[Written originally for the CIPR Friday Roundup.]
You should not make edits to a Wikipedia entry when you have a conflict of interest, as any PR practitioner does in relation to their employer or client. Simple.
This Wikipedia rule is reflected precisely in the CIPR's Wikipedia guidance, published by the social media panel last summer and supported by PR bodies in Canada, Australia and South Africa. (Although not yet in the US.) Read more
Neil recently left BP after 14 years where his most recent role was in the unified command centre in the US, set up to respond to the Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Neil has more than 25 years' managing public affairs issues and crises that have grabbed the headlines in different parts of the world, helping scores of executives to help them communicate more effectively in support of their businesses.
Neil now runs Alpha Voice Communications.
I'm increasingly pleased with the live CIPR TV format and the questions submitted via the streaming video player, Twitter and Facebook. Without such participation we wouldn't have thought to ask Neil about the internal communications aspects of the BP crisis, for example, although the question about Neil's regard for the controversial (ex-)CEO, Tony Hayward, was to be expected!
Neil's responses are compulsory watching for every PR practitioner imho.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gP-MRN-Do-k
Ever considered Twitter in terms of it being a "Human Seismograph"?
Brian Solis won't mind me pointing out that he likes to invent memorable turns of phrase. It's a common trait amongst communicators working on any cutting edge because sometimes existing phraseology doesn't quite do justice to the point being made. So here we are, discussing human seismography.
And two posts this week portray the seismograpic needle waggling wildly.
Firstly, Brian's post "Oil Spill Report: BP and White House Sentiment Spills onto Twitter" reviews the sentiment towards BP as expressed on Twitter. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this detailed analysis is the deleterious knock-on impact the disaster has had on sentiment towards President Obama. Of course, correlations offer no evidence of cause-and-effect unless individual exclamations of feeling explicitly express such a connection, and this is something social web analytics can examine. Read more