend (£510m), with a year-on-year growth rate of 18.5%, with Facebook likely to account for a large percentage of this.

Online video advertising also continued to evolve, doubling in size to £45m, but paid search still dominates, and grew 12.6% to £1.3bn, or a 58% share, with online classifieds growing 3% to £385m.

In terms of vertical categories, it’s a fairly even split, with finance remaining the biggest investor, accounting for 16% of all spend, closely followed by FMCGs on 15%, entertainment and media brands on 12% and travel and transport on 10%.

In the U.S online ad revenues have also grown by an impressive 23% year-on-year reaching almost $15 Billion in the first six months of the year. On the other side of the Atlantic almost half of revenue contributions come from search (49%), up by 27%, where as display advertising accounted for 37%.

For further information, see:

IAB

The Guardian

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Social Media Marketing and Monitoring 2011

September 20th, 2011

We attended Social Media Marketing and Monitoring 2011 in London yesterday, and since its launch this event, developed and run by Luke Brynley-Jones at Our Social Times, has never disappointed.

This year the event included impressive speakers such as Charles Arthur (The Guardian) , Neville Hobson (Nevillehobson.com) and Jon Morter, Big Other (organiser of Rage against the X-Factor campaign).

The event covered a range of topics, including: Social Commerce, Location Marketing, Social Search, Social Media Monitoring, Social Media Management, B2B Social Media, Engagement & Social CRM and Integrated Marketing Campaigns.

The highlights for me were:

The first panel debate, which featuring Luke Brynley-Jones (Our Social Times), Charles Arthur (The Guardian), Neville Hobson (Nevillehobson.com), Wayne Gibbins (Viadeo) and Jenni Lloyd (Nixon McInnes).

The subject was ‘The Future of Social Networking’ and one of the first topics of debate was: have we ‘bloated our streams?‘ particularly Facebook, and is this fatigue or perhaps a maturing of social networking?

The panel also came out with a great statistic to highlight the difference in international usage of social networks: 48% of web users in China are content creators compared with 24% in the western world.

Neville Hobson outlined the difference between methods of measuring influence, which focused on PeerIndex’s founder who makes the distinction between “influencers” and “opinion formers”.

We then heard from PJ Verhoef at Clarion Consulting, who covered: The What, Why and How of Social Local Marketing, and hit us with a range of useful figures, including:

Over 50% of internet connections are location enabled smartphones and 20% of ALL search is mobile.

• 96% felt QR codes were useful, 92% would use it again.
• 55% of tweets are from a mobile.
• 55% of people will travel 15 minutes for a 10% discount.

Following a brief break, we went into a discussion on monitoring, measurement & engagement

Chair: Andrew Grill (PeopleBrowsr), Joshua March (Conversocial) , Giles Palmer (Brandwatch), Catriona Oldershaw (Synthesio), Tammy Kahn Fennell (MarketMeSuite)

Catriona Oldershaw made a good point about brands often having too many metrics and not enough measurable insights, and that social monitoring and responding shouldn’t be siloed, i.e. within an agency, or marketing department.

Andrew Grill used BT as an example of using Twitter engagement, stating BT has 25 people monitoring and talking to customers via Twitter.

Giles Palmer at Brandwatch referenced analysis that his team had completed on the top 200 brands in UK and U.S., which showed 5% UK, 8% U.S. brands are responding to customer service issues through social media.

Tammy Kahn Fennell from MarketMeSuite offered input on the issue of Compliance and liability through social media, confirming the law is going to have to catch up, but it is also going to have to understand we are social people.

One of the key discussion points centred around how the Metropolitan Police should have reacted to the London Riots.

Giles Palmer confirmed the issue was difficult to track as much of the conversation was on BBM (Blackberry Messenger) which is a closed network and so difficult to access/monitor.

However, assuming the data is public, he suggested sentiment analysis could be employed around hate management detection. i.e. normalising traditional language usage, and then monitoring ‘hate language analysis’ that could act as pre-cursors to potential unrest. He confirmed it would be important to set up alerts to bring in humans who will interpret the conversations and act appropriately.

Joshua March also made a good point, confirming he used Social Media during the riots to understand where to avoid, and where was safe to go, so it wasn’t all bad.

Then came one of the presentations that many of us had been waiting for: How I Beat Simon Cowell Using Social Media by Jon Morter - Big Other.

John gave an excellent presentation on his two campaigns to beat The XFactor to the Xmas number one. He used the learnings from his first campaign, which didn’t bring the desired results, and the successes of the second campaign, which as we know kept The XFactor from the number 1 spot, something that we should all be thankful for, at Christmas or any other time.

John achieved some amazing results through his campaign, including achieving 72,000 sales of the track in the last 3 hours after releasing a live version (which is more sales than is needed most weeks to top the chart).

Jon Morter also told us that he got a call from Simon Cowell 3 hours before the chart result was due to be issued. Apparently Simon congratulated him and offered him a drink, which he still has not yet followed up on.

You can read Gordon Macmillan’s write up here.

Then Raf Keustermans an independent Consultant, (former EA and Playfish) spoke about Using Gaming Mechanics for Marketing. His presentation offered real insight into the opportunities available through gamification, including:

Before 2008 games were Niche, a big but closed industry, which rose from 250M gamers in 2000, to over 1Billion gamers in 2011.

He also confirmed 150 billion minutes are spent every month on social games, that’s an average of 10 minutes for everyone on the planet.

Next, Marcus Taylor from SEOptimse spoke about Social Search & Social SEO for Marketing, and posed the question, through various experiments: ‘Does Facebook Likes have effect on Google rankings?’

His answer being: directly no, but as part of ‘ranking circle’ yes. And that it is safe to assume Google +1’s are an influencing factor towards search rankings.

Marcus also offered five tips on encouraging brand search and getting the benefits of personalised search:

1. Appear for comparison and head of tail key terms where people start stopping.
2. Be awesome and encourage return visits.
3. Run offline radio / TV / print) ads with a ‘search for us’ call to action (Pontiac were first to do this in the Superbowl).
4. Run branded events / sponsor events.
5. Link or reference search results from products - tell people to ‘search google for X” if you know you rank number 1 for that term.

There were also case studies on the day from Play.com, Captain Morgan’s Rum and BMi Baby, as well as a final panel discussion: Is Social Commerce the Future of e-Commerce? Chaired by  Luke Brynley-Jones (Our Social Times) and featuring Peter Parkes (Expedia), Amy Kean (Havas Media), Jenny Chiu (BrandAlley), Robin Grant (We Are Social)

The event was a massive success, and congrats once again to Luke Brynley-Jones and the Our Social Times team.

Slides from most of the presentations are available at Our Social Times’ Slideshare.

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Brighton Digital Marketing Festival

September 9th, 2011

The Brighton Digital Media Festival (BDMF) took place yesterday, as part of the month-long Brighton Digital Festival.

As you will see by the event listings on the website, the Brighton Digital Festival really does reflect exactly how far Brighton has come. It confirms Brighton is living up to its billing as a digital hub, with events such as Flash on the Beach , D-Construct and BrightonSEO, as well as many events in their first year, which look set to build huge followings including BDMF and W-P Brighton.

Back to the event itself, which was organised by Pure360 who did an excellent job, and featured local agency speakers such as DC Storm, iCrossing, Content & Motion, SiteVisibility and White Hat Media. The morning session speakers also included a keynote from BBC Technology and Zenith Mist (London based).

The keynote by BBC Head of Technology Mark Kelleher focused on approaches to Social CRM, identifying risks and futures. As the Head of Technology for BBC Marketing, Audiences, Communications & Archive, Mark is responsible for the technology strategy and development of the BBC’s marketing operations covering traditional broadcasting services and on-demand services such as BBC iPlayer.

He started off with the following question to the audience: ‘Hands up if you know about Social CRM?‘ to which he received practically no response, showing understanding of Social CRM is still at a very early stage.

Mark went onto give practical examples and interesting insight, highlighting the changes that have led to Social CRM, i.e. ‘It’s no longer good enough to make great stuff, you must make great stuff and interact with people effectively so they know about your stuff and find it useful for themselves…’

As well as more practical advice such as: ‘Put stuff out there and see if it’s going to work as your customers don’t know how they’re going to behave.’

And: ‘Brands don’t have to answer everything. Give customer the tools to answer their own questions and make their own decisions.’ Mark indicated that this line of thinking led to the closure of the BBC’s call centre.

He also confirmed much of the success of Dr Who, when it re-launched, was created by discussion on user uploaded YouTube videos.

Mark also set out the ‘New rules’ for brands:

1. Allow yourself to be talked about
2. Offer User journeys of graceful ease
3. Focus on providing customer value
4. Keep reviewing

Mark’s presentation was cut short, but you should be able to view his full presentation, as well as the others from the day, via the main Brighton Digital Media Festival website.

Next up was Chris Dadd, CEO at Zenith Mist (a mobile agency). Chris focused on how engaging mobile conversations can convert clicks to consumers, and offered some interesting stats such as ‘91% of UK consumers have used their mobile for shopping.’

Lewis Lenssen from DC Storm then took the stage to talk about “To Attribution and Beyond!” Focusing on designing an attribution model, which should be a combination of technology and change management, not just a technical exercise.

Finally, Marc Munier from Pure360 spoke about Putting advanced email marketing techniques into practice.

Marc also delivered some great stats, such as ‘There will be more mobile users than desktop users by 2013.’ And ‘Emails are opened within 90 minutes, where as SMS is opened within 90 seconds.’

He went onto offer examples of using email marketing to drive engagement via social media, and advised the crowd to ‘make sure you are offering a reason to engage‘.

Using the phrase “somail” (truly mashing up your email & social), Marc went onto offer advice on the best way to combine social and email/SMS, including:

Twitter - keep it short
Facebook - make it shareable
Linkedin - keep it relevant

I’m afraid my laptop battery died during the lunch break, so i wasn’t able to expand on my overviews of individual sessions, which offered smaller group interaction,  covering subjects such as Social Measurement, User Experience and Search Marketing.

The day finished with drinks at The Fortune of War on the beach, with a very welcome sponsored bar by DC Storm.

Thanks to Abi Clowes, Hannah Ward and all of the Pure360 team for organising a brilliant event. Brighton Digital Marketing Festival proved that Brighton can be proud of its digital prowess, and we look forward to next year’s event.

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News of the World closure - the right decision, or a convenient announcement?

July 8th, 2011

At around 5pm on Thursday, Twitter was alive with seemingly unbelievable statements: ‘News of the World to close - News International statement to follow’, swiftly followed by online media and the news channels.

This story has been brewing for many years in the wake of the News of the World hacking scandal, which has gathered pace this year with further revelations. Most recently, news that not only had MPs and celebrities had their voicemail hacked, (which is unlikely to bring much sympathy from the public) but so had a number of high profile murder and abduction cases, as well as families of soldiers killed in action and victims of the 7/7 bombings.

This rightly brought a massive response from the public and on Monday afternoon, a huge social campaign targeted advertisers of the News of the World, which ultimately meant Ford pulled out and a number of other high profile advertisers felt the need to confirm they were reviewing their position.

I think many people watching this issue unfold were quite happy with the beginnings of a boycott and hoped to keep up the pressure via social, traditional and broadcast media. However, on Thursday evening the majority were taken by surprise by what was quite a stunning move by News International.

The full facts behind this move, which has resulted in the redundancy of many of the team on the News of the World (who were not linked to the hacking allegations) most likely has a number of reasons. I agree that morally this was the right decision, but I suspect there is much more to it than that.

Yes, the amount of negative public opinion certainly played its part, but the News of the World has never been afraid of upsetting people in the past. The reaction from advertisers no doubt made News International consider its position, as a paper is nothing without its advertisers. Although as the most popular Sunday paper in the UK, it could have probably weathered the storm.

However, news of imminent arrests of senior News of the World employees and ex-employees in relation to the hacking issue and Police payments were more likely to play a part. As well as the 4,000 potential victims of phone hacking by the paper. We are also likely to find out further problems over the coming weeks and months as part of the Government inquiry which will be public and messy. Furthermore the much discussed deal to acquire BSkyB, which is going through a high-profile Government review, now put back to September, was probably the biggest reason. Sacrifice old media for new (or at least media with more potential in the digital age) - it makes sense.

In reality, although Sunday’s edition of the News of the World will be the last, is this really the end of the country’s biggest tabloid Sunday paper? Or will we simply see it re-born, potentially under the name of its equally questionable sister weekly paper, The Sun, which is the most popular daily.

News quickly got out last night that The Sun on Sunday .co.uk and .com were registered two days ago, which seems to be a large coincidence, further proof that the News of the World will live on in spirit if not name, or a smart person grabbing a valuable domain on a hunch.

Furthermore, Roy Greenslade at The Guardian wrote a piece on News International’s move ‘towards a form of integration of daily and Sunday’ so was this always the plan and the backlash just offered a neat package to deliver it with more than a hint of crisis communications behind it?

So what does this episode teach us? Does it mean public opinion triumphed over the disgusting tactics of a media monster? Well, considering the hacking has been ongoing for at least 10 years, and public knowledge for 4-5 years, that seems unlikely. Does it mean that the social campaign started on Monday killed the News of the World? Again, this was a factor rather than a reason.

Does it mean that the extremely high pressure working style of tabloid national newspapers will change and journalists will no longer be forced to make a decision between their ethics and their job? Again, it seems not.

The likely reality is that those responsible for this problem, or at least most responsible in terms of their title and dealing with the issue throughout its history, are likely to be untouched (unless the legal process and Government review uncovers any hard evidence). It’s likely that the BSkyB deal will go through, and it’s likely that News International will launch a new title to replace the News of the World and regain market share.

So if this battle killed the News of the World, who and what escaped to fight another day will become apparent over the coming months.

For further information, The BBC has a good overview

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Glastonbury buzz

June 29th, 2011

Having recently returned from Glastonbury myself, I was intrigued by the social round-up of Glastonbury buzz captured by Brandwatch, which can be seen in the word cloud and bar chart below.

(Glastonbury word cloud by Brandwatch)

It seems Beyonce’s appearance, which divided opinion at the event, was the most mentioned of all acts, with 19,969 out of the total 169,000 Glastonbury mentions in total.

Unsurprisingly mud was mentioned 3602 times, but the heatwave that hit on Sunday, and resulting mass Sunburn, didn’t seem to gather as much conversation. Although I promise you it was a strong topic for the attendees, as was the appearance (and mass cheering/applause) of the Sun on Saturday morning, after Friday’s rain.

This might also explain positive sentiment growing stronger throughout the event, as the weather improved. Overall it was 47% positive 3% negative and 50% neutral.

According to the figures, the only brand that made a real impact was Orange, with its festival app and chill and charge zones, which constantly attracted queues for all those unlucky enough not to have their car parked nearby and recharge their phones daily…(smug smile).

(Glastonbury bar chart by Brandwatch)

Personally I used Twitter and Facebook to see who was going to be making those special guest appearances, as well as the general feedback on acts throughout the event, of which U2 seemed to get the most abuse, both at the event and online.

Video clip/image sharing was also of course massively popular, and although my connection dropped off at some points across the festival site, generally I was able to stay connected throughout.

So was Beyonce that good, and did the headliners deliver? To be honest i don’t know, as I chose to watch the Queens of the Stone Age instead of Beyonce, Chemical Brothers instead of ColdPlay, and Primal Scream instead of U2, and they more than delivered.

For further information on the social conversation around Glastonbury 2011, see:

BBC - Who was Buzzing at Glasto?

The Wall - Glastonbury by social media numbers - Beyonce rules as Orange made itself heard

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Channel 4, E.ON and the slow crawl to alternative truth

June 20th, 2011

You want to know the slow crawl to alternative-truth? By nature, brands leech. It’s natural; they have no intrinsic life of their own. We build and sustain them. They’d die without us.

Here’s the pitch (thanks to Nick Booth : “Channel 4 is looking new ideas for using technology to save electricity, for a new programme being made in association with E.ON.

“They want you to go to their website and submit your product ideas/surrender your business secrets (depending on whether you’ve taken out a patent) for a new five part series that seeks to ‘revolutionise’ the way we use energy.

“It doesn’t matter if it’s for work or play, as long as your ‘next-generation technology’ will change the way we live.

“We really want to find new and original products,” says series executive producer Dan Adamson of programme makers TwoFour. ”The series is a great opportunity to give budding entrepreneurs a national audience for their creations.”

The programme makers expect people to have patented their ideas. It costs at least £50K to protect an idea in the UK alone. Investors in a really good idea expect spend up to £500K to protect their property in the courts worldwide. It’s a painfully expensive and time-consuming process.

But, at base, do you instinctively trust the E.ON brand? Me neither. There are so many things that I dislike about this marketing shtick but at it’s heart it is without an essential truth.

Maybe that has something to do with the brand’s affection for pushing up prices year on year, way beyond what’s right and reasonable. And their lack of care for their consumers, balanced against their desperate need to appease their shareholders. Guess who wins.

As for “changing the way we live”, we’ve been there, suffered and won’t get fooled again. Maybe

Against all that dark stuff, here’s truth and beauty:

Posted in Digital communications, Industry events, Journalism | No Comments »

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Paper planes from space

February 3rd, 2011

We do like a little bit of creativity on this blog, and today we salute the boffins at Samsung. The Samsung team have dropped 100 paper planes from a hot air balloon on the edge of space back down to earth.

Why have they done this? to basically prove Samsung’s memory cards are as tough as advertised. Here’s the idea; the memory cards are attached to the planes, loaded up with content such as video, music and images. If you are lucky enough to find one, the people at Samsung are encouraging you to get in touch so they can log the findings.

The Team leader of Project Space Planes, Joel Veitch, explains more: ‘I expect some will end up in the Siberian permafrost, where they will remain until they thaw out thousands of years from now to be discovered by whatever post-human civilisation exists on Earth by then.’They will plug the SD card in to their post-human future SD card reader and hear our voices from the deep past and a bond will be formed across the vastness of time thanks to our amazing space paper plane exploit!

‘If we don’t manage that, I’ll be happy with anything over 100 miles. But who knows how far we’ll get? The sky’s the limit! Literally! Because we’re going in to the sky!’

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Cable takes on Murdoch, and looks set for a first round defeat (updated)

December 21st, 2010

I don’t usually delve into breaking stories, but this one is a meeting of the worlds of Government and Media, and looks set to have significant impact on the UK Cabinet, and potentially News Corp in the UK, so forgive me on this one occasion.

As you may have seen, this afternoon news broke that The UK’s Business Secretary, Vince Cable, indicated that he would seek to block Rupert Murdoch from taking over British Sky Broadcasting (BSkyB). In fact as you can hear in the Daily Telegraph’s recording, Cable seems to take on a whole raft of issues in what he thought was a discussion with constituents, but turned out to be a discussion with under cover reporters from the Daily Telegraph.

Yesterday, Cable had already been quoted attacking the UK’s Coalition Government, but this disclosure was held back. The Daily Telegraph reported yesterday that Cable said: “Can I be very frank with you … I have a nuclear option, it’s like fighting a war. They know I have nuclear weapons, but I don’t have any conventional weapons. If they push me too far then I can walk out of the Government and bring the Government down and they know that.”

This afternoon, further details of the conversation were released confirming Cable also attacked Rupert Murdoch, saying: “You may wonder what is happening with the Murdoch press. I have declared war on Mr Murdoch and I think we’re going to win.”

“I didn’t politicise it, because it is a legal question, but he [Murdoch] is trying to take over BSkyB, you probably know that. He has minority shares … And he wants a majority. And a majority-control would give him a massive stake.

“I have blocked it, using the powers that I have got. And they are legal powers that I have got. I can’t politicise it, but for the people who know what is happening, this is a big thing. His whole empire is now under attack. So there are things like that, that being in Government … All we can do in opposition is protest.”

Murdoch’s attempt to buy BSkyB outright is currently under scrutiny by Ofcom who were due to report to Cable in the next few weeks.

To date, Cable has been generally liked, and his position in the Government is certainly a crucial role, but can he continue after these comments? As i write, the Prime Minister is believed to be in conference with senior members of the Cabinet, who are likely to make an announcement later today. however, i can’t seem him surviving the expected backlash.

Before the News Corp-related quotes came out, Nick Clegg said his Business Secretary was “right to be embarrassed” about remarks The Daily Telegraph did publish, and David Cameron confirmed Cable had been “very apologetic” when the Cabinet met this morning, but i expect harsher words this evening.

News Corp for its part has commented; “News Corporation is shocked and dismayed at the reports of Mr Cable’s comments. They raise serious questions about fairness and due process.”

In fairness, this comment may force the Government’s hand, as competition law stipulates that Media Corp’s acquisition must be cleared by the Business Secretary. Mr Cable is supposed to judge whether the proposed buy-out would harm the media industry, after taking advice from the regulatory authorities. So how can he now be considered impartial?

So, will this cost Cable his job? In most other roles i don’t think it would even be a question, his position is going to be extremely difficult after these comments, and that’s without counting Media Corp’s considerable political reach. The rumour mill is already indicating Cable will resign.

However, he has been painted as a key part of the Government’s response to the economic downturn, so he will be difficult to remove easily.

This whole scandal really was of Cable’s own making, and if PR has taught me anything, it’s that nothing is off the record and to expect anything you say to come out at some point. It seems this basic advice escaped Cable on this occasion.

* Update, as of 18.00 21st December, Vince Cable will continue as Business Secretary, but will take no further part in the decision over News Corporation’s proposed takeover of BSkyB, which will be handled by The Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport.

In a brief statement Cable confirmed: “I fully accept the decision of the prime minister and deputy prime minister. I deeply regret the comments I made and apologise for the embarrassment that I have caused the government.”

For full updates, i recommend the Guardian’s politics Live blog.

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