Renowned digital guru Mat Morrison left Porter Novelli last year to set up his own business Magic Bean Lab. We asked him if he’s missing PR and what he’s up to now.

Mat, what are your thoughts on PR now you’re out of it?

Well PR traditionally was all about not spending money. PR could say it was getting the same results as advertising for much less money. But the problem with that was that clients only wanted limited things from a PR agency. If they were getting coverage they were happy with that and at no point was there a sense that if a client doubled their PR budget then something great would happen. So if PR wants to grow it has to move into new areas but those areas are already very competitive.

What would you advise PR agencies to do?

I think they have to seriously rethink their offering. At the moment PR’s boundaries are set by client expectations. Areas such as digital are going to specialist agencies and they’re being paid out of someone else’s budget ie the TV budget, not the PR budget. PR doesn’t own that space. When companies have too many agencies all trying to do each others’ work they ask “what is PR?” and to them it’s reputation, crisis and issues, media relations and blogger relations and they want their agency to leave everything else well alone.

Can PR agencies cope with that?

PR can’t take on a TV ad sensibility – it doesn’t have the creative resources. The client is worried about its reputation and that’s what it wants the PR agency to deal with. If PR is going to compete for bigger budgets it needs to compete for other people’s budgets. An agency just starting out, for example, needs to define itself as a full-service agency so it’s not restricted by inter-agency relationships. This is why social media agencies are doing well. There’s no set of preconceptions.

So can PR agencies take on social media convincingly?

Yes, but they have to tell clients that it’s not about campaigns it’s about long-term relationships. At the moment everyone is concentrating too much on ‘media’ and not enough on ‘social’. Agencies are being paid to push stuff into social media, but it’s not about building a Facebook page, it’s about talking to people. If you want to go into social media then you have to commit. We’re always asked: “Do you do social media campaigns?” The answer is that a campaign is not a relationship. You can’t have a three-to-six-month relationship.

Should marketers even be using such a personal channel?

You have to understand that social media is not a channel it’s a set of filters that an audience has built around itself to reduce noise. There is nothing in our agency business models that has prepared us for that. Clients want to buy seeding and dissemination but social media is more core to the business than that. Return on investment and reputation are two different things. If you want fame that’s one thing but social media is about changing perceptions, and how do you measure that?

So what are you up to now?

I have Magic Bean Lab and a variety of other ventures. One of the things the Lab is working with Amazon Mechanical Turk. I’m trying to set up various ventures that bring human intervention into automated tasks. There are whole new research products that can be built around this. You can’t measure Tweets, for example, you need a human to do that. And there’s a whole workforce out there that’s not really being used. There are women working from home, there are people abroad. A virtual business can use anyone it likes from anywhere in the world.

The core of the business is setting up a Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) organisation that is friendly to PR, ie doesn’t send out releases just to get links. We’re into the crisis and issues area. Part of our offering is finding the blogs and pages that may be low down on Google but in the event of a crisis could become really important. For example, when the bullying helpline story hit, there was a blog that was very critical of the helpline that no one had heard of but suddenly became very important.

What final advice would you give PR?

I would say that if you’re not off-shoring then you need to. Agencies are always being asked to increase their efficiencies and using workers from around the world, even within their own agency networks, is one way to do it.

Welcome to Porter Novelli’s weekly digital news post.

Everyone likes a nice big fat update to software they love, and music streaming service Spotify launched an absolute doozy earlier this week. The ‘massive revamp’ saw a giant leap into social, enabling users to connect to one another more easily (using Facebook as the primary friending mechanism) and share the playlists they wish to share, as well as dragging tracks into their friends’ view by way of a new inbox function.

On top of this, Spotify has also linked up with iTunes to allow users to play their locally stored music through Spotify.

Despite one or two demand-related teething problems, the update has been received to overwhelming positivity and I’ve been upgraded. Having cultivated a loyal userbase, Spotify has now pulled out right into the path of competitor mflow by adding a social networking element. Game on.

Newspaper bias and blogger crackdown?

When Gizmodo paid $5,000 for a mislaid prototype of the next Apple iPhone, we  should have known it would lead to trouble. Despite Gizmodo saying it returned the device after an official request to do so from Apple, one of its editors, Jason Chen, had an impressive array of equipment seized by police from his home including four computers, two servers and an iPad.

The repercussions in terms of the demarcation between bloggers and journalists could be far-reaching. Gizmodo, according to Reuters, believes the search warrant was illegal:

“According to a search warrant posted on gizmodo.com, the computers may contain photographs of Apple’s “prototype 4G iPhone,” as well as email pertaining to its purchase, call records, and research on Gray Powell, the Apple engineer who purportedly misplaced the device.

“In a letter to the police also published on gizmodo.com, Gawker’s Chief Operating Officer and legal counsel Gaby Darbyshire asserted the search and seizure was illegal under California law, because Chen works as a journalist for the publication, protecting him from such action.”

Meanwhile, one newspaper journalist has undoubtedly overstepped the boundaries in its UK election coverage. The Sutton and Cheam Guardian, part of the South London Guardian and Surrey Comet Group, was caught out and exposed when blogger Anna Raccoon found that the local Libertarian Party candidate, one of eight, had a ‘joke’ biography in amongst seven more informative potted bios, and that the journalist involved was a member of the party most likely to benefit from LP ridicule.

To make matters worse, Anna’s further investigation appears to show that the newspaper had a genuine bio information available. Of course, it could be that the candidate’s response to the journalist’s request for information never arrived via email. Except the photograph he sent was used in the feature. Fail.

Facebook Open Graph

In San Francisco last week, Facebook’s F8 conference played host to the launch of Open Graph, a sophisticated third-party content integration mechanism which effectively puts Facebook’s stamp all over the social web. The best explanation I’ve seen comes from We Are Social’s Stefano Moggi, who outlines the process by which consumers of content online can ‘like’ or ‘recommend’ it to their Facebook friends without logging in.

So, when you see ‘Like’ or ‘Recommend’ buttons alongside web content – as Stefano mentions, they’ve already begun appearing at places like CNN and Internet Movie Database – it’s Facebook’s way of making the sharing of content easier and more integrated into the FB network. Clever.

Of course, all this could provide some rather valuable data for Facebook to…store.

‘The voice of assholes?’

Letters to the editor: one of the oldest forms of what would now be called social media. The online extension of this (apart from emails to the editor, I suppose) is the commenting function available on most newspaper websites. ‘Here’s the news, what do you think?’ It’s engaging, or at least listening. But it’s far from unproblematic.

Jeff Jarvis (the Buzzmachine guy, to you and me) whipped up the debate recently by revoking his advocacy of reader comments:

“I defended comments for years. But the problem is that comments are too often the voice of assholes.”

Blunt though he is, Jarvis has touched upon a valid concern. For one reason or another, I find reading newspaper comments quite addictive. Sometimes they’re funny, resembling little mini-memes when readers pun their hearts out at the bottom of a light-hearted story. Sometimes they’re incredibly informative.

Sometimes, though, they’re just depressing, highlighting the narrow-mindedness and bitterness affecting much of society. Or, as Jarvis puts it, assholes. Anybody who’s read his work before will correctly assume that he’s angling for better engagement, not cutting people out of the loop.

Shane Richmond at the Daily Telegraph neatly sums up Jarvis’ point and an opposing one, made by Ilana Fox. Her argument is that newspapers value their comments – Shane, with his history at the Telegraph, is in a position to confirm that.

For me, the problem is not one of a bigoted underclass, or a spread of dubious politics. It’s largely one of trolling, certainly in the newspapers I read online.

Welcome to Porter Novelli’s weekly digital news post.

Everyone likes a nice big fat update to software they love, and music streaming service Spotify launched an absolute doozy earlier this week. The ‘massive revamp’ saw a giant leap into social, enabling users to connect to one another more easily (using Facebook as the primary friending mechanism) and share the playlists they wish to share, as well as dragging tracks into their friends’ view by way of a new inbox function.

On top of this, Spotify has also linked up with iTunes to allow users to play their locally stored music through Spotify.

Despite one or two demand-related teething problems, the update has been received to overwhelming positivity and I’ve been upgraded. Having cultivated a loyal userbase, Spotify has now pulled out right into the path of competitor mflow by adding a social networking element. Game on.

Newspaper bias and blogger crackdown?

When Gizmodo paid $5,000 for a mislaid prototype of the next Apple iPhone, we  should have known it would lead to trouble. Despite Gizmodo saying it returned the device after an official request to do so from Apple, one of its editors, Jason Chen, had an impressive array of equipment seized by police from his home including four computers, two servers and an iPad.

The repercussions in terms of the demarcation between bloggers and journalists could be far-reaching. Gizmodo, according to Reuters, believes the search warrant was illegal:

“According to a search warrant posted on gizmodo.com, the computers may contain photographs of Apple’s “prototype 4G iPhone,” as well as email pertaining to its purchase, call records, and research on Gray Powell, the Apple engineer who purportedly misplaced the device.

“In a letter to the police also published on gizmodo.com, Gawker’s Chief Operating Officer and legal counsel Gaby Darbyshire asserted the search and seizure was illegal under California law, because Chen works as a journalist for the publication, protecting him from such action.”

Meanwhile, one newspaper journalist has undoubtedly overstepped the boundaries in its UK election coverage. The Sutton and Cheam Guardian, part of the South London Guardian and Surrey Comet Group, was caught out and exposed when blogger Anna Raccoon found that the local Libertarian Party candidate, one of eight, had a ‘joke’ biography in amongst seven more informative potted bios, and that the journalist involved was a member of the party most likely to benefit from LP ridicule.

To make matters worse, Anna’s further investigation appears to show that the newspaper had a genuine bio information available. Of course, it could be that the candidate’s response to the journalist’s request for information never arrived via email. Except the photograph he sent was used in the feature. Fail.

Facebook Open Graph

In San Francisco last week, Facebook’s F8 conference played host to the launch of Open Graph, a sophisticated third-party content integration mechanism which effectively puts Facebook’s stamp all over the social web. The best explanation I’ve seen comes from We Are Social’s Stefano Moggi, who outlines the process by which consumers of content online can ‘like’ or ‘recommend’ it to their Facebook friends without logging in.

So, when you see ‘Like’ or ‘Recommend’ buttons alongside web content – as Stefano mentions, they’ve already begun appearing at places like CNN and Internet Movie Database – it’s Facebook’s way of making the sharing of content easier and more integrated into the FB network. Clever.

Of course, all this could provide some rather valuable data for Facebook to…store.

‘The voice of assholes?’

Letters to the editor: one of the oldest forms of what would now be called social media. The online extension of this (apart from emails to the editor, I suppose) is the commenting function available on most newspaper websites. ‘Here’s the news, what do you think?’ It’s engaging, or at least listening. But it’s far from unproblematic.

Jeff Jarvis (the Buzzmachine guy, to you and me) whipped up the debate recently by revoking his advocacy of reader comments:

“I defended comments for years. But the problem is that comments are too often the voice of assholes.”

Blunt though he is, Jarvis has touched upon a valid concern. For one reason or another, I find reading newspaper comments quite addictive. Sometimes they’re funny, resembling little mini-memes when readers pun their hearts out at the bottom of a light-hearted story. Sometimes they’re incredibly informative.

Sometimes, though, they’re just depressing, highlighting the narrow-mindedness and bitterness affecting much of society. Or, as Jarvis puts it, assholes. Anybody who’s read his work before will correctly assume that he’s angling for better engagement, not cutting people out of the loop.

Shane Richmond at the Daily Telegraph neatly sums up Jarvis’ point and an opposing one, made by Ilana Fox. Her argument is that newspapers value their comments – Shane, with his history at the Telegraph, is in a position to confirm that.

For me, the problem is not one of a bigoted underclass, or a spread of dubious politics. It’s largely one of trolling, certainly in the newspapers I read online.