Posts Tagged ‘Blogging’
What is your online reputation number? May 15th, 2009
How influential someone is in PR has alway been a bit foggy to say the least. It is easy to claim you are influential but proof has normally been in the form of being able to open doors or hidden in the infamous black book of contacts.
In theory online makes it easier to check how influential someone is. Things have moved on in terms of people merely using the web to increase their digital footprint. To date there has been a bit of land grab in terms of occuping certain spaces and putting up profiles and leaving them to gather dust. This was useful at the beginning where you could find someone’s LinkedIn profile when you searched for their name but its hardly an indication of their influence – its merely that they exist. Now as people gather and participate in communities around them it is easier to get a better sence of their consistent presence on the web but also their level of contribution.
Piaras Kelly posted about what your Facebook connections could indicate about you sometime ago and Tom Murphy has posted more recently about an Andrew Smith comment on how the media are using LinkedIn profiles to vet the credibility about a potential spokesperson.
There is no doubt that this will continue to evolve further but it is not an easy task to acertain someone influence as Micah Baldwin comments in Mashable.com. As a starting point he points to
Incoming Traffic – Pageviews, Incoming traffic from search engines, rss subscribers
Incoming Links – Primarily manual links such as blogrolls, in-post deep links
Reader Engagement – Internal searches, time on site
Recommendations – Retweets, share stats
Connections – Number of mutual connections, number of mutual connections on multiple sites
Track Record – Age of domain, number of blog posts, length of engagement
Engagement – How often and long a person has engaged with a service online
It is possible to get a manual snapshot of someone by using some of the tools that are available. By inputting someones blog url in Technorati you can get a numercial indication of their authority and ranking. By looking at their Twitter profile you can see how many people are following them and how many updates they have made. LinkedIn will show their connections, groups, length of time on the community and you can check how active they are in that forum. Similarly with Facebook and other social media.
None of these are perfect measures and having lots of stuff online does not equate to being influential but its a better start than taking someones word for it.
Surely there is good scope for someone to develop a FREE application that is comprehensive enough to take account of the different platforms (ie number of retweets on Twitter, pics through Twitpic etc to the strength of connections in Facebook rather than numbers) so that it goes beyond a popularity contest and give a genuinely useful figure. Following 500 people is very different to being followed by 500 people. It would encourage people to move from ‘I am online’ to ‘I participate and contribute online’. If there was an acceptance of the importance of a ORN (online reputation number) number and people could increase that number by engaging more surely this would lead to an uplife in genuine online activity.
I imagine such applications would be greately aided by people inputting their handles, user names for the different platforms with boxes to fill for a wide range of social media. This is probably especially true as people use different usernames and handles. There may be some issues with walled communities but technology normally finds a way around these.
I am sure that there are a few out there that come close to this but I have not found any to date. Let me know if I am missing the obvious. A simple tool could always progress into a more complex one.
Tags: Blogging, Facebook, Online Reputation Management, PR, Public Relations, Social Media, Twitter
Posted in LinkedIn, ORM, Online Reputation Management, Online Tools, Public Relations, Twitter, Uncategorized, social networking | Comments (3)
How much time does social media take? May 1st, 2009
The IIA Social Media Working Group (disclosure - I am a member of this group) produced a white paper on blogging and launched it at a well attended breakfast last week. Brendan Hughes, eCommerce manager with FBD, Michelle Daly, Paddy Power Trader and Aedan Ryan, Director of Puddleducks.ie all gave some practical insights into running a blog, what they experienced in terms of feedback/community and increased findability. Aedans personal findings reflected the findings of the white paper from why blog, to the benefits of it while Michelle presented a more complex arrangement of running multiple blogs. Both integrated their blogs with other online properties from Twitter to Facebook. All three companies have well presented blogs and take it seriously.
Emmet Ryan of Villa81 gives a snap short of the launch in a short video of the launch.
So the big question – how much time and resource does it take. Aedan, who would be reflective of many Irish SMEs, spends 4-6 hours a week on his blog. Michelle was a bit more coy in terms of actual resources invested but did discuss the outsource model that they utilise. At the Blogger Collision course many people reported spending up to 3-4 hours per post, with some posting every day. Assuming that the blog is unlikely to stand by itelf then you also needs to factor the other social media into the mix:
- Twitter (30 min to 1 hr a day if not posting regularly and mainly monitoring),
- Facebook (10-30 mins a day checking, 1-2 hr for multiple updates),
- Bebo (similar to Facebook),
- Flickr 30 mins per photo upload session (captioning etc),
- Pix.ie 30 mins per photo upload,
- YouTube (30 mins upload but 4 hr editing, 1-2 hrs of production is simple),
- Podcasting (20 min upload, 1-2 hr of editing if short, 1-2 hr of production and planning)
- Monitoring (30 mins per day).
This is all very much on the back of an envelope (and does not take account of the creation time) but it can grow into double digits per week very fast and I would imagine that digital is taking a disproportionate amount of the percentage time that people have to spend on marketing – especially at this early stage. There is no doubt that Social Media engagement does deliver but has great capacity to soak up every hour in the day. My experience has been that without some structures you can get extremely distracted and follow ‘interesting’ trails that lead to other ‘interesting trails’. As new tools, blogs and interesting pointers from twitter emerge being disciplined is now even more important.
So if you are looking to invest in social media here are some pointer on managing the time element a bit better.
- Use outlook or some online calendar to dedicate time in the day when you catch upon socia media rather than when you feel lilke it.
- Decide in advance how much time you are going to dedicate to it.
- Be methodical in the list of social media you run through to ensure you dont forget some.
- Allocate time to research and monitoring.
- Use RSS feed to keep up to date on blogs you follow rather than random surfing.
- Use tools such as Tweetdeck to Monitter to help give a snap shot of activity.
- Build an editorial calendar and stick to the frequency that suits your business.
All this before you even start to think about what you want to say. The good news is that once you get into a rhythm you get much faster and efficient
Tags: Blogging, paddy power, puddleducks, social mediam IIA, Twitter
Posted in Blogging, Events, Twitter, social networking | Comments (0)
Some likely changes to the PR industry! January 21st, 2009
I started this post as ‘the Future of PR companies’ but it was too broad and looked like an enormous post so I have distilled to some observations.
The public relations industry is posed to change enormously and at the same time set to remain the same. Let me explain. Changes in social media (and all the new skills it involves), a balancing of focus away from traditional media and all the new services mean a very welcome change in what PR companies do. Much of the adoption will come from bottom up pressure and new entrants bringing new ‘native’ and purer online skills. However the success of PR into the future is not only dependent on mastering new platforms but rather utilising and adapting the central communications and messaging skills. The innate gut feel of what is a good story, understanding the temperature of the moment, know what to say and when to say it and having ones finger on the pulse takes a long time to build up. Largely this life time skill set can be limited by constricted outlets ie just dealing with traditional media.
So how will the emergence of new media change what future PR companies look like and how they work. Some areas where i think we will see change include:
1. Collaboration
Collaboration between the industry is already growing through platforms such as Plaxo and Linked In. Rapidly formed collaborative groups formed PR groups on Facebook, Linked In, Ning show a willingness to share that I have only previously witnessed with close colleagues in the past. As people develop specialist skills this could easily evolve into PR practitioners utilising the collective skills to work on client projects. This will be slow to happen with larger agencies but more likely with smaller niche players. e.g. some looking to develop a Linked In strategy could utilised Krisna De or Social Networking could utilise Conor Lynch. From a clients perspective the experience would be project managed to appear as one.
2. Location
Physical location is already reducing in importance in PR. City Centre offices were alway the preferred location for a variety of historical reasons. This included being close to media outlets. The need for this diminished with the introduction of email. Building on the collaborative theme PR practitioners could be based anywhere in the country with good broadband connections. As the future PR practitioner will not be fully focused on national media and could be focused on social media, for example, then location is less important.
3. Skills Sets
Apart from the central communications skills from writing, developing messages etc a deeper computer literacy will be needed. Consider first how the media is likely to change to help illustrate this. Most traditional media have a website, most have blogs, some have started to incorporate PodCasting and some have Video Casting. PR should be able to deliver content in these forms which means need hardware and software skills namely audio and video recorders and the related editing software from audacity to audition to premier pro. Yes this can be outsourced but these skills are not just going to be needed for media relations. Most social media demand multimedia content from videos, pictures to podcast material. Turn around is important in having these skills. If you organise a press conference and are uploading to YouTube, blog, Facebook etc then you will need to be able to do some basic edits and get it up fast for it to be relevant. The era of corporate video costing many thousands of euro and taking months to develop has moved to shorter, faster, less higher quality (which will probably not be noticed on web platforms) but higher number of interactions. One size no longer fits all.
3. Blogger Relations
There are load of guides to blogger relations from how to guides to codes of practice. PR has received bad press to date here because people treat it the same way as bad traditional media relations. Mainly this covers the write once and send to all practice. Not good in traditional media relations but worse in blogger relations. So what is the impact. PR agencies work on a time based model. Clients buy x amount of time at set rates. The price of this service has largely remained static as PR companies got faster at syndicating press releases due to email and better word processors. Problem is that blogger relations takes time. Individual pitching, understanding the individual blog focus and the blogger themselves, commenting over time, tracking through RSS feeds, researching them through the various methods Damien Mulley mentions all takes time. To short circut this some PR companies just added blogger email addresses to their BCC lists with poor reputation results. The end result is that as blogger and journalists reach parity in terms of influence that PR may become more expensive.
There are many more examples of how the future PR will look from Online Reputation Management to influencing social network but will hold for another post.
Eoin
Tags: blogger relations, Blogging, online collaboration, Online PR, Public Relations, Social Media
Posted in Online PR, Online Tools, Public Relations, Uncategorized, social networking | Comments (2)
Business Blogging Survey January 14th, 2009
One of the Irish Internet Association Working Groups is currently undertaking a blogging survey to gain insight into how much time companies spend blogging, why they blog and how they measure success. Blogging is still at relatively early stages in Ireland and there is still a wide gulf between active bloggers and main stream Irish business. The results of the survey will be published to coincide with a white paper that the Social Networking Working Group is producing. The paper is being produce collaboratively both face to face as not all experts are equal. The survey can be found here and all filled out entries appreciated.
Tags: Blogging, Irish Internet Association, social networking
Posted in Blogging, Research | Comments (0)