Welcome to Porter Novelli’s weekly digital news post.

If we were to draw up a list of people not to annoy, the President of the United States of America would most likely appear somewhere in the top, ooh I don’t know, one. It’s a shame 25-year-old Frenchman “Hacker Croll” didn’t have the same view, because he could soon be in jail.

It’s not really fair to call the guy a hacker. He’s supposedly more like a geek who thought it would be clever to log in to the Twitter accounts of celebrities as well as Barack Obama. His high-tech method was allegedly to guess their passwords or hint questions for their email addresses, according to BBC News.

While we could question whether Hacker Croll would be sent to prison for hacking any other Twitter account, if he is convicted I think it could be argued that he’ll be doing a stretch for stupidity.

More on paywalls

The paywall debate is picking up speed as the UK national newspapers begin to put in place their new online business models. The Times will soon launch its paywall model (charging for access, with the lowest price point being £1 for one day). The company clearly believes the paywall is a workable and viable system, but Will Sturgeon points out a slight problem: on the day the paywall was confirmed, The Times‘ top story was shared by most of its competitors – including The Guardian, which will remain free.

In other words, the newspaper is asking an awful lot of loyalty from its readers.

Elsewhere, The Independent might just be going the other way. Evening Standard owner Alexander Lebedev has bought the group and is rumoured to be considering boosting circulation (and ad revenue?) by making the print edition free. Clearly making the Standard free has done the business.

Liddle blog censured by PCC

The Press Complaints Commission has ruled that a Spectator blog by Rod Liddle breached the accuracy clause of the Editors’ Code of Practice and that the Spectator must ensure that the inaccuracy is corrected.

Back in December Liddle caused a wave of outrage with a blog post which claimed that “the overwhelming majority of [violent crime] in London is carried out by young men from the African-Caribbean community”. Unsurprisingly, complaints were made and action taken. However, this is an intriguing precedent. As Londonist notes, Liddle is the first journalist to have a blog censured by the PCC.

Who knows whether the PCC might some day be responsible for complaints relating to blogs by non-journalists. What do you think?

Incidentally, if you read Liddle’s original post at the end of last year and found it offensive, you’ll probably like The Daily Mail Song.

Facebook reveals private email addresses

Valleywag is reporting that Facebook’s had a little privacy problem overnight: a glitch led to members’ private email addresses being shown on their public profiles. It seems that the problem only lasted around half an hour, but it will have done nothing to help Facebook’s reputation on privacy. It was spotted by many users, of course, and the news was spread on Twitter and, presumably, on Facebook itself.

Facebook’s ongoing experimentation and occasional privacy issues, even when combined with usually unfair abject press coverage, seems to be doing little to restrict its popularity. Facebook will be around for some time to come, but there are people out there with genuinely serious reasons for keeping their details private and I doubt they’re pleased about this latest lapse in security.

Welcome to Porter Novelli’s weekly digital news post.

Another week, another brand allowing Twitter users to post content direct to its own web presence without any moderation. Skittles did it, the Telegraph did it, and now the Conservatives have done it. They seem to be struggling with the web a bit, the Tories. First, David Cameron’s ludicrously airbrushed mugshot on billboards led to the briefly amusing mydavidcameron.com poster editing meme.

And now #cashgordon, the Conservatives’ negative campaigning hashtag scheme, has been hilariously sabotaged. The hashtag, designed to encourage posh folk to tweet criticisms of Gordon Brown’s links with the trade unions (I’m not sure the unions feel entirely supported by the PM, but that’s another debate), fed straight onto a special website and was, predictably, abused.

Amusingly, users were able to use their tweets to alter the site’s structure and created a number of amusing amendments which are detailed in Meg Pickard’s excellent ‘Anatomy of a Hashtag’ graph. Altogether now…#FAIL!

Nestle trips over its own Facebook page

The biggest story in social media this past week has been Nestle. The company found itself in the middle of  a storm online thanks to renewed efforts by Greenpeace to give it a kicking over its use of palm oil “from plantations that allegedly destroyed the habitats of endangered species“. Greenpeace made a video, and Nestle’s ill-advised reaction went down badly.

The video was removed by YouTube thanks to a copyright claim by Nestle. Heavy-handed moves like this are unlikely to be well-received, particularly as it is essentially the use of copyright law to protect the reputation of the company. Greenpeace didn’t go quietly, and the conversation eventually found its way to Nestle’s Facebook fan page. Although it’s not great to have negative content posted all over a powerful web presence (90,000+ members), this should have been a blessing in disguise. When the conversation’s in your own back yard, you can try to dictate its direction. A bit.

Sadly for Nestle, the brand representative looking after the page wasn’t up to the job. Questions and comments about palm oil were not addressed and Nestle’s input appeared to be restricted to threats about – you guessed it – copyright infringement. Way to engage. Now Nestle is deservedly the butt of further amusement, the target of immeasurable criticism, and an eternal case study.

Rule number one? Don’t operate under dodgy ethics. Rule number two? If you can’t obey rule number one, be prepared to manage a crisis. Judging by the way Nestle’s Facebook presence escalated the crisis, it seems a safe bet that they weren’t remotely ready.

This week in paywalls and other assorted news news

Well, not paywalls. More just…walls. The Financial Times website already runs a subscription model but is making some changes to its distribution of free articles. The three tiers of readers will be unregistered readers, free-registered readers and subscribed viewers. Under the changes, unregistered readers will effectively disappear as they will not be able to view any content. Free-registered readers will find that their 25 free articles a month is reduced to 10.

There are a few interesting points here. First, that free-registered layer is a data capture exercise which could well be involved in the newspaper business model of the future. If titles decide to stick with advertising rather than paywalls, free-registered users’ data will be vital in selling targeted space to advertisers, who love demographics.

Second, visitors arriving at FT.com via Google will still be eligible for five free articles after the FT signed up for Google’s First-Click-Free programme in order to close a loophole which allowed searchers to view content for free on the site.

Elsewhere, Meltwater’s war with Times Online has taken another step towards impasse with the news that the Times website has no enabled its block on the news monitoring agency last week having already blocked NewsNow. Neither tool can now crawl Times Online. It’s a difficult situation for the PR industry and clients, but Meltwater’s predicament will have less effect on news gatekeepers than NewsNow, which is also used by consumers (or as the papers like to call them, traffic).

What bloggers should know about PR

PR is working hard to understand bloggers, but not all bloggers understand PR and how it works. I’ve not given this much thought before – having worked in PR before I became a blogger, I understood what was happening the first time I was pitched by a brand. Jason Falls’ post at Social Media Explorer highlights a problem PRs seem to have with some bloggers, namely that they won’t do anything for free.

That’s understandable, in a sense. Why would they? Most of them don’t get paid for what they do, so they’re a very different proposition to traditional journalists. However, that doesn’t mean our clients don’t want to engage with them and it doesn’t mean they’re necessarily unapproachable.

So what happens when you get in touch with a blogger and they respond with a quote for their consultancy services? Clearly, it shows that some bloggers don’t understand the distinctions between consultancy, advertising and PR. It could lead to an interesting conversation and, while I’m fairly certain what I would say back to the blogger, I wouldn’t recommend it.

Welcome to Porter Novelli’s weekly digital news post. Apologies for the lack of a post last week; I’m delighted to say that we were just too busy doing actual work.

More fine research work by Pew Internet, via Guardian.co.uk

Would you pay for online news? It sounds like a simple question but it will come to define the future of news consumption and could change the face of the industry. The big topic over the last year or so has been the paywall, a virtual barrier between content users pay for and content they don’t. Rupert Murdoch is a particularly vocal supporter of the paywall, and he’s far from alone.

But titles introducing paywalls need to make sure they’ve worked out the implications properly or they could face catastrophic loss of traffic or ad revenue (this shouldn’t be a problem for Murdoch, but smaller outlets need to be very careful). The threat, of course, is that readers faced with a paywall will simply get their news for free elsewhere.

A study by Pew Internet, referenced by Guardian.co.uk found that 82 percent of those surveyed would simply find somewhere else for online content if their favourite site introduced a paywall. That’s a real kick in the teeth for paywallism as it neatly sums up its major flaw.

It’s not quite so simple in all cases. Some content can only be found – or found in a timely manner – in a handful of places. Data on the markets, for example, is targeted at an affluent audience and time-sensitive enough for a paywall to be potentially lucrative. But in general I think big-name paywalls might do wonders for free or even social news sites – blogs, etc. – which could become our go-to sites for news.

Happy Birthday, .com!

25 years ago this week Symbolics, Inc. registered the first ever .com web domain. You can see the site here, although the company is no more for this world. According to Mashable, one million .com domains were registered in 1997 before the market peaked in 2000 and the famous .com boom came to an end. 668,000 .com sites are registered every month. Way to go, .com!

Stickybits

PN Digis Kerry and myself spent a few minutes on Friday afternoon trying out Stickybits, a rather interesting application for the iPhone. Essentially, Stickybits allows users to use barcode scanning technology (including QR codes) to attach digital content to real life objects. Stickybits users can scan any barcode, upload digital content – pics and that – to that barcode. Next time another user scans the same code, they can see that content and upload their own.

That’s the main thrust of the app’s genius, but the company is also selling barcodes (“Stickybits”) on Amazon and giving them away for free on its website. So if you see someone running around the streets whacking sticky barcodes to things, now you know why.

What does this mean for PR and marketing? I think it has huge creative potential. Users will end up defining Stickybits’ primary purpose, but there is room for really innovative reviews programmes, social gaming, location marketing and a whole bunch of other areas. The advertising industry will be all over this app but I think PR has plenty of exciting room for manoeuvre too.

You can read more about Stickybits at Econsultancy, which caught up with Stickybits founder Billy Chasen at SXSW, which I’m largely ignoring in this post because I’m not there. </grump>

Daily Mail v Social Media, No. 1727

The Daily Mail isn’t a newspaper I’d choose to read, but a friend of mine sent a link to this story, lambasting the BBC for forking out thousands of pounds to train its staff in social media. The angle is standard Mail stuff but it is a remarkably poor story, even by their standards. Although I don’t have the inside track at the BBC, I’m willing to say with some confidence that the corporation isn’t simply teaching 23,000 staff “how to use Facebook”.

The Mail, of all newspapers, should know the threat of online storms given the huge reactions on the social web to some of its more repulsive content. Big brands need to train their staff in social media, not because we all need to know how to use Facebook and other sites, but because we need to know how NOT to use them, and then do the opposite.

It is essential that staff know the possibilities of online, but it’s far more important that they know how to avoid the pitfalls. Call me trusting, but I suspect the BBC training is more along those lines than some Facebook-based jolly. “Using the social networking site is second nature to millions” but staying out of trouble – particularly professionally – is definitely not.

And I wonder which newspaper will be first to put the boot in when someone from the BBC posts something inappropriate online…