Britain’s Advertising Standards Agency (ASA) certainly think social media can be regulated, having today announced that online content from the UK will be subject to the same regulation as that of other media. The extended regulations are aiming to provide protection for consumers from misleading claims made by advertisers. 

This week:

• An Australian "futurist" predict the end of printed newspapers within 12 years
• Germany legislates to stop employers from auditing potential employees on Facebook
• Sports stars are banned from Twitter

Twelve years left for newspapers?

Australian media strategist Ross Dawson has predicted that newspapers will be irrelevant in Australia by 2022. He argues that the socialisation of content means the current media organisations and journalists will need to reinvent to share any future spoils. He doesn’t argue that newspapers will cease to exist, but that the current model will change significantly. He points to an iPad style news reader future where ideas are crowd sourced and the best journalists oversee conversations. This is already happening and it is likely there will be both victors and victims, as some adapt and share the profits of doing so, and others who either refuse to or are unable to adapt. 

German Facebook users get a reprieve  

Politicians in Germany are legislating to prevent employers from checking the Facebook profiles of future employees. The proposed law will allow employers to check the profiles of prospective employees through professional networking sites such as LinkedIn, but not through “social” sites like Facebook. Individuals have always been able to restrict the content on their profile though most do not. For those of us not protected by legislation the advice is to restrict access to your profile, or just don’t let anyone take compromising photos of you in the first place. 

Sports stars banned from Twitter

There have been numerous examples of sports team news being leaked by players on Twitter before any official announcement. Others have sought to hit out at perceived injustices from their employers. Rather late in the day several sporting bodies have reacted by banning their players from tweeting while on official duty. England’s cricketers have been banned, Leicester’s rugby team have suffered the same fate. These sporting bodies are facing the same challenges as many organisations. They are no longer able to control the message or the content. In the past there would only be a very small coterie of official spokespeople. Now anyone with a phone can broadcast to the world with bored sportsmen having more time than most. Closing ranks is no longer possible and a different approach will have to be adopted as a social media generation won’t accept being cut off. 

First, it was for tech-geeks. Then teenagers got involved. After that, businesses and other organisations started to use it. But you know a social media site has made it when a totalitarian isolationist state, such as North Korea, signs up. As was widely reportedrecently, North Korea is now on Twitter and YouTube, using the handle ‘uriminzok’ (‘our nation’) on both. This may conjure up an image of Supreme Leader Kim Jong-il staring blurry-eyed at a screen, frantically trying to cut his latest statement down to 140 characters or less, but unfortunately this is probably not the case.

In June N. Korea registered 1,024 IP addresses, meaning that amongst the 24m occupants of the ‘communist’ state, only the elite 0.005% have access to the internet. Universities and libraries are largely limited to domestic intranet services. This indicates that N. Korea didn’t join Twitter and YouTube so that it could improve the popularity of Kim Jong-il’s regime at home. If this were the case, they would have chosen a medium which is more widely-used by North Koreans. Instead, Twitter and YouTube are being utilised to improve N.Korea’s image abroad, or at least to provide a mouth-piece for the Korean Workers’ Party (the KWP put the ‘party’ in single-party state). 

Whistle blowing site Wikileaks yesterday published thousands of pages of secret US military documents relating to the Afghanistan war. This has been dubbed the “biggest intelligence leak of all time” and provides the most detailed picture of the conflict to be drawn to date. Working in partnership with newspapers The New York Times, The Guardian and Der Spiegel to publicise the leak shows both social and mainstream media working together to set the news agenda. This is likely to have serious political consequences. The true impact of the publishing of these documents is yet to be established.

There have been a number of interesting developments recently as search and social media continue to work closer with each other.

Microsoft's Bing, trying to steal a march on Google, recently launched a beta of BingTweets - a search engine that blends real time twitter results with Bing's web search too.  It's a very useful site.  

A search for example for PR Measurement will pull up Metrica in Bing's web search, but wont necessarily mention us in the Twitter feed.  Search for PR measurement jobs however and Metrica appears both in Bing's web page results, as well as the twitter feed showing the chatter around our search for a great sales exec (full job spec in case you're interested: Metrica sales exec role).  

Bing's approach blends a decent web search with the immediacy of a twitter search. Bringing the information together definitely beats having to do a manual search on both a web search engine and twitter.

The benefits of blending search and social networks are not lost on the major search engines. Traditional search is already starting to feel like yesterday's industry. More than ever people are looking to find relevant and up to date information from conversations that are happening now.  

As a result, all of the major search engines are looking for ways to encourage and engage on-line communities. Yahoo has recently redesigned it's homepage to embrace web 2.0 style personalised content. (Incidentally in another sign that the old world is changing, it has also recently become the last of the major players to announce that it will no longer be supporting the meta tag 'keyword' in its search results).

Google's not resting on its laurels either.  As Jeremiah Owyang explains, rather than trying to create their own social network portal (like Facebook or Myspace), Google is looking to envelope the social web with Google profiles, Gmail, Sidewiki (already covered on Metrica's Measurement Matters) and Wave. Instead of having their own URL, Google will be enabling every online activity to be a social one run through their own platform. That said, early reviews of Wave from it's intial beta users are that it's 'impressive but useless."

Back to Bingtweets, and some people have noticed that in the last 24 hours it has started to behave a little erratically from a stability point of view. This has coincided with Twitter also having issues which has suggested that behind the scenes, Bing and Twitter are about to sign a major search deal. This would make sense to Bing as it looks to make its search more relevant and 'real-time' and would make sense for Twitter too as it continues to look for ways to monetise without irritating its army of users with adverts. Watch this space.

Either way, it's just one more wake up call to the PR industry that it's time to embrace new challenges and techniques as social media continues to change the way public relations is planned, implemented and measured. 

A few days ago, I read an article citing a recently published study by the Harvard Business School which concluded that only ten per cent of Twitter’s six million subscribers are active posters. This led many commentators to muse that influence amongst typical Twitter users is extremely top heavy and concentrated in the hands of a few users. However, the influence of infrequent users, or weak links to use network analysis terminology, was dramatically brought to the fore in the widespread protests over the Iranian elections yesterday. The unique power of Twitter to provide real-time information from vast numbers of people including activists, demonstrators and journalists on the ground was astonishing. Reports indicated that certain hash tags, including #iranelection and #gr88 generated over 30 Tweets per minute at its apogee.

Watching the vast number of Tweets emerge on my TweetDeck yesterday, I could not help but think that perhaps the findings of the Harvard study needed to be questioned. The study, which polled over 300,000 users, concluded, amongst other things, that the top ten per cent of “prolific Twitter users accounted for over 90% of tweets. On a typical social network, the top 10% of users accounted for 30% of all production”. Significant social events such as the G20 riots and the Mumbai terrorist attacks, when vast numbers of people used the service to both disseminate and receive information, surely demonstrated that there is no such thing as a “typical” Twitter user and, more importantly, that the categorisation of "influential" users on this social network platform needs to be reconsidered.

Having helped companies and organisations both create and implement their social media and online stakeholder engagement programmes for some years now, one of the first things I stress is the need to adapt to the constantly shifting social media landscape. Stakeholder communities change very quickly, as seen above, and companies that understand and adapt their online communications strategies accordingly more often than not reap benefits. Looking for some examples of that point, I was impressed by the social media strategies of the US Army and US Air Force, which have yielded demonstrable returns on investment such as increases in recruits and better relations with their stakeholders. When taking the time to understand the composition of their online stakeholders, both organisations devised social media strategies which focused on building relationships with various communities.

If Twitter and the Iranian election reminded me that online groups and communities are not static, but dynamic and ever-changing, these organisations highlighted that a bottom-up approach to PR using conversational media which focuses on adaptation and engagement, can yield success.