As the Wall Street Journal recently explored, this can be especially vexing for layoff announcements in a world of blogs, citing a Yahoo case where “its instructions to managers conducting layoffs — ‘15 minutes maximum,’ ‘don’t engage in small talk’ — were published by the blog Valleywag.com.”

Sites like Overheard in the Office offer an anonymous outlet for harmless (usually) office gossip, but how should companies prepare for the eventuality of a leak that could lead to legal action?

It can be somewhat of a paradox. Building trust with employees and fostering open lines of communication are strong tools for developing a relationship where those with access to sensitive information will honor its sensitivity. Some employees just won’t have that capacity - particularly those who are on their way out or know they will be soon.

So, another approach might be to limit employee access to private information to reduce the possibility of leaks a priori. However, this disintigrates trust, and can lead to cumbersome bureaucracy, censorship, and spying.

Some advocate for companies to act completely openly, as if there is no filter between their email screen and the front page of Gawker. From the PR perspective, this translates as “there is no such thing as off-the-record.”

To complicate matters - in PR, sometimes we walk a fine line of “leaking” information by soft-sounding reporters. It can be appropriate to build a reporter’s interest in a story by sharing some enticing details of a story without providing client identifiers.

And sometimes PR pros purposely and openly “leak” information in the form of an embargoed press release. But as we’ve seen recently, the practice of ignoring embargoes has been catching on, as TechCrunch recently announced they will ignore embargoes and WSJ partially adopted a no embargoes policy.

Have you ever leaked sensitive information?

Maybe don’t answer that on this blog.

Ruder Finn Intent Index

The Intent Index reveals a new view on why people go online and redefines how we look at demographics. The important concept here for digital business trends is that marketers need to truly connect with their audiences, and not treat their online communications like a checklist of tasks.

As a result, Ruder Finn co-CEO Kathy Bloomgarden has said that “intent is the new demographic.” She continues,

“Delving deeper into the underlying motivations of online behavior is critical to developing proactive strategies. Just being online is not enough to leverage digital channels to drive business imperatives. Audiences must be targeted based upon their intent.”

She recently discussed the Intent Index in a video interview with PR Week.

You can view the results, which will be updated quarterly, with a cool, interactive flash tool here: www.ruderfinn.com/intent

It’s quite addictive.

You can view the full press release along with interesting results here: RF’s New Study of Online Behavior Focuses On User Intent

The survey has the capability of being narrowed down for specific industries. Please comment if you’re interested.

For those of you on Twitter, here are some “re-tweetable” findings (using #intentindex or #rfintent via @RuderFinn):

More than twice as many people go online to socialize (81%) than to do business (39%) or shop (31%)

72% of people go online just to become part of a community

Seniors are going online today for the same reasons younger people are; to have fun (82%) and to socialize (80%)

More people go online to connect via a social networking site (41%) than to post comments or opinions (34%)

More people go online to be entertained (82%) than entertain others (48%)

People seek education and entertainment: most people go online both to learn (88%) and have fun (83%)

Almost half of people (47%) go online to learn to improve themselves and nearly one-third (31%) to find self-help experts or books

The desire to learn drives people to the Internet; top areas are new subjects (68%), the world (65%), a disease or condition (61%)

Three times as many people go online to compare prices (66%) rather than people via dating sites (21%)

E-commerce isn’t dead — one-third of people (34%) go online to purchase an item

Top things people go online to buy: household items (49%), electronics (45%); music (35%), movies (29%)

More men (42%) than women (36%) go online to do business

Women comment, men read: 55% of women go online to find venues for personal expression compared to only 43% of men

The age of blogs: 44% of people go online to create or update blogs and 42% of people go online to read other people’s blogs.

Women (48%) are much more likely than men (39%) to go online to advocate for an issue or position

The Ruder Finn Intent Index is based on a study among Internet users that asks respondents how frequently they go online for 295 reasons. The Intent Index shows that a person’s intent may be a better indicator for how to develop a communications campaign than demographic formulas.

Inspired possibly by HBO’s “John Adams” series, I’ve been reading Bernard Bailyn’s pulitzer-winning “Ideological Origins of the American Revolution.”

During the American Revolution, there was a medium of communication that allowed for “complete freedom of expression,” yet could also “be more detailed than is ever possible in a newspaper,” and “can be produced much more quickly than a book, and in principle, at any rate, can reach a bigger public.”

This medium did not have to follow any standard rules. “It can be in prose or in verse, it can consist largely of maps or statistics or quotations, it can take the form of a story, a fable, a letter, an essay, a dialogue, or a piece of ‘reportage.’”

All that was required of it was that it be “topical, polemical, and short.”

Sounds a lot like blogging or micro-blogging, but these were pamphlets. Pamphlets, in many ways drove public sentiment in colonial America against the British, and as John Adams famously wrote:

“What do we mean by the revolution? The war? That was no part of the Revolution; it was only an effect and consequence of it. The Revolution was in the minds of the people, and this was effected from 1760-1775.”

He goes on to say that the pamphlets of the time period are what should be inspected to learn what formed public opinion.

And much like Twitter and blogging, they were cheap, fast, and difficult to suppress.

Unlike today’s social media, however, pamphlets did not allow for certain social aspects like the instantaneous and public nature of comments, re-tweeting and Digg’ing. But they were similar in that they allowed for conversation in a way that resembles the modern day YouTube response video. It takes longer to put together than a “thumbs up” rating, but they’re not feature length productions that take months to make.

The key lesson here is that even though we’re in the digital age, the basic tenets of PR and communications remain the same. Oftentimes the most effective communicators are the ones who find the fastest, broadest, and most credible ways to put their messages across.

The idea sparked a good old-fashioned watercooler debate yesterday on whether or not certain digital trends are here to stay. One colleague claimed to know enough about Twitter without being on it. That might indeed be enough. As we saw from a Harvard Business School study last week, 90% of tweets come from just 10% of users, and average lifetime number of tweets per user on Twitter is 1. The vast majority of Twitter users, it would seem, are “just looking.”

Maybe “just looking” at social media is enough to cut it in today’s PR world.

We can all survive without the latest tech, sure (he said writing a digital trends blog post on his BlabkBerry on the subway). In many cases, we’re probably better without it - Hulu even advertises that it rots your brain.

But, much like my grandmother who is opposed to getting an answering machine because it’s too newfangled, my colleague might do just fine, thank you very much, but will be missing out on a whole world of possibilities. She’ll be missing out on the virtual watercooler conversations taking place at Ruder Finn on Twitter, missing access to journalists who prefer 140-character pitches, and being behind on what’s going on with Shaq.

Another colleague was considering leaving Facebook, failing to see the point of it all. Her argument was that Facebook replaced prevailing technology that came before it, and something else will be along soon to replace it as well.

Without a doubt, there will be something to replace Facebook, and the question today is, “will I someday look back and wonder how I survived without Facebook?”

Is Facebook like the cellphone - a tool that has become so pervasive in our culture that some people don’t communicate any other way? Is Facebook like email - a tool that many people can’t imagine their work lives without?

Does your business live and breathe social media, or can you do without?

(You can participate by adding #forwomen to the ideas you tweet, and you can watch the conversation at: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23forwomen.)

I’m excited to see where it leads and what the participation will be, as I have a hunch that there are a lot of people out there, particularly on Twitter, who will have a lot to say about the topic.

What does this have to do with digital business trends?

The connection is that there are new ways for companies to look at demographics online. The temptation with a topic like this would be to look first at the demographic and then at how to engage them.

But how we look at demographics is be changing. Online activities blend across demographics, and as Ruder Finn’s Director of Social Media recently noted in an op-ed for PR Week, intent is the new demographic.

This means is that age, race, gender, etc, are not the only ways to determine how to reach a targeted audience online. First you have to look at what people are doing online, and only then can you get a better idea of who they are.

As PR Week’s Nicole Zerillo pointed out in her recent Marketers continue to fall into gender-stereotype traps article:

criticism demonstrates how companies – including well-funded, marketing-savvy ones – still struggle in determining the right way to market to women.

The article highlights how “woman-targeted campaigns” don’t necessarily look at the underlying issues that create a need for the campaign in the first place.

The Wall Street Journal asked last week in “The Forgotten Market Online: Older Women“:

Are online marketers so youth-conscious — because it “feels right” — that they’re ignoring lucrative markets just when they’re most needed? The Internet is neither new nor young. The fastest-growing segment of Facebook users is women over 55, according to the Tracking Facebook blog. And the underlying assumption that young people are still the Web’s most fertile market doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.

This underscores the need to look first at what people are using the Internet for, rather than who they are.

A recent study from BlogHer, a leading online network for women, looks at where women go online to find trusted information. They found that women are twice as likely to go to blogs as opposed to social networking as trusted sources of information.

This survey combines the ideas of intent and demographic, by looking at intent within a demographic.

How do you think this research can help formulate your next PR campaign?

Have already been posted, and another one is due up Friday. I encourage you all to comment.

Also, Ged Carrol, Ruder Finn UK’s new director of digital strategy has been hosting a blog on PR Week’s UK site:

Kittens, babies, sunsets or flowers? Life online

Some recent posts:
That ain’t Digg bait, it’s just good PR

The name of the game

Interview with Matt McGinnis of Dell Global Comms, Enterprise Products

Enjoy!

Extremely hilarious video on integrated eye-popping web placements to leverage buzz for up-leveled cascading paradigms.

Intel’s chairman on antitrust silliness and the secrets of high-tech success. He say

- The business is bigger than the business.
- Don’t mess with Moore’s Law.
- Invest during hard times.
- Consensus is good — except when it isn’t .
- Follow the business, not Wall Street.
- When something works, don’t re-invent it, reproduce it.
- It pays to have good competitors.

50 CEOs who find tweeting a personal and professional delight.

Here’s the list boiled down: http://is.gd/BkPv

It has a great interface, and helped me find @alansmurray’s great feed.

IEEE, the world’s largest technical professional society, turns 125 today, while announcing the first Global Engineering the Future Day.

Designed to raise public awareness of the opportunities in the technology industry, Engineering the Future Day recognizes the contributions and impact that IEEE and its members have made for the benefit of humanity.

The IEEE saw the need to increase awareness of technological advancement and its impact due to global decrease of students entering the fields of engineering, computing and technology. For example, the number of engineering specialties in Chinese universities has decreased by more than half from 1997 to 2006, according to the Chinese Ministry of Education.

In the U.S., although university enrollments are at an all-time high, the number of students in science, technology, engineering and math programs has remained stagnant for the past 25 years.

This lack of growth can lead to America facing a shortage of trained professionals in fields that fuel tomorrow’s innovations in healthcare, alternative energy and communications. And that would spell doom for digital business trends blogs!

Take a visit to IEEE 125, and see what technologies are emerging, and what’s being done to encourage tomorrow’s engineers.

The May 11 issue of Fortune Magazine is a perfect demonstration of what the three largest business magazines have done for decades. Its cover story, “How Bernie Did It’ is the culmination of a four-month investigation into the details of Bernie Madoff’s life and business operations written and reported by three of Fortune’s best editorial staff members, one of whom is a Pulitzer Prize winner. This issue of Fortune is also an example of why the magazine and its competitors Forbes and BusinessWeek, will soon no longer be able to publish these kinds of stories. The May 11 issue has 92 printed pages and covers. There are only 21 pages of paid advertising compared with more than a hundred pages in a spring issue 20 years ago.

Written by Russ Daniels,  CTO of Cloud Services Strategy at HP.

In light of all of the historical comparisons about the current economic situation and its proposed fixes, I’d like to offer my own perspective based on technology trends that have the potential to re-ignite growth for decades. My analogy comes from what at first sounds like an unlikely source: the automobile industry.

Can a lawyer hire a third person to send a “friend request” to a witness? According to an opinion from the Philadelphia Bar Association’s Professional Guidance Committee the answer is no.

Larry Page’s grandfather was an assembly worker at the Chevy plant in Flint Michigan, and his dad thought that computers were a fad. A touching story about his dad.

Rupert MurdochRupert Murdoch took a swipe at MySpace rival Facebook Thursday after News Corp. reported weaker-than-expected sales at its Fox Interactive Media unit, which consists mainly of MySpace. FIM online ad revenue during News Corp.’s fiscal third quarter ending Mar. 31 dropped 16% while the unit’s revenue overall fell 11% to $187 million.

The IT organization and the business units should be much more in tune. Here’s one way to make that happen.

Many thanks to Ruder Finn head of HR and avid horse fan Cathleen Graham (@cashcat1969) for some of these links.

Alex Brown’s love of horses started long before he launched the blog, Alex Brown Racing, but it was Kentucky Derby winner Barbaro that pushed the blog into prominence — and eventually established it as a site dedicated to the welfare of horses. Along the way, Brown learned many things about creating and nurturing an online community by using tools like wikis, Facebook and Twitter, and following certain principles, such as: Be authentic, be transparent, be consistent and build trust. Brown, one of whose goals is to rescue horses destined for the slaughter house, talked with Knowledge@Wharton about his strategies for bringing attention — and money — to the cause.

A group for all us business folk who outside the world of hi-tech and commerce like to unwind and get back to nature with horses. No matter your discipline (Dressage, X-Country, Trail riding, Polo, etc.), or even if you don’t have a horse but like Equine events, then come join in and get together.

Other than the fact that he’s already won $4 million in purses and may be on the verge of becoming one of the most famous faces in the sports of horse racing, Joe Talamo is like a lot of guys his age.

His horse is also tweeting! http://twitter.com/I_Want_Revenge

• www.thehorse.com
• www.chronofhorse.com
• www.horseshowspy.com
• www.ntra.com

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Executives exploring Twitter as business tool

Todd Brink’s cigar-bearing image and his thoughts about music, chick flicks and process improvement have made him a Twitter rock star of sorts.

The Wisconsin executive has nearly 3,000 Twitter followers. What’s more, he is ranked No. 1 among the Twitter Elite in Milwaukee on Twitter Grader, a free service that lets people measure their power and reach on Twitter

It may seem an unlikely classification, but Brink represents a growing breed of executives who recognize the power of the tweet as a way to connect with customers and build brand loyalty.

Brink (@toddbrink) is director of process improvement for Boldt Construction Co., a national contractor with 1,500 employees based in Appleton. Brink stressed he is representing himself on Twitter and not Boldt Construction, although many of his tweets are work-related.

He also sent a friend request to Iran, became a fan of Stimulus, and deleted the group Guantanamo Bay Detainees 4EVA.

They are:

1. Ego
2. Money
3. Travel
4. Business Speak
5. Meetings
6. Business Books
7. Time

The first point can probably apply to many in the digital business trends blogger industry.

Google News: Swine Flu vs The Recession

This juxtaposition of swine flu news and recession news highlights three digital trends that are affecting how businesses communicate. The three biggest similarities between them from a digital communications perspective are:

1. Speed
2. Credibility
3. Language

Speed

Both swine flu and the recession have been reported on instantly and broadly, and businesses and governments have been expected to respond quickly in both cases. This has put pressure on spokespeople and executives to deliver extremely sensitive messages quickly and accurately. For both swine flu and the recession, mistakes and conflicts due to poor timing could lead to the cause of financial ruin or even literally death.

Credibility

The explosion of social media outlets has empowered anyone (or thing) with a connection to the Internet to spread news. Motives are often questionable and uncontrolled. But when controlling a pandemic or a stock market, it is imperative for health and financial experts to rise above the fray. The cacophony of voices in social media makes this difficult to do, but perhaps the advent of “semi-social media” (think Mahalo, Alltop) will give experts the visibility the public at large deserves.

Language

Another similarity between the two crises is that both have suffered from unfortunate nomenclature. Terms like “swine flu,” “toxic assets,” and “crisis” can lead to misinterpretation. For example several tweets on #swineflu caution against eating pork products, however, that is not how the flu is spread.

What lessons has your business learned from these events?