Well, gadzooks. Following on from my last post here, I went exploring and checking my compliance with the detail of the CIPR social media guidelines.

The guidelines have been substantially revised this year and now form part of my professional Code of Conduct. They point out to PR practitioners the need to bear in mind the potential legal issues surrounding the use of social media, including the laws on copyright and intellectual property.

And thus, on investigation, it looks like I'm breaking the law at every turn - and chances are, so is everyone else who is writing a blog, putting links on their website, tweeting about interesting stuff in the press, or even emailing each other links to something worth reading.

I'm talking about 'deep linking', the practice of creating hyperlinks that go direct to a site's interior pages rather than just the home page. We do this all the time - for example, if I tell you there's something fabulous you must read on Building's website, I am highly likely to post a link that takes you directly there, not just link you to www.building.co.uk and leave you to try and fish out the relevant page yourself.

As one of the leading authorities on the Internet, Jakob Neilson, has written: "Deep linking is good linking... A website is like a house with a million entrances: the front door is simply one among many ways to get in. A good website will accommodate visitors who choose alternative routes... Deep linking is your friend: it gets users to their preferred destination as quickly as possible."

But it also turns out to be contrary to the 'Terms of Use' of almost all the websites we checked out today: Here's just a very brief selection:

• www.architectsjournal.co.uk - "We welcome hot links to the home page of our website, but not 'deep linking' by which we mean that you may not include a link to any page of our website that is not the home page." (The same goes for cnplus, nceplus and the other sites operated by Emap).
• www.building.co.uk - "Any link to this website without our written permission is prohibited. Notwithstanding authorisation to link to this website, linking to any page other that the initial start page of www.building.co.uk is prohibited...." (The same goes for BD, BSD and the other sites operated by UBM).
• www.telegraph.co.uk - "You must not deeplink to... the site without our prior written permission."
• www.timesonline.co.uk - "...in accessing [our] websites, you agree not to... set up links to any microsite, except the home page of the website, without our express written permission..."

But wait...Hoorah, a solitary voice of sanity:

• www.ft.com: "A site or service that links to FT.com may link to the home page.. and on an ad hoc, non-systematic basis deeplink to other pages of FT.com..."

Both Contract Journal and the Guardian also seem marvellously free of convoluted T&Cs on linking too, unless I've missed something.

Unsurprisingly, it turns out that there is still a lot of legal debate on this issue. Reviewing case law is not my forte, but allegedly (a good legal term), linking to news items on a site owned by a newspaper or other news provider is particularly problematic, and this has been prone to litigation both in the EU and States.

So what to do? "Sue me, punk" is one thought that jumps to mind - the law's an ass, and in the right mood I'm always up for a good fight against nonsense like this. But for now, I think we shall probably have to contact all the key media we link to and ask permission to link to news stories rather than just the home page. I'll let you know how we get on - it will be an interesting exercise in its own right. In the meantime, expect to see more links than usual to FT.com until it's sorted.

Got any other advice? Please do let me know if you have been affected by the issues raised in this story, as the BBC might say.

About 10 years ago, at the height of the success of the big city PR agencies (one of whom I worked for at the time), almost every proposal document promised the potential new client the opportunity to gain a glistening new reputation and acres of media coverage for its ‘thought leadership’ on one issue or another. I can’t tell you how many new business pitches that won for us.

Thought leadership was all about being the undisputed clever clogs in your niche market. As commentators at the Henley Management College put it: "with intellectual capital at a premium, being recognised for the highest levels of knowledge and expertise is the holy grail of many professions."

Even since, whenever I came across something really exciting and new that I thought could reframe the way the media or industry looks on something, I still tended to use the phrase to explore with clients about what might be possible.

But my enthusiasm for standard 'thought leadership PR’ is definitely waning.

First, it’s awfully easy to over-promise. Don't get me wrong: we're fortunate to have no shortage of clients with original ideas and expertise by the bucket-load. But genuine thought leadership – genuine leadership, in fact – is not something easily created through the use of PR.

My suspicions were reinforced by an FT article I spotted late last year:

“The phrase ought to be banned, and anyone caught using it locked away and left to reflect on the stupidity of their actions. Not everyone can be a leader. It follows that not everyone can be a thought leader either. But that does not stop many professional services firms from claiming that they (alone) offer thought leadership on certain issues…”

And that may also explain why increasingly I think the standard thought leadership PR approach may actually not work very well.

The traditional view among many PR folk is that a thought leadership campaign requires:

• A thought (ideally a new one that can be branded)
• Clarity of communications (and lots of it, ie. big budgets)
• And authenticity (it’s got to ring true with the key stakeholders)

It is trumpeted using every tool in the PR toolkit with the aim of transforming an organisation's reputation, ensuring its expertise is well known and so attracting commercial reward and recognition galore.

Standard thought leadership PR is also usually focused on the personal - implemented through boosting the profile of one or two company spokespeople (preferably chairmen or CEOs) who take to the podium and claim credit for the Big Idea. Much of the media love this too, as it provides an entertaining source of strong personalities with strong views (or “any old fool in possession of an ego and a blog”, as Lucy Kellaway would say).

For some people this approach also links well with the ideas in Malcolm Gladwell's book 'The Tipping Point', and his 'Law of the Few' - the idea that a small group of influencers can spark a much bigger change or social phenomenon. In short, perceived thought leadership and high level influence leading to fundamental change in the business or social environment.

But the reality is that a lot of effort goes into thought leadership PR that actually achieves not very much at all - certainly not the sort of change that we would all like to claim. I suspect there are a lot of companies out there that are rather disappointed by the long-term impact of their so-called 'thought leadership' campaigns.

Obviously you cannot claim to be thought leaders simply by virtue of being the first, biggest or longest-established firm in your sector. (In my experience, the most original thought often comes from the sharp sightedness of the new kids on the block, or from the initial creative and often confrontational juxtaposition of teams that might not otherwise work together.)

Nor is it enough to offer an expert opinion on, say, water efficiency or waste management in construction, back it up with a survey among a client group and a White Paper to download from your website, hold an event and claim to be the thought leaders on this aspect of environmental sustainability.

It’s certainly not about coming up with a new piece of jargon, a nice logo or fancy graphic to package ideas differently.

Like the best leaders generally, genuine thought leaders do something beyond showing off their cleverness or marketing wizardry. They change the world by bringing others with them, forming collaborations and partnerships to bring their vision alive and to make it real. 

Corporate reputations are changed through having new ideas, yes, but not by concentrating it all around a couple of corporate celebrities. It is about a generosity of spirit, allowing those ideas to be tested in the real world, sharing the lessons learned and utilising a communications strategy that is much more open and devolved (ie. less centrally controlled by the boss).

My view is therefore growing that it's not just the intellectual capital that matters, but an organisation's overall connectedness.

Let's take a look at one aspect of this...

Remarkable research findings reported in the New Scientist last month show that our emotions and behaviours may be more heavily influenced by others than we previously thought – even by people we have never even met or heard of. To summarise, it suggests that:

"...we are beholden to the moods of friends of friends, and of friends of friends of friends - people three degrees of separation away from us whom we have never met, but whose disposition can pass through our social network like a virus."

The effects of 'empathetic mimicry' are thought to explain how happiness or depression can be 'caught' from others not in our immediate social circle. Looking at the ways social norms are spread is also helping scientists to understand how to change the behaviours of whole communities, such as tackling smoking or obesity (maybe even one day triggering a mass epiphany for one planet living?).

One part of the New Scientist article caught my eye in particular, quoting the controversial work of Duncan Watts at Columbia University. It shows that "seeding localised social groups with certain ideas or behaviours can lead to the ideas cascading across entire global networks."

As the article points out:

"This contradicts the notion - promoted by the author Malcolm Gladwell in The Tipping Point and others - that social epidemics depend on a few key influential individuals from whom everyone else takes their cue. It doesn't ring true, argues Watts, because such 'influentials' typically interact with only a few people. The key for the spread of anything, he says... is a critical mass of interconnected individuals who influence one another."

If this is true, the role of Web 2.0 in an organisation's communications activities also becomes incredibly important.

Admittedly, the research has not yet been done into whether actions or feelings can spread via the digital world as powerfully as they do in physical communities. I suspect it would probably be much easier to measure this contagion in a consumer market than in a construction industry group.

But if it is possible to seed new ideas and achieve widespread attitudinal or behavioural change through social media, then it’s time to dust off that company policy on Facebook, Twitter and other social media tools and take a fresh look at what people are allowed and encouraged to do.

It may be that each of your people's individual relationships, social networks and their online conversations on Twitter, through blogs, discussion boards and the like could be a much more effective route for your organisation to achieve genuine thought leader status and tangible results than the old PR approach.

The FT has started another of its excellent Mastering Management series this week. 

The focus of this special report, predictably, is on managing in a downturn. And I'm heartened to see the importance of internal and external communications highlighted so clearly. Here's an extract from Stefan Stern's intro (I've put bits in bold):

"... There are only so many ways you can tell a company to 'conserve cash'. It will probably turn out to be the business catchphrase of 2009. But while managers are understandably in a hurry to stem the flow of cash out of the building, in particular by reducing headcount, they risk cutting too deeply into the flesh of the organisation, and making future recovery much harder to achieve. Easy advice for an outsider to give – and hard for a manager to take for when survival is the number one priority – but sound advice all the same. Don’t get rid of the people who actually make your products and services worth buying in the first place.

"Second, the rumour mill is almost as big an enemy to senior management right now as collapsing customer demand. All the management gurus agree that leaders have to invest much more time than they might think is necessary into communicating with their staff. And “communicating” means listening as well as telling. In his new book The Leadership Code, Dave Ulrich estimates that a message may have to be communicated as many as 10 times, in a variety of means or channels, for it to get through and be understood.

"Offering as much certainty as possible will also help kill rumours. Binna Kandola, managing partner of business psychologists Pearn Kandola, argues that knowing you have lost your job is a better outcome for most employees than being in the dark about your future.

"Third, keeping your head down, retreating from markets and turning introspective, while a natural human response to bad news, is a terrible option for businesses. Now is not the time to abandon partnerships and joint ventures, or to close yourself off to other outside influences. Keep an open mind to new initiatives, remain an active networker and ensure the organisation is not collectively burying its head in the sand.

"Fourth, remember that recovery will come – eventually. Research and development needs to continue. Revenue streams that may have temporarily dried up will start to flow again. But capacity that you cut back on now may be hard to resurrect. And again, excessive redundancies – which carry a significant cost in any case – will deprive you of the talent you need to make the most of the upturn. You will only have to hire it back again, at great expense, in a year’s time."