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Search, social and video conf in one? We can’t stop talking about Google+…and why it’s brilliant for public relations people

14 July 2011
by Caroline Higgins
Tags: BSkyB, Google, PR, Social Media

FINALLY. That’s the way I feel about Google+.

There are lots of Google-detractors out there, and with the BSkyB bid quashed by Murdoch himself, I totally understand why competition commission and reputation management may be the words on everyone’s lips. But honestly, this is one PR launch that’s been lost in the noise and you’ve got to pay attention because it will go BIG.

Having been invited to the ‘test group’ (thank you Ben), I went about creating my ‘circles’. These little groups create communities for you on your profile so you can really simply send status updates or share photo albums with just your friends, or your business contacts, or your mum, without letting anyone else see it. It’s what I so wanted in Twitter. In Facebook. In Linkedin. But it’s all in one place and I feel totally in control.

Now this isn’t intended to be an advert, but I’m genuinely too excited to contain it. For clients, Google+ has huge potential since it doesn’t require your contacts to approve you before you can add them to your profile or circles. So if you wanted to send out a message to all your clients, or a particular media group, they wouldn’t know which circle they were in but they would be in one easy place for you to send messages to, the latest corporate video, or photos from an event. There’s also a video ‘hangout’ facility, which may well be the next-gen free conference facility. If Google listens to feedback though, it seems the current capabilities in this test version could be just the tip of the iceberg.

Fancy trying it together? Get invited now!

What We’re Raving About: Klout

11 July 2011
by Toby Schuster
Tags: analytics, influence, Klout, measurement, online profiles, Social Media

Klout provides social media analytics that measures a user’s influence across their social network by collecting data from sites such as Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. It measures the size of a person’s network, the content created, and how other people interact with that content.

Social media influence is measured by using data points from Twitter such as: following count, follower count, re-tweets, list memberships, how many spam/dead accounts are following you, how influential the people who re-tweet you are, and unique mentions. This information is blended with Facebook and LinkedIn data such as comments, likes, and the number of friends in your network, to come up with a very consumer-friendly “Klout Score”.

Even better for PR and comms people, and unlike Facebook Insights or Google Analytics, you can determine anyone’s* Klout score and is therefore a fantastic research tool as part of any social media audit and strategy.

*With an online profile.

The Social Web is Not Flat

by Dominique Lahaix - eCairn
Tags: blogging, conversations, influence, mummy bloggers, social marketing, Social Media

In the early days of social media and web 2.0, brands and marketers were fascinated and scared at the same time by how the new web was enabling direct access to consumers.  Brands discovered the power of reaching millions of customers on a one-to-one basis, while marketers helped them deal with unsolicited feedback on issues related to their product/service; or in fact, anything that could help the brand increase its social proximity to the prospective client.

Still, what we now know is this:

- People (and people behind brands) can’t socialise with millions of people at the same time.  According to Dunbar, we as individuals can’t actually develop relationships with more than 150 people at a given time.

-  Humans have an irrepressible desire to differentiate and socialise with like-minded people sharing a passion or an objective.

- Engagement/socialisation happens mostly while sharing content, and different people in the ecosystem started to play different roles like content writing and content distribution (what Forrester calls Mass Mavens and Mass Connectors)

- Bloggers play a key role in the eco-system both as Mavens and Connectors, (see this Yahoo! Study on the role of bloggers in Twitter).

The net is that the social Internet is far from being flat, but reveals itself more as a network of tribes with their own rules, slang, symbols and influencers.

“Community is the new demographics” (as Jaffe Juice puts it). “One size fits all” programmes, whether they entail listening, engagement, or a “Facebook fan page with millions of people sharing nothing but a like” clearly fail to grasp the diversity of these tribes and communities.

To really understand communities, we have to look at them in context.

Here below is a visual example from the UK “Mums” Community in eCairn.

Each node represents one UK mummy blogger; arrows between nodes represent links (direct reference or blogroll) and the colour is automatically assigned based on the discovery of clusters of nodes.

Different clusters make up the UK Mums community, as shown above: a core red cluster is mainly talking about parenting and general mum topics; the green cluster is more focussed on food; others (navy blue) are into books/writing or (purple) fashion.

That said, it is still difficult to discern the motivation for people to connect in a separated group, like the yellow cluster.

So, what is it they talk about? Here is a mining of last week’s conversations:

Besides the usual suspects, you will notice “Father’s Day” and “Three word gallery”. The latter, which refers to a contest in which mums have to come up with creative, three-word-long taglines for photos, strikes me as a particularly good example of how social the Internet has become.

And who are these mums? Here are a few of them…

The most influential mum in the UK:

 The most vocal mum on the topic of vouchers and coupons:

Another point worth noting is the absence of “coupon” or “voucher” among the top expressions.  Using US moms as a benchmark, it is clear that vouchers/coupons do not have the same importance on both sides of the Atlantic.

As you can see from this example, engaging with social media is far more complex than just replying to anyone who mentions a brand name or a topic.

And I guess this is excellent news for marketing professionals!

Is Social Media Eating PR’s Lunch?

by Ana Mangahas
Tags: communications, PR, Social Media, Twitter

Now before you think, “what a bizarre question,” with regard to this blog post’s title, let’s just stop and reflect on one thing for a moment: Twitter.

Nothing about Twitter could have bypassed your notice; and if Time magazine had a “Thing of the Year” issue, the Tweety-bird logo should be firmly plastered on its front page.

From disgruntled gaming flacks, to super-injunction mania to  Twitter’s very own EMEA HQ having recently set up shop in London, you’d be hard-pressed not to have personally experienced the Twitter juggernaut first-hand. Twitter is on the brink of ubiquity, and as in the case of Wikileaks and the Arab Spring, it’s also being lauded as a tool for democracy, or at the very least, the democratisation of information of great public interest.

Which brings me to my original question: when Twitter’s around, who needs flacks? Why rely on PR intermediaries when all journalists need (or so it seems) is Tweetdeck, caffeine, super speed-reading skills and a knack for smelling controversy at 140 characters?

Twitter is ultimately, one of the best social technologies to help the PR profession, and in fact, we wish more journalists were using it. It does have its limitations, so the more important question for PROs is surely how to use Twitter practically, responsibly and sagely in one’s day-to-day job and in broader reputation management.

Let’s look at how we got here, in the first place. 

Twitter’s success is that despite the limitations of 140 character tweets, people have found it a fun and useful platform for conversations. According to a lot of my own friends (and I agree), it’s even more conversation-friendly than Facebook, which developed additional social features (e.g. chat) before Twitter did.  Furthermore, when you consider that in 2009, the second-highest volume of activity on Twitter was conversation-based, it makes you wonder about the fate of personal and corporate email, and even Skype or other forms of IM.

What’s on Twitter (Pear Analytics, August 2009 report): 

• Pointless babble – 40%
• Conversational – 38%
• Pass-along value – 9%
• Self-promotion – 6%
• Spam – 4%
• News – 4%

Twitter in a business-to-business context continues to be a trickier subject for many corporate communicators and here is where we think there is huge scope for Twitter become a highly-desired (not feared) part of the communications arsenal.  This is also where the restraint of a wizened PR pro is really valuable, because let’s face it: there are enough examples of Twitter gaffes…we don’t need to add to the list.

For any corporate/b2b brand looking to step into the Twitter-sphere, we would offer the following considerations:

-  Objective:  perhaps the most common stumbling block, it’s always a worthwhile exercise before engaging in – then abruptly choosing to abandon – Twitter. The objective should be rooted in a real business need, and if possible, tracked via a set of key performance indicators (KPIs).  A simple one could be tied to sales, with the drop-down list of “How did you hear about us?” to include Twitter as an option for new customers or clients.  

 - Audiences: some companies get on Twitter with the express purpose of reaching the media, by using Twitter as an extension of the PR process. Be aware also, that more and more journalists are asking to be “pitched” exclusively via Twitter, so it’s helpful to be informed about their rules of engagement.

Mummy bloggers are another tribe in the B2C world with specific pitching requirements – especially when being asked to review products – and they will normally be very transparent about their rules of engagement on various social platforms.  

-   Tone and Manner : It still amazes us how a “sober” brand on Twitter can sometimes go over-the-top with exclamation points and other effusive writing/punctuation that makes tweets sound over-zealous…or just plain hysterical. Fully recognising there’s a human being (or several) behind those tweets, the writer’s tone shouldn’t be a huge departure from the overall brand’s tone – be it authoritative, informative, or simply humble. Increasingly, there is also no such thing as “delete” on Twitter. Not everyone will feel this more painfully or acutely as some of these unfortunates, but a small dollop of pre-Tweeting restraint never hurts.

-  360-degree communications: And here is perhaps the most important point: Twitter can’t replace an honest-to-goodness relationship, which needs cultivation online and off-. It’s trite but true.   

Twitter is a necessary part of the full journalist contact mix – a call here, a lunch there, a roundtable here, an industry conference there, and tweets and DMs everywhere in between.  As one journalist friend put it:

“Twitter allows me to frequently update and communicate with PRs, making it easier for both sides to keep track of new editorial features or product releases,” said Matt Tuffin, editor of IPC Media. “Introductions can be made without having to ‘cold call’, ensuring both sides communicate directly with the desired person. The less formal nature of Twitter also makes it easier to make a personal connection, and for messages to be more succinct.”

And yes, there may be times when Twitter leaks need to be managed and clients counselled about rumours circling around in the ‘Twether’. This is hardly making a job in the communications sector an endangered species; it’s making our job more challenging and dynamic in its increasingly less linear form; and altogether much more valuable.

Is Facebook heading for saturation point? Should this affect PR campaigns?

14 June 2011
by Claire Walker
Tags: brands, Facebook, PR, pr campaigns

The unthinkable happens. Brands arrive and rise at a breathtaking pace. Brands disappear alarmingly quickly, as well. Who remembers Netscape and Alta Vista, to name just two?

Today I read on the Inside Facebook blog that Facebook growth in North America has slowed for the second month in a row, although overall, Facebook is expanding (especially in Brazil, India and Mexico). Is this the beginning of the end?

Still strewn across my desk is “The F-Factor”, a great report by trendwatching.com on friends, fans and followers and why the Facebook phenomenon is important to consumers, influencing their purchasing decisions in ever-more sophisticated ways.

Should PRs panic? Well, with 700 million Facebook users worldwide, losing a few million users in North America won’t make a dent. A 45% site expansion over the last year is amazing but is Facebook heading for saturation?

Facebook is still an unstoppable beast and any company needs to consider Facebook and social media generally, as a part of its communications strategy. In terms of proliferation, ease and entertainment, nothing else comes close to Facebook…yet.  But I do think people will get bored and look for something new, and there will be a contender to Facebook, as indeed Facebook has become the contender for Google, which seemed unthinkable in 2005.