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Latest research shows that more than a quarter of people have cut back on buying magazines and newspapers in the economic downturn in favour of free online content.

However, the results also reveal that this does not mean people are more open to subscription services. Just 11% said they currently pay for online media and a further 11% said they may begin a subscription in the next 12 months.

But this begs the question of why? Why would a consumer buy access to news online when they can get it free elsewhere?

Surely a precedent has been set after receiving it free for years and it’s too late to change?

Rupert Murdoch, whose global empire has made a huge financial loss, declared recently that the “free-for-all in online news has ended” and has pledged to shake up the newspaper industry by introducing charges for access to all his news websites.

I don’t doubt Murdoch’s ability to pave new ways, but is this really the best way of increasing revenue?

With the amount of blogs and social networking sites out there, far fewer people rely on traditional media for their latest news fix. That isn’t to say a paid for model won’t work for specialist media, where there’s a niche audience, but mainstream news is readily available, whenever we want it.

But many believe it’s purely down to behavioural change. As David Elms, media partner at KPMG, the company behind the research, says: “Monetising online content is the holy grail of the media sector. The challenge is changing the mindset of a consumer population that is used to accessing free online content.”

Steve Brill, co-founder of Journalism Online, which promises to help news outlets charge for content, says: “People have been exchanging cash for newspapers and magazines for decades - they just need to get into the habit of doing so online.”

But Vivian Schiller, president and CEO of non-profit NPR, who believes in making pay optional, said: “To think that we are so smart that we can retrain the audience, that’s an awfully elitist, condescending, and frankly old perspective.”

Instead of charging for subscriptions, perhaps newspapers should look at what they’re offering and provide the best online content to attract lucrative advertisers?

There has been a lot written about The London Evening Standard recently (full history on followthemedia), so here’s a more light-hearted look at the pros and cons of the newspaper going free. Through Londoner’s eyes with PR glasses if you wish.

Pro

You can pick up both the Evening Standard and London Lite and play the game ‘spot the difference’ with the main news stories. Don’t look at the business page though – there are none!

Con

After a short three-week piece, two bright jackets are yet again vying for sidewalk inches and obstructing our journey home. 

Pro

They probably won’t be there for long. The word on the street is now that thelondonpaper is gone Lite will soon follow and the Evening Standard will rule London’s streets once again (although from another perspective that’s probably a con). 

Con

An unsightly mess of 600,000 more newspapers littering London’s streets, trains, buses and the tube. 

Pro

Watching a certain type of person staring at the ceiling on the tube as they will not read their evening paper now that it’s devalued and stuffed in your face every evening like a freesheet.  

Con

The spy who loves media now decides what we read. 

Pro

His team has had the great idea to feature anecdotes on the 2^nd page to celebrate the paper going free: “Public figures reveal the free things in life they love the most. Gordon Brown says, the NHS…” 

The Evening Standard is the first quality newspaper to go free, possibly suicide for an already ailing paper or perhaps a very smart move into a new territory which others will follow, and if they do, is this a pro or a con for the PR industry? 

It is reputed to be erstwhile Sex Pistols manager and punk svengali, Malcolm McClaren, that popularised the phrase “Never trust a hippy” in relation to a certain British entrepreneur.

Worryingly, the sentiment ended up in the script to the Pistols’ celluloid chaos known as “The Great Rock and Roll Swindle”, going something like: “Call all hippies boring old farts - and set fire to them”.

Somehow, American rock band hatched in the hippy era, The Grateful Dead, escaped the flames and became known for their endless touring and a relationship with their fans, the “Deadheads”, probably unique in rock history.

And it’s this that social media consultant, Steve Goldner, feels encapsulates the - ahem - vibe of social media.

In his latest blog post, he draws the parallel between “The Dead”, their audience and the way social media works: “Tune into your audience, sensitive to their vibe and perception.” For a hard-nosed marketing director or business owner that might sound like waking up at Woodstock, circa 1969, after a bad trip.

But the point, I believe, he’s making is that the way The Grateful Dead listened and responded to their fans - tailoring the concert set list and feel of the show depending on how the audience reacted - was doing something back then that social media is capable of doing now.

For companies this means listening and understanding first, then engaging in online conversation (not selling) and building a relationship, based on trust, with their audience.

Got that? Great - now pass the bong, please.

Update: Efforts to rebuild trust are clearly striking a chord with businesses by the look of this PR Week case study.

If business leaders breathed a sigh of relief that they weren’t politicians when the UK Parliamentary expenses scandal blew up, they should beware of feeling smug.

A recent poll by Ipsos Mori revealed the public’s distrust is not reserved for our political class, but business people too.

Net trust in business leaders - according to the poll - has fallen to its lowest level since the research began in 1983 and placed business fourth from bottom among 16 groups in terms of truthfulness.

In that context, it seems strange that the leading business organisations were unwilling to mount a defence of commerce and industry, with the Confederation of British Industry telling The Observer:  ”We are just not going to comment on the survey” and the Institute of Directors not replying. Why the reluctance to fight business’ corner? After all, not everyone in business works in banking.

In last week’s conference staged by the Public Relations Consultants Association (PRCA) entitled, “Emerging from recession”, the issue of trust was very much on the agenda, with the BBC’s director of communications, Ed Williams, running a session on rebuilding trust and posing the question: “How do we restore public confidence in organisations and rebuild reputations to emerge stronger in the future?”

Among the Tweets from the conference quoting Williams, helpfully supplied by Orchid Communications, the Mori poll’s point was reiterated: people trust companies a lot less than they did a year ago. And, thanks to David McNamara’s tweet, we learned what Ed Williams feels is the best strategy to deliver trust: ”openness”.

The credit crunch, the banking crisis, the fall of Lehmann Bros and Fred Goodwin’s pension package have done little to warm the cockles of the public’s heart towards business people. And that’s terribly sad, as those enterprises which go about their business providing employment, behaving ethically and responsibly, creating things of value for their customers and occupying a meaningful place in their communities have nothing to be ashamed of. Yet they are lumped in with the rest of them in a skip marked “untrustworthy”.

And that’s where business needs to come out fighting. If public opinion has decided business is unprincipled, it’s not going to change on its own; it needs to be persuaded otherwise. And that’s where openness comes in. It’s not about revealing your competitive advantage or the details of boardroom arguments, but being able to communicate effectively across the landscape of what you do and why it’s important. That means recognising it’s not always possible to tell a happy story each time your organisation speaks. In fact, it could include having to apologise when your business has messed up. But being proud and vocal about your achievements - while maintaining transparency about your shortcomings - is all part of building trust.

A more recent, and critical, development in this problem for business is the advent of social media: online, peer-to-peer sharing of knowledge, information and opinions about a myriad of subjects. And that could include your business. Chris Brogan, a veteran of using social media for business, warns how communications around a company are no longer within the organisation’s exclusive control. But social media presents an opportunity also, to show greater transparency and enhance reputation and trust. 

I’m pleased to say Greater Manchester Chamber of Commerce has been willing to participate in the debate and its deputy chief executive, Chris Fletcher, told PR Media Blog:

“It’s natural for the public to be suspicious of large corporations and this can be a positive thing in ensuring that businesses are held accountable for their actions. However, I think a big problem is that business leaders equate to bankers in most people’s minds and this carries connotations of huge profits, big bonuses and inflated salaries. Actually, the vast majority of UK businesses are small to medium and are struggling in the current climate. These businesses play a huge part in driving us out of a recession and need all the support they can get. It’s the Chamber’s role to provide this support and to fight their corner by taking their concerns to the right people for action.”

Whether the present government succeeds in winning a further term in office, or not, it is right to ensure that public trust in politicians of any hue is clawed back by drawing a line under the expenses debacle. And even MPs unscathed by the scandal will have to justify their party political peers on the doorsteps come election time.

And the same goes for business. You might be doing great things and be great people; just don’t assume that anyone beyond the factory gates or the web portal believes you are.

New York-based writer and editor - and previous PR Media Blog guest blogger, Bridgett Gayle - talks about why company branding begins at home. 

A brand must deliver on its promises. A product brand that markets itself as being 100% natural is promising that every ingredient is natural. At any time that promise is broken, the brand is damaged and customer loyalty is threatened. Companies are beginning to realize that they need to make promises to their employees as well. Product brand promises are crafted by the marketing team and employee relations are managed by the human resources team. Employer branding is when marketing and human resources collide with the goal to create a work environment that promises to be a great place to work.

Business owners know the adage “the customer is always right.” Satisfy the customer and they’ll become loyal to your product brand. But the more effective way to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty is to first satisfy the employee. A great place to work, the employer brand, has a work environment that engages employees.

For about five years now I’ve been an on-staff freelance writer for several companies. And for those five years I’ve witnessed employees so disengaged that I wonder how the companies managed to stay in business. Engaged employees talk about what they can do for the company. Disengaged employees stick around for what they can get from the company. And I was no different. The paycheck kept me around for another day. Free lunches were nice but that couldn’t ignite engagement. And when my contract was up, I was ready to leave. But worse yet, I wasn’t at all interested in telling anyone about the company’s product.

The marketing-HR mash up takes a different approach to employment: employee engagement becomes a factor. Just as the marketing team devised ways to keep a customer loyal to the product, the new marketing-HR team seeks to keep employees engaged, leading to loyalty to the product brand. Engaged employees are more than happy to become product brand ambassadors. Happy employees create happy customers.

The Container Store, the US-based storage products retail chain, has been successfully using the marketing-HR mash up strategy. Their focus on employer branding has put The Container Store at the top of Fortune magazines “The 100 Best Companies to Work For” list for ten consecutive years. The company believes that their employees are an extension to their product brand.

Employer branding is a growing concept for companies wanting to get and keep top talent. EMC, an information technology company, has developed its employer brand with a 10-step plan to improve employee engagement. Dan Schawbel, who assists with EMC’s branding strategies, revealed what those 10 steps were in “10 Employer Branding Strategies to Become the Employer of Choice.”

So is your work environment building or destroying your product brand?

I recently came across Jezebel, a blog which, as the raunchy name suggests, is aimed at women and focuses on celebrity, sex and fashion, ‘without airbrushing’. 

My first thought was – hmm, another feminist website. Turns out it’s much more than that. Churned out by Gawker Media since 2007, it’s clocking up on average nearly 1 million visits per day and has an impressive following on social networking sites and other blogs. Yesterday I noticed a twitter conversation about an intern position at the site, which went something like this, “Dear Jezebel, I will sell you my soul for an internship.” 

Why all the hype? I decided to monitor the blog to find out and have to say I’ve been very impressed. Most blogs aimed specifically at women have never appealed to me as they seem to focus on recipes or similar, not particularly exciting subjects. Jezebel, on the other hand, with a fiercely direct and analytical attitude, takes on not only women’s mags, but also newspapers (Daily Fail, as they call it, being one of the most favourite whipping boys) and offers tens of witty articles every day on pretty much every subject a modern woman might be interested in. How about: Daily Mail Finds Rare Childless Woman Who Is Not Miserable? 

The blog positions itself as the rebel, sick of the lies perpetuated by the women’s media, from airbrushing and shallow predictable celebrity interviews, to must-have products that journalist’s themselves don’t believe in.  

For this reason, from a PR perspective, however, Jezebel is almost an impossible win – they simply won’t read PR pitches and seem to have a grudge against the PR industry as such. Having said that, if you come up with a spectacular idea, perfect for the audience, I think you can chance it. Also, their FAQ section offers a very interesting insight into how a professional blog is run. 

A more general realisation though is that in today’s world where citizen journalism is on the rise, getting your news story printed is not the end of the story. Increasingly, it is then taken apart and analysed by ever more powerful and media savvy groups and blogs all over the world.  

All in all, Jezebel is a much-needed breath of fresh air in the tired space of women’s websites and magazines, which at the moment still follow the same traditional format – Wednesday’s launch of the Stylist is a prime example.  

“Black goes with everything and you probably don’t need any more assistance going broke!” shout Jezebel’s editors in unison. And the reason Jezebel is on the rise with an army of active commentators, whilst many women’s magazines are dying out – passion and edginess!   

Earlier this week I gave a workshop on PR and social media at the CIPR Northern Conference at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds.  One of the examples I covered was the work that the team at Staniforth has done with this blog.  You don’t really get the full perspective when your are on stage so I was astounded at just how big the blog looked on screen when this picture popped into my inbox (courtesy of Don’t Panic’s Andy Wake).  The post in question is a piece on art by my colleague and fellow blogger Julie Wilson.

I found out later that whilst I was talking another blogger was backstage behind the screen bashing at the keys of a laptop just a few feet away.  Alastair Campbell was opining on Osborne’s oratory at the Tory conference before taking to the stage for the keynote speech at our event.  I’m sort of glad I didn’t know that at the time.

Louis Venter, CEO at Media Vision, a London/Cape Town based search marketing company, shares his thoughts about search engine reputation management in our latest guest blog post.

With branded search increasing, search engine reputation management (SERM) is getting more and more important. There have been several recent crises that have affected some big brands but I’m going to focus on the current PC World crisis and illustrate what could be done to counter their current SERM crisis. 

It’s important to realise that Google isn’t going to remove negative press from its listings. Your only option for removal would be to legally instruct the offending website to remove it and then to submit a Google manual removal once they have complied. This is clearly only for serious cases where you have that legal option. For the most part, this option is not open to you so you will need to be content with promoting positive content above the negative, thereby displacing it. This is in essence what Search Engine Reputation Management is all about, controlling the entire front page for a brand’s search results.

If you Google “PC World” you’ll quickly see the offending item, a piece in the Guardian covering a PC World employee’s Facebook group that mocked customer’s stupidity. The piece clearly impacted them in the mainstream press for that week and must have had an effect on their reputation and sales. The crucial bit, however, is it continues to affect them online and with a poor SERM strategy in place it is not likely to go away any time soon.

The potential cost of this crisis is not insignificant. With close on 3 million people Googling “PC world” a month to purchase their products, it will have a serious effect on click through and conversion rate. A conservative estimate would result in a loss of around £1.5 million a month. This doesn’t take into account the valued customers that were previously loyal to the brand.

They have several web assets that aren’t optimised that well. The first step would be to optimise these better to create a hedge that would be difficult for these news articles to penetrate. They also do not have a separate press centre or recruitment website that is optimised for the brand. They are currently under the DSGi banner but could be optimised to appear for the “PC World” search.

Their online PR strategy could also do with some more attention as there are legacy stories sitting on page 2 which would indicate very little is being done to promote the positive pieces online.

An example of a “best practice” strategy would be Apple. The controlled hedge dominates most of the front page for their branded search. ASDA also does well and wasn’t affected by the “employee licking chicken” crisis on the search engines. This is also owing to the correct optimisation of all web assets.

Search engine reputation management is becoming a key part of online reputation management and a few simple techniques will go a long way in preventing crises affecting your branded search results for months to come.

The nation’s sweetheart, Cheryl Cole, has landed a global advertising deal with L’Oreal Paris making her the first British woman to be signed by the company since Kate Moss in 1998.

The Girls Aloud singer and X Factor judge will appear in a major TV campaign this month following the launch of a new range, Elvive Full Restore 5, in the UK.

It’s reported that L’Oreal tested a number of UK celebrities and unsurprisingly, Cheryl was the clear favourite, held in great affection by the British public.

But what is it that makes this Geordie lass a national treasure? From humble beginnings on a Newcastle council estate to gracing the cover of UK Vogue, Cheryl Cole has well and truly been through the public mill (remember the incident with the toilet attendant?). But since winning public sympathy when husband Ashley Cole allegedly cheated on her, and replacing Sharon Osbourne as a judge on X Factor, she has been the crush of many girls, boys, men and women.

In fact, over the last couple of years there appears to be a distinct lack of criticism for Cheryl generally. The press love her, girls want to be her and we know what boys want to do…

In a recent interview with The Sunday Times, she talks candidly about her life in the media glare, often referencing her Geordie roots and admitting that she “doesn’t trust anyone except her mother and her dogs”.

The interview also reports how, on set of the L’Oreal TV ad, she humbly admits that she can’t quite believe she’s been given the opportunity to say those iconic words “because you’re worth it” and, in other recent press interviews, when asked how she feels about being involved in the campaign, she’s a PR dream: “I have always loved the brand, to be given this opportunity is amazing.”

Cheryl Cole has cleverly managed to position herself as a fashionista, a songstress and a TV favourite whilst retaining an air of openness, accessibility and honesty unseen in the likes of Victoria Beckham and Kate Moss.

Love or loath her (unlikely the latter) with a deal rumoured to be worth half a million pounds, L’Oreal clearly think she’s worth it….

The Internet will score a first when England takes to the pitch against Ukraine in the World Cup qualifier next weekend.  It will be the first time ever that a a football match of this import has been broadcast live to fans via the web rather than on a TV channel.

The situation has arisen because the broadcast rights had been picked up by failed sports channel Setanta.  Following the collapse of the broadcaster, fans will watch this weekend’s World Cup clash on their computers.  Media group Perform will  stream the footage on a pay-per-view basis at www.ukrainevengland.com at a cost of £4.99.

This is a critical moment for television as a medium.  What is demonstrates is that TV is no longer platform specific, or more simply you don’t need a TV to watch TV anymore.  In fact the hundreds of pubs up and down the country who usually pack the bar for this type of fixture must be considering wiring up the PC to the big screen, and if not next weekend then they surely will as this trend continues.   What is really significant is that this is a sporting ‘event’.  Live events were supposed to be the saviour of broadcast TV and the Saturday night schedule reflects this.  If live TV can find a home on the net then how long before content follows advertising spend and goes digital?