Like Suraj, I’ve been thinking a lot about online PR recently.

Public Relations traditionally holds a reputation management role, making sure its organisation is kept in the public eye, regarded positively and protected from the damage caused by public criticism. Crucially, the internet offers companies the opportunity to engage with their target audiences in new and exciting, more productive ways – but it also gives consumers a platform from which to vent about poor experiences, and negative reports can spread like wildfire. I need say no more than ‘Dell Hell’.

This topic was touched upon by one of the speakers at a CIPR conference I attended this week, and the Q&A session was indicative of how wary much of the PR industry still is on the subject of online PR. One exec said that her company had so far omitted any online activity from their communications strategies, but that they had realised they really should get involved. However, her particular organisation was subject to a certain amount of public criticism. Her question was this: if we begin communicating with our audience online, will we be opening ourselves up to more criticism and will we in fact be focusing people on the negative story?

Of course, the answer was this. People are talking about you online, positively or negatively, anyway – would you rather stick your head in the sand and let the conversation go on without you, or engage in it and take some control of the messages being circulated?

I think an important point to make about PR is that it’s not always just about the protection and management of company reputation. Yes, a company’s reputation is arguably its most valuable asset – after all, consumers listen to each other and if they’re all slagging you off you’re unlikely to make enough money to survive. But PR can also be used to communicate with customers on a more equal level, where you’re not trying to impose your own interpretation of their needs upon them, but really listening to them and building their feedback into your product or service.

The internet offers some exciting possibilities for companies wanting to place customer requirements at the centre of their business. If you do it right, you can get valuable feedback from your target audience that would cost you thousands in focus groups and surveys. Perhaps this is the most valuable PR opportunity presented by new media at the moment.

The fact remains that organisations can no longer hide from the fact that the web now has the power to make or break them. The ‘blogosphere’ should be ignored at their peril.

Well it's nearly upon us. We knew it was coming, but here it is. On 31st October this year Chameleon will be 10 years old, and we're embarking on a whole bunch of fun to celebrate over the coming weeks. (Not least by behaving like 10 year olds on our temporarily kid-like blog ;-) )

A decade is a lot of time in anyone's book. Particularly in the life of a web agency. When we were established Vicky wanted us to be a one stop shop for all things web, a bold move back then, but the right one of course. Even so, who knew it would work out so well?!

Seriously... In '98 the web was a different kettle of fish to what we see today. To kick of our 10th anniversary blogging, I thought I'd have a quick look at the web world circa 1998...

When we started up, Google looked like this...

...and really was still in Beta :-) Google is also 10 this year, so we're in good company. You can check out the last ten years of the world's favourite search engine at: http://www.google.com/tenthbirthday/

An early client of Chameleon's were these cheeky chaps, with an ambitious website also founded in 1998:

A concept probably before it's time, sadly, and a story that didn't end too happily for well-publicised reasons - fortunately nothing to do with us, and we got paid too, which I don't think can be said of all their creditors!

I didn't realise until today that usability guru Jakob Nielsen archives his popular Alertbox commentary online (http://www.useit.com/alertbox/). Well worth a browse for insightful titbits and the odd amusing misfire prediction (nobody's perfect!).

On 1st Nov 1998, a day after our founding (no doubt a busy and disorienting day in Harrow), Jakob writes about Yahoo:

"Yahoo's home page has an average download time of 3.0 seconds according to the Keynote performance index. This is one of the fastest download times among major websites. " Bang, zoom!

He also notes that "since Internet bandwidth is very limited, Yahoo emphasizes a slim design and forgets about emulating television or glossy magazines." We were all on piddling 56k modems at the time don't forget, so the thumbs up from Jakob for Yahoo.

He does argue however that "Advertising Doesn't Work on the Web" and that "Yahoo's financial reports show that Web advertising is a very poor revenue generator". Hm... not so sure that prediction panned out all that well.

Old screenshots are fun, so here's a Yahoo one:

Look familiar? I expect so, because Yahoo looked more or less like this until about 2004.

A final bit from the Nielsen archives, just since it shows how things have changed. On 29th Nov 98 he advises that web pages should be left online indefinitely because "search engines are slow in updating their databases". Word, Jakob. Chameleonnet.co.uk has received 3,154 hits from search spiders so far this week alone.

Things have moved on. We all know that, but it's a bit dizzying sometimes to think just how rapidly the web has evolved. Chameleon started in a climate of snail's pace modems, search engines that spider and index every other week at about teatime, adventurous but ill conceived web-only startups, and the beginnings of a world dominating brain child of two adventurous geeks in California (sorry Larry/Sergey).

Exciting and turbulent times were ahead. I'll do a bit more digging and pick another exciting year in the life of Chameleon for one of my next posts, so watch out web lovers.

This month we have re-launched our very own Chameleon Net website with a brand new look. When I came on board as Creative Director at the beginning of 2006 one of my first tasks was to undertake a re-working of the 'then' current branding. Far from throwing away everything that had come before and creating something completely new I wanted to capitalise on everything we had already achieved as a company, and the recognition we already had within the new media sector. I saw it more as an 'evolution of the brand' and in approaching the recent re-design of our website I really wanted to stay focused on the principle of evolving our online proposition rather than going back to the drawing board.

Our development team have spent a lot of time creating a flexible, scalable .NET and XML based solution that is robust and easily maintainable. Likewise we have invested many man hours, creating relevant copy to achieve a very search engine friendly, accessible site. So the design brief was quite simple; Bring the website in line with the current branding and communicate our design abilities without effecting any of the underlying code or foundation work already undertaken.

Interestingly enough this scenario is not uncommon among many of our clients. There are of course occasions when their current solution is too old to cost effectively salvage technology, but many of our projects have involved existing systems or required collaboration with an in-house IT team to effectively re-skin their offering. With contemporary standards based development techniques like CSS ( custom style sheets ) we can 'skin' just about any system.

So back to the new Chameleon Net offering. We have added a dynamic Content Managed Flash Banner to our homepage and in the long term we will be re-tasking this space with multiple promotional panels featuring video, animation and motion graphic work from the design team. We have further utilised flash, and specifically siFr, to convert structural headings ( H2, H3 etc.. ) into our brand font on the fly,  whilst retaining an accessible, standards compliant layout for users without the plugin.

I hope you like the new look Chameleon site as much as we do, and if you have any comments or ideas I would love to hear from you.