#CIPRSM | Wadds' PR Blog

October 15th, 2010 by Wadds

Media fragmentation and the future of PR

This is a presentation that I gave to the CIPR North East regional group in Newcastle this morning. It explores how the media is changing as all media becomes social and social media becomes a media category in its own right – and the resulting opportunities for PR practitioners.

The North-East has itself been a place of incredible innovation in media business models during the last 18-months and the hunt in Rothbury for Raoul Moat made it the location of one the biggest news stories in Britain this year.

The Northumberland Gazette was the first regional newspaper to trial a paywall. Josh Halliday, a former-student at Sunderland University and now journalist at The Guardian, was one of the first individuals to explore a hyper local media model with his SR2blog.

And the Trinity Mirror-owned Journal in Newcastle has pioneered a network of hyper local blogs throughout Northumberland.

The presentation content abridges much of the Social Summer series that the CIPR has been running in London each Thursday evening since early June.

Thanks to Sally Keith, Sally Pearson and Laurel Hetherington for organising the session.

Posted in Business, Media, PR
Tags: "pr jobs", #CIPRSM, CIPR, future of media, future of pr, media fragmentation, PR, pr career", Public relations, Social media
1 Comment »

August 13th, 2010 by Wadds

Building your personal reputation online (and getting hired) – lessons from recent graduates

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.

Posted in Social media
Tags: #CIPRSM, CIPR, Social media
4 Comments »

August 6th, 2010 by Wadds

Getting ahead and getting hired in social media and digital PR

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.

Posted in Business, PR, Social media
Tags: #CIPRSM, CIPR, digital footprint, digital PR, Google, LinkedIn, online reputation, recruitment, Social media, twitter, web shadow
5 Comments »

July 2nd, 2010 by Wadds

CIPR Summer Social debate finds PR and search marketing remain separate worlds

The PR industry has failed to embrace search marketing. That was the conclusion of a group of PR, social media, and search marketing professionals that met yesterday as part of the CIPR’s Social Media Summer series to debate the issue.

There are well-publicised exceptions highlighted by the recent NMA search league tables but the majority of the PR industry has seemingly yet to wake-up to even the basics of search marketing.

Analysis by Escherman’s Andrew Smith shows that the majority of the PR Week Top 150 agencies are failing to make even basic efforts to optimise their own web sites.

Disparate functions
But perhaps that’s not important. It is unlikely that PR and search marketing will be integrated until clients break down silos and recognise the opportunity for an integrated approach. And that’s going to take at least a generation of marketing professional according to We Are Social’s managing director Robin Grant.

“The opportunity for earlier wins lies in targeting entrepreneurs, small-to-medium sized businesses and marketing directors that outsource their marketing programmes,” said Grant.

Friend and foe: PR vs search
Site Visibility’s creative director Kelvin Newman spotlighted the similarities between PR and natural search. Content creation, syndication and engagement are all PR techniques he said.

Newman’s view is that the integrated use of PR to drive brand and search to drive sales is a potent combination.

But never the two shall meet according to Nixon McInnes’ managing director Will McInnes. PR and search are completely different disciplines with their own unique cultures.

“We’ve been talking about integrated PR and search marketing for at least four years. If it was going to happen it would surely have happened by now,” said McInnes.

Opportunity?
But developments such as the semantic web and social search could provide the PR industry with fresh impetus to regain ground according Klea’s director David Phillips.

Phillips is a long time PR industry commentator and said that he believed that the next generation of search engines are likely to make it increasingly difficult for search marketing agencies to manipulate search results.

Uniting around a crisis
Crisis management is the one area where search marketing and PR are integrated and the role of the normally discrete functions is well understood according to Lanson’s head of digital Simon Sanders. PR typically takes the lead advisory function but will pull in search professionals to clean up the aftermath of a crisis in search results he said.

One person that has been closely observing how PR and search marketing shakes out is Daryl Willcox, chairman and founder of DW Publishing, the media group whose products include ResponseSource and SourceWire.

In 2007 he wrote a white paper that warned that the PR profession risked being sidelined by search marketing. Today his biggest customer is a search agency.

“A fifth of the 850 press releases that are posted on SourceWire a month are from search agencies. Less than half of the releases from PR agencies include links [indicating a low awareness of SEO],” said Willcox.

Many of the individuals present had a story to share about media confusion that had resulted from search marketing agencies using what have traditionally regarded as PR channels to distribute content.

Search agencies buy PR skills
PR agencies may have been slow to embrace search but there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that search marketing agencies are hiring PR professionals in a bid to understand the editorial world.

But it’s not just the talent that they are seeking. We Are Social’s Grant said that a higher premium was placed on search marketing agencies. “Valuations are at least three times the multiple of PR agencies,” he said.

Grant predicted that search marketing agencies may start to seek out PR firms as acquisition targets in a bid to create scale. It’s unlikely to happen the other way round.

The CIPR’s Social Media Summer Series will continue to explore different aspects of digital PR and social media each Thursday evening in London throughout the summer. Please check the wiki for upcoming topics.

Posted in PR, Social media
Tags: #CIPRSM, CIPR, PR, search marketing, SEO
7 Comments »

Stephen Waddington

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