Nick Bishop (@nbishop), who heads up the Economist account in our corporate team, shared this Economist video with me this morning.
It plots the pace of changing face of media and devices and is fast becoming a hit on the Economist YouTube channel.
Have a look. I promise you’ll enjoy it!
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Google quietly rolled out Sidewiki last week via its blog. Its the Google way.
It allows anyone with Google account to annotate web pages in a sidebar enabled via the Google Toolbar. It also appears to pull in content related to blog page from Google blogs.
Comments are ordered using an algorithm that promotes the most useful, high-quality entries.
Here’s the irony: Google launched this tool to take control away from brands in the same week that Squidoo launched Brands in Public in a bid to bring control back to brands.
I think I know which of the two products will fly.
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There’s a new sport in social media land: Seth bashing.
Seth Godin announced last week that Squidoo was launching a new service called Brands in Public.
The new service collates the conversations online around a brand onto a Squidoo “lens” (web page) and charges $400 per month to allow the brand to respond.
The service initially launched with pre-baked pages for major brands. Accusations of brandjacking followed and Squidoo backed down.
At best Brands in Public is a crude reputational tool. Time poor brands can comment on content from the blogosphere, Facebook and Twitter in a single place.
But instead best practice dictates that brands should be participating in conversations wherever they are taking place as part of a social media strategy. A direct response from a brand carries authority and remains a permanent contextualised record for search engines to find.
And as econsultancy said $400 per month buys a lot of social media monitoring tools.
Anyone else and this launch would almost certainly have been ignored. But Godin’s profile has driven attention.
Curiously Squidoo’s Brands in Public page hasn’t tracked all the negative conversations during the last week and I doubt that it will pick up this blog post.
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Celebs have been quick to use Twitter as a means of extending their profile online and developing direct relationships with their audience.
But last night Kristy Allsop (@kirstiemallsopp) discovered the downside of being so open when she became the target of a stream of nasty abuse from @steeeeeeeven.
Social networks operate entirely on the same basis as human relationships and mechanisms exist to block and cut off people that abuse the network.
Allsop has since blocked @steeeeeeeven and he’ll no doubt be kicked off Twitter. But no one should have to put up with such public abuse.
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Russell Davies has spotted the flaw in using a network of local bloggers as a cost-effective model for developing local content. I blogged about this issue last month.
Here’s what Russell has to say.
[…] writing about my neighbourhood worries me deeply. Because the people and shops and cafes are going to notice that you’re writing about them, and if you’re in any way critical they’ll know and glare at you, and you’re going to feel really bad.[…] There’s a difference between slagging off a restaurant you don’t intend to go back to and walking past the same place every day.
I’ve tried it and its not comfortable. There is no doubt hyper local media is viable and that local bloggers are able to provide the content and reach of a regional newspaper but the issues of personal anonymity and legal protection need be tackled.
Russell again.
[…] if hyperlocalism is going to work in the UK maybe it needs to be aggregated rather than authored (somehow, I’m not really sure what I mean by that) or it needs some imprimatur of professionalism that says “I’m just doing my job”.
The twin issues of personal exposure and the backup of a publisher need to be resolved if hyperlocal media is going to work.
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Fleet Street in London was home of the UK media until it headed east to Canary Wharf and Wapping in the 1980s.
Agence France Presse (AFP) and D.C. Thomson & Co are all that remain. D.C. Thomson is headquartered in Dundee and is best known for publishing The Beano and The Dandy.
Broadstuff explains how “the theoretical basis on which a thousand crowdsourcing start-ups have been launched is flawed”. It turns out that less than one per cent of crowds contribute to crowd sourcing schemes.
0.9% creators
9% commentators
90% consumers
Strictly Come Dancing judges and participants have been gagged over the Arlene Phillips affair according to reports today in the mainstream media.
The Evening Standard reports tonight that a “secret memo” issued by the BBC tackles difficult issues of the age and gender of the former judge.
What complete and utter nonsense. Everyone in PR will have recognised the memorandum is a media Q&A. It is a standard tactic used a briefing document for anyone that has to face the media.
Q&As are typically tedious documents drafted to ensure that all spokespeople stick to the script and are prepared for tricky questions from the media.
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The D&AD was set up in 1960s by the advertising and design industry to celebrative creative communication, reward its practitioners, and raise standards.
The D&AD seeks to protect intellectual property in pitches through fair payment for work. It has also created a series of effectiveness awards that test objectives, strategy, tactics and measureable outcomes. The awards are a meaningful benchmark for campaigns in the design industry against which an agency and its creative work can be judged.
Could this be a model that the PR industry could adapt via the CIPR or the PRCA to enforce pay-to-pitch and create standardised benchmarks?
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Payment-for-pitching is back on the agenda in the PR industry after PR Week reported last week that Confused.com offered to pay agencies for their ideas post pitch.
Mark Pinsent has done a great job of capturing the debate.
[…] the novelty of Confused.com’s action serves to highlight how happy the PR industry still is to give away what should be its most valuable assets: creative and strategic thinking. It really should stop, but when even the biggest, most successful firms haven’t got the bollocks to change things, it won’t.
Loewy Pitch Masterclass
By coincidence I was in the audience of Loewy agencies yesterday afternoon for a Pitch Masterclass at the Wellcome Institute in London.
We heard from a mix of agency and client speakers from inside and outside Loewy, including Branded, EMI Music, Seymourpowell, The Team and Wieden + Kennedy.
Payment-for-pitching
Richard Williams, founder of design agency Williams Murray Hamm said that his agency rarely pitches for work and only under well defined circumstances. When it does pitch, it charges for creative work.
It’s a bold approach. But as a result WMH has developed a phenomenal reputation and is a highly profitable business.
Dick Powell, founder of design and innovation company Seymourpowell said that his agency always charged for pitching.
Pitch porn
At the opposite end of the spectrum Neil Christie, managing director of independent ad agency Wieden & Kennedy shared some of his agency’s pitches for multi-million international accounts.
Like its contemporaries in the ad industry Wieden & Kennedy doesn’t charge for pitches but does have a rigorous selection criteria and process for work that it chases. As a result it has won four out five pieces of work that it has pitched this year.
Update: Wieden & Kennedy’s Neil Christie has blogged about the Pitch Masterclass.
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Today is World Carfree Day 2009 – part of European mobility week.
I broke my pledge before 6am by driving my car the 25 miles from home in Holystone over Alnwick moor to Alnmouth to catch the crack of dawn train to London.
My excuse? There are no public transport options at that time of day and it would be a hellish cycle ride at any hour. And I drive a Smart car.
But whether looking to cut carbon emissions, reduce costs, or improve work life balance, more and more companies are now helping their employees to work from home.
One of Speed’s tech clients Aastra has launched a Twitter mash-up today to promote where people are working from home. Using Twitter anyone working from home is invited to tweet their location with the hash tag #wfh.
The hash-tag will automatically add users to a map of home workers.
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We can find no evidence of any reputational impact to Scotland online as a result of the Scottish government’s decision to release Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi, the Libyan convicted of the Lockerbie bombing.
The mainstream media reported last week that businesses in Scotland were concerned about the impact of the decision on Scottish business particularly with the US.
We’ve looked hard and believe that claims of a boycott have been largely exaggerated. Its a good old fashioned PR stunt to drive interest in Scottish products.
But results from Google Insights for Search do show that searches around keywords relating to Scottish products are cyclically focussed around Summer and Christmas and that search volumes have been in decline since 2006.
Search term: “scotch”
Search term: “Scottish shortbread”
Search term: “Visit Scotland”
Search term: “Scottish tartan”
The UK political parties have a long way to go to incorporate social media into their communication planning according to Alastair Campbell.
“Myself and John Prescott are two of the most followed people on Twitter in UK politics. Yet we’re both bloody has-beens,” said Campbell.
Campbell (@campbellclaret) has 9,200 followers whereas Prescott (@JohnPrescott) has 6,700.
Campbell uses Twitter to promote his blog and said that it is an incredibly effective means of connecting with people. He claimed that politicians are trapped in old media and are yet to fully capitialise on the potential of social media.
“When I was working with Tony in the mid-90s if we led the BBC News and had a splash in The Sun and The Times we used to say that we’d dominated the agenda. It’s no longer true. It helps of course but there are lots of other channels to get your head round,” said Campbell.
“The parties haven’t cracked [social media] yet,” he said.
Campbell addressed an invited group of communication professionals at a dinner at The Capital Restaurant in London hosted by Durrants on Thursday evening. He is best known for his role as former British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s spokesman, press secretary and director of communications and strategy.
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According to Alastair Campbell it is no longer possible to control a media agenda and the style of communication planning that characterised his tenure in Downing Street no longer works.
Campbell is best known for his role as former British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s spokesman, press secretary and director of communications and strategy.
“We are no longer in control. The challenge of communications in a modern organisation is a scary prospect,” he said.
Campbell addressed an invited group of communication professionals at a dinner at The Capital Restaurant in London hosted by Durrants on Thursday evening.
Campbell said that we had entered the era of the permanent campaigning citing five themes that demanded a fundament shift in communication style to what he called authentic campaigning.
Campbell said that the role of a communication professional operating in this modern environment was tough. “You need a strategy to build a picture over time and messages must be seamless across all channels. It must all speak to the same message.”
“[Communication planning] is what most organisations get wrong. You must clearly define your objective, develop a strategy and only then develop tactical expressions. But your strategy must be fluid and adaptable to crisis situations,” said Campbell.
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Matt Bunnage (@mattbunnage) of Boldfield Computing is making a bid to repeat Derren Brown’s crowdsourcing technique to predict the lottery numbers for Saturday evening.
Matt wants people to submit their prediction via his web site. In return he promises to publish the average calculation before Saturday’s draw.
Brown claimed to use a similar technique of 24 volunteers to predict the lottery numbers on television last week although he almost certainly used a split screen to fox viewers.
Online crowdsourcing lottery experiment
Matt Bunnage (@mattbunnage) of Boldfield Computing is making a bid to use Derren Brown’s crowdsourcing technique to predict the lottery numbers for Saturday evening.
Matt wants people to submit their prediction via his web site. In return he promises to publish the average calculation before Saturday’s drawn
Brown claimed to use a similar technique of 24 volunteers to predict the lottery numbers on television last week although he almost certainly used a split screen technique.
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