Tag Archives: PR

What happens when social media really takes off.

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I am surprised that the launch of Microsofts Kinect, the long expected arrival of internet TVs by year end and the never ending expansion of cloud based services has not generated more debate about the potential impact on PR and social media.

In the not too distant future instead of the collection of different remote controls, DVD/VHS players, games consoles and related bits you will eventually have a very large screen with a built in sensor that can pick up and interpret your movements.  This will all be connect to a ultra fast broadband connection which pulls down the different services you are looking for from entertainment channels, social media platforms, your photos, home videos and music collection.  The lines we draw between different media, storage and internet access will become completely blurred.  Instead  of thinking PC for internet access, TV for news and programmes, stereo and radio for music we will consume it all through one screen.  For alot of people this is already a reality as they access TV via RTE’s iPlayer on their PCs or laptop.  We will probably spend more money on sound systems and bigger screens as ultra fast broadband via fibre becomes more of a commodity.

All of this sounds wonderful and not too futuristic but it has seriouly implications for the PR industry.

Picture this.  You will be sitting on your sofa, to change a channel, increase the volume you merely waving your hands.   You are watching the 9 O’Clock news or PrimeTime and see something about company.  You wave your hand another direction and your collection of social media appears along with a virtual key board.  As the piece is still running on split screens you visit the company website for more information.  You also decide to check out their facebook page and decide that what was reported is worthy of posting a comment or you just check what others are saying.  You go to the personal sites of the spokesperson via LinkedIn or another to see how credible they are.  You tweet your comments on what is being covered with your own personal networks and make judgement calls on it.  If it particularly irked you, you DM friends and organise for a coordinated response to the company.  DMs will naturally switch to video chatter where you see the people in your network and the debate leaves a less trackable footprint.  Parodies of the crisis/spokespeople performance will appear instantly as people create their own mocking content.  The phone number pops up in the company search and you call the organisation to register your view point – all from your couch.  Finally you organise a flash mob to appear at the company or outlet to register a protest, video record it and upload to keep the debate going.

A lot of this all happens at the moment.  Anyone checking out twitter at the weekend will see lots of comments by people about whats on TV and radio.  This ranges from mere obervational to wide ranging debates.  At the moment this is a trickle as you need to have a reasonable smart phone, be working on your PC or feel motivated enough to go online.  Once people have access to all of these on one ease to navigate screen its set to explode.

Most companies have a reasonable feel for the increased importance of social media and have started down the line of building a social media strategy.  This will move it from a nice to do to a must have.  Here are some of the changes I can see.

  • Social media monitoring and responding becomes a 24 hour job.
  • Debate will be swift and much more far reaching.
  • After hours online chatter will have matured by the time most people get to the desk the following morning.
  • Social media tombstones which have not been updated will be highly visible and reflect poorly.
  • The expectation that there will be a company representative at all times will grow (via social media or phone lines).
  • Big launches and crisis may need to have experienced teams working on them on a 24/7 basis.
  • The weight attached to traditional media will continue to be extremely important but debate will take place else where.
  • Local issues will get even more global exposure and debate.
  • Messaging will morph and adapt as the temperature of debate rages.
  • Expectation of an active presence on a broader range of channels.
  • Ability to rapidly create content to match particular platforms will increase from Video – YouTube, Photography, Pix.ie, Facebook etc
  • Traditional PR outreach will need to be integrated into social media outreach.
  • Communications, marketing and online teams will need to be synched.
  • Close community debate will be harder to track especially if video or DM orientated.
  • Coordinated action will spill over into real life organised action.
  • Nature and tone of online debate and chatter will change as it moves from early innovators to mass audience.

None of this is massively different from what PR companies are faced with every day but the scale, speed and timing are very different.  9-5 just wont work and ill thought comments will spread much faster and to wider communities.  At the moment this is contained due to technological barriers, once these disappear a regular tidal waves will appear.  Consider the difference between 20-30 tweets from a few influentials which can network out to a few thousand via retweets versus the 600,000 people who view PrimeTime.  How well resourced would an Irish or international company be to that larger figure but also a much broader profile.  Some Irish companies I have spoken to can be dismissive of what they view as a small Irish Twitter community while they are consignant of the impact of high profile programmes.  Merge the two with sufficent numbers and you enter a whole new arena.

Of course its not all bad and with all this come huge opportunities but the the reality is its not that far away.

PS: Since writing this I stumbled across this interesting report by emarketer on social TV trends amongst different demographics.

3D image technology give lift to photography.

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PR companies generate a lot of really good photography from media launches to product launch shots.  Normally they are only distributed to the media and remain on file server until someone requests them which is a shame given the relatively high expense of them.  This is a legacy from the days when prints were ordered and with each print costing up to 20 euro, executives were reluctant to order what was not going to be reprinted.  Things have changed greatly since then:

1. Most photographers will give unlimited usage of the images and supply them on disk following an asignment.

2. Social media has created a wealth of new platforms to get extra value and better visual understanding of an organisation or the product.

At the most basic level photos should be uploaded to the company website – ideally in a format where they can be downloaded.  Social media sites like Flickr and Pix.ie should also be optimised especially if you have developed a community there.  Facebook, bebo and blogs can really be enhanced by including these images in posts and updates.

To date these images are also mainly 2D static images and give little interactivity or ability to see from multiple angles.  Now you can produce 3D images for free using Photosynth which is technology developed by Microsoft (disclosure they are also a client).  In their own words it ”allows you to take a bunch of photos of the same scene or object and automagically stitch them all together into one big interactive 3D viewing experience that you can share with anyone on the web.”

Photosynth gives the ability to reconstruct the scene or object from a bunch of flat photographs.  The free webbased technology examines images for similarities to each other and uses that information to estimate the shape of the subject and the vantage point each photo was taken from. With this information, it recreates the space and uses it as a canvas to display and navigate through the photos.

In essence you take a bunch of photos (20+) of the scene walking through or around it, upload them to the site (you need to set up a profile but simple enough) and then the technology does the rest.

You are left with an image similar to below:

Photos taken at the launch of airbike.ie showing their range of Yamaha FJR 1300A motorcycles.

Photos taken at the launch of airbike.ie showing their range of Yamaha FJR 1300A motorcycles.

From this you can navagate left, right, upwards or downwards depending on the range of photos you inserted.  You can include the link on a varity of different mediums.

This is one we did for the launch of Airbike showing its Yamaha FJR 1399A motorcycles that they will use to deliver a motorbike passenger service.

How Photosynth is used in communications is very open.  Image you are trying to walk people through a building/hotel/leisure centre or allow them to see a new car from different angles.  Normally this would have involved complicated website building technology.

Once you have created the synth why not include in press release material, blog, email signatures and social media platforms from Twitter (shorten the url) to Facebook.  What I really like about it is that people can choose the angle and the level of interactivity it allows.  

Some tips:

  • make sure you take enough photo (20 -30)
  • try ensure that the background are different enough so photosynth can easily stitch together
  • build in enough time into the photoshoot to take the right amount of shots
  • ensure you have unlimited usage rights of the photos
  • files are large so needs a good broadband connection

The video below gives a good run through the technology.

What is your online reputation number?

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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.

Nice tool for checking the strength of your message

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I have stumbled on lots of online tools that are interesting but trying to find an application for them in PR is sometimes a struggle.  Twitter Mosaic for example is a nice tool but does not have huge amount of PR useage potential.

At Search Marketing World 2009 Ciaran Norris from Altogether Digital mentioned a service called Wordle in his presentation where he showed the tag cloud it created on Obama inauguration speech which clearly showed the key words he was emphasising.

Basically the service allows you to input text or a url and it will create a tag funky tag cloud from it.  Frequently mentioned words are emphasised as in any tag cloud and the layout is pretty intuitive and easy to interpret with nice colour coding and layout.

Wordle Example using eoinkennedy.ie/blog

This one is from an analysis of this blog.  The more words the trickier it is but at a glance the main areas that you wish to cover should become pretty apparent.  So how is this of help to the PR industry?  This has great use to test the messaging validity of things like press releases and speeches.  It wont replace the manual intervention but it should give you a snap short.  It only does words and most messages are more complex than words but it should help to make sure that what you are trying to communicate actually comes across.   Consider that most people absorb huge amount of information but simple repetition of key words can stick.

Here is one I did on a press release we did for Repak on recycling at Christmas time.

Repak Green Christmas Wordle Example

Repak Green Christmas Wordle Example

Packaging Recycling at Christmas time was the key message we wanted to get accross and it shows in the tag cloud.  I would suggest that if you put in a press release or speech from a CEO and the tag cloud bares no resemblance to the core messaging then something may be wrong.

One note of caution – do not add to the gallery unless you are comfortable with people seeing it.

Online PR Distribution Debate Opened Up Again?

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The launch of a new press release distribution service called PR Zone is likely to open up the debate about public relations companies using online distribution services once again.

PR Zone Front Page

PR Zone Front Page

The PR industry has been slow enough to embrace these type services and Searh Engine Optimisation of press releases is ignored by a lot of traditional PR companies.  The service is not new (although it does contain some innovations) and is broadly a welcome development.  However the service uses a pay of play model where you register full company details and then buy credits to utilise the different levels of service they deliver.

This is a route that Prangle tied some time ago but with limited uptake from PR companies.  Prangle came from the journalist side of the house and tried to establish the service as a one stop shop for the media industry where the different publication houses would allocate a resource to monitor the feeds supplied by the PR industry.  The theory being that PR and other companies would go through the service rather than send their content to their contacts in the media.  The stumbling blocks were the cost involved (a fee was charged to use the service) and a perception that the relationships that PR companies spend years fostering with the media, would in essence be cut out of the equation.  It also relied heavily on the media commiting to using the service consistently and most media are still happier to receive stories from established contacts.  On a technical side the service was robust and future proofed in that it allowed uploading of different type media from high res photos to video.  As a supplemntary service it was useful but the cost of using it meant the PR industry did not buy into it wholesale.

Not all entrants went the paid for model and Irish Press Releases uses a model similar to the other international sites where you can up load a story, with the site displaying all the recent stories.  Some vetting of stories is done to ensure a certain level of quality control.  Overall its a good service and I imagine it will charge at a future date for add on facilities such as loading of extra multimedia and possibly other syndication services similar to PR Zone.

Irish Press Releases Homepage

Irish Press Releases Homepage

We have used some of the free international SEO press release submission sites and have also used paid for syndication services such as Business Wire – especially for international releases where we would not have strong relationships overseas media.

The PR industry would appear to feel threatened by these services espcially the paid for ones where they feel they could be cut out of the process and budgets are tight.  The reality is that having a service does not replace the genuine value that a communications company brings in terms of constructing a good robust story.  Up to half the effort can be invested in getting the messaging and scripting right.  These services are a good supplement to what a PR company does and does not replace them.  They are especially good at increasing the digital footprint, even more so if a company does not have a media section on their site.

Innovation in the PR industry is always welcome and for some companies these services are the best way for them to go, especially if they are good at telling their story and have limited budgets.  I dont believe they are a threat but rather offer a lot of synergy.

The big question is if the PR industry is willing to pay for them and see their value.  Time will tell.

Are we facing online newspaper subscriptions again?

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Siobhan O’Connell wrote an interesting piece in the yesterdays Irish Times about how newspapers need to make online content profitable.  One of the things I took from it was that broadsheets are losing readership numbers to tabloids which would appear to be more linked to the lack of an online presence than the editorial.  The arguement being that most broadsheets are freely available online while tabloids like the Star feature little more than an ad.  If you cannot get it online you are forced to buy the physical product.  Not a very encouraging sign or trend.  The online subscription model has with a few exceptions failed but Times Ann Moore looks like reopening the debate.  

Who started this rumour that all information should be free and why didn’t we challenge this when it first came out? I say this in college classrooms and they start to throw their shoes at me. I say, ‘Kids, your food is not free and your cars are not free, your clothes are not free. Good information costs money. Someone has to pay for the Baghdad bureau’.”

This is understandable in a era of dropping ad revenues but its extremely hard to get people to pay for content and even harder if they are used to getting it for free.  It appears more like a desperate attempt by media publications to steam losses than a concerted effort to monitise their online models.

As usual the industry will find ways around this.  One interesting development is the paper reviews by Campbell Scott of IGO People and Bernie Goldbach.  They use very simple technology to talk through stories they enjoyed in the media, which they record with mobile phones and upload to mobile video shaing site QIK.  Of course if they agreed to show the ads then everyone would be happy…wouldnt they?

From a very selfish simplistic  PR viewpoint the more opportunities that people have to view a story about a client the better………that is until its a negative one and then we curse the longevity, reach and viral nature of the web stories.

PR and Bloggers Can Live Together

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Last nights PR and Blogger meet up in Edelmans offices passed off with any physical harm to any of the attendees.  Billed as collision course the atmosphere was pretty friendly and more curious than frictional.  Overall some interesting points:

- most bloggers post on their own time and approaching them in a insolicited fashion is akin to stopping a random punter on the street and sticking a press release in their face.

- most bloggers are open to approaches that show you undertand their blog, what you are offering is relevant, is fairly informal and covering anything from attending events, angles on stories, reviews of new stuff, interesting videos.  The approach by BTs to the Young Scientist and giving free tickets was pointed out as positive.

- Bloggers are constantly in touch with each other and will frequently IM each other when they get approaches from PR companies especially if offering exclusives.

- No bloggers reported making money from their blogs and are fuel/energised by passion for the topic.

- Blogger relations takes more time and the PR industry has a struggle to convince clients to allocate resources so it does not end up being a bloggers email address getting added to a media distribution list.

- Journalists who are also bloggers view mails and  to their media email account very differently to their blogger email account.

- Twitter offers great potential for monitoring (ORM), possible relevant story seeding and early heads up on industry developments. 

- Bloggers like to have previews of up and coming stuff so they can debate it before it hits main stream media.

- Bloggers spend vast amounts of time in preparing their posts and take personal pride in them.  Poor blogs will just not get read.

- There is a general nervousness in approaching blogger as mistakes can become highly personal and visible.

- Links to stories/press releases/photos plus personal commentary are more welcome than cut and paste press releases.

- PR community doing a poor job with clients in convincing them of the merits of PR and blogger relations in general.

- PR people should blog more so that they can understand the medium and utilise the Irish press release service.

Overall is was a positive event and these type face to face encounters help to over the suspicion and mistrust between the two groups.

Interesting to see how the next one goes which is planned for February.

The Business case for Social Media

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The IIA Social Media working group recently organised an afternoon session with Neville Hobson entitled The Business Case for Social Media.  The session was well chaired by Brendan Hughes and viewed remotely by students of the Tipperary Institute courtesy of Bernie Goldbach.  Neville has great insights into experiences of trying to get companies to experiment with social media.  Some of the expected issues popped up including the difficulty of identifying evangalists within an organisation, the absolute lack of knowledge of what social is and can do and the need to show return on investment before considering it as a medium.  All of these are overcomeable hurdles but social media is not exactly new and the pace of progress is still very slow.

I understand that there is a clear need to correctly identify and match a company to the media used but a huge amount of opportunities are being missed by analysis/paralysis.  A lot could be gained by simple experimentation.

Within the public relations field alone huge amount of energy and resources are spent in  getting the story and messaging correct.  This then get channelled into tools like press releases, feature pitches, interview hooks etc but a lot of it dies a death after it has been issued in the normal fashion to traditional media.  The best some of this achieves is print coverage in the media and perhaps an online footprint if the publication had an online version.

It is a real shame not to maximise all this effort by using the other tools that are out there.   Video/audio recording the event/interview gives people a more rounded version that the static written word.  Once due care is given to the sensitivites of other platforms such as Facebook, Blog, Twitter and Social Bookmarking a lot more can be achieved.  Very few companies are Search Engine Optimising the releases that they generate.  This is not about blindly posting the press release and photos in lots of places but utilising and customing the underlying messaging and content to create engagement within different communities.

So what the problem.  Numerous but take two of them.  The PR industry has been a bit like an oil tanker and slow to invest in learning how to use these tools and still see print and radio coverage as the job done.  The images and content then reside on a file server until someone asks for it.  Many do not engage in the online conversation in any meaningful way and scoff at them in terms of impact due to ignorance.  However how many do not use search engines as their primary research tool and possibly wonder why other brands or companies rank higher.  This is within their control as strong content generators.  On the client side of the fence lack of familarity raises all sorts of fears – some founded some as a result of scare mongering.  Its easier to miss an opportunity where there is fear about making exposed online error. 

So whats the answer.  Best practice says you undertake a detailed landscape mapping exercise and build a cohesive online strategy before you do anything but another pragmatic approach is to experiment.  Do enough due dilligence but dont let it stop you from using some of the online opportunities that are there now.  Life moves fast in the online world, communities and tools change rapidly so the winning companies are those that can merge strategy with reseach, speed and experimentation. 

Building Applications in Facebook

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Facebook offers a great medium for building relevant applications and is one of the reasons that it has maintained its current numbers of subscribers. We have built an application called Get Creative which is a database of Public Relations, Marketing and Advertising ideas. It is currently in beta testing on Facebook but the philosophy behind it is that you can search for ideas, add your own and comment on other peoples contributions to give them further life. Launched internally we have found that it helps people to start thinking more creatively and watching what trends, ideas and initiatives are happening all around them. It was born out of frustration of thinking up great ideas which disappeared into the far recesses of your mind before you could full capture them. It will be an interesting test of collaboration amongst the public relations, marketing and advertising sectors.

Get Creative Application

Some lessons from the exercise:

- Get a good developer on board
- Test as many other applications as you can to see what you like and what works well
- Keep it as simple as possible
- Keep data entry down to a minimum of time
- Be aware of the external hosting requirements
- Get a core group to test the application and populate
- If people fail or run into problems at early stages its harder to get them to engage later so make sure most bugs are eliminated early
- Think through how the application will look and how the person will interact with it and draw up a information flow
- Assume that it needs to be pretty intuitive as more people will not have the patience to read long rules and instructions
- Become an evangalist for it

We hope to roll out more broadly through Facebook in the next week or so.

Look out for the Irish Times unofficial Facebook application and the Silicon Republic one which is being tested.

Eoin

Irish Times Goes Audio

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Following the training of Irish Times staff a few weeks ago the fruits of their hard labour can now be seen online.

Now Irish Times journalists go out with trusted pen, paper and digital recorder. Journalists recording interviews is nothing new but them editing and uploading the content is a fairly big progression.

Interesting implications from a PR perspective. It introduces an element of colour to press conferences that may not always be desired and further erodes the fallacy of control but it also opens up opportunities. If they are using audio content then why not high quality audio interviews that are supplied by a PR company especially if the reporter cannot attend.

This is a trend that is only likely to increase in complexity with rumours that Silicon Republic will be introducing video content or at least recording some events they cover. Undoubtably this will be a sellable item for them but again once the PR industry invests in the software and hardware its another area of potential growth for the PR industry.

Lets hope the NUJ sort out their differences on content generated for the paper versus the web.