According to the site, Twistori is the "first step in an ongoing social experiment."
Twistori pulls tweets from Twitter containing specific keywords: 'I Love', 'I Hate', 'I Think', I Believe', 'I Feel, and I Wish. It then publishes the tweets it finds anonymously in a non-stop, auto-updating river of news. The result is a continuous stream of feelings from the Twitter community.
The brainchild of Amy Hoy and Thomas Fuchs, it's not clear from the site what the second step in the experiment is. But for now, watching the feelings of anonymous Twitter users scroll by is strangely addictive and exciting when you see one of your own tweets appear. I'll leave you with this (slightly altered) thought to bear in mind when you're watching the flow of thoughts and feelings on Twistori:
"Sin writes Twistories, goodness is silent." Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
According to Goethe, all us Twitterers are sinners - and watching the 'I Hate' stream backs this up. But it's also perfectly counterbalanced by the 'I Love', 'I Wish' and 'I Believe' streams, showing that there's still a lot of love in the Twittersphere!
He concedes that this is the same theory that many had in 2004 with regard to blogging., but to back up his theory Calacanis points towards his own company's figures:
"Since inception Maholo has had over 4M views to our videos, and last month we broke the 1M mark. Four million views means millions of folks (let's say two million) have come in contact with the Mahalo brand. If you were to pay for four million 15 second spots on the web the cost would be $25 for each 1,000 views--or $100,000. That's about what we've spent on the show over the first six months. Additionally, the shows have archival value and will get another 2-4m views over their life I'm sure.In another three years every company will have not only a corporate blog but a corporate vlog. The New York Times, JetBlue, American Express, and Apple will communicate with their leading customers with regular videos."
"It’s become fairly typical for major ad agencies to get into content creation under the premise of producing branded entertainment on behalf of clients. But it is unusual for a public relations shop to try its hand at the practice. New York-based PR firm Edelman hopes to widen the perception of itself - if not the industry - by forming a “virtual studio” to connect producers, directors and screenwriters to develop short-form online videos for its clients, AdAge reports."
Benjamin Koe believe this is a correct move for PR agencies today. He says that the web is all about creating your own content and making it count:
"Why just keep to press releases for the journalists when you can create content that go direct to customers? If I was a marketeer on a budget, I might want to try for a million views on YouTube vs a national news pitch. Of course it depends on which is the best means to reach your target audience. Good to know we now have the choice."
Brian Solis argues that this is a very “official” move that should inspire the industry to evolve a new branch in this direction:
"When I’m not blogging, I also run a PR agency (FutureWorks PR) and I built a full video and audio recording studio in our Sunnyvale HQ specifically for this purpose. We’ve been working with talent to create original pilots and series to help clients tell their story in a more visual, human, and creative ways using the powerful and easily accessible online social video channels available to all of us."
Although it has come down in price, setting up the kind of studio that can produce the high-qulaity content that clients want is expensive and time consuming - resources that many agencies just don’t have and that could be better spent elsewhere.
Most PR agencies will have a relationship with a video and audio production company (or several) so that they can outsource this work if clients demand it, producing higher quality content then they could in-house.
As Edelman has the resources, it is a good idea to bypass this relationship and set up their own production studio. But as prices drop and the means to produce high-quality content for clients becomes increasingly available, more and more smaller agencies, such as Brian’s FutureWorks PR, will be able to follow Edelamn’s route and include it in their agency’s services.
What do you think? Is your agency going to set up the means to start creating its own content for clients? Or will the timing too early and will the service become more popular in a few years time?
The Daily Telegraph reports today that council tax bills could be reduced by £40 a year if local authorities cut back spending on areas such as publicity and pensions.
The TaxPayers' Alliance has compiled figures showing councils spend more than £400 million on publicity, £1.9 billion on senior management and £4.3 billion on pensions a year.
Cutting costs in those areas by 10 per cent would generate £660 million to ease the council tax burden, taking £40 off the average Band D bill of more than £1,100. The figures could be even higher as they have been calculated using 2006/7 data for councils in England and Scotland.
"Councils should not feel the need to promote themselves," the group says in a report issued today. "They should employ fewer press officers."
Surely, though, part of a council's services is communicating the services they offer, how tax payers can contact them, and where taxpayers money is going?
Also, while I admit I don't know a lot about running a council , senior management and pensions schemes must be indispensible to the running of councils - worth £40 (maybe more) a year in my eyes.
Or perhaps council press officers need to communciate why taxpayers are forking out £40 a year each to keep them in their jobs?
(Picture: Robert Peston (left) receives the Business Journalist of the Year Award from John Neilson of BAE Systems.) The Business Journalist of the Year Awards were held last night at the Grosvenor hotel in central London.
Widely recognised as the most important global awards for business writers and broadcasters, they are the only awards for business writers that are open to journalists of all nationalities, and the only awards to cover the entire spectrum of business and financial reporting.
Soon after winning Newspaper of the Year at the British Press Awards, the FT took home a raft of awards. John Gapper won Best Communicator, Martin Wolf won Best Commentator, and Mure Dickie took home the award for Best Newspaper Story.
Robert Peston picked up a couple of awards, winning Best Scoop and Business Journalist of the Year, which were thoroughly well deserved (despite Peston being part of the awards' Editors' Committee)
The Daily Telegraph claimed the prize for best breaking news story. Philip Aldrick, Katherine Griffiths and Myra Butterworth won the award for their coverage of the crisis at Northern Rock.
The full list of winners:
- Best Broadcast Story - Martin Shankleman of The BBC - Best Broadcast Feature - Jeff Randall & Martin Small - Best Deadline or Breaking News Story - Philip Aldrick, Katherine Griffiths and Myra Butterworth of The Daily Telegraph - Best Personal Finance Journalist or Team - Victoria Knight of Dow Jones Newswires - Best Magazine Story - Michael Smith & Carlos Caminda of Bloomberg Markets - Best Online/Wireservice Journalist or Team - David Dietz & Darrell Preston of Bloomberg News - Best Communicator - John Gapper of the Financial Times - Best Commentator - Martin Wolf of the Financial Times - Best Corporate Journalist or Team - Mike Esterl & David Crawford of The Wall Street Journal Europe - Best Economics Journalist or Team - Edward Chancellor of Institutional Investor - Best Finance & Markets Journalist or Team - David Evans of Bloomberg News - Best Newspaper Story - Mure Dickie of the Financial Times - Best Scoop - Robert Peston of the BBC - Business Journalist of the Year - Robert Peston of the BBC - Decade of Excellence - Hugo Dixon of breakingviews
Going home without an away goal was still, even at that point, not part of his agenda for the evening. Instead he still had the belief and the dogged, never-say-die spirit to look up, whip the ball in and beautifully find Jean-Arne Riise, ghosting in from deep to the near post.
Talk about timing your run to perfection. Look again at the agility with which the Liverpool man gets himself down low. Look at the power he manages to impart behind the header. Look at the inch-perfect placement, wide of Reina and into the roof of the net. Riise probably won't score a better goal in his career. He certainly won't score a more valuable one from our point of view. In front of the Kop, too. Ah, the memories.
Now, obviously there are going to be some people who maintain that Carragher ought to have picked him up. And it does appear that Reina was left fearfully exposed by his central defence at that moment. I'd prefer, though, to give the credit to Riise for eluding his man.
Sometimes a player can come into the box so quickly and from such an acute angle, that not even the best defender in the world would be able to do anything about it. This was one of those occasions.
In other news, John Arne Riise was arrested on the M6. A report from the police said that he was heading the wrong way.
Looking for a cushy job with great pay and low responsibility? Be a bank CEO!Well, that's according to Henry Blodget, president of Cherry Hill Research, a business research firm, and editor of Internet Outsider, an Internet business blog.
In a post that appeared on The Huffington Post, Blodget gives the run down on why Bank CEOs are laughing all the way to the, er, bank.
Here are the highlights of how it works:
Take the job after an economic downturn, when your predecessor is forced out after presiding over the loss of billions in bad-debt and trading write-offs (don't worry, your predecessor won't starve in retirement).
Immediately take huge additional write-offs and reserves and blame them on your predecessor. Clean up balance sheet so your performance bar is so low you could fall over it.
Announce "new era" in which Your Bank will focus on conservative, fee- and spread-based businesses in which you grow steadily and prudently.
Sit in your chair for two years while economic recovery (and your earlier write-offs) deliver strong earnings to the bottom line.
Smile for the cameras. Have PR people place a Fortune cover story entitled "The Wizard Who Turned Around [Your Bank"]!
Announce that, given the huge opportunities in the markets, Your Bank will take a bit more risk (prudent, of course) to improve return on equity.
Sit in your chair for three years and collect at least $50 million a year during rest of bull market while those risks pay off.
When it's clear that your traders were just bull-market geniuses and have gambled away all the "profits" Your Bank booked in the previous three years, blame them and express disappointment. Then hang around to see whether market cares.
If market demands resignation, resign, collect $500 million severance, and join private equity firm.
If market yawns, re-up for another cycle and do it all over again!
'Smile for the camera' is my favourite part, because apparently all us PR people do is place senior execs on the covers of financial publications, then sit back and relax. Of course, our job is a lot more complicated and stressful than that.
So on that thought, I might start looking for an easier job.
It was interesting to see via this post on Techcrunch that Google have been buying up domain names left, right and centre according to "uptime monitoring service" Pingdom:
"Pingdom has put together a list of thousands of .com domain names owned by Google, based on an analysis of the root zone file. They then verified the most interesting ones with WHOIS information."
Techcrunch lists some of the most interesting domain names, but these are the ones that caught my eye:
Looks like Google are really trying to make it hard for anyone to easily find criticism on them, or at least through their own search engine anyway. The thing is, it takes more than a catchy or rememberable anti-Google domain name to stop that from happening.
Also, I wonder how far up Google's own search engine these sites would be?
I guess we'll never find out, unless of course Google start up some kind of existentialistastroturfing anti-Google group.
I can't remember how this event came up on my radar, but I've got a social enterprise project in the works so I thought that the SHINE Unconference was worth checking out:
600 social entrepreneurs
3 days
39 sessions (and counting)
1 warehouse on London’s Southbank
and me!
"Welcome to SHINE, an event dedicated to connecting, informing and inspiring hundreds of Social Entrepreneurs.
This event is created by social entrepreneurs for social entrepreneurs, whether you’re just starting out or more established.
Long presentations, boring speeches and being trapped in closed rooms are out. Peer-to-peer exchanges, info-snacking and flexible sessions are in.
The content is contributed by participants, and there is no compulsory programme. Make your own event."
That last sentence caught my eye, so I thought why not give it a try and submitted my own event. I found out today that I have a spot, which is great and I hope the session is useful both for the people who turn up (if anyone does) and the project.
I notice my spot is in a venue called "The Cubby Hole" - it could get quite cosy.
The image of the pin on the chair is actually quite appropriate for the position I'm in. At the moment, the project is merely at the ideas stage, so I hope this unconference will give it a bit of a kick start in the right direction.
There seems to be lots of great people going with some great ideas. Most importantly, and that's why I think the event will be a great success, is that they all want to help change the world for the better!
According to study by digital developers BroadView, a majority of large British firms are 'behind the curve in digital comms':
Despite recent warnings from the FT Bowen Craggs Index on the importance of web video, only 23 per cent of videos on FTSE 100 sites are for general corporate comms.
The majority – 59 per cent – are aimed solely at investors, with the vast majority simply standard webcasts of investor briefings. BroadView MD Stuart Maister called these videos 'boxticking exercises', aimed at fulfilling regulations.
'Making the most of websites is a hot topic, but companies still need to do more,' he said. 'The web 2.0 generation expects much more than text-heavy pages.'
While this survey is little more than a glorified sales pitch for Broadview's services, it does raise a few issues.
That reason that the percentage of videos for general corporate comms are so low is that quite often companies either do not have (or want to provide) the budget for Web 2.0 technologies, especially in the current financial climate. If they do have the budget, often there isn't a suitable executive to act as a spokesperson for the company (there's a reason there are so many media training companies out there). If a company does have a suitable executive to use, they are often too busy to spend a day or two filming. They are the leaders of a FTSE 100 company for a reason, and not for their acting ability.
As for the 'Web 2.0 generation', most of the FTSE 100 companies will only have a vested interest from investors. Last time I checked, video wasn't a prerequisite for fulfilling regulations. At the end of the day, analysts, investors, and the various stakeholders of FTSE 100 companies can glean much more information about a company's background and financial performance through traditional text-based methods, e.g. press releases and market announcements.
A FTSE 100 company website doesn't need to be text-heavy. It just need to provide the most relevant content in the clearest manner. Often, web 2.0 technology isn't the right way to present that information, although it may well in the future and that is when FTSE 100 companies will start to use it.
The Harold Wincott Press Awards took place last week, with Dan Roberts of the The Telegraph taking home the award for the Senior Financial Journalist category, and David Proseer of The Independent was awarded the Personal Financial Journalist award.
The FT picked up a couple of awards, with Saskia Scholtes winning the Young Financial Journalist award and Alphaville winning the Online Award in its inaugral year.
Robert Peston's reporting of the Northern Rock crisis won him the Business News/current Affaris Programme award.
The Wincott Awards were instituted in 1970 in memory of Harold Wincott, the leading financial commentator of his generationto perpetuate his commitment to encouraging wider public understanding of economic, financial and business life.
The full list of winners is below:
Senior Financial Journalist Dan Roberts (The Sunday Telegraph)
Personal Financial Journalist David Prosser (The Independent)
Young Financial Journalist Saskia Scholtes (The Financial Times)
Online Award Alphaville (The Financial Times)
Special Award “West Eye View” (ITV West)
Television Programme “Can Gerry Robinson Fix The NHS?” (BBC Factual Open University)
Business News/Current Affairs Programme Robert Peston for Reporting on Northern Rock (BBC TV)
Radio Programme “Mortgage Mayhem” (File on Four BBC Radio Current Affairs)
A couple of surveys for you on this dreary Monday morning.
First up, a BIGresearch Simultaneous Media Survey reports that 26% of all adults say they regularly or occasionally blog.
Of those:
53.7% are male
44.7% are married
28.4% hold a professional or managerial position
10.4% are students.
Bloggers tend to be younger, averaging 37.6 years old, compared to 44.8 for adults 18+ (the "general population"). Ethnically:
69.7% of Bloggers are White/Caucasian (vs. 76.1%)
12.2% are African American/Black (vs. 11.4%)
3.7% are Asian (vs. 2.0%)
20% of Bloggers are Hispanic, compared to 14.8% of adults 18+
I'm sure you can make up your own mind about what those figures mean, but the most important fact to take away (if any of these surveys can be said to contain any facts at all) is that 1 in 4 adults blog, which showsn how the blogosphere is still very active.
The second survey comes from Ciao Surveys, which claims that 60.3% of people in Britain believe that PR officers often lie, while only 3.3% are convinced of the opposite. Additionally, only 17.9% of the respondents think public relations have a positive effect on society, against 26.5% who disagree.
Despite these findings, the survey shows that nearly a third of Britons believe the PR industry is a necessary one at 32.7%, as opposed to only 21.1% who believe it to be unnecessary.
Respondents evidently showed a good understanding of the industry because, when asked about their impression of a PR officer's main job function, they stated it is strongly related to: media relations (49.6%), event planning (18.2%), advertising (9.5%) and word of mouth marketing (7.9%).
According to Ciao, 55.1% of respondents seem to be aware of the symbiotic relationship between the PR industry and the media, as they declared that the two are biased by each other.
Some people recognise that the media are the main vehicles for the PR industry's messages, with 13.8% believing that up to half of the content in daily newspapers is initiated by public relations, and a sizeable group think up to 80% of the content in consumer magazines is PR-related.
Ciao does concede that some of the participants lacked a clear opinion on many questions. "In some instances", says the survey group, "approximately half of the respondents answered that they were either indifferent or did not know the answer to the question."
So 60.3% of people in Britain believe that PR officers often lie, but nearly a third of Britons believe the PR industry is a necessary one at 32.7%, as opposed to only 21.1% who believe it to be unnecessary - doens't this invalidate the claims of the survey?
Ciao's online survey involved 1,005 people, aged 18 and above, in the UK during March. But it is Roy Greenslade's comments about the survey that are the most revealing:
I can't let that pass without inserting a comment here: is it not obvious that the participants were merely responding to a list read to them?The media and PR industries are "biased by each other"?Does it, in all honesty, tell us anything we need to know?
Surveys, then - a PR staple used for standby copy for Monday morning newspapers. Given that 1 in 4 adults blog, surveys are also useful for bloggers who can't think of anything else to write about on a Monday morning - including me. Just make sure the survey's relevant to the audience and tells them something they need to know.
On Wednesday night the great and the good of PR and Journalism (and a few 'punters') gathered in the LEWIS Media Centre for the 'The Media Accused' event.
The event was centred around the controversial Flat Earth News author and journalist Nick Davies and a panel of media and PR luminaries, gathered to discuss the (alleged) falling standards in the media and the suggestion this has at worst been brought about, and at best been exploited, by the PR industry.
Here are the biogs of the panel:
Nick Davies, author and journalist - Nick Davies has been named Journalist of the Year, Reporter of the Year and Feature Writer of the Year for his investigations into crime, drugs, poverty and other social issues. He writes regularly for the Guardian and also makes TV documentaries; he was formerly an on-screen reporter for World in Action. Nick's latest book Flat Earth News sparked controversy in both the media and PR industries. He joins us tonight to discuss the issues raised.
Jon Bernstein, multimedia editor, Channel 4 News – Jon Bernstein has been with Channel 4 since 2005 when he joined to establish the broadcaster's FactCheck website, set up in the run-up to the UK general election to 'sniff out' political spin. Prior to joining Channel 4, Jon was editor-in-chief of the UK government's DirectGov website as well as being a founding editor of IT news service silicon.com.
Elisabeth Lewis-Jones, president Chartered Institute of Public Relations - Elisabeth Lewis-Jones has 15 years’ experience working both in-house and in consultancy. Elisabeth is a former CIPR Young Communicator of the Year and chair of the CIPR in the Midlands.
Danny Rogers, editorPR Week - Danny Rogers has been editor of the PR industry's bible for three years but has been a leading media and marketing journalist for almost a decade. Danny has been a contributing editor to the Financial Times and Media Guardian, as well as deputy editor for Marketing magazine.
Will Sturgeon, Associate Director of Lewis PR opened the event with a tale of a Jaffa Cake shaped like David Beckham, the point being that this was a bad PR stunt that exploited the press to gain the client press coverage (See Will's take on the event here).
Will then left the floor to let Nick explain the basic concept of his book, creating a background to the debate and also allowing him to plug the book fully before the rest of the panel joined him.
Nick Davies has just bet the audience that the story of the Jersey school is going to turn out to be mostly false. This was due to PR and journalists working together to amplify the story, which started out as something small with little evidence into a much bigger scandal and subsequent newspaper coverage.
The media has become increasingly vulnerable to being manipulated by PR. The change in ownership structure means that all types of media are geared twards profit. Thus, editorial staff have been stripped, forcing juornalist's to cover 3 times the amount of content as previously. Therefore 'Churnalists' don't check their stories, Nick says - in fact, it's just 12% that conduct proper fact checking. According to surveys, in 54% of 'home' news stories, the facts themselves were taken from PR.
PR, Nick says, works skillfully to exploit "the inherent, pathetic structural weaknesses of the way Fleet Street works" (targeted mainly towards Hill & Knowlton, who Davies is not worried about naming and shaming). PR is a manipulative profession, but he admits that PRs are clever and desrve their money!
Nick Davies asks, "Why are we running a flaming torch around the world?" Is it because we need to get the torch around the world easily? No - it's a PR artifice, but one that protest groups will also jump on the back of. The flaming torch becomes a pseudo-event generated by groups to create their own PR.
This is all part of the "structurally vulnerable media" that has made the "PR industry big and skillful". "There is a toxic chemistry at work here," Nick says.
Jon Bernstein, multimedia editor of Channel 4 is challenging the fact in Flat Earth News and journalists are filling three times more space than they did 20 years ago. He says that "It's questionable to come up with figures on editorial numbers" and that the numbers are exaggerated and not as important as Nick thinks.
Danny Rogers argues that we will have a healthy media if journalists and PRs are professional in their practises. He ponits out the irony that Nick Davies is a great PR man - he publishes his book on a Sunday, creates many events to promote his book etc, and therefore the difference between journalists and PRs is not as defintie as Nick says it is.
As a retort, Nick asks "How vulnerable do journalists have to be to fall for a PR campaign about a book that criticises them?"
Nick Davies:
"Good journalism in this country is not dead. It's just very sick."
"Our press is disappearing into a commercial black hole, and I can't see a solution."
In a related event that took place at the University of Westminster last week and debated the very same book and ideas, The Guardian journalist Roy Greenslade wrote a follow-up article post titled "Rethinking the Journalsim-PR Divide", Roy Greenslade admitted he was having a change of heart on the debate:
"Ever since last week's debate about the successful grip of PR (see here and here) I've been having revisionist thoughts. I aired them yesterday in my London Evening Standardcolumn yesterday.
I was particularly impressed by a study conducted by Metrica, a media analysis and evaluation company, that showed the growing effectiveness of PR in spite of its practitioners operating within an increasingly fractured media landscape. At first glance, this looks very worrying indeed. At second glance, however, it may be altogether less worrying than we think."
All very interesting, especially when Greenslade recognises of the irony that much of his article was informed from a PR briefing. By the end he was beginning to doubt the extent of the divide between journalists and PR.
Flat Earth News is an interesting book that has given rise to a number of extremely interesting debates. I've got my copy so will be making my decision on the current state of play soon. Perhaps, as Greenslade does, I'll end up thinking we're all in the same boat together. Now all we have to do is to figure out how to stop it sinking.
Frehs off the back of their exclusive story on Shire Pharmaceuticals’s decision to re-register its head office outside the UK for tax reasons, City A.M. reports today that the decision came as a surprise to HM Revenue & Customs - and in the process turned the spotlight in Shire's seemingly inadequate communications team.
"Despite the fact that most companies consult HMRC as a courtesy about a week before making this sort of announcement, tax officials were left to find out about the move via a City A.M. exclusive on Tuesday."
The Capitalist section of City A.M. reportedly called Shire’s inhouse public relations team yesterday to confirm the snub, but it turned out to be a lengthier process than they had foresee, leading to a 'taxing' conversation with the a PR:
City AM: Did the Inland Revenue know about Shire’s decision before it was announced?
Shire: Errrr…well, we had discussions with them about the announcement.
City AM: Yes, but did they know about it beforehand?
Shire: Errrr… they know about it, yes.
City AM: I know they know about it now, but how about before it was announced?
City AM: Errrr…errrr…I don’t know the answer to that.
Not the most helpful PR then and I'm sure using the phrase "Errrr..." will soon be banned from being uttered by Shire's PR team.
Just another lesson that knowing your stuff and having a storng communciations team really does make any process a lot smoother, especially one as large as Shire's move away from the UK.
One of the five reasons she gives is that often the first sentence of the release is just too long:
"The opening sentences of the last three releases I received had 30, 61 and 77 words in their opening sentences. I may be proved wrong, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say that nobody ever said anything interesting in a 77 word sentence. As a rule of thumb, 25-30 words is about the maximum and if you can make it shorter, then do."
Hmm, 25-30 words... Which service do I know that forces me to write sentences that long...
Twitter is probably the answer to everything at the moment, but what a great way to practise writing that killer first sentence of a press release or, arguably more important, the email subject header of a release.
Along with their regular personal accounts (in which they get practice at writing short, sharp, attention-grabbing sentences) PROs should be setting up private Twitter accounts and direct messaging each other their first sentences.
You then get the benefit of seeing that sentence out of context. Perhaps add a Tiny URL in there as well to test whther the sentence makes you want to click through on the link.
This is idea might not be that practical, but hopefully it has reminded all us PROs that first impressions count, especially when sending a press release to journalists.
The award is well deserved: since the FT integrated its newsroom in 2006 and moved into a new one in 2007, it has been among the few British newspapers to increase its circulation, ad revenue and profits, and has now established itself as the place to go for financial news, comment and analysis.
As well as the top prize of newspaper of the year, the FT's Philip Stephens (not 'Stevens' as The Guardian reported it) was awarded political journalist of the year while Gillian Tett won business and finance journalist of the year.
The FT's online operations have also strengthened, with Alphaville becoming a popular resource for instant market commentary, a slew of Twitter feeds (here, here and here), and the Market's Live chat, which happens daily for an hour at 11am, has an increasing number of fans.
With these recent success stories, a promising future and as one of the few newspapers actually increasing its circulation and profit, it seems that we really do live in financial times.
But rather than taking on the simple angle of looking at where BA went wrong in their crisis communications and how they could recover from this blow to their brand, Shakespeare looks at how daily opinion tracking can reveal the pattern of the effect thios crisis has had on the BA brand:
"What aspect of the brand suffered most? Is it a severe but short-lived downward spike which will leave no lasting effect? Or will there be longerlasting damage?
The drop to -57 in “buzz” counts among the biggest PR disasters since the salmonella outbreak at Cadbury’s in 2006. Corporate reputation fell 37, value 15, and quality 20.
Shakespeare plots the share of positive clicks BA gets within a basket of competing brands — easyJet and Ryanair, Virgin Atlantic and American Airlines — and BA’s share price. Surprisingly, on this graph, BA's company valuation actually goes up:
"Do investors think that the PR problems are superficial and create a good buying opportunity? Or maybe there’s simply no connection because they think the performance of the company is determined by other factors.
True, customers don’t suddenly stop flying BA because of these mess-ups but continue to choose it because of schedule, price and safety. And profits are as much driven by factors such as the hedging of oil prices."
But while BA are an excellent operator in terms of schedule price and safety, customer satisfaction is an aspect that will ultimately affect the long-term health of the company. With reports of pilots saying that BA is a laughing stock, their recent PR efforts certainly don't help them out:
"When British Airways' Terminal 5 descended into chaos at its public opening, BBC viewers were treated to the sight of BA's exasperated PR Richard Goodfellow shutting the door to a staff rest room in the face of pursuing journalists after a fraught press briefing in which the director of operations, Gareth Kirkwood, refused to take questions."
This is from a Media Guardian article that posits the question "When is it OK for a PR to run away?" Max Clifford, Lord Bell, Sally Osman and Julia Simpson (Head of Corporate Communciations at BA) all give their opinion.
Lord Bell's advice is not particularly convincing:
"If you are going to run, don't get caught."
Sally Osman, Greg Dyke's former PR, has a more sensible view:
"The instant satisfaction of storming out, slamming the door, throwing the phone down, is never worth it. You've stoked the fire. The balance shifts, they scent blood. Controlling the situation just gets harder. Being calm, courteous and civil, even in the face of appalling rudeness, are far more powerful weapons. Histrionics or bully tactics signal weakness, lack of confidence, uncertainty - not power."
And what is the main lesson learned from this PR disaster?
According to Julia Simpson, "if a customer-facing operation disintegrates in front of the massed media there is no PR guru in the world who can save your bacon."
There was a random email from an unrecognised contact sitting in my inbox today. Here's the skinny on what it said:
"Hi!
I finished your painting! Sorry it took so long. I've had to get through over 450 requests to get to yours. What do you think? If you like it i'll mail it to you right away! Talk to you soon!
Ali"
It wasn't until I scrolled to the bottom of the painting until I realised that the email was from Ali Spagnola, an artist offering free paintings, who I had emailed back in May 2007 asking for one.
Because she had such a long waiting list, it took her nearly a year to fulfil my request, but the result was amazing - It really has made my entire year when I got that email and saw the painting!
The pictures floating around this post are examples of her work. Cute and cuddly, and a lot of fun. Ali is even mailing my work of fine art completely free!
A message on the free paintings part of her website has this to say:
"The list to get one of my free paintings is about 400 people long. (Sweet!) I paint as dilligently as I can and people keep requesting so thats about the length its staying currently. If you're submitting a request right now, keep in mind that you'll be at the end of that list of 400 people. Its not that I'm ignoring you, its just that I haven't got to you yet. If you want to move up on the list, by all means donate. The more you donate, the faster you'll get my attention."
This has just renewed my belief in the power of the internet.
So go ahead, check out Ali's website, buy her paintings and donate to her cause.
Ali Spagnola. Remember the name. Buy the paintings.
"The rise of Social Media, whether it be blogging, social networks or YouTube has created a new generation of consumer content creators.
Individuals now have tools to publish and broadcast their views on your organisation, brand or industry and potentially reach an audience of millions with the simple click of a mouse.
As the content creation generation matures, what are the implications for traditional media? Will today’s news organisations whether in print, TV or online survive and more importantly retain their authority and influence? How are media outlets adapting to the rise in ‘citizen journalism’ and reaching out to the public to help create the news?"
"As newspapers wrestle with declining circulation and the rise of the new media, is the profession behind the headlines in jeopardy? The internet's influence has drastically changed the media landscape, often to the detriment of print newspapers.
Is new media edging out accountability and standards with ill-informed opinion and user-generated rants? Or is it the evolution of journalism, breaking down barriers which previously restricted the flow of information and narrowed the range of debate?"
Is it traditional journalism dead yet? Or is it just the subject of whether social media is killing it that's suffering from overkill?
As previously mentioned, I was recently interviewed for the Finance Talking website, the idea of the site being to find out how people get into different types of careers in communications and gather their advice for others who are interested in a similar career.
The interview is now up on the Finance Talking website and available here - complete with cheesy corporate profile photo!
There are so many april Fool's Day jokes circulating round t'internet today that I thought it would be useful to collate them all into one place. This has resulted in a very long blog post, a surfacing of paranoia over which stories are real and which are fake, and a wish for next year's pranks to be less in quantity but more in quantity.
For ease of use, each prank is divided up by an introductory sentence in bold.
Enjoy them all and if you discover any more, let me know in the comments!
Google has arguably had the best pranks this year, the first being their 'Wake Up Kit':
"If you create a new document in Google Docs, you’ll see a number of options in the “File” pull down menu. One of those options, which as far as I can tell wasn’t there yesterday, is “New airplane.” It’s right there after “New document.”
Choosing it opens a new file with folding instructions to build a paper airplane,"
Google Australia launched Gday today, a new search engine that allows users to search a day in advance of real time:
Google spiders crawl publicly available web information and our index of historic, cached web content. Using a mashup of numerous factors such as recurrence plots, fuzzy measure analysis, online betting odds and the weather forecast from the iGoogle weather gadget, we can create a sophisticated model of what the internet will look like 24 hours from now.
We can use this technique to predict almost anything on the web – tomorrow’s share price movements, sports results or news events. Plus, using language regression analysis, Google can even predict the actual wording of blogs and newspaper columns, 24 hours before they’re written!
To rank these future pages in order of relevance, gDay™ uses a statistical extrapolation of a page’s future PageRank, called SageRank.
Also announced by Google was Virgle, a joint Google/ Virgin project to establish permanent human settlement on Mars:
"Sir Richard Branson writes:
Larry Page, Sergey Brin and I feel strongly that contemporary technology is sufficiently advanced to make such an effort both successful and economical, and that it’s high time that humanity moved beyond Earth and began our great, long journey to explore the stars and establish our first lasting foothold on another world…In the years to come, we’ll be sending up a series of spaceships carrying (along with the supplies and tools needed to build the new colony) what eventually will be hundreds of Mars colonists, or Virgle Pioneers — myself among them.
Virgle is currently taking applications on its site here. The official site also includes a 100 year plan for Mars Settlement and a statement explaining the benefits of the project being Open Source."
Last, but not least from the Google camp was 'Custom Time':
"Gmail Custom Time lets users send emails with a custom date in the past, putting it in the recipients inbox at the old date:
How do I use it?
Just click “Set custom time” from the Compose view. Any email you send to the past appears in the proper chronological order in your recipient’s inbox. You can opt for it to show up read or unread by selecting the appropriate option.
Is there a limit to how far back I can send email?
Yes. You’ll only be able to send email back until April 1, 2004, the day we launched Gmail. If we were to let you send an email from Gmail before Gmail existed, well, that would be like hanging out with your parents before you were born — crazy talk."
YouTube sabotaged it's own site by 'Rick-Rolling' its users:
"If you aren’t familiar with RickRolling - it’s when someone puts a link on website to something, but it actually takes you to a music video of Rick Astley’s “hit” song Never Gonna Give You Up.
YouTube is RickRolling its own users on April 1. All of the featured videos for YouTube UK and YouTube Australia actually link to the Rick Astley video."
The programme is being presented by ex-Monty Python star Terry Jones, who said: "We'd been watching the penguins and filming them for days, without a hint of what was to come.
"But then the weather took a turn for the worse. It was quite amazing. Rather than getting together in a huddle to protect themselves from the cold, they did something quite unexpected, that no other penguins can do."
BBC1 viewers will see the penguins not only take flight from the Antarctic wastes, but fly thousands of miles to the Amazonian rainforest to find winter sun.
"The film reveals nature's stunning glory in exciting and unexpected ways, so much so that it defies belief," said Mr Jones.
"Not only does it create a vivid and emotional experience for the viewer, it also illustrates just how bold and simple Darwin's idea of natural selection was."
Tim Ferriss, author of the 4-Hour Work Week, wrote a prank post on his blog, claiming that he had outsourced his life:
"Happy Japanese April Fool’s Day!
Man, oh, man. I was going to wait until tomorrow to publish this follow-up to the last post, but it kicked up some dust, so I wanted to own up. Yessir, it’s an April Fool’s Day joke. Sorry for any confusion! It would have been too obvious on April 1st in the US, so I used the alternate time zone."
There was also an alleged prank from Facebook, claiming a new application allows users to track their friend's on their mobile phones - or maybe it is actually happening?! (via Lewis PR's blog):
It's 1984 in 2008! Big Brother Britain gone mad!
The Times reported today on a shocking new Facebook app that lets you track down your friends through their mobile phones.
The application is called SNIFF (Social Network Integrated Friend Finder) and is, apparently, already popular in Scandinavia.
SNIFFing?! I sniff a rat! It is April 1 after all...
Infoworld magazine posted a whole lot of fake articles on their website. The full list is available here but the highlights are below:
Gotcha! ... Or did we? From the plausible to the absurd, we give you a fool's paradise of April 1 tech fun and insights.
Study: Don't Know tops IT's to-do list Nascent technology poised to take hold of enterprise, as CIOs gear up to champion Don't Know as an agent of change
