It’s been a day of high political drama with The Sun announcing that it’s turning its back on Labour to endorse the Conservative Party at the next general election. Nobody would accuse us of underestimating the importance of online media and digital platforms, but we would never be naive enough to assume that when it comes to political campaigning or PR in general, that national newspapers no longer matter.  However, surprisingly, this seems to be the agreed attack line adopted this morning by Labour spokespeople being interviewed about The Sun’s decision.

Everyone from Lord Mandelson to Charlie Wheelan to the Guardian’s Michael White have been on the TV and radio claiming that The Sun’s explosive decision to back the Tories doesn’t matter in today’s internet age with falling newspaper circulations.  Labour MP Kerry McCarthy, the parties new media chief even went so far as to claim in a Tweet last night that “Labour doesn’t need The Sun. We’ve got Twitter.”  As wonderful as Twitter is, it won’t have been read by close to 8 million people this morning, alongside a full-colour pull-out poster detailing what the paper claims to be Labour’s shortcomings.

There were some interesting Twitter sentiment analysis carried out yesterday by the team at Tweetminster in response to Brown’s speech, which classed 53% of tweets as positive with 21% negative.  The analysis is great to see but I don’t think it tells us anything more than lots of delegates at the Labour Party conference and supporters were on Twitter yesterday afternoon.  I don’t think Twitter is significantly Labour supporting, so again McCarthy’s claim of ownership over the platform for Labour seems rather misguided.

The pure online impact of The Sun shouldn’t be underestimated either. This morning it’s launched a Google Adwords campaign bidding on keywords including ‘Gordon Brown’ and ‘Labour Party’ which state  “The Sun endorses The Conservative Party for the next general election.” The paper’s FeelingBlue campaign has already translated onto Twitter within hours.

Ultimately lets not forget the 23 million plus unique users per month to Sun Online. Beyond pure news coverage The Sun’s website will be a key battle ground for seeding video attack ads and virals during the election campaign – following today’s switch it’s a battle which Labour’s online team will struggle to win.

This week’s issue of PR Week takes an in-depth look at the BNP’s success at the recent European elections and asks a straightforward question – was enough done by the main political parties to prevent their breakthrough? My own view, shared by other industry colleagues, is that a communication strategy based on the premise that if we simply ignore the BNP they will just disappear has clearly failed.  A new approach is now needed, focussed on countering BNP propaganda whenever and wherever it appears, with a far more proactive stance taken by all mainstream political parties.  This includes online.

While I agree completely that there is no substitute for knocking on doors and talking to voters directly, the inability of the BNP to use the mainstream media as a mouthpiece, makes the internet a key component of its campaigning strategy. The online world will therefore become a key battleground in fighting extremism.

I was given the opportunity to debate these issues further with Luke Pollard, an account director at PR consultancy Edelman, as well as a prospective parliamentary candidate for the Labour Party. You can watch our discussion in the PR Week video podcast below.

Following the G20 protests, the death of Ian Tomlinson and two police officers being caught making controversial comments on Facebook, the Metropolitan Police has been battling a storm of negative publicity. This has been driven and perpetuated in the traditional media by ever more revelations emerging through YouTube and other social media platforms.

The challenge faced by the Met shows that no organisation, whether in the corporate, consumer or public sector is immune from the threats and opportunities posed by social media. When an organisation’s reputation is at risk, not monitoring for threats online – at the very least – will in end up costing more in the long run, with greater investment required to regain lost trust.

You can read my advice on how the Met should combat the recent negative press in this week’s PR Week.

As reported by PR Week this morning, Diffusion has been appointed by Beatbullying to implement a social media strategy aimed at increasing awareness and engagement with young people, adults and key political figures online. As part of the project, we are also going to be providing traditional media press office support with consumer and youth media as part of what is a fully integrated communications campaign.

In the past seven years, Beatbullying has worked directly and indirectly with 1.5million young people, helping and supporting those being buillied, re-educating and changing the behaviour of those who bully and preventing bullying in schools and communities across the UK.  

Through their work with young people, Beatbullying understands that young people spend more time online than they do consuming traditional media, and using the online and offline media channels in the right combination is key to ensuring their message cuts through and achieves behavioural change. It’s going to be a busy time ahead and there are lots of exciting things planned, all of which I’m sure you hear about in due course.

It’s often difficult to pinpoint moments when new online services cross the chasm and become mainstream. Yesterday’s ‘Friday Night with Jonathan Ross’ was one such moment for Twitter.

The momentum behind Twitter has been building for a while now. Last April saw Downing St launch its own feed, which has now attracted almost 20,000 followers and key media including the BBC, Guardian and FT have used Twitter updates to not only disseminate news, but to drive all important traffic to their websites.  Twitter is becoming a core online communication tool, with Boris Johnson for example, launching a Mayor of London Twitter feed last week and David Cameron answering questions posted on Twitter, during a live webcast discussing his green agenda.

However, arguably it’s been the power of celebrity endorsement which has propelled Twitter into the national consciousness.  Jonathan Ross and Stephen Fry have in the UK become the services most important advocates – even inspiring the Mail on Sunday of all papers, to devout half a page to a rather dismissive article about the service a few weekends back.  You can watch them both discussing their love of Twitter on Ross’ show below – seen by at least 5.1 million viewers according to the BBC.

Ross and Fry have been joined by a growing international list of sports stars and pop stars, who in contrast to Facebook, have started using Twitter long before the majority of their fans.  So will all this massive amount of free PR be enough to turn Twitter into the success story of recession-hit 2009?

Well, as ever the hype will need to meet the reality.  The latest statistics from Hitwise show that Twitter was one of the fastest growing sites of 2008 with a 10-fold increase in traffic in the past 12-months. Given the amount of glitches which have afflicted and continue to afflict the service, it would be generous to say that this growth has taken the company ‘by surprise’.  For me, Twitter really comes into its own during big events, such as Macworld, CES or Barack Obama’s inauguration and this is exactly when Twitter decides to crash under the weight of traffic. This isn’t acceptable or feasible going forward. While early adopters grudgingly accept that new online services may have teething troubles, the mainstream public will not be so patient or forgiving.

This year Twitter is firstly going to need to make a rapid and significant investment in its infrastructure, if it’s to cope with potentially millions of new users.  Secondly, for an online service designed to connect people and share information it is beyond ridiculous that Twitter has also been unable to fix its search functionality. Twitter users need to be able to find each other and track what is being said about their favourite subjects. This investment will be ongoing and expensive which means that Twitter will finally have to bite the bullet and implement a revenue generating business model – whether ad-funded, subscription or a mixture of both.

For Twitter’s fanatical users it’s obviously exciting that everyone is finally taking about it, but to paraphrase David Ogilvy, all this great PR could  just end up killing a bad product faster.  In 2009 Twitter needs to get serious or risk crashing permanently under its own success.

Thanks to Techcrunch for the footage below

The hot news out of Diffusion this week is that we’ve been hired by Stuff, the best-selling gadget magazine in the world, to implement a very exciting social media campaign that will develop an interactive online community of readers and bloggers around the title, and drive visitors to the Stuff.tv web site.

We’re really excited to be working with such a great media organisation as Haymarket, and with people who understand that just as social media allows people to consume media in a more fragmented and personalised way, their business can also benefit by using the amazing content on Stuff.tv to interact and engage with relevant communities online.

Our work is just beginning and there are a lot of very exciting, top secret digital plans. We’re going to be using a combination of digital tools and channels including blogs, forums, social networks and online video to broaden out Stuff’s reach online, and drive even more visitors through to Stuff’s brilliant site.

Being both a politics and digital PR junkie I’ve been rather spoiled and completely fascinated by the US Presidential elections. I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to record a video podcast for PR Week on both my favourite topics last week, which you can watch here. I think it’s fair to say that we are witnessing the first Social Media Election, where online platforms have become so much more than just channels for raising money but central to campaign strategy for both the McCain and Obama camps.

While the US elections have no doubt showcased the scale of what the web can achieve, there is still so much more that could be done in terms of sophistication. I touch on the issue of better campaign integration in my podcast – amplifying the power of political campaigns through intelligently linking traditional media relations, Search marketing and Social Media.  This is one of the areas I highlight where political parties in the UK, particularly the Conservatives are taking a lead and have a thing or two to teach our American cousins. The Tories live-bidding on Google for keywords spoken by Alasdair Darling as he was delivering his last budget speech is just a sign of the things to come.

Another example of integration in action, which I never managed to blog about at the time was Obama’s visit to the UK in July and his private meeting with David Cameron. Though most of the actual meeting was conducted away from the cameras, the party released a video on YouTube of Cameron discussing the encounter within an hour of it ending and then pushed this out via its press office, an email marketing shot and a sustained Google PPC campaign. The video made it into the Top 10 most popular YouTube videos that weekend, with over 20,000 hits in 48 hours, helping to ensure that the Tories at least matched the coverage given to Obama’s meeting with Brown.

As with most things Social Media we have barely scratched the surface, particularly when it comes to using the two-way communication potential of online platforms to the full. Watching how the UK parties fight the next general election online is going to be compelling viewing!

 The Daily Telegraph is making strides in implementing its online strategy after the latest ABCe figures revealed that the Mail Online had overtaken it to become the UK’s most popular national newspaper site in May, with 18.7 million unique users.

Crucially, the Telegraph isn’t just thinking that having a Facebook and Twitter presence is the key to a great digital strategy, like so many of its rivals. What the Telegraph has realised is that just as social media allows individuals to consume media in a more fragmented and personalised way, so they can actually benefit from that, by allowing individuals to follow personalised sections of Telegraph content. The dream for content owners trying to fight against falling traditional media circulations, is being able to segment and offer their content online to their audience in a completely personalised way. It’s quite an involved process to achieve that when you consider how broad a national newspaper’s coverage is, and how many segments that could be, but the Telegraph has taken a big first step on that road, and with these widgets is making an important stride into the mobile space too.

What is worth noting about the Telegraph’s approach is that six of its eight new widgets are all designed to drive traffic and engagement with Telegraph TV – the online video that’s become so important to all the major newspapers. Beyond that, there’s a breaking news widget and a toe in the water with a slightly more ‘niche’ European Championships Football widget. Apparently there are plans to launch further specific sports and business widgets shortly.

Above all this shows the Telegraph’s open approach to digital and clear understanding that it’s not just about pushing people through the Telegraph.co.uk front page, or amassing a number of fans on a Facebook page or twitter feed, but giving people direct access to the content they are really interested in, in the way they want it. We’ll just have to see in the next two or three months how big an impact that will have on the ABCe figures…

So I was asked by PR Week on Monday for my views on Gordon Brown’s Ask the PM initiative on YouTube. This was the latest foray into the online world by Downing Street, following its recent embrace of Twitter. My assessment that Ask the PM “smacks of gimmickry and desperation” led the article and there was a clear consensus from other industry commentators, that this project was a typical case of ‘too little, too late’.

I had a couple of interesting conversations on Friday in response to the piece. These boiled down to the argument that as a Social Media evangelist I should have welcomed the initiative, however imperfect, as a step in the right direction. Sorry to disappoint.

I have come to a view, which has hardened in recent months, that high profile examples of digital tokenism such as Ask the PM, are actually devaluing the real potential of Social Media. They are feeding a scepticism which makes the pioneering work we are doing unnecessarily difficult.

A couple of years ago, the medium was the message when it came to organisations adopting Social Media. This was typified by those endless stories in the national press, with leading youth brands like IBM and PA Consulting opening virtual offices in Second Life. Today, the filter I always use when assessing Social Media initiatives, my own and others, is whether the communication objectives and creative approach are actually more interesting than the digital platform(s) being utilised.

Using this filter, Ask the PM just doesn’t cut it. It’s not a genuine attempt by Gordon Brown to reconnect and really start listening to a disillusioned electorate. His comment at the end of his welcome video, where he states, “I’ll be back to talk to you at some point…” betrays a total lack of understanding of the two-way conversation that Social Media enables. You may as well write a letter and stick it in the post – you’d probably get a quicker reply!

In my mind the YouTube channel, the Twitter feed and whatever online gimmick is announced next, is primarily about metaphor, the hope that some shiny digital zeitgeist will rub off on an increasingly lacklustre Prime Minister. Equally, it’s a clumsy attempt by the new Downing St communications team to ‘get with it’ and reduce the gaping void between their digital approach and that of the Opposition.

As I have been saying a lot this week in new business pitches, Social Media is not a magic wand. Ultimately whatever Stephen Carter and his team try to do, Gordon Brown at heart, will always remain an analogue politician in a digital age.

Rupert Murdoch’s $580million acquisition of MySpace may have seemed a steal compared to the $240m Microsoft paid for a 1.6 per cent stake in Facebook, but all is not well with Murdoch’s plans for his social network, and it is being felt in its stock price after Fox Interactive Media (where MySpace sits in the News Corp empire) reported it would miss its 2008 revenue goal of $1billion. News Corp’s stock price has slipped 9.9 per cent this year alone.

Sure, Murdoch is throwing money at MySpace to expand into India and South Korea and add a music downloads service, but the social network is struggling to attract and retain advertisers in the volumes it needs because of the risk of their brands being shown next to inappropriate user-generated content. It is precisely the freedom and flexibility MySpace user love so much, which is causing the company problems with advertisers.

Bloomberg reports that Fox Interactive’s costs will rise a massive 46 per cent this year as they bid to open new channels for MySpace – almost as much as revenue is expected to grow. The bottom line with investors is that while MySpace continues to try to grow its audience in different markets – it is still failing to fully monetise the vast audience it already has.

However, today MySpace launched a new ad platform to give advertisers more control over where their ads are being run. It is a small step – arguably long overdue – but whether it will solve the site’s short-term adveritsing issues remains to be seen, when rival networks have already stolen a lead. While Facebook wrestles privacy issues, today enabling an ad system opt-out, it is at least driving strong advertising revenue.

MySpace’s hope has to be in the medium term, beating Facebook into new markets where advertiser sensitivity to site content is far less pronounced, doesn’t it?