Who keeps your digital assets safe? There are companies who can help keep your Pr assets safe and...

Hello, my name is Jim James and I'm your host on the Speak PR Podcast. I'm recording this from the UK and sending this worldwide for business owners that would like to get their companies noticed using tools and technologies that I've learned and put into practice over 25 years, both for my own companies but also for over 500 clients as I run my East West PR agency. Today I'm going to talk about the importance of keeping records. Now, it doesn't sound like the sort of topic that would be covered in public relations, but it is, and for a number of reasons. I've just been tasked by Grace, my operations manager in Singapore, to find the original certificates, the registration for the Weibo account in China. Now, Weibo is a social media platform in China, and in order to register for any accounts in China on social media, you have to show your company registration documents. Now, that's not as simple as it seems because these are quite large documents that are embossed and printed and, and kept in a safe. The digital ones are not sufficient. And I left China now a year ago, and I'm not the best at keeping records. So I've been digging through to try and find what I can. I did find what I believe to be the right record, but as it's all in Mandarin, I'm having to rely on Grace. Now, if I've lost this particular document that proves that the company was registered and is still registered in China, I'm going to lose access to my Weibo account. Weibo is the China equivalent of Twitter. And I have some 3,500 Weibo followers that we've curated over the last 10 years, and we share with them news and information about ourselves as an agency, but also about our clients. And we have on there followers who are partners, clients, journalists, analysts, and so on. So for the sake of a piece of paper, I could end up losing access to a really large and well-connected community for my business. So the lesson, of course, is that we have to keep records. And the question will be to you, how well are you keeping records yourself for your company? Now, there are a number of ways that we can keep records, and most of us believe that once we've sent an email or we've got it on our server or even on our website that it's going to be there and be there forever and be safe. But actually, having worked with companies like F5, the security company, there are more often than we would like to know the, the common occurrences of data breaches and attacks taking place. And I personally believe that the Zoom bombing rooms that took place a little while ago before these new security measures were attempts by hackers to extort money from Zoom because they only extracted, you know, they only interjected in a few rooms in very high-profile ways. So companies are actually taken hostage by hackers, and one of the problems with that, of course, can be that they can steal data and they can compromise data. But if we're looking at running our own PR activities on our website, there are a couple of problems. One is, of course, that the breach itself is a PR disaster, quite possibly threatening the confidence that our consumers and our employees and our partners have in our business, but also threatening the data that we need in order to run our businesses. So there are some sort of fairly high-profile cases where fire, for example, a long way back in 2008 destroyed the Universal Music Group's master recordings. And in the old days when there were physical assets like recordings, they got destroyed once and forever. Now we, of course, hopefully scan and keep records of all of our files. But what if we have those and they're not protected? Now, there was a Ponemon Institute cost of data breach report in 2019, and it shows that the average cost of a data breach is some $3.92 million, and that each lost record represents about $150 worth of cost. But this is the staggering thing. It's taken on average nearly a year, 279 days, to discover a breach in an organization's data. The biggest loss of consumer confidence, of course, is going to be in the, the loss of trust in that brand. How can you possibly trust that company once again with your either your financial assets, maybe your medical records, your university records, whatever they are? And I raise this now because as I'm looking for my old records I'm also able to start to look for some of my old records online. Now, there are 2 issues here when we come to public relations about this. One is that we can look at websites like Wayback Web that keep records of old websites and old data that were on those websites. Now, sometimes, especially in issues of compliance, for example, if we've made a claim about a product and then there is a legal case that's brought against us. Sites like the ones put together by the UK Government Web Archive are repositories that are now going out and basically like massive sweepers, sweeping up and creating libraries of all of the websites and the documents that are available online. The current provider for the UK Web Archive is a group called MirrorWeb, and you can also contract MirrorWeb to save your own website. And a bit like the Time Machine on a Mac, it creates a snapshot of the website but also the data, for example, the social media that you've got in your ecosystem. Now, this is going to be important because if there is a breach and your website's taken offline, for example, what's the backup? Do you have a plan to put it back again in real time, or are you going to go back to the developers or the in-house team and ask them to upload what was the last version of the website? So it's one thing for a website to go down because the servers are out, but it's another to go down because there's been a breach. And the business is held hostage. So these companies like MirrorWeb, and there's another one called Preservica in the UK, are enabling companies to keep changing their web presence but to have some confidence that if they need to go back a day, a week, a month, or replace an element on a website, that they can do that and still meet compliance and legal requirements. So we all have now a growing body of content on our websites and our social media platforms that can create, as I've talked about in an earlier podcast, litigation liabilities. And those liabilities may remain on the web long after we have thought they've disappeared. So now there is a whole industry in cataloging what we say about ourselves online, because in the case of a court case, a defamation, uh, or any kind of a litigation of compliance, keeping a snapshot is going to be important. Now, I remember in China I had an issue where I was trying to bring a case against a former member of staff who created her own company whilst working in my office and using my facilities. And in a slightly bemusing case, she had created her own website and iTunes podcast, and I was required to then show the court the actual live website To demonstrate that she actually was promoting her own self at the same time as being an employee of mine. Of course, the added challenge to that was that there was no Wi-Fi in the courtroom, and I had to tether a hotspot, and because they wouldn't give access to public Wi-Fi. So we're in a strange position of having to demonstrate something in order to win a case, but in real time online. And actually, at the time then, her lawyer denied that it was her. A very strange circumstance indeed, I can tell you, in China there. But companies like Preservica and MirrorWeb are helping companies and entrepreneurs to take snapshots. Now, there are groups also in Stanford, for example. The Stanford University Library has been web archiving since 2007. And of course, you know, this is missing, you know, the web really starting with Berners-Lee, but of course the Google and Yahoo in the mid-'90s. So I have found an old website called goevents.com that I started back in '98, '99, all the way back when. We have to start thinking then, as we've got our own businesses, What about as our website becomes much more dynamic? It's no longer a static WordPress website. It's integrated with video, with commentary, with social media, with tweets. And as the volume goes up of our engagement through all of these platforms, and for example, live Zoom to a live Facebook, this is creating an archive of potentially valuable but also potentially damaging content. So I started off by going to hunt for a Chinese certificate to enable my team in Singapore to unlock the China Weibo. On the, on the way through the box, I found my old 2009 yearbook from Baseline Junior High in Colorado. And looked at all the old Photowalk graphs in black and white as they were then, with a red cover with a dragon on the front. And of course, the other aspect of archiving is the wonderful memories that those bring back. And I can't help but thinking, as we sit in an increasingly digital world, that our children may not have yearbooks, they'll have Facebook groups. They may not have baby pictures, they'll have shared folders on iCloud. So as a PR activity, it may also be something that I start thinking about, which is creating physical memory moments and sharing those with my staff and my clients and my partners, so that actually I have something tangible. I have something to keep, something to remember, something that I don't need preservica.com to retain for me. And as you are building your business, maybe think about the memories that you're creating today and that you've got from the past, and look forward to celebrating this moment at some stage in the future when we've passed through this COVID times. So archiving isn't public relations, but it's a record of what we did which created our current reputation. Capturing those records online is something that we need to do in order to remain compliant, to keep our businesses safe. But as we work on building the story of our business— and I talk about the power of story and storification— as we build our story, it's essential to keep these records because these records will help us to build the narrative that will be credible And as I've learned just recently when I issued a press release talking about how jumping out of a plane at 18 launched my career in PR, I actually still have the picture of me jumping out of that plane, and I, and I sent that to media. And actually, I've had a few people reach out to me on LinkedIn, including someone from Harvard and some people from Singapore that I did a, uh, an interview with today. Because the narrative, the history, the archive that we have from yesterday is a big part of who we are today. So let's cherish those and let's preserve them, some online and some— let's just keep a trophy somewhere. Let's keep a photograph. Let's keep a memory book. So with that, I'd like to keep this short. Andrew, my friend who I interviewed On the podcast about video said, just do your best not to be boring, do your best to have some fun, and to keep it short. So I'm going to take a hint from Andrew that I sometimes go on too long and keep this short. In the meantime, I'm going to wish you all the best in good health, a profitable business, and that you keep some great memories and you keep an archive of what you're doing now. Thank you very much for listening. And if you like this podcast, please do subscribe and check out our website eastwestpr.com where we have a weekly newsletter. Please subscribe and share what you learn with us so we can share it with our community of business owners who are just trying to get a better business. Thank you.