The CIPR has hit out at the ASA for not consulting the PR industry on its proposed regulation of brands in social networks.
In a statement issued by the CIPR (disclosure: I’m a member of the CIPR social media panel) it said that it was given undertaking in May that the views of the PR industry would be heard.
We are disappointed this action has been taken without our involvement,” says Ann Mealor, Interim CEO at the CIPR. “We are writing to the ASA regarding our concerns and advocating the need for closer working relationships on this issue.”
The CIPR said that it has reservation about the planned changes to the ASA’s remit. It called for any definition of advertising to be properly scoped so as to avoid censoring online communication.
Here’s a delightful little app that you might like. I’ve been using it for the last year or so to rediscover old snaps. Flickr users that sign up to Photojojo’s time capsule are sent a fortnightly selection of their snaps from 12-months ago. It’s such a simple idea that is absolutely delightful.
One of the real benefits of social media is that when a document is published such as the OFCOM Market Report last week or the Advertising Standards Authority’s (ASA) extension to include a digital remit published today, the combined might of bloggers and journalists are quick to review the document and share their thoughts.
Media and marketing experts have been quick to share their views on the ASA announcement published this morning.
Opinion is polarised: consumers need to be protected and advertising standards should apply to all media yet the ASA’s approach is heavy-handed and impinges on editorial engagement.
Brew Digital’s Chris Reed is in the former camp.
“It’s been some time coming, but looks sensible, workable and financially viable – and with the advertising/search networks on board, has teeth as well.[…] The extension of the ASA’s remit means that all commercial communications, irrespective of channel, need to be legal, decent, honest and truthful.”
Marketing Week’s Russell Parsons spotlights the overlap between advertising and editorial engagement in social media.
“An ASA spokeswoman admits there will be “teething problems” and some “grey areas”, for example what is editorial and what is marketing, but adds that objections will be dealt with on a case-by-case basis using a “principles-based” approach.”
Visit 33 Digital or the Drum for overviews of the ASA’s guidelines.
Please consider donating online to UNICEF’s appeal for children in Pakistan.
Deleted celeb-Tweets make great fodder for stories for mainstream media. The spontaneous format of the platform, makes it all too easy to tweet-in-haste, and then subsequently delete.
Here’s an example of the genre spotted by The Guardian by cricket star Kevin Pietersen after he was dropped from the England squad today.
TweetMeme developer Chris Alexander suggested that the process of spotting deleted tweets could be industrialised by storing tweets for a few hours and then comparing them against messages that are subsequently flagged as deleted. But that would break Twitter’s terms and condition according to Alexander.
Spoil sports.
In a comment via Linkedin in response to my post on getting ahead in digital, journalist Clive Couldwell noted that it isn’t just graduates that are using social media to promote their career.
“Even 30-year veterans who haven’t rethought their CV in 10 years have to get their act in gear and be seen to be doing it. With the tools now at their disposal, the medium is fast approaching the content specialists. So we’ll be back on top very soon,” he said.
Individuals that want to get ahead in digital PR should use social media to build their personal reputation. At least that was the conclusion of the CIPR Summer Social workshop that I led last week on getting ahead and getting hired in digital.
I included examples from recent graduates such as Ben Cotton, Jed Hallam, Laura Tosney and Matt Watson that have used digital techniques to build their personal reputation during the last two to three years.
Their experiences getting hired into some of the UK’s leading PR and social media agencies are inspirational and worth sharing more widely. Each story shows that irrespective of the economy there is always a market for smart, proactive and motivated individuals.
It’s traditionally been tough for individuals to break into careers in journalism and PR because it took time to build networks and opportunities were limited to the number of pages of newsprint published each day. Networking relied on being invited to the right parties or getting in front of people at conferences and events.
But the web has removed all constraints to content and truly democratised personal networks. Anyone with internet access can become a publisher via a blog, Flickr or YouTube and build a network of followers on a network such as Twitter.
Video job application: Laura Tosney
Laura Tosney developed a beautiful video job application in order to get the attention of 33 Digital managing director Drew Benvie. I challenge you to watch it and be anything but utterly charmed. She got the job.
“Social media allowed me to show a future employer a lot more about my personality and work attitude than I felt I could with a traditional CV. [...] It presents you with so many ways to show people who you are and what you can do, if you’re willing to go after the opportunities,” said Tosney.
Facebook campaign: Jed Hallam
Woflstar’s Jed Hallam created a Facebook page to get the attention of his future employee and persuaded people in his network to leave recommendations. And of course Wolfstar managing director Stuart Bruce invited him for an interview and he got the job.
“[…] the key to starting out in social media was finding platforms that I was comfortable on. For some people this will be podcasting or shooting videos but for me I found Twitter and blogging gave me a comfortable outlet full of supportive and generous people,” said Hallam.
Building reputation through networks: Ben Cotton and Matt Watson
Ben Cotton works in the digital team at Edelman UK. He studied personal online reputation as part of his degree at Leeds Metropolitian University and so you could say that he had a head start.
“Whilst social media may seem daunting at first, providing you are authentic, which means being open, honest and transparent in your conversations, there is a host of opportunities and knowledge out there ready to be tapped into,” said Cotton.
“I’m constantly surprised by the tremendous level of goodwill I’ve encountered from people, who I’m yet to meet in person, but have been willing to answer questions, offer advice and let me know about potential openings,” he added.
Matt Watson used this tactic to build relationships with PR agencies including my own when he was looking for a job two years ago. During his final months at Huddersfield University he reached out to PR agencies that were working in online and social media. Three weeks later we hired him. The rest of the story, as they’ll say in the future, is searchable via Google.
Here’s a blog to plug firmly into your RSS reader.
Its Sally Whittle’s new site called Blogger.Ed. It launched this week and is shaping up well, tackling topics from getting started in blogging, such as SEO and basic HTML, through to trickier issues such as copyright, naming and shaming, and transparency.
There’s also plenty of educational content for PRs seeking to engage with bloggers and a forum where participants can seek out technical information and PRs can connect with bloggers and vice versa.
Go and have a look for yourself. I highly recommend it for bloggers and PRs alike.
Another day and another research exercise.
Today’s is from econsultancy for its 2010 online PR and social media report sponsored by bigmouthmedia.
Last year it found an industry grappling with issues of engagement, monitoring and measurement.
The research is the most exhaustive in the sector. Please consider completing the questionnaire.
If you’re working in PR and social media you might be interested in helping out two post graduate students that are working on research projects.
Laurence Baken (@PR_Social_Media) at Sheffield Hallam is taking a look at the importance of social media in the PR industry.
“I aim to find out how well PR practitioners are familiar and up-to-date with social media tools and how it enhances the PR practitioners’ power within their organizations in terms of decision-making power,” he says.
Weijia Qiu (@weijiaqui) at Newcastle University is exploring whether social media is a more cost effective channel to communicate with an audience in a downturn and whether its growth can be attributed to the recent downturn.
I ran a workshop last tonight as part of the CIPR Summer Social series on building your personal reputation online. It’s never been easier to manage your personal reputation by building networks and publishing your work.
Here’s the deck.
It kicks with an audit of your online reputation or web footprint and then describes how to create profiles on LinkedIn and Twitter, build networks and publish content. It includes case studies from people that have used social media to build their personal profile and secure jobs and concludes with a discussion about dealing with less favourable content.
I’ve pulled examples and case studies from around the social web and am grateful (pause for breath) to Ben Cotton, Carolyn Mendelsohn, Jed Hallam, Josh Halliday, Laura Tosney, Matt Watson, Mike Litman, Neville Hobson, Phil Sheldrake, Shel Holtz and Stephen Davies.
I’ll follow with a blog post next week with personal recommendations from some of this gang about how they’ve used social media to build their personal reputation.
If you’re interested in exploring this topic further I recommend you check out Antony Mayfield’s Me and My Web Shadow: How to Manage Your Reputation Online.
Steve’s up next week at the CIPR Summer Social series on word of mouth.
Escherman’s Andrew Smith and Realwire’s Adam Parker have scrutinised the reach versus engagement for 50 online news sites ranging from Heat to The Economist.
“In the past, the notion of measuring engagement with editorial content was largely theoretical. Circulation and readership figures were treated as proxies for engagement,” say Smith.
But for online PR, Google tools provide hard numbers. Parker and Smith define reach as the number of views that a page receives and engagement as the amount of time that a person spends on a page.
They find that visitors spend a widely varying amount of time on different news sites and predict how many words they are likely to have read per page.
“[…] as a general rule, specialist titles seem to have lower numbers of visitors and page views, but tend to have far higher engagement with content,” says Smith.
There is one exception. News sites such as Reuters that act as a syndication service have a high level of reach and engagement.
The lessons for online PR are clear.
