The Rise and Rise of Social Media in the UK

Over at the We Are Social blog, Robin Grant points towards research from Hitwise showing that 10.09% of all UK internet visits over the Christmas period were to ‘Social Networking and Forums’:

"The successes of Facebook and YouTube, along with similar sites, meant that social networks accounted for 1 in every 10 UK Internet visits during Christmas week. For the week ending 27/12/08, our Computers and Internet – Social Networking and Forums category accounted for 10.09% of all UK Internet visits, the first ever time it has passed the 10% threshold."

Robin Goad, Research Director at Hitwise UK

Here's the graph showing the rise in internet traffic to social networking sites over the past 12 months:

UK Social Media traffic Dec '07 - Dec '08

The trend also applies to Twitter:

UK Internet visits to Twitter Jul '07 - Jul '08

The post on We Are Social pulls out another quote from Robin Goad that highlights the key facts about the rise in visits to Twitter:

"UK Internet visits to Twitter have increased by 631% over the last 12 months, with 485% of that growth coming this year. Twitter is more popular with Brits than Americans: last week the site’s share of UK Internet visits was 70% higher its share of visits in America. Twitter cannot yet be considered mainstream in the USA, but in the UK it’s getting there."

It all makes for positive reading for those operating in the space and I'm sure it won't be long before Twitter becomes one a 'mainstream' social network, as many are predicting.

The full set of in-depth data is available in Hitwise’s UK Social Networking Update. Thanks goes to Robin Grant for flagging the research to me.

The End of Embargoes?

Michael Arrington wrote a piece on TechCrunch today that proclaims the "Death of the Embargo":

"All this stress on the PR firms put on them by desperate clients means they send out the embargoed news to literally everyone who writes tech news stories... One annoying thing for us is when an embargo is broken. That means that a news site goes early with the news despite the fact that they’ve promised not to. The benefits are clear - sites like Google News and TechMeme prioritize them first as having broken the story. Traffic and links flow in to whoever breaks an embargo first."

But the digital world means that embargoes have long been dead in this PR specialism.

Bloggers don't work 9 til 5 - well, not on their blogs anyway. Most of them will have day jobs with all of the responsibility that entails and so will only get the chance to blog in their spare time. This means that they just don't have time to sit and wait on an embargo.

If they do get paid to write for a blog or online news site, they are getting paid to get the news first. In the world where a hit on Digg can increase traffic by ridiculous amounts, or - as Arrington points out - being the first to break a story to gets you on the front page of TechMeme and another substantial increase in traffic, it is against the journalist's best interests to wait on an embargo, especially if they know that another publication is getting the same story with the same embargo.

As anyone who has seen Will Ferrell's Talledega Nights will know, "If you're not first, you're last".

This isn't a solution, but if a PR agency wanted to get their clients on a wide range of blogs and online news sites, they wouldn't bother with an embargo - ever. Instead, they should spend time on actually making their announcements newsworthy and targeted at the right publications, time that would have otherwise been spent explaining to journalists and bloggers what the embargo was. This means that the journalist will want to break the story before anyone else and therefore you'll get a range of publications who are actually interested the news writing a piece on it.

But Arrington does give an exception for when embargoes will be honoured:

"We will honor embargoes from trusted companies and PR firms who give us the news exclusively, so we know there won’t be any mistakes. There are also a handful of people who we trust enough to continue to work with them on general embargoes."

So the solution is to build up a trusted relationship with the journalists and bloggers that you are conducting outreach to and give them a strong story so that they can guarantee that the news will be of interest to their readers. Isn't this the case with traditional journalism? When did the rules change for digital PR?

Newsworthy announcements given to journalists that you have built trusted relationships with. Just because embargoes may now be extinct, it doesn't mean that the basic rules of PR are.

There's more excellent discussion on this subject in the comments of the original post and over at Mahalo. Drew Benvie also covers the post here (complete with reference to grey hairs!) and Brian Solis gives an insider's perspective here.

Update: Jonathan Hopkins pointed out this delightful little site this morning, The Embargo Killer.

Is a public relations degree worth it?

Over at Rock Star PR , Jed Hallam ponders the value of a university degree in public relations:

"I didn’t study public relations at university, I studied English Literature and, typical for the industry, I fell into PR. But what if I would’ve always have wanted to work in PR and would’ve studied it at university? Would that make me a better PR professional? Or would it have simply prepared me for the technical aspects of public relations; the format of the press release, the communications audit, the strategy, the three month plan, the research, the analysis and on and on… Can this be learnt on the job or must it be taught?"

John Burg left a comment on the post that points out that even the best degrees are useless uinless you can convert theory into practise:

"You cannot learn to ride a bike until you get on it. But if you first study physics, balance and riding on a stationary cycle, you will be better prepared once you hit the ground. However, just because you don’t have that piece of paper doesn’t mean that you are any less qualified than the next guy. All it means is that you don’t have the perspective of a trained “practitioner”. PR and Communications are a human sciences. We invented them, we drive them, we are them. If you intuitively “get it” you can do it. But a little background, some perspective, some experience goes a long way."

I feel personally that a degree in PR is the same as any other degree in the arts and humanities - unless there is a strong vocational element (as Richard Millington points out) then the degree won’t prepare you that well for working in ‘the real world’. History, Philosophy, English Literature, Sociology, etc. - all very good degrees with no clear career path at the end.

As such, it is the experience gained outside of these degrees that is more likely to prepare you for working life, whether its playing sports, joining a society, or taking up work experience as part of the degree.

It’s only when students/graduates get into a real working situation with real clients that their skills are put into practise. As Vikki Chowney tweeted just yesterday:

"Graduates; there’s nothing like real industry experience - now you really start learning"

This is an element that Bright One is trying to help with, offering students real life clients as part of their degrees - even if they’re not studying PR - so that they can learn on the job and do something for the social good at the same time. It's an opportunity to gain real world experience with real clients that will translate into a higher level of professionalism in years to come, using skills learned from studying in real world situations, benefiting both current studies and future employment.

Those who study for a public relations degree will benefit by gaining a better understanding of the communications industry and the everyday workings of a PR agency. There is a gap here that posts like Jed's highlight, a gap that Bright One hopes to help fill.

Hotwire heads up 'preeple' table

Following on from yesterday's post on Stephen Davies' list of preeple on Twitter, Michael Litman has produced a table listing agencies' presence on Twitter, which is aimed as a compliment to Stephen’s alphabetically ordered list.

I'm sure the list will get updated as more people add themselves to the list through comments so the table may change, but at the time of writing Hotwire heads up the table with a total of 16 preeple without including any twitterers from it's sister agency, Skywrite Communications. Axicom comes next and it's good to see the Rainier team with 11 Twitter users.

Although the table might not mean that much as the agencies listed vary in size and as such will have differing levels of people on Twitter, it is nice to see that Hotwire has a lot of active people on Twitter and how we recognise it as a useful tool throughout the agency, not just in our digital media practise.

Here's the list as it appears on Michael's blog:

1. Hotwire (16)
2. Axicom (12)
3. Rainier (11)
4. Edelman (9)
5. Lewis (9)
6. Ruder Finn (9)
7. Cow (8)
8. Berkeley (6)
9. Freelance (6)
10. Wolfstar (6)
11. Hill & Knowlton (5)
12. Porter Novelli (5)
13. Six Degrees (5)
14. Text 100 (5)
15. ITV (4)
16. Liberate Media (4)
17. Mantra (4)
18. Microsoft (4)
19. Waggener Edstrom (4)
20. Weber Shandwick (4)
21. Diffusion (3)
22. Kaizo (3)
23. O2 (3)
24. Shiny Red (3)
25. Wildfire PR (3)
26. Fishburn Hedges (2)
27. Nelson Bostock (2)
28. Punch Communications (2)
29. Racepoint Group (2)
30. Splendid Communications (2)
31. Staniforth (2)
32. University of Warwick (2)

Jeeple and Preeple

Stephen Davies of 3W PR has produced two blog posts of note recently (not that is other posts are rubbish, just these ones have garnered more attention than normal...).

The first post lists journalists in the UK who are on Twitter. The second does much the same, listing PR people in the UK who have a profile on Twitter.

So far, there are 85 journalists on the list compared to 137 PR people by the last count. That's almost twice as many 'preeple' on Twitter as there are 'jeeple' (using Stephen's terms), and the list of PR professionals is growing as people leave comments below the post to be added on to the list.

What does this actually mean anything though (apart from the fact that journalists are now going to get contacted more often by PROs on Twitter, PROs will get contacted by recruiters through Twitter, and Stephen will get a lot more hits to his blog)?

It has been documented that there are currently around three times more PR professionals than there are journalists in the UK, so it might come as no surprise that the list of hacks is longer. 

It might also be an indication of the varying levels of usefulness of Twitter as a tool for both professions:

Journalists can source stories and potential snippits of information on Twitter much quicker than most other tools, tweet stories they've recently published, and use it for sourcing information for articles. There's a much longer list of uses and some good discussion on the subject here.

PRs can use Twitter to have a conversation with their cleint's market and make and mange connections with customers, bloggers and other stakeholders, keep in touch and build relationships with the  media and influential bloggers, monitor mentions of their company or client brands, announce special deals,  post live updates on events or conferences and promote blog posts, webinars, interesting client news and more.

I'm sure that journalists will argue with me on this one, but it may just be that PR professionals have a wider range of users for Twitter than journalists and these uses are more valuable to their work (BTW, this isn't me trying to get journalists to leave comments on this post so we can find out more clearly how they use Twitter...).

Then again, it might also be an indication that PR professionals have more time to waste scouring t'internet and posting up to Twitter ;)

What do you think? Do you feel that there is an imbalance in the number of journalists on Twitter compared to PR people? Is this a bad thing? What does it mean for both journalists and PR professionals?

How to write a "great blogger pitch"

My colleague Drew Benvie was sent an "interesting" pitch from a PR firm, which you can read about more on his blog here.

The pitch has received a lot of criticism, not from Drew (as he left the post fairly neutral) but from the comments below the post. These include: "it just seems like a load of waffle"; "what strikes me is that there is no sense of personality in the pitch"; "the overuse of the word aggressive is, well, aggressive"; and - my favourite from Luis Levy - "it's almost as if Word wrote that pitch by itself based on crappy Microsoft algorithms."

Perhaps a bit harsh, but these criticisms could have been easily avoided.

One of the things that I have found most appealing about people involved in social media is the ethos of sharing. Sharing is a good thing, especially when trying to pitch a blogger, as there are plenty of examples and tips on how to pitch a blogger. Now, I'm not going to dive into a long, long list of all sorts of tips on how best to pitch to a blogger. Instead, I'm going to show what the PR professional from 5WPR might have done better, even as some first steps.

In the interests of research, I simply googled the term "great blogger pitch" and came up with the following results:

How to Pitch to Bloggers - 21 Tips
www.problogger.net/archives/2007/10/30/how-to-pitch-to-bloggers-21-tips/

The Jeff Pulver Blog: PR 203: How to Pitch a Blogger
pulverblog.pulver.com/archives/008349.html

Will Video for Food » Best Blogger Pitch Letter Ever
willvideoforfood.com/2008/06/06/best-blogger-pitch-letter-ever/

How to Pitch a Blogger » BloggerDesign.com
www.toprankblog.com/2006/10/blogger-relations-101/

Attention marketers: do you know how to pitch a blogger or podcaster?
www.krishnade.com/blog/2007/how-to-pitch-a-blogger-or-podcaster/

How not to pitch a blogger: Church of the Customer Blog
www.churchofthecustomer.com/blog/2007/04/8_bad_pr_pitche.html

Micro Persuasion: How Not to Pitch a Blogger
www.micropersuasion.com/2005/02/how_not_to_pitc.html


I hope I'm not being too unfair here, but surely it wouldn't have been too much effort to find out what other people have said on the subject? After all, every one of the bloggers on this list would have had to have started somewhere. If it took those bloggers a while to get the pitch just right, then they've done the hard work for you by repeating the exercise until they have found a way that gives them a good chance of being well received when/if they pitch to a blogger.

This situation can be repeated over and over - if you're not sure on how to go about something in the social media sphere, google it and there is sure to be a helpful article from Chris Brogan, Brian Solis, Seth Godin or other brilliant social media strategists to at least help get you started on whatever you're thinking of doing.

While I don't think that there's such a thing as the perfect blog pitch - after all, I believe that every pitch should be tailored for every situation - if all I have to do to pick those social media guru's brains is to google a certain phrase, then I count myself lucky that they have been willing to share their expertise with the rest of us. When we believe our expertise to be of use to someone else, we should be sharing that knowledge too.

So how do you write a great blogger pitch?

Google it. The answer's out there somewhere.

Free Media Relations Campaign Up For Grabs

Shout! Communications, a London-based specialist broadcast PR consultancy, is inviting any registered charities to take part in a competition they are running as part of their pro bono initiative.

In previous years, they have chosen a charity to support put forward by a member of their team. In the past this has included Breast Cancer Campaign, the Victoria Cross and George Cross Associations and Hearing Dogs for the Deaf. This year Shout! have decided to widen the net and are inviting interested charities to take part in a competition.

First prize is a media relations campaign (radio, TV or online) worth up to £2,500. All you have to do is tell Shout!, in 300 words or fewer, why you'd like your nominated charity to win.

A panel of judges, including CIPR President Lis Lewis-Jones and PRCA Director General Francis Ingham, will decide the winner. The judges will base their decision on how good the campaign is, in terms of creativity and originality. They’ll also be looking at how suitable the campaign is for broadcast – that means having engaging and available spokespeople, good case studies where appropriate, possibly a news hook for the story and good picture and sound opportunities.    

All charities that enter will also be eligable for a 25% reduction off Shout!'s rate card for a period of 6 months. The deadline is  eop on Friday 7th November. For more information, take a look at the news section of Shout! Communication's website here.

He's So Hot(wire) Right Now

Just a quick note to welcome our newest recruit to the Hotwire family here at 33 Dallington Street.

Phil Sheard will be joining us from Plusnet where he has been for the past 7 years, more of which you can find out about at his blog here. Lately he's barely been off Twitter , so he's obviously got the hunger for the digital media mastery that we prize over here.

Phil has also assured me that he's been practising his milk warming skills in order to get in my good books straight away, so I'm looking forward to him joining Hotwire later this month!

A Bright Idea with A Bright Future

I just wanted to take a moment to tell you about Bright One, an intiative that I've been spearheading over the last few months and that launched last week.

Bright One is a communications agency aimed at charities, non-profits and social enterprises, run by volunteers from the industry who want to broaden their communication’s experience and use their expertise for social good. It aims to deliver high quality communications for charities, non-profit organisations and social enterprises, and in turn help them to reach those they are trying to help. You can find out more about Bright One's aims by going to the website here.

Bright One launched officially on Thursday 25 September with an appearance in PR Week, which you can read by clicking on the photo below.


I hope you agree that this is a great idea - everyone we've spoken to has said so and we know there are plenty of people out there who need our help, which is why an idea has become a working organisation.

You can follow us in Twitter, join our Facebook page, flag useful things to us using Delicious, and find out about the other social entrepreneurs we are working with over at Unltd World.

To get a better idea of what I'm up to over at Bright One, read the introduction post here.

May Those Who Help The Most Win

Google has launched a number of new sites as part of its 10-year anniversary celebrations and one of the websites that caught my eye (well, a site that a friend flagged to me) is Project 10^100, which has been described as "a call for ideas to change the world by helping as many people as possible."

Google explain more about their thinking behind the project:

"Never in history have so many people had so much information, so many tools at their disposal, so many ways of making good ideas come to life. Yet at the same time, so many people, of all walks of life, could use so much help, in both little ways and big. In the midst of this, new studies are reinforcing the simple wisdom that beyond a certain very basic level of material wealth, the only thing that increases individual happiness over time is helping other people. In other words, helping helps everybody, helper and helped alike."

The project is called Project 10^100 because 10100 is another way of expressing the number "googol," a one followed by one hundred zeroes. This expresses Google's goal of achieving great results through smart technology that starts small and scales dramatically over time to have a tremendous long-term impact. Project 10100 is a similar attempt to produce those kinds of scalable results by harnessing Google's users' insights and creativity.

It's a great idea as no one knows what ideas would help the most people. Google's project has the premise that maybe its hundreds of millions of users might. 

Google said that it would post a selection of the 100 best ideas and ask the public to choose 20 semi-finalists. Following this selection process an advisory board will select up to five final ideas.

I've got an idea that I'm thinking of submitting (more on this very soon), but in the meantime here is the official promo video:

Mobile Monday London - “Mobile Platforms”

After a summer break, MoMo London returned this week with a great event discussing the future of mobile platforms. Held at the usual venue,  CBI Conference Center in Centre Point Tower, the evening was sponsored by Yahoo! and facilitated by EMCC Software.

After the evening it was good to catch up with Andrew Grill - who showed me a cool mobile service that is sure to launch over here soon - and to meet Simon Maddox in the flesh after exchanging tweets.

Blog posts on the evening have already appeared from Simon Judge and Kai Hendry. Below are the notes I took on the evening, which I'm sure are far from comprehensive and may not make sense unless you were there, but I hope they prove useful in some shape or form:

Chair:

Annie Turner, TelecomsEurope.net

Panel Members:

Simon Rockman – Sony Ericsson

Nick Allot – CTO, OMTP

Msrko Balabanovc – LastMinute.com

Ben Last – EMCC

Ricardo Varela – Yahoo!

Platform fragmentation

• OMTP looking for consensus on key issues.
  

What do we mean by platforms?

• A cheap way to build an application
  
• OR What developers develops their applications for
  

Different platforms at both ends of the scale

• All pervasive, e.g. Text
  
• Other end of line – Symbian application, deeper user experience but not much penetration

In between user experience and market penetration is ideal, but doesn't give you a good return/monetisation

Web is fantastic for broad applications. For mobile applications, need access to things that classically present a security problem, e.g. access to contacts and location.

It's difficult to write apps for a sustainable business model. Only success story (apart from porn) is mobile ringtones.

How can we get consistency in what the web can gave to native mobile platforms so that it doesn't threaten security and viability of mobile applications/platforms?

Trying to find application environment that is ubiquitous, is quick to develop with, and quick to deploy to the end user.

It is the integration with the web that really adds to the richness of the user experience.

Computer games developers optimise for certain platforms, e.g. Brain Training for the Nintendo DS.

• Fragmentation of mobile platforms doesn't make this possible for mobile developers, unless you target a niche with a large audience, such as Blackberry users.
  
• Also made more complex by different languages and societies with different grades of mobile handsets around the world.

1 billion mobile phones sold around the world per year. 40% of those are Nokia handsets.

App stores could be tailored to who the consumer is, e.g. only present them with apps relevant to their handset.

Develop apps for Nokia Series 60 and Blackberry and you can capture the majority of the mobile app audience.

Apps that already exist on the web aren't interesting to mobile users. Those that are enhanced and unique to th mobile are a lot more interesting.

iPhone app store works because it is such a seamless experience. It is easy to connect to the internet, easy to connect to the app store, and easy to pay for items as it is billed to your iPhone account. If operators see this model working, they will replicate it and incorporate it into their own business model.

Writing apps for the web gives you 10s of millions of users, but for the mobile space only gives you a few million at most. The business model doesn't scale well.

Consumers who don't download apps are not averse to spending money, but disappointed with apps and games that they have downloaded. Web still gives a much richer user experience.

Lots of phones will not get more powerful, but they will get a lot cheaper. Phones will become to be priced 12-15 pounds. But for the next 2 billion people to enter the market by buying these phones this is still very expensive, e.g. a weeks wages.

Two ways of stopping fragmentation:

• 1 or 2 companies monopolise the market
  
• Operators and developers collaborate on a single platform

One of the biggest applications in India is having a torch on your phone – extremely useful to a large base of users, but no sustainable business model given their economic demographic

OMTP trying to construct a system which properly constructs trust in the system and completely removes the unneeded questions that users have to deal with. E.g. taking an application from one operator/mobile platform to another without having to re register of fill out more security certificates

Ben Whitaker: Users shouldn't ever have to deal with different languages for different phones or have to set up their own internet connections. The technology for a standardised WAP system is available but very few operators install it automatically.

Yahoo! Blueprint

• How are they going to make money out of this?
  
• The way they make money is to make their own applications. Yahoo's motivation behind releasing Yahoo Blueprint is to gain the audience and then monetise once the audience is there.
  
• Yahoo wants to get the reach so they only have one system for each different type of platform, e.g. Symbian, Java, etc

LastMinute.com aren't looking to see applications, but rather get people to buy stuff from LastMinute.com through using free applications on their phone.

• Using as a trial to see what the user uptake is in this space, e.g. what do users find useful?
  
• But only concentrated on Western European users and find mobile secondary to what users have on web at home or work.

Trying to resolve the fragmentation issue by bringing out your own solution will just result in ore fighting over the issue. The reason Firefox become so successful was that it started to do the same things as IE but make it better and with added features.

If a user doesn't have an internet connection on the phone, the app automatically detects this and completes the registration process through encrypted SMS texts.

Ladbrokes reported 250% uplift in users when they introduced full registration on mobile rather than on the web.

As with the web, we will see some standardisation at some point, but this has to come from something higher than a company or organisation. When this will happen is determined when it comes to the point when users say that this isn’t working

Customers didn't buy the Wii for the Wii, but they bought the Wii when they saw someone else playing Wii sports and bought the Wii so that they too could play Wii sports. It's a dot com phrase, but that 'killer app' which is easy to use, offers a rich experience and is easily shareable among users will make a lot of money even if it is on one platform.

Scheduling Twitter messages with Twittertise

Twittertise could prove to be an extremely useful tool for all sorts of companies and organisations on Twitter, as it lets you schedule Twitter messages in advance to send automatically.

Whatever is written on Twitter is posted immediately into the main timeline, which is great for individual users who want to let people know what they're up to, but if a company wants to send out pre-written tweets - like news, announcements, or other promotional messages - they'd need someone to remember to manually send out the messages or setup an RSS feed, through a service such as Twitterfeed, to automatically do the job for you.

The problem of tweeting announcements this way is that  it normally results in 10 messages being sent at once - very annoying for those whose timeline is suddenly taken up by a torrent of news announcements:

That's where Twittertise comes in, allowing you to spread out the timing of tweets to appear less spamtastic. Twittertise is also simple to use: you log in with your Twitter username and password, type in tweets your tweets as normal and schedule them to send at a specific time.

Simple, but effective.

If you want to direct people to your homepage or a news item of interest,  Twittertise has an excellent feature that routes links through a URL shortening tool called Bit.ly, which lets you track how many people have clicked through your link - an indespensible feature for Public Relations practitioners (amongst others) who want to prove the audience reach of their Twitter activity.

I'm sure there's lots more uses for Twittertise - what do you see as potential uses of this service? What are the other advantages if using this service? Any disadvantages that users should be aware of?

Saying hi to 3W PR

Stephen Davies, (formerly) of Webit PR and prolific blogger at PR Blogger, has announced today that he we will be establishing his own PR agency.

3W PR is "a new communications agency designed to help organisations, brands and individuals navigate through the World Wide Web." Davies says that the agency has been introduced to meet the growing trends of how consumers are now informed and how organisations do.

Davies gives us an insight into his motivations for setting up the agency:

Setting up 3W PR just felt like the right thing to do. Not just because I think it’s going to be a success but because I see it as a challenge to me on both a personal and professional level. It’s a challenge that I’m really up for, though, and over the course of setting up 3W (as I affectionately call it for short) I’ve developed a vision of where I want it to be headed. And a vision really isn’t a vision if you only think small.

Spawned out of admiration for a number of individuals in the industry who have taken a similar move (Stuart, Daljit , Jonathan, Katy), 3W's first client will be the company that Davies is leaving, Webit PR. You can read the news release announcing the launch here, or for a more personal tone you can read the blog post here.

All that remains to say is best of luck to Stephen and we'll all be watching this space to see what he gets up to next!

HWH PR Named and Shamed

The Bad Pitch Blog writes a scathing post today, criticising the practises of PR agency HWH PR and their habit of turning client news releases into PR spam.

The Bad Pitch Blog even went so far as to 'honour' them with a Lifetime Achievement Award (pictured) - though I think that if it was a bad pitch then the ball should be falling out of the glove, not neatly caught in it.

This post may represent a change of tact in the battle against PR spam: creating public appeals to the brand owner rather than the PR agency itself. As the post says:

To Samsung, Westinghouse Digital and Dotster I ask if you want people like this representing your brand.

Blasting news releases to anyone with an email address and ignoring their replies is not practicing media relations – it’s spamming. They’ve done a bad enough job handling media relations on their clients' behalf that I’m forced to call these brands into question.

When the people that you are paying to represent your brand start to tarnish it, it poses a major risk to the reputation of your brand. Firstly from the intial spam that these people are sending, but secondly from the extended implications of this, namely that your brand has chosen these people to represent them and are still paying them despite a large amount of complaints from the journalist community.

It's becoming increasingly important for brands to not only listen to what is being said about them, but also to listen to what is being said about the people they outsource work to and who represent their company. If they don't and respond in the correct way to any negative feedback (e.g. when journalists consistently complain, find a new PR agency and ensure that they are representing the company in the right way), then they risk damaging their brand and losing trust from the communities, including journalists, that they are trying to reach.

Should PR people blog/tweet about their client work?

Not wanting to start of this post sounding like an episode of Sex and the City, but what are the rules surrounding PR practitioners talking about their client work in the online space? Does it annoy the people not in PR have to put up with our occasional promotional tweets in between personal messages? Should we be posting/tweeting about or client work at all?

Etiquette would have it that most people would be perfectly happy to put up with a few plugs from a PR person, as long as there was a disclaimer stating that it was client work. I've done it a few times on Twitter (with a disclaimer), but I've seen a few people being pulled up for tweeting about client work but not disclaiming the fact.

There's also the issue of people who put up a link on their blog or a Tiny URL on their Twitter feed, but not informing people where the link leads to. Often it is to personal blog post or a clients site. Is this practice frowned upon?

What about people who blog/tweet on behalf of a client? And what if they then retweet a client's messages sans disclaimer? This confuses the issue even more.

I believe that in PR, transparency and authenticity counts for a lot. I'm perfectly happy for people to write about their client work and even plug it, as long as the wool isn't being pulled over our eyes and there's a clear disclaimer that lets everyone know that what has been written should be read from a certain perspective. Sometimes it can be really useful for people to write about their client work as it may be of genuine interest to people who read about it.

Our personal and business lives are so intertwined in the online community that it is often impossible to separate the two in some cases. Even then, it is only good practice to let people know what's going on behind the scenes.

What do you think? Do you let people know when you write about client work? Do you get annoyed when people write about their clients without telling you that they're being paid by them?

(P.S. Apologies, but upon rereading this post, it really does seem like something out of Sex and the City, especially if you read it in Sarah Jessica Parker's whiney New York accent)

Senior PR executive admits to blog misconduct

Hotwire recently blogged about a recent change to UK media law that makes a certain practice of ‘fake blogging’ against the law. What used to be just a faux pas is now more than just that. In plain English, the law means that organisations should not pretend to be consumers.

To prove just how relevant this issue is, an article appeared on the front page of the US edition of PR Week, describing an incident where New-York based agency 5W Public Relations acknowledged that a senior executive was involved in misconduct by impersonating a client when leaving a comment on a blog.

The incident arose when 5W Senior Vice President, Juda Engelmayer, left comments under a client’s name on the Failed Messiah blog. The comments were then traced back to the IP address of Engelmayer, showing how people who undertake this now illegal practice are leaving themselves open to be caught.

The CEO of 5W, Ronn Torossian, said that they had instituted internal measures to ensure this cannot happen again: “A senior staff member failed to be transparent in dealing with client matters,” Torossian said. “He has taken full responsibility.”

For further reading on this, check the BBC’s take on the law and read the PR Week article.

Cross-posted to the Hotwire Interactive blog.

Journos Should Walk a Mile in Our Shoes...

... and that's exactly what journalist Sally Whittle has been doing.

In a post titled "I'm not cut out for PR", Sally describes her experiences as she takes on the role of a PR for a short while.

"In a slightly odd turn of events, I have been doing some PR and copywriting for a business in recent months (nothing to do with what I cover as a journalist), and I have to say: journalists suck."

She pitches a story idea to one nationals journalist who rather snootily sent a reply saying: "That's not a story." Next, she pitched the story to a hack who told her that her story was rubbish, but then came back saying her editor liked it, and could Sally write up 800 words for her to customise slightly, which then ran in a paper under the journalists byline. Another journalist asked Sally to arrange an interview with her client but also to schedule calls with two or three of its competitors, and also provided a list of statistics, facts and figures she'd require for the article.

It makes for very refreshing reading for all the PR practitioners out there who are fed up of all the bad mouthing that hacks give the PR industry. Now the tables are turned, I'm sure it makes unpleasant reading for those same journalists.

As Linda says in the comments:

"Shout out that PRs are tossers and you get a Mexican wave of support. Dare to whisper some journalists are tossers and you must be kidding, right? To be honest, I think more and more journalists will be finding out for themselves what's expected of them in a PR/copywriting role - they have to find work to replace all the commissions slipping away..."

But The Wordsmith offers a balanced view, one that has echoes of when a flack is called to defend their profession:

"I think there are good and bad PRs and good and bad hacks. I'd never expect or even ask a PR to set up calls with a clients' rivals or write my copy for me. That's my job. Hacks that lazy ought to be nominated for a Churner Prize."

Sally ends her post by asking "How do you do this stuff for months on end? Seriously, journalists are just REALLY obnoxious."

How do I work in PR for months on end?

I like to think that PR is a great industry to work in, that I'm great at my job, that my peers in PR are great at doing theirs, and that it is a very exciting place to be in right now. And there's no amount of obnoxious journalists that will change that for me.

Q&A with Paterson of Plebble

Following on from my previous post on Plebble, I managed to put together a quick Q&A with James Paterson, one half of the brothers who co-founded Plebble in early 2006 (the other being Will) .

The session took a bit of a PR spin (excuse the pun...) so that practitioners can work out how to get the most from using the site, how to interact with the users on the site, and any dangers they should be aware of.

Some pretty sound advice was given - advice I might add that can be applied to various other areas of PR activity. James even branded the questions with a special Plebble speech bubble!

Questions

1. What impact will Plebble have on the companies that PR agencies represent?

Web 2.0 has seen new communication channels are opening up all over the place.

However, I think that PRs have often had difficulty using these channels to convey their clients’ messages because, frankly, they’re usually not welcome. For example, people want to use their social networks for ... socialising. They don’t want brands to keep popping up all the time, saying “Hello, remember us?”

To get round this, some PRs/brands have resorted to subterfuge – pretending to be an ordinary consumer, when they’re not. This is a high-stakes game and, if they get caught out, it reflects really badly on them (eg Walmart).

What Plebble is all about is providing a place where both consumers and businesses can exchange views, messages, opinions in an open, neutral forum. We combine customers’ voices to give them a greater impact on the businesses concerned – but that also makes it easier for businesses to listen to, digest and react positively to what customers are saying.

2. Do you have any good examples of businesses using Plebble effectively?

Plebble is very new and so we are still in early-adopter territory. Nevertheless, some brands are already using it, albeit not to its full potential. Brands such as British Gas, B&Q, Littlewoods, Norwich Union and Standard Life Bank are in what you might call listening mode – they’ve signed up for alerts so that, when anyone rates them, they’ll be emailed. B&Q have also added all their stores to Plebble so they can see which ratings relate to which stores.

What these brands aren’t doing yet though is exploiting the possibilities of communicating with their customers through Plebble. If someone has a problem with British Gas, for example, if British Gas sorts it out publicly, through the site:

(a) They get 1 happy customer (i.e. the person who had the original issue) – the same if they sorted it out privately;

(b) They instantly show anyone else with the same problem browsing the site how to resolve it – thereby cutting down on people contacting them with the same problem; and

(c) They show the whole world that actually they’re a good company that is good at sorting out customers’ problems.

Businesses that already know they provide great service can also ask their customers to help support them on Plebble. People are incredibly willing to reward good service with a recommendation to other potential customers. At least 3 of our current top performers have reached out to their customers asking for support – and have clearly got it.

3. How do you think PRs can best use Plebble, e.g. reputation monitoring?

Plebble is definitely useful for reputation monitoring – and will be more so, as more consumers start using the site. We already provide various tools to help businesses/PRs make sense of what people are saying and will soon be adding more.

But our functionality is really geared towards reputation management and brand building – i.e. being proactive in engaging with customers and distinguishing yourself from your competitors on that basis.

In the end, what’s going on on Plebble is a living advert for each business and the values it stands for (for both good and bad). It’s up to PRs and the businesses concerned what they do with it.

4. Is there a way for Plebble to stop ‘Sock-Puppeting’, the practise of PRs posting fake comments to improve their client’s reputations?

We take data-quality extremely seriously – it’s the lifeblood of our business. We’ve got a number of security procedures in place (e.g. unusual rating monitoring, IP analysis, blacklists, etc), which I probably shouldn’t tell you much about ... and we’re adding to them all the time.

We’re philosophical that we’re never going to be able to eradicate fake comments completely. Plebble’s nature as an e-mocracy, though, means that, in the end the majority view prevails. If you’ve got a few comments that are favourable while the rest are really bad, then people are pretty good at working out that the good reviews are bogus. So, ultimately it’s not worth PRs posting fake comments because (a) people probably won’t be taken in by them and (b) it reflects even worse on the brand they’re supposed to be representing if it looks like they’re trying to game the system rather than engage with people’s genuine issues.

5. Any other tips and tricks

Be open, positive and honest. Deal with negative criticism, no matter how painful and shout about the good stuff as much as you can!

PR Week's Redesign

Hot of the press, the latest issue of PR Week arrived on my desk this morning. And would you believe it, they 've had a redesign!

On first impressions, it looks a lot like its American counterpart. There's more white space and the fonts are bigger - prompting one of my colleagues to say "Wow, those fonts are big - it looks like PR Week for stupid people."

One interesting addition to the Technology page (still only one page...) is the "Best of the Tech Blogs" column, which features the choiciest cuts from three Tech PR blogs.

This week's column has a post from Jim Horton (the original PR blogger) on Barack Obama's new press spokeswoman and her opinion of PR practitioners, there's one from Stephen Davies (the current PR blogger) the fragile nature of relationships in social media, and lastly a post from Hotwire's own Drew Benvie, who looks at the Associated Press' anti-blogger stance.

Overall, it will be interesting to see how this column develops and who will be featured. It's no doubt a great way to position yourself as a online PR expert (as Jim, Stephen and Drew already are) and we may well see lesser known bloggers who are featured being swept up by the bigger agencies for their social media expertise.

It's good to see PR Week attempt to freshen itself up and keep up with the developments in the Tech PR space, but what about the bloggers in other PR spaces, like charity, property and government?

Also, the cover price is now £5 - is the redesign really worth charging an extra £1.40 for?

Take my advice: subscribe to Jim's, Stephen's and Drew's blog and you'll learn a mountain load more about Tech PR than paying £5 a week for a copy of PR Week. while you're at it, subscribe to this blog - you might even get a gem of wisdom or two from me!

Blogging for the real world

Last weekend, I was lucky enough to spend the weekend in Dorset doing some charity work. Much as I love London, it was great to get out of the City into the countryside for a bit of a break from the fast-paced city life.

As an added bonus, we were in the middle of nowhere and could barely get any phone reception, let alone an internet connection. This meant that there was no way of keeping up with the blogosphere, Twitter, or emails.

It was great to get away from it all - even if for just a weekend.

This sentiment rang even truer given the book I took away with me to read: We Think by Charles Leadbeater. It seemed to me, reading in the middle of a field in the middle of nowhere under a lazy blue sky, that Leadbeater could have done with stepping outside his office more often.

Don't get me wrong - We Think is a great book. It explores plenty of the issues surrounding the new ways of working that the internet has brought about and the challenges we will all face in the future in light of this. Leadbeater also avoids using overly complicated language for the sake of it and uses simple terms and descriptions to get across his ideas (a big tick in my box).

But - and I think this is a problem with academia in general - it seems to be less rooted in the real world with concrete examples of how to apply the theories put forward to the real world, and more as a piece of academia written for academia's sake.

You could argue that the same happens to the blogosphere - blog comments just come from bloggers commenting on each others blogs. Twitter is an extension of this; bloggers commenting on issues - not on each others blogs, but on Twitter (could it be argued that Twitter is a post and every Tweet a comment underneath it?)

Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody is a much better book - for me anyway. It is written ion the same simple language as We Think, but the ideas it puts forward are much more rooted in the real world, concrete examples and case studies are explored in depth, and - most importantly - it is discussed how these examples can help us in our everyday business and personal lives and what we can take from these examples. Shirky has stepped outside his office into the real world, but then brought it back to write the book, and finally tailored it to be put back out into the real world.

This is a lesson that I'm hoping to take to my blog. I'm going to try and root every blog post in the real world, giving examples of how readers can apply the ideas given to their work and personal lives. It may be a tall order - not every blog post will appropriate or useful - but it's a good ideal to work towards.

As for stepping outside the online bubble? I think I'm pretty good at that anyway, but will try to keep on keeping on and getting out into the real world. This may seem hypocritical coming from someone who's paid to do online PR, but to keep things even more in perspective, read this unbelievably true blog post from Jeremy Pepper.

The kids I was helping this weekend have gone through so much more than you or I probably ever will, so just bear in the back of your mind the next time you're still reading blogs at 2am that it just doesn't matter.