The Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee recently published a report on harmful content on the internet.  This once again brought a renewed focus on social networking following the earlier publication of the Byron Report this year and the Home Office best practice document on social networking.

The report was written to address the "increasing anxiety among parents about the use of social networking sites". The Committee's inquiry included evidence from industry, other parliamentarians and the third sector concluding with 29 key recommendations. Recommendation 28 is of particular note; stressing the need for greater parent responsibility in protecting children from harm on the Internet and suggesting that parents should have more knowledge of social networking sites.

This is interesting stuff, but what does this mean in regards to social media consumption?

Leading children's charity in this area Childnet International have this week published a new guide for parents on young people and social networking sites suggesting that one of the easiest ways for parents to become more familiar with social networking sites is to set up their own page to see what the attraction and the appeal is, and to look at the information and advice for parents on these sites.

This view was backed up with advice issued in July by the Internet Safety Advocate, at security provider Symantec, with whom Metrica have been working on the Digital Family Safety campaign: "now that summer is in full swing, chances are your kids are spending more time online than usual. Staying informed about what they're doing in cyberspace is the best way to help ensure they don't do anything foolish".

With social networking sites high on the public agenda, and likely to stay there with the September start of the new UK Council for Child Internet safety, it could well be that more parents go online and set up their own profiles.  As the internet increasingly becomes the marketplace to reach people of all ages, companies may find that reaching parents on sites not necessarily associated with that generation will become increasingly possible and profitable.

In recent times, we have seen the meteoric rise of social media, where chocolate bars have been resurrected, musicians have socially networked their way to chart success and unprecedented levels of hype have opened the door for new marketing methods. The power of social media in a lot of ways boils down to the power of opinion – if enough voices sing the same tune, it’s hard to ignore.

But should there be a limit to the power placed in the hands of the user? NewsCred, a news aggregator that ranks stories by the “credibility of their source”, has recently been launched and sparked a significant amount of online chatter. Users can rate each story, author and publication’s credibility, seeking to establish quality over popularity, unlike other news aggregators.

The site itself claims that NewsCred is all about “the Social Media Revolution” – harnessing the power of community to allow “the discerning news consumer to focus only on credible news content while filtering out the noise”. Interesting concept, yet the premise itself is problematic. Can something be deemed “credible” based on the recommendation of a group of faceless strangers? As Marissa Peacock discusses in her article, “Is it an author’s credentials, a publication’s political endorsement or a penchant for not lying, making up or otherwise hiding the ‘truth’ no matter how messy or uncomfortable it makes us?”

Rory Cellan-Jones also discusses NewsCred in his blog for the BBC Website, taking the debate to an interesting level, by stating his concern that “sites like NewsCred will become playgrounds for lobby groups and obsessives” and asks, “Isn’t it likely that those with passionate views will rush to judge the credibility of news stories according to their own prejudices, while the rest of the internet population just won’t bother?”

My own personal concern is that there is also a level of laziness that results from relying on sites such as NewsCred – since when did it become so difficult to make up your own mind? But perhaps I am missing the point. Either way, if there is one thing that Snakes on a Plane  has taught us (a truly dreadful film – avoid it), it’s that you can’t always trust internet popularity as an endorsement.

Pure gold!  Nathan Gilliatt at the Net-Savvy Executive has produced the second version of the Guide to Social Media Analysis

How does it warrant being called THE guide to social media?  Well, it contains a whooping 63 profiles of suppliers in the social media measurement space.  That's twice as many as last year.  It clearly sets out the capabilities of each company and explains each competitors' approach.  It's a steal for any time pressured communicator looking for the right social media supplier.  I guarantee that one hour of flicking through the guide will get you a shortlist of three suitable suppliers.  Better than days spent desk researching only to end up taking a punt on the one with the brashest marketing budget / leaving it to chance.

This year we're joined in the guide by more of the traditional measurement suppliers which is great to see, even if it is competition!  As communicators around the world start integrating social media into their mainstream media programmes they need suppliers (like us) who can reflect that in the measurement of their activity to give an holistic view of the results.  A siloed approach just won't cut it.  Expert measurement agencies that have innovated with new technologies are now (rightly) taking a lead over the technology companies dipping their toes into the vast ocean that is PR measurement.

What do you think? Are social media guides like this helpful? Will you buy it?

According to Hitwise, Britons are out-Twittering Americans. Interestingly, 70% more people in Britain use Twitter than in the USA.  The micro-blogging tool has experienced a 485% traffic growth rate in 2008 alone.   Some interesting nuggets from the study include:

• Broader age range appeal: Twitter has grabbed a broader age range than social networks such as Facebook and Bebo. 

• Key adopter segments: It has captured important early adopter segments such as the 25-34 (the majority of its users) and 37% of its users are in the 45+ age bracket.   (Many of these Twitter users would be the C-level executives in your own firms or target consumer groups).

• Gender parity: Twitter’s UK users are split 50/50 in gender, allowing it to avoid niche sector cul-de-sacs of gender imbalance online and offline, and giving marketeers more to work with in one source.

• London bias demystified: Only 15% of the Twitter UK micro-bloggers are from London, eroding some of the myths that early adopter tribes are prevalent in global commerce cities such as London or colonise creative class and entrepreneurial hotspots.

 
I find this fascinating stuff.

What reasons do you think might partially explain the British propensity to Twitter?  Having just returned from the USA, I can vouch that Americans are less apt to text than Britons (possibly for economic reasons).  Could it also be echoes of cultural stereotypes about how different (but similar) cultures approach communications tools?  Maybe something else.

What are your thoughts on why the British are out-Twittering Americans?  More important, how can these learnings be applied to your communities, core programs and clients?

I'm delighted to see that Metrica's Measurement Matters has made an inaugural appearance in the AdAge Power 150 which ranks the world's top media and marketing blogs.  In a table that currently has 748 blogs listed, Measurement Matters joins the chart at a modest 558.  The index is updated each morning, and already we have climbed 37 places since yesterday.

There's still a long way for us to go until we catch such industry luminaries and great reads as Katie Paine at No 278, Brendan Cooper (your very friendly social media planner) at 382, Andy Lark at 315, Richard Edelman 6am at 124 or the fabulous Web Strategy by Jeremiah Owyang at a heady 29.  But watch out Richard and Glenn of Intelligent Measurement - at number 557 we're right on your tail! 

Where are some of our other favourite reads though?  Don Bartholmew's Proving the Value of Public Relations and Nathan Gilliat's Net-Savvy Executive are both missing from the list for example, but with the quality of information, suggestions and thought on their blogs, not for long I am sure.

Those of you wondering how AdAge's Power 150 ranks and scores all of these blogs can find the answers to all their questions here.

Update:

James Gordon-MacIntosh of 77PR and T4W has distilled the AdAge Power 150 list down further and provides a sub list focussing on just the UK's top PR and marketing blogs.  Loads of good blogs here to add to our RSS readers...

Here's a screen grab from a BBC online news article that I read this morning (original article).  What's so extraordinary about this?  Well, the first thing that might strike you is that it is a page from BBC News online before it went through it's latest redesign.  In fact, the article is dated 8th March 2006.  So why flag it for attention now?  The reason is that as I was sipping my cup of tea I noticed that it was the 4th most read article on the BBC's website.  Today's fourth most read article?? Nearly 30 months after it was first published?!

It gets really interesting when you read the content of the story itself - Tim Weber's 2006 article, somewhat ironically, is commenting on how an email was then doing the rounds claiming that Microsoft were contemplating charging for using a Hotmail account.  Which was true, except that the deliberations over how to monetise Hotmail had actually been going on in 2001, a full five year's earlier.  (See the report by the BBC here.)  This original 2001 article was now climbing the popularity rankings of the BBC a full five year's later.

Now, fast forward to 2008 and the story is starting to appear again.  So what is happening and what does it mean? 

First of all it shows that the consumer doesn't always check the date of an online article before they read and react or respond to it.  In both articles' case, their resurgence in popularity has been driven by people forwarding the link to their friends and colleagues without paying heed of the date.  Examples like this are fairly common on the BBC, and in other online media too.

It also shows the power of 'the long tail' with online and social media.  Articles and comments once written tend to stay around.  They're available, they're visible, they're searchable, they're forwardable.  They carry influence and they can still affect reputations.  To the media consumer, they're still real.  They still carry influence, and shouldn't be ignored necessarily just because they aren't in this week's batch of press clippings.

Welcome to the new media.  The days of yesterday's news being tomorrow's fish and chip wrapper are well and truly behind us. The way that the media works and the consumer interacts with it are changing rapidly.  Are you ready for these new challenges to your ongoing PR strategy and metrics?

So Google has a new competitor, and judging by the snails-pace load times on release day Cuil (pronounced "cool", although what the French make of the name I can only imagine!) proved popular. A quick search for Metrica proved its accuracy for text at least, a search for media analysis and media evaluation showed it finds the right companies!  The site previews were a little baffling however (take the link to our "About us" page -  I can't remember ever seeing this guy roaming around Metrica Towers!)

On the whole, the consensus in the office is that Cuil is, well, cool. The layout is neat and speaks the language of people like me who are surrounded by technology but have only really got into it since they dumbed it down a bit. We've established that the search engine works. But here's the thing - why stop there?

Cuil's creators are obviously smart people with their fingers on the pulse of trends in web usage. So with analysis of web content and web usage gaining importance by the second, why doesn't Cuil have any social media search functions or access to web analytics tools as part of the service? I wouldn't have expected blog tracking of the sophistication of Buzz Logic or Radian 6 (or Metrica, of course!) but I find it baffling that Cuil haven't at least paid lip service to the idea. They could be in development of course, but if I was up against Google, with it's vast array of additional products and services (let's not forget Google news for mainstream web content) I'd have been tempted to finish developing my service before I launched it.

In a straight "search engine to search engine" fight, no one really expects Cuil to beat Google. And with people pleading for more control of the information on the web, I couldn't help but feel that, pretty as it is, Cuil's offering is a bit of a step backwards.

Imagine a world in which newspapers have been wholly replaced by online news sites… not so hard is it?! And somehow, without even trying, it makes sense.

Jeff Jarvis muses the idea in his Guardian column today, referring first of all to a vision outlined to him by Edward Roussel, head of digital for the Telegraph. Roussel’s vision is that Google becomes an online distribuitor for a paper’s content so it can concentrate on its real job (journalism).

And Bob Wyman, a technology entrepreneur, agrees: "If Google can provide free hosting to the 'citizen journalists' who are making life difficult for the newspapers, Google should be able to host the newspapers for free as well." It’s a good point and one which lends weight to the idea that the days of hard copy news papers are numbered.

And there are more:

·         As Wyman points out, Google, with all its services (search engines, alert systems, video serving, database services, application hosting), is kitted out to be the ideal news distributor: "Ideally, every newsroom would be able to think of Google, and all its capabilities, as their own”

·         Moving to an online news model which offers publications the opportunity to concentrate wholly on content (and not worry about distribution) should also, one would hope, have a positive affect on the quality of copy

·         If audience/reader interaction and conversation is moving online then a hard copy newspaper’s content essentially becomes isolated – from both dialouge and commerical opportunity

·         And surely online better reflects contemporary lifestyles…

·         Plus of course there are the environmental benefits…

So already (I think) the argument for waving goodbye to newspapers and moving online is becoming really rather compelling.