Who keeps your digital assets safe? There are companies who can help keep your Pr assets safe and ready to restore in the event of a loss.

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. 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. That's not as simple as it seems, because these are quite large documents that are embossed, printed, and kept in a safe. Digital ones are not sufficient. I left China 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. 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 as well as about our clients. We have on there followers who are partners, clients, journalists, analysts, and so on. 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. The lesson, of course, is that we have to keep records. The question to you will be how well are you keeping records yourself or your company? There are a number of ways that we can keep records. 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, data breaches and attacks are common occurrences and these happen more often than we would like to know. I personally believe that the Zoom bombing rooms that took place a little while ago, before these new security measures, were attempted by hackers to extort money from Zoom, because they only interjected a few rooms in very high profile ways. Companies are actually taken hostage by hackers. One of the problems with that can be that they can steal data, and they can compromise data. And if we're looking at running our own PR activities on our website, there are a couple of problems. One is that the breach itself is a PR disaster, quite possibly threatening the confidence that our consumers, our employees, and our partners have in our business, and also threatening the data that we need in order to run our businesses. There are some fairly high profile cases where a 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. We hopefully scan and keep records of all of our files, but what if we have those and they're not protected? There was a Ponemon Institute Cost of Data Breach report in 2019, and it said that the average cost of a data breach is $3.92 million, and that each lost record represents about $150 worth of cost. But this is the staggering thing: on average, it's taken nearly a year, or 279 days to be more specific, to discover a breach in an organization's data. The biggest loss of consumer confidence, of course, is going to be in the loss of trust in that brand. How can you possibly trust that company once again with your financial assets, your medical records, your university records, whatever they are? 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. There are two issues here when it comes to public relations. One is that we can look at websites, like WayBackWhen, that keep records of old websites and old data that were on those websites. Sometimes, especially in issues of compliance, for instance, 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 (UKGWA), our repositories are now going out, sweeping up, and creating libraries of all of the websites and the documents that are available online. The current provider for the UKGWA is a group called MirrorWeb. 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 and the data; for example, the social media that you've got in your ecosystem. This is going to be important, because if there is a breach and your website's taken offline, 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? It's one thing for a website to go down because the servers are out, but it's another thing for it to go down because there's been a breach and the business is held hostage. 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, they can do that and still meet compliance and legal requirements. 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, litigation liabilities, and those liabilities may remain on the web long after we have thought they've disappeared. Now, there is a whole industry in cataloguing what we say about ourselves online, because in the case of a court case, a defamation, or any kind of a litigation of compliance, keeping a snapshot is going to be important. Companies like Preservica and MirrorWeb are helping companies and entrepreneurs to take snapshots. There are groups also in Stanford, for example. The Stanford University Library has been web archiving since 2007, but this is missing the web really starting with Tim Berners-Lee, as well as Google and Yahoo in the mid-90s. I have even found an old website called goevents.com that I started back in '98-'99, all the way back when. in my office and using my facilities. In a slightly bemusing case, she 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. I had to tether a hotspot, because they wouldn't give access to public Wi-Fi. We're in a strange position of having to demonstrate something in order to win a case, but in real time online. Actually, at the time then, her lawyer denied that it was her, a very strange circumstance indeed, I can tell you, in China. We have to start thinking, then, that as we've got our own businesses and 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 the volume of our engagement through all of these platforms goes up as well. This is crazy. It's an archive of potentially valuable, but also potentially damaging content. I started off by going to Hong Kong for a Chinese certificate to enable my team in Singapore to unlock the China Weibo. As I was going through the box, I found my 2009 yearbook from Baseline Junior High in Colorado, and I looked at all the old photographs in black and white (as they were then) with a red cover and a dragon on the front. The other aspect of archiving is the wonderful memories that those bring back. I can't help but thinking that 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. As a PR activity, I started thinking about creating physical memory moments and sharing those with my staff, my clients, and my partners, so that I have something tangible, I have something to keep, something to remember, something that I don't need Preservica to retain for me. As you are building your business, think about the memories that you've got from the past, the ones you're creating today, and the ones you look forward to celebrating at some stage in the future when we've passed through these COVID times. 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 (which I've talked about along with the power of story and storification), it's essential to keep these records, because these records will help us to build the narrative that we'll be credible. 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 sent that to the media), 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 an interview with. And as I've learned just recently, 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.