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April 12th, 2011 by Flora Turner

Social Media Savvy?

PR is changing as the ways in which we communicate expand. PR practitioners are arming themselves with the skill sets and the tools to ensure that they are, if not ahead of, are at least not far behind, the pack and this has never been more pertinent than with the rise of social media. Most of us have jumped straight in there with company blogs, LinkedIn, Twitter accounts, Facebook pages, personalised YouTube channels and all other permutations on the online communications theme. It comes as no surprise that we want to take our Clients on this journey of discovery too but when it means additional budget, time and resource – the holy trinity of all things negative in “Client speak”  – this isn’t an easy task.

Yesterday the CIPR Social Media Conference went some way to address this very modern PR dilemma.  The speakers were all top of their game and fascinating in their approach to social media.

Digital Media Manager, Thomas Knorpp from Sainsbury’s revealed a refreshingly laid back approach, choosing quality over quantity in terms of who they responded to, aiming to start solving people’s problems and creating interesting content instead of the usual message monologue big brands adopt as their ‘strategy’.

ASDA’s Head of Corporate Comms, Dominic Burch revealed they had chosen a ‘suck it and see’ approach where as a company they encouraged all staff to get involved and monitor the result – a bold move for a company of its size. As Dominic put it, “It’s only a mistake if you make it twice” – a phrase I shall certainly be repeating again.

The million dollar question of the day was; “What’s the best way to analyse and present the results of social media to your Client…?” The answer, disappointingly, was that there are no quick fixes!

You get what you pay for and while free tools such as Google Analytics, Twilert and Nutshell Mail offer a rudimentary overview, you really need to invest in a good bespoke tool for an accurate analysis if you are going to start taking social media seriously. Luckily, here at Speed, we’ve invested in SM2. This is arguably the best in the monitoring tool in the business and yes, while you do need to invest a little time setting up your searches the effort to gain ratio is more than satisfactory.

Myself and my attending colleagues all left with our heads buzzing with a renewed vigour and respect for the power of social media. Interesting, yes; insightful, absolutely; but without the reassurance of a definitive value attached – whether that be in line with comforting AVE figures or even a way to monitor ‘intent’ to purchase – the struggle to justify additional budget, time and resource with Clients of a certain nature continues…

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March 11th, 2011 by Speed Budapest (Matt)

Thoughts on LinkedIn Today

LinkedIn TodayThe launch of LinkedIn Today is an interesting development. It produces a dashboard of popular news stories, based on the articles and blog posts that have been most shared by people on the social networking site.

Articles are filtered into sections, such as Retail, Financial Services, Telecommunications, and IT, based on what news has been most shared by people working in a particular industry. This is handy if you want to find out what the hot topics in a specific sector are at any given moment.

Currently some of the news channels feature articles that aren’t relevant to that specific sector, as general interest stories, such as the earthquake in Japan, are shared by people from all industries. I imagine LinkedIn will develop the service in the coming weeks so that news, which isn’t relevant to a certain industry, is not displayed in that industry’s channel. I also wouldn’t be surprised if LinkedIn added a geographic filter to news channels so that you can view the most shared news in a specific region.

Since launching this morning, many of the channels have already acquired a few thousand followers. This will no doubt have a sizeable impact on the level of traffic that news sites receive when their articles are included on the site. This could see more publications adding LinkedIn’s sharing button to their websites in a bid to encourage people to share news on the social network, and in doing so, drive traffic back to their website.

What’s also interesting, is that you can follow a few select news sources and see which stories have been most shared. I’d love to see how this compares with the likes of Facebook and Twitter. Do people share different types of news on different sites? Considering that the way that I use Facebook, compared to Twitter or LinkedIn, I reckon we’d see some big differences in the news stories that are shared most on each network. What do you think?

October 26th, 2010 by Helen Beavis

GRADS THE WAY WE LIKE IT

When I was asked to present at the CIPRs ‘Getting into PR’ conference for graduates yesterday, it made me think my tactics (a decade ago) were child’s play compared to what’s needed today.

 Our industry has moved rapidly to mirror the pace and appetite for content & conversations that new media channels demand. It’s modernising its approach and so too must graduates seeking their first break.

 Don’t get me wrong, the determination and ambition to succeed hasn’t changed but the approaches needed have.

 So here’s a few pointers:

 - Do your research – read about the industry you are so passionate about, find out the challenges, what the hot topics are. Decide the kind of PR you want to do and whether it’s in-house or agency and then find out as much as you can about that organisations clients, campaigns, people and graduate scheme. You need to interrogate the business to ensure it’s right for you and provides good grounding to move up the ranks. Watch out for details of the new Speed grad scheme-coming soon.

- Have an opinion: high calibre grads who demonstrate understanding will make an impact- and stand out. Get your opinions out there. Guaranteed, potential employers will find it.

- Engage with your audience: it’s not enough to have a recruitment agent and think that’s all you have to do. Agencies don’t want to pay agency fees. If you make it easier for them to find out about you with direct contact, and you’re what they’re looking for, it’s a win win. Find out where the people you want to influence are and how to contact them e.g Linked-in, Twitter, blogs, email. Then use that opinion & knowledge about them, their business and the industry to create difference. A tailored approach to three contacts is better than a broad brush approach to 100s.

And to Miss Badcock, who asked whether her name would be a hindrance in launching her own blog, I look forward to reading your first introductory ‘embarrassing name’ edition – great fodder right there.  Good luck.

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May 11th, 2010 by Dan Howe

How to export your friends from Facebook

With the repeated news of privacy letdowns from Facebook, like lots of other people I have been questioning my dependence on the social network. My quick conclusion is that the only reason why I always return to Facebook is that it is where my friends are. If I were to leave the site, how can I bring my friends with me?

Facebook doesn’t make it easy. They won’t allow you to export the email addresses of your friends, making it tricky to transfer connections should you decide to leave for good. Facebook’s competitive social networks, like LinkedIn, Twitter and niche sites, don’t have access to import contacts from Facebook, as they might with email providers like Gmail, Yahoo and Hotmail. The question of how to transfer connections between sites might be frustrating, but there is an answer, and it is a pretty simple one:

You’ll have to go through a middleman. Facebook will allow you to transfer contacts to an email provider like Hotmail. Hotmail will allow you to export email addresses as a .CSV file. From there, other social networks will allow you to import contacts from email addresses, most as a .CSV file. Happy days.

There are step by step instructions for exporting your Facebook contacts’ email addresses to Hotmail here. Once you have the file, you are free to bring your contacts with your wherever you go in the social networking world. While you’re at it, add dan.howe@speedcommunications.com in, it would be great to connect with you.

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October 2nd, 2009 by John Brown

Future graduates: your PR career has to start now!

Your career seems like a lifetime away and anyway, surely a 1st in some form of degree will be enough for you to waltz into a PR agency of your choice and demand a lucrative salary and expense account.

Future graduates, you are wrong.

Whether you are graduating in 2010 or 2013, you will be entering one of the most competitive job markets in recent years and you need to make damn sure that you have earnt some PR stripes well before you send through your CV.

So as a relatively recent graduate who managed to avoid the doll queue, I thought I would share with you my top ten tips.  No…..Scrap that.  I will share with you the top ten minimum criteria that you need to achieve in order to stand a good chance of getting that first PR role:

1.    Read: Industry press, newspapers (regional and national), trade magazines, influential bloggers; you need to be keeping up with the media and PR industry on a daily basis.  Read, absorb and read again.

2.    Get a PR client: You are at university and have access to a thousand and one different societies, clubs, sports teams etc. Approach these people and offer them your PR services.  There may even be a little (and I mean tiny) bit of budget there to do a PR campaign, but most of the time it would be your time spent for free

3.    Start pitching: The biggest fear a grad starter has is speaking with journalists.  Well as one of my MDs put it in his recent blog “That’s a big part of the job, dummy”.  The sooner you overcome this fear the better.  Develop a press release for your new penniless client and start pitching it to the local press.  Try and make sure it is at least vaguely interesting, it will help

4.    Blog: A blog is a fantastic way of honing your writing skills, commenting on industry issues and getting yourself noticed.  Write what you want but bear in mind who is going to read it, a blog can be the most important bit of writing you do before your first job.

5.    Tweet: If you haven’t been then you need to get a move on.  Twitter, despite its recent increase of spam, is still a great platform for developing a network, showcasing your activity, pitching to journalists and interacting with future peers and colleagues.  Ignore it at your peril

6.    Get LinkedIn: Develop your profile and add anyone and everyone you come across in a professional capacity.  Having a bank of contacts to bring to the table at interviews will impress and may make things easier once you start

7.    Experience Junkie: It doesn’t matter what your lecturers say, you cannot learn the trade with a hangover in a lecture theatre and agency owners know this.  I promise you, if you are eager, you won’t be a coffee monkey.  Work experience is gold dust to a new grad, start yours as soon as possible.

8.    Work at a publication: Maybe blurring the lines, but I think utterly valuable.  Spending a little time in a newsroom will give you a glimpse into how busy a journalist’s life is. It will make you appreciate their time, their working day and their editorial process.  You may even like a couple of them.

9.    Don’t be an arse: PR is still full of self righteous people who treat journalists as a nuisance and clients as a means to max out the company credit card.  These people are quickly being exposed as the industry gets tougher.  Start off well, understand that you are at the beginning of a very big learning cycle and always act professionally.

10.  Get in quick: Start applying for jobs at the beginning of your final year.  Hopefully, if you have followed the above, you will have relationships with a few agencies, be able to get some journalist references and have a portfolio of work.  Now all that is left is for you to do is get in there before anyone else. It’s never too early to apply.  Worst that can happen is that they advise you to apply later, they may even remember your name!

    September 18th, 2009 by Speed Budapest (Matt)

    Daily News 18/09

    Computer Weekly – More businesses block social networking sites
    More businesses are blocking social networking sites for security reasons than three years ago, an IDC security conference in London has heard. There has been a significant increase in the number of businesses taking a more stringent view on access to sites like Facebook, said Eldar Tuvey, chief executive of web security firm ScanSafe.

    BBC News – Silicon Valley ‘seeing revival’
    Silicon Valley is stirring back to life, following a bruising economic downturn, according to industry insiders and start-up entrepreneurs. The view seems to underscore Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke’s belief that the US recession has ended.

    Silicon.com – White House looks to the cloud for IT cost-cutting
    The Obama administration on Tuesday announced a long-term cloud-computing policy intended to cut costs on infrastructure and reduce the environmental impact of US government computing systems.

    IT PRO – UK shines when it comes to IT competitiveness
    In the wake of economic turmoil, the UK ranks sixth in the world in IT competitiveness, according to study released by the Economist Intelligence Unit and sponsored by the Business Software Alliance (BSA). The study, now in its third year, surveys the IT industry environments of 66 economies to discover the extent to which they enable IT sector competitiveness. The UK scored a 70.2 out of a possible 100 in the index, a figure that pushed the country down three places from 2008.

    New Scientist – Super-dense data stores cool down
    Engineers in Korea have created a material that could allow super-dense “millipede”-style data storage systems to work at room temperature. The discovery brings the technology closer to commercial reality – good news for people struggling with over-full digital memories.

    August 19th, 2009 by Speed Budapest (Matt)

    Hot off the press 19/8

    CBR Online – Hackers turn attention to social networks
    New research from virtualisation firm Nebulas Solutions Group has revealed that hackers are increasingly targeting social network sites as the popularity of Twitter and Facebook continues to grow. The company’s Web Hacking Incidents Database (WHID) examined trends for the first half of 2009 and found that social networking sites were the most targeted vertical market, making up 19% of all attacking incidents.

    The Times – Bosses crack down on social networks amid leaks
    A US survey found 31% of companies had dismissed employees for violating email policies. And the Proofpoint poll also revealed 8% of firms had dismissed staff for leaking company secrets via the likes of Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn.

    Silicon.com – IT essential for businesses’ green success
    Life is tough for IT management. Not only does it have to juggle the conflicting demands of ‘business as usual’ but many managers are now expected to add a layer of environmental concern to their workload.

    The Register – Opaque Wi-Fi laws ‘damage UK economy, social inclusion’
    Laws controlling the sharing of wireless internet access are hindering the digital economy and the digital social inclusion plans of Government, an academic has warned. The law should be clarified to help spread broadband access more widely, he said.

    New Scientist – Internet ‘immune system’ could block viruses
    T IS 0530 UTC, 25 January 2003. A computer worm named Slammer has just unleashed one of the most devastating attacks on the internet ever. Within minutes, it infects nearly 90 per cent of vulnerable computers. Major net links break down, ATM machines fail and airlines have to cancel flights.What was impressive about Slammer was the overwhelming speed of infection. There was no chance to intervene. Six years on, our defences are little better.

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    April 8th, 2009 by Speed Budapest (Matt)

    Q&A with Bob Pearson, president of the Blog Council

    Bob PearsonThe Blog Council, the world’s leading forum for large companies to share best practices in social media, yesterday appointed Bob Pearson as the organisation’s new President. Bob previously worked as Vice President of Communities and Conversations at Dell, where he oversaw the company’s global social media efforts.

    The Blog Council was set up in 2007 to give  senior executives in charge of social media at the largest corporations in the world, a platform to share ideas and to learn best practices.  The Council now has more than 40  members, including the Coca-Cola Company, Hewlett-Packard, Cisco Systems, and Microsoft.

    I caught up with Bob to find out why he thinks blogs can benefit businesses.

    How long have you been blogging?
    I have been communicating online for many years, but I really started blogging during the last three years. I blogged a lot internally for Dell’s One Dell Way and Marketing Blog to reach Dell’s 80,000 employees and I did a series called ‘TechKnowledge’ on Direct2Dell where I interviewed leading experts about the future of technology. You can expect me to blog on a regular basis related to social media trends on the Blog Council’s blog.

    Why did you start blogging?
    It’s important to listen and learn with your customers, which is a two-way street. Blogging allows any of us to share a point of view and then listen to the comments. I have to admit I read every comment every time for my posts. You learn a lot from what people enjoy and, quite frankly, just as much when your post is greeted with silence.

    How can businesses benefit from writing a blog?
    This is a long list, but here’s a few key points.

    • Customers are co-creating messages of brands everyday. If you aren’t communicating online, you aren’t really shaping your brand effectively.
    • There are hundreds or thousands of conversations occurring everyday about a brand. At Dell, we could see 5-10,000 conversations per day. If you know what customers are interested in, your blogging can become a relevant part of the conversation.
    • Blogging is really symbolic, in my view, of telling your story, which is also done well with video, photos, twitter, facebook and many other ways to round out how you share content.
    • Overall, it’s really a company’s approach to joining in the conversation that matters the most. Customers can see who really cares and, most importantly, who is trying.

    What concerns do businesses have about blogs – and why?
    I would flip that around. What concerns should businesses have about how their brands are being shaped without their knowing it? What issues do they not know about due to a lack of strong blog monitoring? How well is a company preparing for a future where 500,000 new people go online everyday for the first time in their lives? Social media is a new discipline that is transforming how we speak with customers, how we conduct e-commerce and how we unlock the knowledge of our employees. The leaders are realising their social media strategy may start with a blog, but this is only a first step.

    Should every business blog?
    Yes. Every business has conversations with its customers via the phone and in person. Why not via a blog? In a few years, this question will sound like “should every business have a website?” Of course so. Same with a blog.

    Which blogs do you particularly admire?
    I enjoy reading Jeremiah Owyang’s Web-strategist. If I want to listen to a podcast, I think Neville Hobson and Shel Israel do great work. If I want to see what the world is saying, I look at my customised Netvibes screen or my new Tweetdeck summary.

    How do you think Twitter has affected the blogosphere?
    Twitter is making people think, which I love. Twitter is showing us that people are willing to follow accounts where they can get information they want at their convenience. Unlike email, which shows up in your inbox whether you like it or not, you have a choice on Twitter to visit or not visit a site. Someday, people will receive the content they want wherever they want it, e.g. Twitter, Facebook, Plaxo, LinkedIn, MySpace and they will receive it all at the same time. It will redefine how we distribute content. For example, if I want an update from Starbucks, I might want to only receive it in Twitter and if that can be done, I’m in. If I’m looking for a new bike, maybe I only want updates that contain reviews and new videos delivered to my Facebook account for a certain period of time. So, I give Twitter a lot of credit for opening up new ways to reach people effectively. It’s power goes well beyond the fact that it is a microblogging tool.

    Follow Bob on Twitter: @bobpearson1845