Online PR: News and Views from ://CORPORACT

Friends Reunited Eyes Up Over-50s Dating Service

DC Thomson, the new owner of Friends Reunited has announced it is planning to launch an over-50s dating service to appeal to users of its genealogy business Find My Past.

This is good news for its 60 FR staff who are likely to keep their jobs now.

DC Thomson acquired Friends Reunited for £25m from ITV yesterday.  It has been reported they approached the Office of Fair Trading in a bid to gain clearance for the deal, which will see two of the three biggest online subscription genealogy businesses in the UK merge.

Online PR: Woolworths' Relaunch

Good to see that Woolworths is now a fully fledged etailer.   Six months after it disappeared from the high street, it has been recreated online, by Littlewoods-owned Shop Direct and comes packed with all the product goodies you could expect – including its famous pick’n’mix, sweets selection.

20,000 people signed up to the new site within hours of its launch, so it has plenty of fans.

Can't imagine buying pic 'n' mix online. Perhaps it should be renamed 'click 'n' mix'?

G20 Planning for April Fools

Businesses around the Bank of England in London have boarded their windows up in anticipation of the forthcoming G20 protests, with demonstrators expected to converge on the Bank tomorrow (April 1st).

President Obama is likely to receive a warm personal welcome in Europe but analysts say he will almost certainly meet resistance over his plans to revive the embattled world economy.

The G20 summit is being held at the Excel centre in London's Docklands on Thursday.  Watch out for those April Fools who will come out to disrupt everyone's day.

Long Life Comes at a Cost in Japan

The Japanese are living longer because of healthy diets, strong communities and easy access to medical care. In 1963 just 153 Japanese celebrated their 100th birthdays compared to 19,768 new centenarians in 2008.

But long life comes at a cost.  The Japanese Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare has decided to reduce the size of the congratulatory silver cup given to centenarians and inscribed with the Chinese kanji character ‘happiness to all’.  From now it will be 9cm in diameter rather than 10.5cm.

How would this apply in the UK? 

Like Japan, the adult population in the UK is living longer and the health of the population has improved steadily over the last century in spite of increasingly unhealthy diets and problems with access to national health care.  The population is also getting older.  By 2026, half of the adult population in the UK will be over 50.

Messages from the Queen are automatically sent on a person's 100th, 105th and subsequent birthdays.

With more and more people celebrating their 100th birthdays, I wonder whether the Queen will resort to technology or social media to process en masse her congratulatory message to centenarians in the future?

Online PR Blog: Social Websites Are Bad News for Children

Last week Lord Harris of Haringey (Labour) called attention to the growth in the use of social networking sites by children, and the adequacy or otherwise of safeguards to protect their privacy and interests.

There is a need to safeguard children when it comes to social sites.  It took MySpace (disgracefully) two years to delete the known names of 90,000 sex offenders listed in the public domain.   More worrying is the fact that social websites are unable to protect against the offenders trying to sexually solicit children online who haven’t been caught.  In addition, there is currently no age authentication system in place so a 40 year old can easily pose as a teenager.

Also this week during a House of Lords debate, leading Oxford University neuroscientist, Baroness Greenfield , warned that social websites harm children's brains.  She believes that repeated exposure to social networking sites, computer games, instant messaging and chat rooms could leave a generation with poor attention spans, effectively 'rewiring' the brain.

With so many children and adults using social networking websites (more than 150 million use Facebook alone to share information) the responsibility for safe social networking for children needs to lie with the provider of the service and should include validation of its users, identification and mediation.

Likewise, it has to be the responsibility of parents (many of whom complain that youngsters lack the ability to communicate or concentrate away from their screens) to “police” excessive usage.

Schools too can play a part by teaching safe internet behaviour.  There are some great online educational communities in which children can safely learn and communicate with other children.

With this in mind, let’s hope that politicians continue to debate (and legislate).

Well done Team GB

I was privileged to just be 'one of the crowd' today welcoming Team GB back to London with their medal haul.  There were simply thousands of city workers out to greet Britain's Olympians and Paralympians for a parade to celebrate their Beijing success.

I saw (among others) our gold medal cycling stars Chris Hoy, Aileen McGlynn (pictured) and swimmers Rebecca Adlington and Eleanor Simmonds heading from Mansion House to Trafalgar Square.

What a team.  They turned a negative city into a positive day.  The grey suits were out in force.

Thank you, Team GB.  Can't wait for London 2012.

Online PR: Guidance Ratings for Financial Institutions

I read an article this week that said websites like YouTube could be forced to carry cinema style guidance ratings.

UK Culture Secretary said that tougher content guidance would help parents monitor their children’s internet use.  Website would include age certificates if they feature sex, violence or strong language.
MPs on the Commons culture, media and sport select committee don’t like it that the operators of YouTube do not routinely screen clips posted on them.

With the financial crisis going from bad to worse, isn’t it about time that MPs start discussing the enforcement of cinema style guidance ratings on financial institutions too?

Online PR Blog: Clicking into retirement

Just how old do you need to be these days to stop working?

I expect there are a few middle aged Brits (particularly women) out there who don't realise that the state pension age - currently 60 years - has now risen, meaning that they may be over 66 before they can get their hands on their state pension entitlement.

The UK Pension Service has a handy little online calculator that can work out in a click how old you need to be before you can start to enjoy your pension pittance. And it will get worse over time. If you have a child aged nine now, he/she will have to wait until they are 68 years old to officially "retire"! What has gone wrong?

Imagine London 2067. Our poor ageing population of over 68's clicking through the City to work on their sticks and frames, driving London buses filled with free bus pass travellers, cleaning the streets and tucking their fellow homeless 70 year olds into their cardboard beds, creaking knees and arthritic hands polishing the shoes of the well-to-do.

I never used to think that being a civil servant was a career choice. But with the credit crunch hitting private pensions and savings, a protected pension pot has to be a golden ticket.

Online PR Blog: Whose fault is meltdown Monday anyway?

The “betrayal of the working class” – populist words quickly used by Republican candidate McCain this week to replace his questionable earlier statement that the US economy was “fundamentally strong” – is about right.

With Monday’s meltdown continuing and the credit crunch biting that bit harder for all those thousands of ex Lehman Bros. employees out of the work plus the many thousands of ordinary people who have pensions and hard-earned savings that are badly affected, where does the blame lie, who has betrayed us and who will be held responsible?

Politicians for the ailing economy?

The greed of those controlling hedge funds who make livings beyond most people’s wildest dreams, by short-selling (selling shares that aren’t actually owned in order to buy them back at what is hoped will be a lower price a bit later)?

Irresponsible (and highly paid) directors of vast organisations overseeing the lucrative business of irresponsible gambling with other people’s money?

How can it happen that companies the size of Lehman Brothers can continue to shell out vast bonuses when they don’t even have enough of their own money in the kitty to pay the staff?  Most small business owners couldn’t begin to imagine this scenario.

Silly us thinking that there is a Financial Services Authority who governed this industry.  Of course, the reality is that no one will be held accountable for this one.  Certainly not those who were ultimately responsible for the crisis in the first place – they have too much money and power to be touchable.  I'll wager the champagne is already on ice.

://CORPORACT is a specialist London based online communications.

Online PR: Stories we liked this week

• Virulent venom. The Daily Mail’s columnist, Quentin Letts, declaring that readers of the Guardian are “full of hate”.  says…“The Guardian seldom the sanest of arenas, has this week, descended to virulent venom.”  The reason?  The revelation that the government is planning a state funeral for Margaret Thatcher – the first afforded a non-royal since Churchill.  Many Guardian readers expressed their disgust online. 

Wonder whether (how did he get that knighthood?) Sir Mark Thatcher, wanted by Equatorial Guinea, who have issued an arrest warrant for his alleged role in a failed 2004 coup, will be leading the funeral procession?

• Never mind mum. Girls are now turning to social networking websites for guidance on personal matters, rather than seeking advice from their mothers. (Gillette survey)

• Backfiring badly. The actress Tricia Walsh Smith, who counts the Benny Hill Show among her credits, and who posted a humiliating video on YouTube to embarrass her ex about their sex life, has lost her divorce battle.

• Charm offensive. UK presidential candidate John McCain who is worried about Barack Obama magic, has launched an online PR offensive using UK blogs like Guido Fawkes to ‘expand communications with overseas bloggers as the campaign progresses.’

://CORPORACT is a London-based online corporate communications company