The Digital Week

Welcome to Porter Novelli’s weekly(ish) digital news post.

A campaign by RealWire has been the talk of the UK online PR scene for the last week and a bit. An Inconvenient PR Truth emerged from research which found that the irrelevance of press releases is a real problem for the public relations industry and a source of straining relationships between some PRs and some journalists.

The campaign’s a natural fit for the blogging PR community. Many are busy writing about the age-old topic of scattergun pitching already and a concerted effort to put a stop to it is natural blog fodder for them (well, us). On top of that, it’s a timely acknowledgement that the industry is aware of its foibles and is willing to work with journalists to continue into a mutually beneficial future.

Of course, this means that coverage has been absolutely everywhere. Nicely done, RealWire.

Paywall FAIL

Thanks to Rupert Murdoch, the paywall debate has been kicked into overdrive. But one daily newspaper in the United States demonstrated the risks when its paywall launch spectacularly failed to live up to expectations. James Dolan and his family spent $650m on Newsday, a Long Island daily, and whacked all its online content behind a big fat paywall.

Three months later, a grand total of 35 people had subscribed to the site at a cost of $5 a week. It’s easy to laugh – and I did. But is this an omen for the future of the paywall, or just the painful fumblings of a pioneer? Either way, it’s best not to be smug. So just stop, okay?

Obligatory iPad item

Apple launches iPad, iPad is game changer, iPad is just a big iPhone, blah blah blah. The world and its cyberpet are talking about the iPad – or rather were, before it launched – but seeing as we’ve already got an iPad Nano, the most interesting thing for us has been the ‘buzz’.

And buzz it did, with Steve Jobs’ announcement bagging a mind-bending 177,000 tweets in the first hour. If I remember correctly, Twitter was rather slow that evening too.

Jobseekers: say less, think more

Adam Singer has been writing about a Microsoft privacy survey which revealed that “70% of surveyed HR professionals in U.S. (41% in the UK) have rejected a job candidate based on online reputation information”. So, when we’re all told to be careful what we write online because possible employers are watching, it turns out they really are.

This isn’t hugely surprising, but we did raise one eyebrow when we considered the other point Adam extracted from the research, namely that candidates know their prospective employers are digging around their social media profiles and yet they continue to post material that is likely to see them rejected.

Workforce Darwinism? Adam thinks so.