Back in January 2008 I met with a couple of guys from the behavioural advertising company Phorm. Shortly after, I wrote a pretty rosy blog post about their proposition.

Positivity about Phorm has been, and continues to be, unpopular, but I haven't worked in display advertising for over a year now (I moved into paid search) and so I hadn't given much thought to my one-sided initial appraisal of Phorm since writing it. (Some will suggest that I didn't give it much thought at the time!) Last week, however, twitterfeed suffered a technical 'hiccup', and all my blog posts were accidentally automatically tweeted about, as if they were new posts. My old post about Phorm was brought back to the attention of my twitter followers, and to that of anyone who was searching twitter for Phorm-related tweets.

As you might imagine, I've since received one or two twitter mentions of criticism. I owe many thanks in particular to @zootcadillac who suggested I revisit the topic, and who sent me a link to this recent (October 2009) report of the All Parliamentary Communications Group.

In the report, evidence submitted by Phorm makes a forceful case for the legality of their system, and for their principles of collecting and storing as little data as possible (much less than Google, for example). Testimony from Gill Davison, on the other hand, suggests that allowing Phorm's proposed interception of ISP data would be akin to allowing one merchant to covertly listen in on a customer's phone call as they ordered services or goods from a competing merchant. Needless to say, as Davison points out, this kind of practice is not permitted in telephone communications.

Imagine a world where covert communications surveillance was allowed, and indeed was commonplace. If one merchant could do it, without repercussion from the consumer, no doubt all would do it; a level playing field would result. Davison's analogy may not be totally damning then.

However, such a world would not be right (and will never exist). It's not the merchant's rights we have to worry about, it's the consumer's. As the All Parliamentary Communications Group concludes, Phorm's proposed system is an opt-out one, and one that cannot be allowed. Worse still for Phorm, they have already conducted secret trials of their technology, where even opting out was not possible. They have been condemned for this, and rightly so.

With cookie-based behavioural targeting systems, the consumer is in complete control of their participation. If they want to disassociate themselves from any targeting profile that has been established, they merely clear their cookies. Moreover, together the IAB and Google provide facilities for the consumer to actively prevent a lot of cookie-based behavioural targeting from operating on their browser.

The interception of ISP data in ad targeting systems would allow the consumer considerably less freedom. As the All Parliamentary Communications Group report points out, Phorm will not be operating in the UK in the foreseeable future.

Take a look at the report and form your own opinion. It addresses a number of hot topics, in addition to behavioural targeting. Thanks again to @zootcadillac for sending me the link.

This past week I’ve been in Mountain View, California, for Google’s annual Website Optimiser and Google Analytics Authorised Consultant summit. Harvest Digital gained the WOAC and GAAC accreditations at the end of September.

Contrary to Dickie’s ( @thesearchbaron ) accusation, the summit was much more than just GPAITS (Google’s Piss About in the Sun). The WOAC/GAAC summit served primarily to strengthen the WOAC and GAAC network, which operates as Google’s support for the Website Optimiser and Google Analytics products. Plus it wasn’t even sunny for the first two days.

Google has quite a presence in Mountain View. My first clue about this came when the officer at San Francisco immigration saw I was staying in Mountain View and asked immediately if I was visiting Google. Someone told me that three years ago Google had only one or two buildings in the area; now, they must have twenty separate office buildings in Mountain View, maybe more. The company provides free WiFi to the whole of Mountain View, and the cab driver that took me to and from the office each day told me that eighty percent of his fares were driving people to and from Google. With all the office buildings and their support staff, the cab drivers and hoteliers, and the Google developers and executives themselves, the economic contribution that the company makes locally is very substantial (and that’s not to mention all the people around the world whose jobs exist because of Google’s role in the digital industry).

I didn’t see the main Google ‘campus’ in Mountain View (the so-called Googleplex), but the buildings where we were meeting for the summit were impressive enough.

The canteen food, all free, deserves a special mention: on my first day I served myself rib-eye steak for lunch; on my next, foie gras. I’ve often thought when visiting the Google offices in London that somehow the whole atmosphere feels a bit staged, but the execution of ‘Googliness’ in Mountain View felt much more genuine; I think ‘Googliness’ must sit a little better with the American culture than it does with our more cynical British one.

There were three hundred and three attendees at this year’s WOAC/GAAC summit. I estimate about two hundred and ninety of those attendees had an Apple iPhone – I can’t imagine there being many other occasions when there are quite so many iPhones in the same mobile phone cell.

Practically the first thing we were told was not to tweet or blog about anything that was presented without the express permission of the presenter. Fair enough I suppose: much of what we heard was either a client-specific case study, or a preview of yet-to-be-released technological features. While I’ll be sharing much of this stuff with my colleagues at Harvest (enough at least to convince them that it was worth sending me to California for a week), I can’t publish it here.

I will offer some general description though. First of all, it was really refreshing to attend a conference where I wasn’t constantly being sold to. There were two obvious commercial interests that defined the summit: the first was that of the conference attendees: we were there to learn about how to offer more and better services as consultants (no objections there!). The other was Google’s, and they were quite overt about it: advertisers that use GWO and GA properly are more successful, and they spend more money on Google AdWords (again, no objections there – ad agencies stand to make money from advertising spend as much as the media supplier does).

Most of the content that was presented had to do with what was possible with advanced use of the GWO and GA products, through clever application of the API, or through clever integration with other technologies or adaptation to a client’s particular needs.

On the WOAC day, much of what was presented had to do with how best to use and sell the Website Optimiser product. As Dan Siroker ( @dsiroker ) pointed out, GWO is for challenging assumptions, or as Tim Ash ( @tim_ash ) put it, it’s for correcting the client’s false perception that their ugly baby (a rubbish website) is handsome. As Google likes to think of it, GWO is the anti-HiPPO (the HiPPO being the “Highest Paid Person’s Opinion”).

With GWO, as with GA, much of the challenge for us as consultants is figuring out how best to work a client engagement: how to communicate with various client departments, each with their own concerns, or how best to manage an engagement where multiple agencies are involved.

My week in Mountain View has brought me a little closer to the support network that exists in the combination of Google and the WOAC and GAAC partners, and it’s revealed how much potential there is for my agency’s expertise in the Website Optimiser and Google Analytics products to create value for our clients and for ourselves. The next step is for me to start thinking about relaying what I’ve learnt back to my colleagues... (how to make sure Harvest sends me again next year...).

An inflated number of voluntary and community organisations find themselves dependant now more than ever in recession on funding from individuals. In the profitable online sphere, the volume of potential donors for which these VCOs are competing appears to be slowly dwindling. This trend, compounded with the loyalty of individual donors in recession places the relationship between the individual and the VCO at the heart of third sector fundraising. Social media is ‘relationship media’, and as such it has a natural and vital role to play here; but by social media’s special nature, its importance to third sector fundraising in a recession has commercial implications for the digital agency with third sector clients.


Fundraising in Recession

The role in public services for voluntary and community organisations has grown under the new Labour government, as the opportunity to provide those services has been opened up to the private and voluntary sectors.¹ The Financial Times reported back in 2007 that, “private and voluntary organisations now supply at least £44bn worth of public services”.²

The related increase in government funding available to VCOs has seen the number of registered charities in the UK grow dramatically, and at an increasing rate: as visualised in the chart below, there were 120,000 registered charities in England and Wales in 1994/95, 164,195 in 2006, and there are 189,009 today.³


The main sources of income for VCOs can be identified by four categories. These are government funding, corporate funding, funding from investments and legacies, and funding from individuals.

It is an abundance of government funding that has grown the third sector in recent years, but we find ourselves now in a recession, in which this source of income for VCOs, as well as another two out of the main four, is in decline.

In recession, the budgets of both central and local governments are pressurized and funding for (both private and) third sector service initiatives is cut. Similarly, corporate funding dries up, as smaller corporate profits, which are related to economic performance, result in a reduction in corporate giving. Investment and legacy income also begins to decline, as assets (equities, bank deposits, and property) become less valuable and susceptible to lower interest rates.⁴

We have a situation now, in recession, then, where an increasing number of competing charities are left increasingly at the mercy of the fourth and final category of income: funding from individuals.

When it comes to fundraising from individuals, next to the canvassing of high net worth donors, online fundraising is on average the second best method for return on investment.⁵ Maximising online fundraising then should be a focus for VCOs during recession.

Examining the UK market for online donation, and even, more generally, examining UK online interest in charities, however, uncovers some worrying trends. As the following graph shows, interest on Google in the search terms charity or sponsor or donation or “online donation” in the UK has declined consistently year-on-year since 2005.


One might suggest that perhaps VCO brands, rather than generic terms, have grown in the online space since 2005, but looking at the entire charitable and non-profits category of Google searches, which includes brand terms, a similar trend is revealed: consistent decline year-on-year since 2005.⁶


We can conclude from these trends of decline in online interest in donation and charities that the base level volume of online donation from individuals is declining. It is important, then, for VCOs in their online fundraising efforts to attempt to secure higher value or repeat donation from the same individuals.

The pressure to achieve this is compounded by the current climate of recession. Evidence from other recessions is that individuals are less promiscuous with their giving during a downturn: they focus on causes that they already support.⁷

Right now, then, more VCOs than ever have fewer than ever potential donors; and of those potential donors that are available, fewer of them are new donors. Moreover, from those donors that have been secured, VCOs increasingly must squeeze more value.

This situation puts emphasis on one thing: the relationship between the VCO and the individual donor. It’s not a new relationship, not one that has to be won; it’s an existing relationship, one that has to be preserved. More than preserved, this existing relationship has to be developed into an increasingly lucrative one for the VCO.


The Role of Social Media

Social media has an important role to play here, as fundamentally it is the expression and cultivation of the relationships that exist between individuals, and between individuals, brands, products, and services.

There is a stronger relationship between an individual and an organisation when the communication between that individual and organisation is a dialogue, rather than a one-way broadcast from organisation to individual. Social media, which has at its core user-generated content, gives voice to the individual, thus facilitating dialogue back and forth between individuals and organisations. It should be embraced as part of any strategy that seeks to promote strong relationships between those parties.

Moreover, with the growth of social media, there has come to be an expectation on the part of the individual of opportunities for dialogue with brands and product and service providers. Not to fulfil this expectation would be to jeopardise the strength of the relationship that exists between the organisation and the individual. Oliver Westmancott puts it simply: “If you present your content in a way that doesn’t make it easy for people to respond to they just won’t, they’ll engage with other issues and organisations.”⁸ Those “other issues and organisations” will be the ones that do provide a platform for dialogue.

Another effect the growth of social media has had on the attitudes of the individual is the trend, as Rachel Beer describes it, for people to use social media “to get the things they need from each other, rather than from traditional institutions like corporations”, or indeed VCOs.⁹ Increasingly, individuals value the opinions of other individuals more than those expressed by the organisation. Organisations should therefore seek to provide a platform on which individuals can be evangelists for the organisation’s cause.

Not only does social media then both facilitate and demand conversation, it can be used to strengthen relationships in other ways: through the opportunity for organisations to grant individuals privileges, such as membership of a community whose shared interest is the work of the organisation, and personalised information about the individual’s role in that work. These things add value to that which the potential donor gets in return for his or her donation.

Social media can be used to achieve specific goals in third sector fundraising. For one, it can allow organisations to connect donors with recipients. By demonstrating more vividly the impact of a donor's 'investment', this connection will reinforce and augment the value of donation in the mind of the donor.

Social media can also be used to improve transparency and legitimacy in an organisation's work. The communications that constitute a social media environment are by their nature “open and equitable, and require […] the transparent sharing of information, honest discussion of […] successes and failures, highs and lows – warts and all – rather than the polished diplomacy of PR, the hard sell of advertising or the push of marketing.”⁹ As well as rendering communications transparent, dialogue about the work of an organisation can also have the effect of democratising that organisation. It gives a donor the opportunity to question, criticise, and approve the work of the organisation. More to the point, it gives the organisation the opportunity to respond to those questions, and to act on that criticism or approval. A more transparent and legitimate organisation is a more attractive one to donors, and more attractive to donors means more likely to receive support.¹⁰


The Implications for the Digital Agency of the Value of Social Media

Social media then has a valuable role to play in third sector fundraising, especially during recession when the relationship between the VCO and the individual is paramount. Apart from anything else, the expectation on the part of the individual of opportunity for dialogue with the organisation, and the need on the part of the organisation to provide a platform for individuals to be evangelists, mean that VCOs cannot now afford not to invest in social media: they risk damaging their relationships with their donors if they do not.

Any agency that describes itself as a ‘full-service’ one must therefore be able to provide comprehensive social media services. Investment will be required in the agency’s capacity to provide these services, and in their marketing of them; at the same time though, these services should be increasingly easy to sell to third sector clients.

That said, when it comes to selling social media services, agencies will still have to consider carefully how they’re going to prove the return on investment in social media to their clients. Some forms of social media, exemplified by the Dogs Trust’s Facebook application (http://apps.facebook.com/dogstrust/), promote direct donation, and there are opportunities to monetise social media and track the revenue it generates. An organisation can turn social media content into advertising inventory, and it would be easy to put tracked links to donation pages in a twitter feed, for example. However social media is not particularly suited to this kind of advertising. As has been discussed, it is honest conversational communication; and sales (or even fundraising) is not generally at home with honest conversation, or at least not with the honest conversation that is conducted between individuals. It would in most cases be a counterproductive misuse of social media to attempt to advertise with it.

One solution to the problem for the agency of proving return on investment in social media, when that return is rarely direct, is for the agency to establish with the client more qualitative objectives and measures of success for social media investment. All VCOs value their relationships with individual donors. Success with social media can therefore be attributed where it leads organisations to “build better relationships”, to “participate in conversations where” they “hadn’t previously had a voice”, and to “move from a running monologue to a meaningful dialogue” with potential donors.¹¹ These successes all involve participation on the part of the organisation; the organisation will know for itself when they have been achieved. When asked, “How successful has it [social media, specifically twitter] been in terms of raising awareness, attracting donations and finding homes for dogs?” Alex Goldstein of Dogs Trust responded:

The answer to this all depends on how you measure success. To us, it’s been very valuable. People are increasingly coming to us for advice on obtaining or caring for dogs and we’re able to give that or direct them to where they can find it; that’s certainly part of our job description.

We are also able to build enthusiasm in new supporters who hadn’t heard of us before. And, best of all, we were able to rehome a dog.¹²

Goldstein recognises Dogs Trust’s success here, because, in the way success was measured, he was part of it.

It’s not surprising that the measurement of success with social media is linked to the client’s participation in it. Unlike the views and clicks of advertising media, social media is not a commodity in which the digital agency can deal. It's an activity, that clients need to be enabled in, and need to learn to perform for themselves. True dialogue, connection, transparency, and legitimacy cannot be held or made or achieved by proxy. Digital agencies will need to educate and to enable clients in the practices of social media, so that, contrary to the nature of ‘agency’, clients can participate in it for themselves.

If the digital agency does its job properly, then, by being a good teacher, there is a limit to the amount that can be charged to the client for a single social media service. Sure, a client can be charged a consultancy fee over time, but the agency cannot teach the same lesson to the same client in perpetuity. Social media services are finite in nature.

What’s more, regardless of how good a teacher the agency is, clients will always be good pupils to varying degrees. Social media services provided by the agency are related to the abilities of the client. If the digital agency is to deliver quality, then it should be prepared to have to work with clients for as long, and only for as long, as it takes in order for them to become proficient. This has the potential to make billings for social media services unpredictable. Agencies might want to attempt to charge minimum fees for each social media goal, but when social media goals are qualitative as has been discussed, they can be difficult to define in contractual terms.

Most of all, since social media services are an education, and a process of enabling, while finite in billings, they are virtually infinite in value to the client. They must therefore be charged out to the client at a premium: at a cost that represents their value to the client over time. This premium – or investment, as it should be seen – needs to be justified to the client in an agency’s marketing and pitch activities: education, therefore, begins from step one.


Like any business, VCOs will be feeling the pressures of the economic recession. Online fundraising from individuals will be important to them, and less than ever before can they afford to burn bridges with potential donors. Maintaining and building on existing relationships, keeping people donating and donating more – these are the tactics not only for survival but for success. Social media has a valuable role to play in relationship management, and indeed a vital one, as individuals are coming to expect and rely on the communications that form social media; it must therefore be integral to third sector communications strategy. The agency will need to educate at every step of its providing social media services: with its marketing of the services to prospective clients, with the establishing of objectives, and with the provision of social media services themselves.


1 National Council for Voluntary Organisations, ‘Bringing markets into public services’, Third Sector Foresight, http://www.3s4.org.uk/drivers/bringing-markets-into-public-services (2008)
2 Nicholas Timmins, ‘Private sector role in public services explodes’, The Financial Times, http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/0469c6c6-a2d4-11dc-81c4-0000779fd2ac.html?nclick_check=1 (2007)
3 National Council for Voluntary Organisations, ‘Number of general charities’, Third Sector Foresight, http://www.3s4.org.uk/drivers/number-of-general-charities (2008); and Charity Commission, Register of Charities, http://www.charitycommission.gov.uk/Showcharity/RegisterOfCharities/RegisterHomePage.aspx?Language=English (2009)
4 National Council for Voluntary Organisations, ‘Economic downturn’, Third Sector Foresight, http://www.3s4.org.uk/drivers/economic-downturn (2009)
5 Sue Fidler, ‘IT Intelligence: Online Fundraising’, Third Sector, http://www.thirdsector.co.uk/Resources/Finance/Article/834817/intelligence-Online-fundraising/ (2008)
6 These two graphs, which reflect interest in search queries and a category of queries, are taken from Google Insights for Search. They plot the volume of searches on Google as a proportion of all searches, normalised over the time period on which the graph reports.
7 National Council for Voluntary Organisations, ‘Economic downturn’, Third Sector Foresight, http://www.3s4.org.uk/drivers/economic-downturn (2009)
8 Oliver Westmancott, ‘Social Media Optimisation for Charities’, Inspiration and Expertise Blog, http://www.iedesign.co.uk/blog/social-media-optimisation-for-charities/ (2008)
9 Rachel Beer, ‘Why charities need to use social media’, CharityComms, http://charitycomms.org.uk/articles/insider_secrets/why_charities_need_to_use_social_media (2009)
10 Megan Griffith, NCVO Third Sector Foresight, How online communities can make the net work for the VCS, http://www.ncvo-vol.org.uk/uploadedFiles/NCVO/Publications/Publications_Catalogue/Sector_Research/ICT%20Foresight%20-%20social%20networks.pdf (2007)
11 Aaron Uhrmacher, ‘How to Measure Social Media ROI for Business’, Mashable, http://mashable.com/2008/07/31/measuring-social-media-roi-for-business/ (2008)
12 Graham Charlton, ‘Should more charities be making use of Twitter?’, Econsultancy, http://econsultancy.com/blog/3258-should-more-charities-be-making-use-of-twitter (2009)

I've just added an 'AddThis' bookmarking button to the bottom of my blog posts and I'm keen to test it - only first I need something to bookmark.  Looking back through my previous blog posts however I can't say I feel proud enough about any one of them to want to draw new attention to it.

I met a week or two ago with a couple of guys from internet technology company Phorm. They presented what struck me as an exciting proposition: a network of business relationships, of which phorm would be the administrators, named the Open Internet Exchange, or OIX.

Phorm's OIX will involve publishers, advertisers and, crucially, internet service providers in a way that will allow advertisers to target internet users whose behaviour on the internet identifies them as having relevant consumption interests. This is great: behavioural targeting identifies consumers who have actually started down a particular road to consumption (purchase, subscription, or whatever); rather than just identifying those who are only likely to start down this road, because, for example, of their demographic.

With behavioural targeting, once the user is identified as a target, they can be shown relevant advertising while they're viewing any internet page, not just pages whose content is relevant to the marketing proposition. The advantages here are that publishers can monetize all their content, even that which isn't easily categorised and wouldn't otherwise be valuable; and advertisers can avoid the clutter of competitive ads that forms on the pages whose content pertains to the advertising.

But behavioural targeting is something that advertising networks do already. So what makes the OIX different? Exisiting methods of behavioural targeting work like this:

1. a user suddenly appears, browsing one of the sites in an advertising network


2. he or she exhibits while on that site a degree of behaviour that identifies him or her as a potential target: he or she conducts a relevant search, clicks on a relevant ad, or looks at a relevant page


3. when he or she next appears back on one of the sites in the advertising network, he or she gets shown a relevant ad

The limitation here is that the behaviour of the user is observed only while the user is in the advertising network. Some eighty or ninety per cent of the internet population might be reached at least once each month by traditional advertising networks, but only a fraction of a user's total internet behaviour is actually observed by any one network. This limits the volume of relevant users available, and the accuracy of their match to the advertising.

Phorm's OIX, which involves internet service providers, will make use of the ISPs' data on users' entire browsing histories: it will 'see' all the pages they visit, and all of the searches they make. This will allow adveritisers to define and successfully target a practically infinite number of behavioural advertising 'channels' - combinations of keywords and URLs that define specific behaviours.

Sounds good, doesn't it? - like a more highly evolved approach, that makes use of a massive resource that has been under our noses all along. But, while it employs one resource of the ISPs, for it to work Phorm's OIX must sustain another: the user. While the user won't have to download any software onto his or her computer, and no personally-identifiable data will ever be recorded, there will be cries of 'Big Brother is watching us!' Moreover, users will be generating a revenue stream for all those involved in the OIX. So what's in it for them?

Well firstly, we all see advertising anyway. What Phorm is proposing with the Open Internet Exchange is a way for us all to see more relevant advertising - advertising that might even be helpful!

Secondly, Phorm is in a position to provide the user with whatever services that can be derived by the monitoring of his or her internet behaviour. The obvious ones here are internet security services, like warnings against phishing websites.

Given how important it will be for them to preserve the ISPs' good relationships with users - to keep the user sweet - I wonder if Phorm will be able to come up with anything else ground breaking, by way of services for the user. Indeed, they may have to come up with something of this nature before the OIX will take off. Whether Phorm can provide something where ISPs have long had the opportunity to do so already will be interesting to see.

So now i can publish to my blog, which is shared on facebook, from my
mobile! I can hardly wait for the future. My mobile device and the
internet are only going to get better. But how it'll all be monitized
- now there's a good question... and one not easily answered on my
mobile's keypad.

--
http://www.kevinjoyner.com/

It was reported on Tuesday that the entertainment giant Viacom, which owns MTV and Nickelodeon, will be launching a billion-dollar lawsuit against YouTube and its owner Google. YouTube, Viacom argues, does not take sufficient responsibility for removing copyrighted Viacom content from its video sharing site.

The most common response to this news that I have read about has said that Viacom is making a mistake: that they are struggling against a market whose natural flow is in fact in their best interests. As Jeff Jarvis observes, Viacom is 'trying to spread stupid', by criticising the actions of its own fans, who are publicising Viacom content.

The clever action, so goes Jarvis' argument, would be for Viacom to do as CBS and, in fact, the BBC are doing: They are condoning the posting of copyrighted content on YouTube, not only by leaving it on the site, but by replacing it wherever it exists with high-quality copy. CBS's and the BBC's idea here is to use YouTube for the marketing tool that it provides, concentrating YouTubers' attention around single high-quality copies of their content.

As one comment on Jarvis' blog puts it, however, the argument is not so one-sided: YouTube is illegally hosting the best of Viacom content, deriving its own potential revenue from it, and developing but containing its own audience - because they don't necessarily have to go anywhere else to get the Viacom content they want.

Basically, Viacom aren't stupid, they do have a point, and perhaps in their case they should be taking the action that they are.

The CBS/BBC model is a good one, but the merit of it is found not so much in the 'clever' strategy itself, as in what it intends for the quality and nature of their content. The secret to making use of YouTube as they plan, will be for CBS and the BBC continually to offer, on their own channels, fresh, appealing product, which competes with what should be regarded only as its own advertising on YouTube.

It will be a shame if Viacom wins a lot of ground against YouTube in the outcome of this lawsuit: the CBS/BBC model is one that will only drive better content.

I want to share a discussion that a friend and I had this weekend about some of the differences between our prime minister, and the US president. It's worth thinking about, given the political events of recent years, in which our prime minister has assumed so much power as an individual, and in which he has been so close to George Bush.

We were talking about the treatment the two leaders of state receive from the political institutions of which they are part. 'Politics' is of course supported by the media, so part of this treatment must be attributed to treatment by the media.

Our standard of journalism is higher, I believe, than in the US, but it would be very wrong indeed to suggest that there's little criticism of Bush in American politics.

'But we don't revere him like they seem to,' my friend suggested. She was talking about the ceremonial treatment of 'Mr President' in the US.

In the UK, we have little such ceremony to apologise for our political leader: either there's no ceremony at all, or else our ceremony surrounding the prime minister is actually in itself more often critical of his position. Our politics treats the prime minister in a way that puts him almost permanently on the defensive. With the sorts of institutions epitomised by the televised prime minister's question time, and by the dragging of our prime minister onto Radio 4's Today programme, I think our political leader almost always has a struggle, to prove himself.

There's some relationship here, we thought, between the treatment of the prime minister in our politics, and the fact that we have a ceremonial head of state; where the Americans lack one, other than their president. It goes some way in suggesting an explanation for American reverence of their president: for us, it's our queen who's to be revered; but the Americans have no institutional point of reference higher than the president, except perhaps for God!

This explanation asserts that we necessarily have a need and fixed capacity for reverence. Whether or not that's the case is the same question as in asking, would we necessarily revere politicians more, if we didn't have a royal monarchy? I believe we probably would, but whether this capacity for reverence is in our fundamental human nature, or rather induced by our sensationalist media is a more difficult question. Perhaps the need is natural, but the capacity is media-controlled. I believe that the media reflects human nature, so I'd say certainly that both are at work in reverence.

Were we to be without our royal monarchy, I'd expect most of our reverence to be diverted to popular celebrity; already celebrity attracts the greatest share. Perhaps this is a reason why worship of celebrity as well is healthy for politics: in that it helps to divert some of our capacity for reverence away from our political leaders, who should remain instead under clear-sighted scrutiny. (Perhaps even the occasional reference to our nominal national religiousness helps also to keep things in perspective.)

What then is the difference in this function between celebrity and royal monarchy? There must be some difference if what we've theorised about the relationship between the monarchy and political reverence is true; America has celebrity too. It seems as though the value in this function of a royal monarchy is in its hybrid state between political institution and popular celebrity: such that it attracts just the right sort of reverence away from politics proper.

Last week I heard a live satellite report given to BBC Radio 4's PM programme. I was struck my a mistake that the reporter made - it was just a simple slip - he said one thing when he must have meant to say another.

I've written in my last couple of posts about some of the issues surrounding the development of new media; I'm going to play on this theme once again this time around.

It's all very well that consumers should be looking forward to stepping up in the new media world to the status of content creator, but I wonder now if traditional broadcasters and publishers (henceforth, broadcasters) can really be looking forward to the relative step down that this represents for them. I'm not suggesting that traditional broadcasters are going to lose their status as professional organisations overnight as a result of so many oiks being capable of writing a blog; but if traditional broadcasters are going to keep up with the developments of new media, in pace, breadth, and flexibility, then they're going to have to prepare themselves for the consequences of a degree of redundancy at some level in the traditional editorial process.

The work of the consumer-turned-creator is in most cases going to be rough around the edges, and I'm not suggesting either that major broadcasters are going to want to emulate this style in order to 'fit in' to new media; even in those instances when broadcasters would want to fake not being edited, I don't think they're going to have a problem doing it. The real problem though is this: the limits of the traditional editorial process are not easily resolved with the limitlessness of new media broadcasting. When a major event happens, for example, I could comment on it in my blog, with words, pictures and sound, within a day of hearing about it on the news. While maintaining its editorial integrity, I imagine it would take the BBC current affairs television programme Panorama at least a week to compile and produce their special on the same event. Even Newsnight doesn't match the pace of the internet in its latest form ('web 2.0', the 'blogosphere'). Without making a new offering in doing so, it would be impossible for the BBC to issue considered comment on the same level as my blog.

The corollary is that it's impossible for my blog to issue considered comment on the same level as the BBC; though given the number of smart people in the world who don't work in tradtional broadcasting, but who are capable of blogging, and given the ongoing development of new media as mentioned above, I know which body of creators is soon likely to be driving the other. The answer probably would be for traditional broadcasters, as they invest in new media, to get as many of these smart people on board as possible. I'm under the impression that Guardian Unlimited is a leader in this field: they've got loads of bloggers writing for them.

Perhaps I've identified a strength of traditional broadcasters in a new media environment: they are the bastions of the old media model, editorial integrity and more. The demand for reliable information is only going to increase with the growing popularity of new media. What's more, editorial integrity aside, the fact is that not everyone wants 'new' media all the time; in fact very few people do. I was conducting some research the other day, looking at online men's magazine Monkey. The magazine has a graphical interface that mimics the paper magazine reading experience - you can drag the pages by the corner across the screen to turn them - but I found that this detail of the interface seemed only to emphasise the fact that this wasn't a real magazine. It's a problem because a paper magazine to relax with is probably what a substantial proportion of the men's mag audience wants; computers are for working on.

This example is only a technological limitation, but you get my point: there will always be a market for traditional media. I think traditional broadcasting mammoths should still be worried though if the way I'm describing their offering is beginning to sound niche rather than mainstream; it's my belief that increasingly that's what traditional media is set to become: niche.

But that means that new media, and its editorial process, is increasingly going to have to develop beyond its current niche status. I hope we'll see a honing of what are effectively instinctive production and editorial techniques. More than that, redunancies on one level in editing and production in new media will necessarily be compensated for by an expansion in the same on a higher level, in terms of what is produced, who produces it, when it is produced, and in what context (Joe Marchese described on Tuesday some of the new processes involved in managing new media). I guess maybe what I'm describing is an expansion of PR function in place of redundancies in editing, as if in new media editing is PR... but then isn't that kind of what it is already? (See my entry 'Our Innocence Lost' on artifice and engineering in new media.)

It was reported last month that five families at a court in Los Angeles jointly filed a negligence and fraud suit against Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation. The company owns the social networking site MySpace, which enabled paedophiles to groom and sexually assault the children of those families.

I first read about this case shortly after writing my last blog entry, and I think it provokes a discussion that follows from it: about the responsibility that new media providers must be willing to accept if they are to protect the health of new media. Empowering media consumers as broadcasters is a dangerous business. By encouraging us all to become personal broadcasters, new media providers are giving each of us the ability to devastate our own privacy in an instant. It's not just Google or News Corporation that we share our information with, so that they can show us adverts; imagine the consequences of accidentally sharing a personal document with the whole internet, instead of a small group of friends. And it's not just issues of privacy that accompany broadcasting. Media providers are also empowering individuals to commit libel and infringe ownership rights.

One immediate response to these concerns would be to say that it's down to individuals and the government to be responsible for these issues of identity and interaction; and it's true, we do have personal responsibility, and of course the government does too. But I think that responsibility for these concerns should lie most of all with media providers, because assuming this responsibility is in their own best interests. Let me explain why:

As I mentioned at the end of my last entry, moral integrity and trustworthiness are likely to become increasingly valuable as a consequence of changes in the branding environment. This somewhat superficial reason isn't the only one though for why media providers will need to be moral, trustworthy, and responsible: they will need to be these things in order for new media, for consumer content creation to work at all.

As they collect and help us to share more information, media providers are demanding more trust of consumers than has ever been asked of them before. In addtion to the information that we actively upload, media providers are in a position to collect information relating to every single discrete action we take in using the internet. When a transfer of information occurs, it's already being recorded:

• where geographically in the world the consumer is; and more specifically, what internet service provider he or she is using. This is to become increasingly important when, as with Virgin's new 'quadruple-play' TV, landline, mobile phone, and internet offering, the channels of our media consumption ('old' and new) begin to merge.
• When exactly the information transfer was made;
• exactly what information was transferred;
• and how, i.e. with exactly what media device the transfer was made.

That last category of recorded information is very sweet icing on the cake for the media industry. By using 'cookies', the data gathered about each of our information transfers is made uniquely identifiable, and so can be made continuous with the data on all our other internet activity.

We're looking in new media at the ready availability of a massive amount of information on consumption; and this information is without the bounds we've seen traditionally in media research methodologies, like those of sample size, human error, research budget, as well as others. Where online media consumption can be linked to purchase - and that's where consumption itself is not already purchase - there's a veritable cornicopia of data relating the media we consume, to how we spend our money.

My point here though is mainly to encourage trust, and to urge media providers to warrant it, rather than to warn consumers against it. There's incredible potential for insight in all this information, and I'm sure that that can be for the good of everyone involved; but, and here's the very significant rub: media providers must be responsible for and have the trust of consumers if they want us to invest our information.

Thinking now for a moment of the work I did at the marketing research agency Millward Brown, I'm not sure what all this new-found power in new media is going to mean for the study of consumer attitudes. In a world where on-demand, interactive new media is the only media, it might not be necessary for us to bother trying to research consumer attitudes at all, when we would have a near-perfect picture of what media people are exposed to over time, and the effects of that exposure on media consumption and purchase. In such a world, in the terms of consumer insight, attitudes become consumption itself.

I would probably guess also that advertising pretesting, as we know it - out of 'field' - will become a redundant practice. What would the point be of having a separate out-of-field process for pretesting a piece of advertising, when it's actual performance in field, amongst a perfectly controlled audience, can be monitored, perfectly?

However I can see it being useful to be able to apply to our ongoing study of how consumption is impacted upon in new media, that which we understand already about how in traditional media attitudes can be changed. And I don't mean to suggest either that the quantitative analysis of consumption data is ever going to replace the creative, brain-storming processes of qualitative research, or anticipating patterns in consumer behaviour before they form.

And once again, as with the future of the advertising industry, we run into a brick wall when it comes to the number of people actually 'on' the internet. All the traditional ways of examining consumer attitudes remain of paramount importance in the undeveloped world. Whatever man-power that might be freed up by efficiencies and redundancies in the new media world would probably be wisely invested in developing digital media on the ground, in the places where it hardly yet exists.