However, I think what really needs to be assessed- not just by journalists, but by all of us in the communications industry- is what exactly the social media landscape means for our role and our image. Journalists no longer find the scoops, PRs no longer control the conversation, Marketing people no longer enjoy hegemony over public information. These are no longer problems to be considered: they are facts, known to public and media alike.

As a consequence, how do the communications industries present themselves and their function? If the newsmakers are, often, not seen as sleuths and explorers, then what are they?

Over the next decade or so, we will most likely see a shift in the role of the respected journalist from content generation to a mixture of content generation and a healthy dose of content auditing.  Instead of getting the scoops, they’ll be checking their validity. Instead of generating the content, they’ll be sifting through it, distilling it, re-presenting it. Instead of giving voice to the zeitgeist, they’ll be working out how that voice sounds.

The role of the media professional in the future is, therefore, practically bureaucratic, certainly organisational and analytic.

This will affect the PR and communications industry too. While historically the function of the PR has been to dream up the stories and then spin and feed them to journalists, who in turn feed them to the public, this hierarchy could soon be totally obsolete. However, the PRs do have one advantage over the journos: since our stories often come straight from the people making them, we can be first with the scoop.

Our function is therefore set to become, perhaps already has become, twofold. On the one hand we become infiltrators; experts in the social environment who know where to place stories to gain maximum traction in the constant conversation. On the other, we become supervisors to the analytic and summary process of new journalism, ensuring that the stories we create fit with those being collated and confirmed by opinion monitoring auditors in the media.

The public are becoming increasingly more aware of the huge role social media plays in newsgathering and broadcasting. Major international networks like CNN are among the most followed information providers on twitter, and the BBC’s follower profile has increased enormously (almost exponentially) over the past year.

There’s a danger here that they’ll come to associate the PR world with the old journalism- cast it as part of the defunct hierarchy. Agencies need to work hard to make sure that potential clients understand that, in a media landscape dominated by assessment and analysis, PRs are the ones with the know-how to act on and add to that analysis in the most targeted manner.

The Fleet Street era of colossal expense accounts and booze-fuelled revelations couldn’t last, of course, but it had one thing going for it. When devious tactics were employed to extract information, more often than not they were employed face to face. It was open warfare of the kind where the loser probably deserved what was coming to them, if only because they’d had a few too many brandies with dessert. Perhaps if a generation of scribblers were not chained to their desks in the Wapping Gulag, the need for hacking might have taken a back seat. Worshipping the powers of a lunchtime claret, and its ability to make a contact sing, might have suppressed the lust for the dark arts.

Journalists have always done whatever it takes to get information. Nobody in the media industry has any illusions about that. Look at how readily Kelvin Mackenzie implicitly defended many of those involved in the phone hacking scandal in his 2010 spat with Chris Bryant, for instance. The point is, though he can sympathise with those who did, Mackenzie didn’t resort to the kind of invasive tactics employed at NI publications in the late 90s and early 00s when he edited the Sun. Sure, he didn’t have some of the technology, but he also didn’t have to.

The culture of the long lunch looked like laziness to the executives who came to re-shape the media landscape throughout the late 80s, but it wasn’t. Between the coppers in the pubs round the Old Bailey and the City Boys in the square mile boozers, the hack of two or three generations past had the kind of network Rebekah Brooks would have to hire armies of Private Investigators to achieve. As post-boom social pressures turned against drinking culture and geographic pressures sent the industry scattered far and wide – Docklands, Wapping etc – this network, decades in the making, was silently dissolved.

What’s more, the newspaper industry became (and still is becoming) a young people’s game. With the culture change the old blood – not just Mackenzie, Wendy Henry, Stewart Higgins et al, but senior reporters and writers – faded away into alternative careers. Rushing in to replace them came the Piers Morgan, Andy Coulson, Rebekah Brooks brand of quick-fire young editor. Following on from them, we’re about to see the dominance of kids fresh out of media courses, ready to follow a formula rather than their nose.

These cultures, both of which in their way prioritise tangible, novel skills over less condensable experience, combine with an increasingly desk-bound age to create isolated environments. If on the one hand you’ve never had time to develop the kind of lifetime people skills and ephemeral networks available to the journalists of bygone decades, and on the other you’ve a world of voicemail and internet based dirt at your under-callused fingertips, the results aren’t hard to predict.

So what’s the answer? These days, the entire media landscape will have shifted more than once in the space of a 1981 Times lunch break, so clearly a straight return to old habits is impossible. But social media doesn’t have to be about disconnection and alienation. With Twitter you can involve yourself in the kind of fast-paced conversational wranglings that occurred over those mythical luncheons. With Foursquare, even the busiest people can align their days sufficiently for some brief face time.

All it takes is a little imagination and media professionals of all kinds can use their instincts, not their phones, for a spot of information gathering.

Cheryl’s recent sacking is an opportunity to re-evaluate her identity and learn valuable lessons in creativity. We all have to learn to deal with rejection and the word ‘No’.

1. Focus on who you are and why you’ve been successful.

A strong identity and deep roots in what made you successful in the first place will help you weather the worst storm. Was the American ‘X Factor’ actually the right strategic move for you? What is your real mission in life? Is your brand in accordance with this? Remember, being a sleb is not the most important thing in life.

2. Do you have a relevant narrative?

When you move on to a new challenge is your ’story’ appropriate for the new context you are moving in to? Consider this: is an American TV focus group going to be moved or confused by “British television celebrity/Geordie singer/overcame the odds/deprived back story”? Always bet on the latter.

3. Make the most of your successes to date

Your strategy here is to ensure that your previous successes that made you are amplified as much as possible. What new things are you planning to do? What past, present and future exciting projects can you plant as memorable seeds in people’s minds?

4. Don’t piss off your enemies. Forgive. Don’t bear grudges.

You evidently landed the role in the American ‘X Factor’ thanks to your links with Simon Cowell. Encourage these links and you may open up new avenues.

5. Do you need to focus on new skills? What can you learn?

Take time to come back. Use that time to learn new skills. Don’t mention them until you’re ready. Project confidence. People with authenticity will always surprise.

6. Go back to basics – your core skill, your ‘essence’.

Don’t confuse people. Remind them why they love you. Learn the power of saying ‘No!’ to things that aren’t you. Make sure you understand what your Brand Essence is. Don’t let rejection define you. Get back to basics, and you will find new ways to move forward.

7. Bounce-back-ability

A fundamental characteristic of creative people is the ability to bounce back after a major knock. It may be a cliché, but if you get knocked down the best way to cope is to get straight back up again.

8. Make sure you trust your team.

If you can trust the people around you and you are willing to let them be honest, they can inject new insight even if it is sometimes not what you want to hear.

9. Say very little until you have something to say.

Filling the social media with endless weak messages will dilute your brand, as will staggering in and out of the tabloids. A little mystery goes a long way. When you have the platform, then it is time to seed the social world with strong positive stories.

Like a Chinese meal, it is all you can taste and think about, but when it’s finished it’s forgotten and all you want is the next fix of foodstuff. There’s news, there’s excitement, there’s hyperbole scattered all over the place like MSG – and then it’s gone.

Of course, we are at the point that everyone is most interested in – the freak parade. Never mind the machinations behind the scenes or the commercial value of the brand; this is what the people most care about; the narrative, the crazies.

Given that it’s all about BGT right now, will we ever know the truth of what caused Cheryl Cole’s American X Factor exit and non-admittance to the UK judging panel? I doubt it, as the people have spoken and what they want is the tears, the heartache, the visceral stories, whether good or bad. What use is a nation’s sweetheart without some pain? We’ve used up the divorce tears – here’s the next weepie Cole adventure.

We know that Fox had a part to play, and Cowell, and many other factors, from agents to stylists – but it barely matters so long as the newspapers and Twitter benefit.

Brian Solis says that Social Media is creating its own ego systems. To survive, brands, businesses and celebrities should ride the shift in public perception and develop market strategies to work these ego systems. They need to recognise the shifts for what they are, however – the public has taken built in obsolescence at the heart of celebrity and business and celebrates it wholeheartedly – the nation no longer cares for yesterday’s cast offs. It only cares for the now.

We are living in one giant QVC-style shopping channel trading in celebrity; not a format that creates longevity. There’s no need when the consumer gladly moves on as soon as the sleb stops living in the now and starts thinking about the future.

Consumers are setting up information networks and are happy to be governed by social media connections. They expect the information to come to them in the instant – hardly anyone seeks out information elsewhere any more. They want it all NOW!

Yet, since no one is focusing on the past, no one is contextualising what’s happening now either, so let’s try to. Only people with platforms triumph – hence we see Cheryl Cole becoming cannon fodder to the march of the platform she’s been ousted from. High profile she may be, but she’s still just cannon fodder. It’s the people who’ve been spat out of the system who can offer most context on what is happening within the machine, but the machine has programmed us to expect a retrospective in ten years time asking “where are they now?”, at which we’ll grunt with slight recognition at the participants of all the old formats who never made it and then move on. There is no room for context in that model.

Fans and followers are firing up the process so it runs ever faster. Image is as disposable as a burger container. There is no point to super injunctions; the law is a blunt stick – and anyway, it’ll all be forgotten tomorrow.

Only a few are managing to succeed; Jedward are a prime example. But then they make no references to the past and they don’t care about the future – they may have represented Ireland at Eurovision, they may have met Obama but they have skins like rhinos and they don’t care. Their career is now and we have got to the point where the audience don’t trust people who talk about a future.

Maybe you just have to be stupid to succeed. Or, as I heard Simon Cowell tell a Britney impersonator: “Never mind the negativity. Ride it!” Salient lessons for Cheryl Cole and anyone else wanting to enter the social media whirl and the giddy world of celebrity in the 21st century.

I have always believed there has been a calculus of public vs. private interest, but this week has proved that the law is broken. The wider world is not interested in the deliberations of a dusty-wigged UK high court judge. The legal framework must try and understand the new age of free, libertarian speech especially when they are considering a celebrity’s position on his or her commercial value. There appears to be a very obvious point: the law is useless! It’s broken and unenforceable.

For the record, I do believe in a privacy law, but only if the conduct and careful appliance of fame is not undone by unacceptable behaviour. Legal muscle has its place but it cannot solely or independently save a career and reputation meltdown – the hapless attempts to halt the inexorable momentum of social media will now thrust the guilty more quickly into to the sewer of purposeful disparagement.

A few years ago I viewed, with some trepidation, the onset of this kind of web content, the sort that would unleash a revolution of new possibilities. I spent time preaching to agents and celebrities about the new dangers of the age. My protestations fell on deaf ears.

Few public figures learnt anything from the wretched and very public legal sagas surrounding John Terry and Wayne Rooney a year ago. Not even a downturn in their earning potential from sponsors and brands seemed to make a mark. As yet another hapless celebrity attempts to use the force of the law to turn the internet tide and save a tattered reputation, it is time to face some hard facts.

The celebrity industry is gigantic, Paris Hilton no less is by Forbes estimated Paris Hilton value around $30 and $50 million two years ago. We learnt last year Wayne Rooney earns £760000 a year from his image rights. These are big figures and this is why public figures will invest in expensive legal council to protect their privacy. Especially if the story doesn’t fit the projected brand truth

We are living in an age of experimental democracy. I have stood and watched, with some trepidation, journalism and technology battering against the walls of the law. Recent cases have arguably set a bad and confusing precedent. Famous and public cases have created destabilisation via the online world. The PR profession is grappling with the change.

Arguably, the social media world is destroying truth. PR folk recognize it’s an absolute fact that once you’re in the public eye everything changes.

The revolution in celebrity has changed the rules of engagement and the role of the celebrity has changed. This is the modern age, the age of the super-injunction, the age when celebrities want to keep their dirty laundry in bomb- and journalist-proof cages so that not even the slightest whiff of scandal can escape. Celebrity is now more than just playing in a team or starring on the screen. The public investment in the brand and therefore brand truth is more important than a spun image. The days of suppressing the facts are over.

If the brand behaves in a certain way then that’s its brand truth. The new social media age will out the truth, will focus on the authentic profile. If that isn’t the way certain public figures want it to be, they may find they have to change: they should realise that openly threatening will be unlikely to encourage investment from sponsors.

Legal firms specializing in this arena at the moment try to apply chloroform to the faces of troublesome editors. There isn’t enough anaesthetic, or the means to apply it, to smother the web. As for spraying threatening letters in a bid to suppress the facts, this is hat so old it’s fossilised when thousands of tweeters are registering support or outrage and have the ability to pass on the information. You can’t sue or stop them all.

Those celebs who engage in a sensible lifestyle and recognize that fame is a curse invest wisely in agents of communication. They weigh up their options professionally and seek to communicate their brand ethos. Of course they deserve to be protected from the lies and the defamers. How? Well, there’s the rub. We have entered an age of democratic experimentation, so it is time to come to terms with this truth of the situation facing then and therefore their own truth.

It’s no surprise that many of the major A list Hollywood names prefer the council of a wise old grey haired PR wrangler, a cautionary breed schooled in the laws of human error. A great flack is part shrink, part wise council, part foot soldier; someone not afraid of the blood or the battle. A listers will defer to someone who has a trust of the medium they work in.

The digital swirl has changed the game, so the provision for translucency and an ability to find a way to manage an enormous global community that has an interest in his clients brand is vital. There must be a place for sensible conversations with the media, both on- and offline, that might undo their clients.

Few UK public figures invest in long-term media management. Instead they prefer to pay eye-watering fees to a class of lawyer who is not graced with the skills of media negotiation. We are in an age where trust is thin the ground. Brute force commands a premium.

Good PR folk are trying to address the challenges that face them in a world where social networks are revolutionizing the planet. Modern media relations are about reaching out, not flexing legal muscle. Celebrities and public figures must invest in help that knows how to engage a whole new generation of consumers, whose values are being reshaped almost daily by their new social dialogue. Of course it’s not as easy as that, as the furore over someone posting information on Twitter about people who have allegedly taken out super-injunctions proves.

Crises come and crises go: the trick for a good flack is to develop a pleasant outward demeanour for their client. If the client can live up to it they’ll do well, but in these Twitter-fuelled days a caddish serial offender who tries to hide will be found out. Twitter makes a PR’s job harder, not easier.

The days of things being suppressed for decades are over, thanks to Twitter. We’re not living in old Hollywood any more. It is for everyone to change his or her ways of thinking; time for attitude, heart and a sense of proportion instead of craven process.

Of course, it’s just not as easy as that, as the furore over someone posting information on Twitter about people who have allegedly taken out super-injunctions proves. My instinct suggests that the poster is simply a nobody seeking a rather risky path to fame; but this does not alter the fact that technology changes at an exponentially faster rate than humanity’s baser instincts, as this outbreak of injunction-exposure, and the reaction to it, shows all too clearly.

Even the royal family, who have learned the hard way about bad publicity, cannot prevent occasional slips of image – as witness the recent bra-and-skirt dancing pics of Pippa Middleton, Princess Kate’s sister. Mind you, if all that can be found is such tame photos, the royal PR machine must be pretty happy.

It’s not been so easy for other cagey public figures lately, of course. The trick for a good publicist whose client finds themselves in difficult circumstances is to stand by their client and, once the trouble’s passed, give them truthful, honest advice and create them a forgiving profile. I remember, years ago, a client ringing me up in a panic that the Sunday People was about to run an expose on him. I had to ask “Is it true”. “Of course it is,” he replied. “Now can you make it go away?”

These days, I would work with him to try and make sure it never happened in the first place.

Crises come and crices go: the trick is to develop a pleasant outward demeanour for the client. If they can live up to it they’ll do well, but in these Twitter-fuelled days a caddish serial offender who tries to hide will be found out. Twitter make a PR’s job harder, not easier.

The human imagination is a powerful space and the need to weave a story is inherent to it. We have entered an age of democratic experimentation, so it is time to come to terms with this truth. The social space has, and the legal profession is powerless and ineffective against it.

The days of things being suppressed for decades are over, thanks to Twitter. We’re not living in old Hollywood any more. Time for everyone to change their ways of thinking…

Here’s my comment in the Independent on the risks of spinning for dictators. This is an article in Marketing Week on the rise of social media. Here’s a piece from the Guardian on the redemption of Chris Brown. And finally a comment in the Vancouver Sun on Sarah Ferguson.

The power of social media is at their fingertips, so isn’t it time to reinvent the act of protest and direct action for the digital age, where the image is ever more important? Images of violence, window smashing and scarf-faced ‘anarchists’ are something the establishment can deal with in the aftermath all too easily – it allows them the breathing room to default to a huffy ‘look at them, they don’t care about anything’ stance.

Grey matter needs to be applied as creatively as possible in the devising of a contemporary method of effecting real change. Smashed windows and bloody faced policemen should be a thing of the past. Interesting, also, to see the Met so woefully unprepared for any violence – perhaps they thought students were a spent force? The other possibility, of course, is that health and safety has prevented them from giving protestors a kicking.

The bloody noses and cut heads the police endured work against the protestors, of course, and become the sort of startling imahes that illustrate, in glorious technicolour, the more scaremongering media outlets; it’s quite possible the police just don’t want to provide or create the opposite effect. If so, the protestors need to learn from that and become more canny in their methods of dissent.

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Talking of the aftermath of violence, the Royal British Legion have come up with an excellent PR stunt to rejuvenate the Poppy Appeal – a “2 Minute Silence” download from iTunes.

There is some grumbling that they may have swiped the idea wholesale from the latest anti-X Factor Christmas number 1 campaign, for John Cage’s famous silent piece of music 4’33” – wittily titled Cage Against the Machine – but that doesn’t take away from the fact that this is a very smart move by the Royal British Legion.

Unless you’re in the UK, that is, in which case you’ll be watching episode seven of 13 and the spoilers could really hurt your enjoyment of this remarkable series. The start of the series may have been brought forward in the UK, but we’re still too far behind. In today’s social media world, the narrative is just not as powerful when the story is out of sync in different parts of the world with a (fairly) common language and culture – it is diluted by spoilers and web-chatter.

True event TV benefits from Twitter and the Twitterati show fans of Britain’s Got Talent, the X Factor and the Inbetweeners offer great examples of tweet chat from the sofa. A great way to pull in more followers is to use show hashtags and demonstrate sharp wit that can be retweeted. True entertainment brand-love usually has a crowd that engages with Twitter. But it is hard to engage properly when a global source like Twitter is moving faster than the shows its users love. For narrative TV brands like Mad Men to keep up, they need to be shown as close to simultaneously as can be achieved to avoid dilution.

For the next series of Mad Men, mind you, they will need all the PR and web-chatter they can muster just to achieve the amount of coverage the show gets in the UK at the moment, as it will debut for the first time on a Sky subscription channel, alongside all of the output from HBO. I suspect many more people will be driven to file sharing, not only to avoid having the narratives of their favourite shows spoiled before they’ve seen them but also to avoid paying fees for what was previously free to view.

And now, a sneak preview of Mad Men’s radical new direction for season five.

It’s hard to tell if it’s his PR doing it or if – and this is perfectly possible – he’s so plugged in to the web that he’s acting on his own. His digital promotional skills are pretty strongly evident – just look at his YouTube channel and the large following it has. His online fan club shows his social media prowess of to very flattering effect.

His response was to the effect that he’s a big fan of Malcolm Hardee and that he approves mightily of the satirical awards, even if they come at his expense. And, most perfectly, the email states that: “Yes. I care about money. But I do kind of hate myself for it.”

It’s a great counter-play no matter whether it was he or his PR who made it – someone has moved very quickly to counter any accusations of being po-faced, before the story had a chance to take hold. I suspect that it was Burnham himself who stepped up. Despite a minor – and extremely brief – slip, he is a very modern entertainer, one who matches onstage brilliance with online dexterity. He has got it all and when a crisis looms he just seems the type to step forward, front and centre.