Unsurprisingly none of the big name wire services took part or have commented on the story.

Check econsultancy for the full post. Here’s my comments.

“The public relations industry is embracing social media and slowly moving to direct relationships where relationships are built via direct engagement. It’s a long haul that will take a decade to work out. In the meantime wire services provide a short cut and though diminished will continue to have a role whilst these changes work through.”

“The press release has become a general purpose document that an organisation publishes on its web site and issues via a wire service, not to inform the media of a news event, but typically to reach broader audiences and more often than not to satisfy an internal audience.

“Wire services will always have a role in the financial market where a legislative framework demands that information is communicated simultaneously via prescribed channels.

“During the downturn there has almost certainly been an increase in demand for wire services as a catch all means of ensuring that a press release reaches as broad an audience as possible. It’s often an issue of scale for large international organisations.

“The online search industry has recognised the opportunity that press releases and wire services offer to build inbound links as a tactic to improve keyword search rankings.

“Faux news content is often distributed via a wire service with the goal of securing widespread coverage around target keywords and web links on editorially driven web sites that are ranked highly by search engines. It’s a mechanical process to game results that is a flawed. It creates confusion and can result in reputational damage.

“Wire services need to innovative and work out their relative to information flows as media continues to fragment and social media develops. Those that recognise these changes and figure out how to continue to be relevant by embracing social media will thrive.”

Thanks Vikki.

Head to Twitter and search for the transport operator that you used to get you to work this morning, the name of the high street or ecommerce site that you recently visited, or the restaurant where you’re planning to eat tonight.

You’ll turn up a stack of insights from customers noisily expressing their views. Technology in the form of monitoring solution is essential to manage the huge volumes of customer data.

We’ve tracked the life cycle of a social profile for numerous clients at Speed. Launch a profile on Facebook or Twitter to engage with customers and within less than a week you’ll be dealing with customer service and sales issues.

Consumers are using social media to short cut existing customer management systems such as call centres. Good communication and integration between PR, marketing, customer service and sales is critical to meet consumer expectations.

It’s an issue that Econsultancy’s Online Reputation and Buzz Monitoring 2012 Buyers Guide recognises:

“This step-change has resulted in a shift in consumer expectations. Many customers now expect a public response when they mention a brand on a social network or have an issue or complaint. The absence of a swift response (in real-time if possible) is now seen as an abject ‘fail’ and responding online is increasingly seen as the norm.”

The Econsultancy guide assesses the marketplace for reputation monitoring solutions from the perspective of the buyer. It profiles 15 companies offering reputation and buzz monitoring technology and tools.

The companies included in the report are: Alterian, ASOMO, AT Internet, Attentio, BrandsEye, Brandwatch, Cymfony, Infegy (Social Radar), Market Sentinel, Meltwater Group, Onalytica, Radian6, Sentiment Metrics, Sysomos and Visible Technologies.

Econsultancy stops short of recommending any of the suppliers featured in the guide. Instead it characterises each of the organisation and its’ tools against a variety of criteria, namely history, business model, technology, data sources, monitoring and reporting, language support and cost.

I had chance to review an early draft and comment on the findings.

Organisations are integrating social media with other forms of marketing. Here are some of the highlights:

• 80% of organisations integrate social media activity with email marketing
• half integrate SEO with social media, highlighting the relationship between search and social
• the biggest increase in the level of integration is for print media; 32% compared to 21% last year

Social media is not replacing traditional marketing. Some respondents explained that their organisations had ramped up social media efforts without cutting into traditional marketing.

Elsewhere the report describes a market that is growing up and starting to get to grips with standards, governance, measurement and training.

The State of Social Report 2011, sponsored by LBi and bigmouthmedia, is based on anonline survey of more than 1,000 respondents, carried out in September and October 2011.

Stuart Bruce has written an excellent summary of the report on his blog. The report costs £250 or is available for free to econsultancy members.

Have no doubt Twitter is a business tool for marketing, conversation, PR, engagement, branding, awareness, customer service, plus much more (Econsultancy lists 26 business applications in its guide).

Used effectively, Twitter can bring you closer to your customers, generate traffic to your website, support customer service, extend your marketing and PR efforts, and boost brand awareness.

Businesses broadly have two approaches to Twitter: the first is a race for followers with minimal engagement and content broadcast from the smart phone or laptop of an enthusiastic employee; the second is more considered approach

Econsultancy’s Aliya Zaidi has written an excellent guide and I’m not just saying that because she has quoted me throughout the report. The 90-page guide covers best practice and insight from brands such as Dell, First Direct, Innocent Drinks, Walmart and Zappos.

My favourite examples of good Twitter use are firms that have a well-balanced mix of news, customer service and engagement while also adding humour and creativity to conversations. Speed’s clients’ aside two accounts that I’d spotlight are @harleystea, my local coffee shop, and @mmm_newcastle, a Newcastle-based deli.

Finally, if you are new to Twitter please don’t do another thing until you have read my new Twitter rules blog post. Aliya was kind enough to quote my post in her guide.

The report is £250 to download on a pay-per-view basis, but Econsultancy members can access all its reports for free (membership starts from £295 for a single user).

Related posts:

• Sage against machines: the new Twitter rules – 6 July 2011
• Twitter for business: the experts’ view (econsultancy) – 8 August, 2011

We’re in a period of experimentation. More than 90 per cent of companies have engaged in some form of social media programme but a third are spending less than £5,000 a year and 28 per cent are not spending anything at all.

Much of the social media activity is taking place on Facebook and Twitter, with the vast majority of clients (80 per cent and 83 per cent of respondents respectively) using these sites as part of their social media strategy.

The measurement of return on investment remains primitive: 72 per cent of respondents said that it is one of the three most important metrics that are used.

The econsultancy report sponsored by bigmouthmedia is based on an online survey of more than 800 respondents in August and September 2010.

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.

The 70-page report lifts the lid on client-side and agency digital programmes. It tells a story of an industry experimenting with social media programmes (typically with no dedicated budget or a small budget) and grappling with the issues of engagement, monitoring and measurement.

The report is a must-read for anyone in the PR industry who aspires to remain in the PR industry. Here are some highlights:

• 46 per cent of companies and 45 per cent of agencies are using tools to monitor their brand online. Without exception, all businesses should be tracking the conversations around their brand online. There really is no excuse as the results of the research show such tools needn’t cost a thing.
• 47 per cent of companies are responding to negative comments online. Negative comment is often the start of a conversation that can ultimately transform a vocal critic into a loyal supporter, able to offer support and understanding for your business. Yet all too often, brands are on mute.
• The report is in no doubt that Twitter is the PR tool of 2009. However we’re still in the early stages of experimentation and there are very few examples of real innovation. It’s easy to get hung up on follower numbers and use Twitter as a simple one-sided broadcast channel for corporate messages.
• Metrics to define social media success remain a work in progress. Measurement has been an ongoing issue for the PR industry during the last 50 years. A series of cross- industry initiatives such as Social Measurement Camp are focussing their efforts specifically on what success looks like for a brand in a social network. In the meantime direct traffic and the tone of conversations around a brand are good proxies.
• While the measurement of social media remains an issue, businesses are very clear about the desired benefits of investing in social media programmes, namely brand reputation and customer engagement.

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.

“The future for QR codes is very bright. In Japan they are widely used by companies and consumers, but in most other parts of the world there are a couple of things that need to happen before QR codes really take off.”

I’ve blogged about the potential of QR codes in the past but think its a topic worth revisiting.

econsultancy provides a four point guide to creating a personal QR code using KAYWA QR Code Generator. Here’s a QR code that I created with my personal information.

Search Google for a reader such as Neo Reader to snap and decode the QR code using your mobile phone.

We’ve been just completed a piece of planning work for a prospect and spotted the issue that Econsultancy calls social media succession planning in its Online PR and Social Media Trends briefing.

It’s an issue for any organisation where an individual is the face of the company in social networks. The risk to the business is the individual building up relationships with customers and then choosing to leave the organisation.

In the sector that we’ve been researching brands are represented on Twitter either by a corporate account or an individual, or in a few instances both.

Econsultancy recommends that a branded Twitter account combined with individual Twitter representatives is best way to mitigate risk.