“I started blogging in 2007 during my final year at Leeds Met. However, in Oct 2009 I wanted to change tact and produce something more social media orientated, in order to try and land a social media agency role. I’m a firm believer that having a sound grasp and recorded opinion on industry issues is a great way to differentiate yourself when job hunting.”
“I also wanted a fresh start using WordPress and to get away from the student angst posts e.g. will I get a PR job and focus more on wider industry issues. It has proven to be a wonderful place to collect my thoughts as was initially hoped, however one of the unintended consequences is that it has been an absolutely brilliant networking and personal PR tool.”
PR is the management of reputation. That used to exclusively mean using media relations to build trust between an organisation and its audiences.
But traditional media is in turmoil: ad revenue is at an all time low thanks to the recession and the internet has reduced the cost of publication and distribution to almost zero.
The rise of social networks has led consumers to fundamentally change their media consumption habits. Consumers are becoming contributors.
The impact on the PR profession has been dramatic. Command and control media relations no longer works and increasing brands are building direct relationships with their audiences using compelling content and story telling.
These changes formed the core of a guest lecture I gave on digital communication to the International PR MA course at the University of Cardiff yesterday.
The slidedeck cites five trends in the media and the rise of social media – and five areas where I believe PR professionals need to skill-up as a result.
Paperchase customers are using Twitter and Customer Reviews on Amazon (the product page has since been pulled) to vent their fury at the alleged copyright theft of work by independent artist HiddenEloise.
Econsultancy’s Aliya Zaidi has written an excellent summary and analysis of the story making the point that social media has become an incredibly effective tool to expose corporate misdemeanors.
The blogosphere is buzzing with about the Tory campaign poster hack launched by MyDavidCameron.com built by Clifford Singer, creative director at Sparkloop. He is the bloke behind the Other TaxPayer’s Alliance website and has no political affiliation whatsoever.
But that hasn’t stopped Labour’s campaign machine nabbing the concept and adopting it as part of its campaign. It’s become a social object. I’m sure Clifford is delighted with the attention.
But the Tories aren’t amused and have gone into overdrive criticising Labour’s negative campaigning. Instead they should focus their energy on developing an innovation social campaign.
I maintain that the forthcoming election is unlikely to see any breakthrough social media campaigning by any of the major parties.
Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales is raising funds again from users. It’s an annual occurrence. Wikipedia’s free-to-access crowd-sourced encyclopaedia is a noble cause and extremely useful. I’ve chipped in again and would happily pay a subscription.
Wikipedia’s fundraising efforts demonstrate that however worthy a community or social project it needs assured finance if it isn’t to rely solely on volunteer effort. And even then there are basic costs that need to be met.
Yet we’ve entered a period of almost dot com-like exuberance where social projects are launched almost daily without a business model based on financial return or indeed any of the alternative economic metrics outlined in Chris Anderson’s book Free.
Ultimately I think that Wikipedia’s fundraise shows that there no such thing as free – just different ways financing a project.
Location based marketing has been mooted for sometime as the panacea of customer relationship marketing (CRM). Foursquare may just have cracked it and monetised its income stream in the process.
I checked into China Town when I nipped out of the office for lunch and discreetly in the corner of the screen was a link to nearby Hummus Bros. The link had a two-for-one offer for the local Mayor.
I get to visit a new place for lunch. Hummus Bros get a customer. Foursquare receives ad revenue. Everyone’s happy. If I visit regular and grab the Mayor’s title I’ll be rewarded with discount.
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.
Mums’ blogs and communities are one of the strongest social media verticals but Dads’ blogs are few and far between and good ones are extremely hard to find.
Parenting isn’t equitable between the sexes of course. But Dads are more involved than any other previous generation in the upbringing for their children and Dads as the primary career are increasingly common. At least that’s what our work for Tesco Baby tells us.
Yet this level of involvement isn’t spilling over into online conversations. Why is that? I polled my Twitter network on the topic last week and received a variety of answers.
Thanks to @markpinsent, @mynameisearl, @dannyWhatmough, @rhoughton, @andismit and @katiemoffat.
“The door that we have walked through to allow justice and freedom-of-speech through the wisdom of crowds can also easily succumb to the wisdom of mobs. Society hasn’t really thought through how to deal with all the ramifications.”
I thought we’d observed a game changing moment. Not a chance. There are currently more than 300 so-called super injunctions holding tight in the UK according to Joshua Rozenberg on Sky News on Saturday morning (via @rfenwick).
Was the Trafigura incident a one off? I doubt it. But don’t let the Trafigura case fool you. Legal process is alive and well on the Internet.
Kluth identifies three “layers” of media that he consumes:
Professional media
The Altantic and New York Times on a Kindle for “global headlines and mass market news.” Various “publications and blogs including sources not traditionally considered news” via an RSS reader
Social curation
Online and offline friends have become media editors pointing out interesting content via email, blog comments and Facebook
Intimate media
Content produced by family and intimate friends that by its nature is intended for a tiny audience
It’s a neat summary of how our appetite for media is increasing and how technology is providing the means to edit and filter. In his post Kluth concludes that there is no crisis in media – and that as “one media era of media ends, another [is] starting.”
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.
As a PR tactic embargos are broken and has been for the last 12 months. Publications from Techcrunch to the Wall Street Journal no longer respect the tactic as a means of managing the release of news.
Social media channels such as blogs, Facebook and Twitter has led to PR stories frequently leaking out before their intended release.
“[…] one of the major causes of problems has been some PR agencies’ tendency to spam everyone they can think of with a story, rather than relying on more traditional skills of developing relationships with key, relevant journalists on a one-on-one basis.”
“The PR industry is moving wholesale to the discipline of the financial markets whereby news is managed by a small team and kept under strict wraps until the break date and then distributed to all audiences at the same time.”
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.
Celebrities may have popularised social media sites such as Twitter but marketing folk have been quick to follow.
The report cites instances of how social media is being applied for qualitative research, track conversation around a brand, develop brand, drive sales, build relationships with journalists and manage customer relationships.
Econsultancy’s documents are always succinct but packed with insight. This report, like others before it, is a must read for anyone in a PR or marketing role.