Thanks to Neville Hobson (@jangles) I've managed to get an invite to join Socialthing!, which officially went into private beta today
Socialthing! is different from the other social network aggregators out there (FriendFeed is popular due to some ex-Googlers starting it and a list of other aggregators can be found here) due to the way it determines which of your friends to track.
While FriendFeed requires users to create their own list of friends for FriendFeed, Socialthing! automatically detects who your friends are on the social services to which you belong, saving you a both time and hassle.
The distinction might not sound obvious, but as TechCrunch reported today, "Socialthing!’s method actually makes things a lot easier, both for initial set up and for longer term maintenance. When you sign up for Socialthing!, you only have to provide it with your credentials to sites like Facebook and Pownce. And as time goes by, you don’t have to worry about setting up new friends on the service because it will automatically know that you’ve become friends with people elsewhere. In contrast, FriendFeed requires you to both explicitly designate friends during the initial configuration and manually add new friends over time."
Another benefit Socialthing! has over FriendFeed is its focus on allowing users to send data back to applications such as Twitter. For example, I can respond to tweets directly from Socialthing!.
It's also very simple to use and looks very clean. Unfortunately though, it just doesn't keep me updated with tweets as well as other services I've tried, such as Thwirl or Twitbin. Socialthing! groups tweets from people together, often in threes, meaning that I often miss the drift of conversations - vital to be able to use Twitter properly.
Ultimately, there is little to choose between the two at this stage. FriendFeed currently supports a wider range of applications than Socialthing! (28 vs. 11), but FriendFeed doesn't let you see Facebook updates.
Time, as always, will tell.
Monday, 10 March 2008
Such a SocialThing(!)
Friday, 7 March 2008
Par for the PR course?
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In an article that appeared on Gorkana PR today, long time PR Terence Gibbons muses on the relative merits of PR courses…or not.
While Gibbons does say that he would "hate to panic hardworking students just about to complete a dollop of course work, or the tutor whose job depends on another intake of freshers on a “PR/Media” BA", it actually looks like he is going to upset anyone teaching or studying PR at graduate level, which is a lot of people:
"The only way to “get into PR”, is having a passion for it. Nobody “gets” into PR. You “get into” organic chemistry. You get into “organic yoghurt”. You get into “your music”. You get into a Porsche. But, you aspire to work in PR. As such, a PR degree seems to be of limited use."
Wise words on the aspirational aspect of working in PR, but still feel he is giving a harsh view on PR degrees as of "limited use".
"You can develop any talent within, hone and craft skills but if someone can’t write good copy or prose, it can’t be taught. You either have a natural talent for it or not. You can learn the techniques, but unless your interest lies in the whole fascinating subject that is human psychology, its manipulation, the creation of thought contagion and mind viruses, forget it. Can you teach someone to sell a story? Can you teach someone to be innovative? To be creative? Can you teach someone to have a flair for publicity? For spotting trends before they happen? Personally, I don’t think so."
True, but PR degrees give students plenty of real world situations where they can apply the skills they have learnt, not to mention the work placements that they often undertake. I think Gibbons is alluding to his very high standards here, and why not? PR students should learn from his comments and strive to attain these high standards too.
His example of a PR student takes on a more sarcastic tone:
"I have worked with PR Graduates. For example, Ermintrude. Ermintrude is a PR graduate of a very large new University that is well known for its “innovative” approach to PR degrees and now works in a large consumer plc. She has completed her 3-year course of study and has acquired “all the skills for PR” and the degree to prove it. Yet, she doesn’t know what a stand first is or what the 20-word rule is. Or what “forward features” or “selling in” consist of. She knows the theory of mass communication, has read Chomsky, but she flounders when the technique of selling a story to a hung-over reporter on the Times Business section is required. She reads well but is unable to spot trends. She writes like she is still on a student newspaper. Bless.
Ermintrude is a composite of course. Yet I’ve experienced all the above from PR graduates. Many PR degree courses are oversold and offer few practical advantages in securing a job in a cool agency or in a tip-top job in house. Very few have lecturers who’ve worked anywhere in the industry from what I can see. PR needs creative individuals who also happen to have the gift of organising and selling a story. It’s really that simple. No need to intellectualise it."
Here, I think Gibbons lets slip his poor knowledge of the current state of PR degrees. These courses are improving all the time, listening to their students and current PR practitioners to improve upon their offerings, matching both the demands of the graduates and of the job market they will be entering in to. Graduates from these courses are often more prepared for PR2.0 than their more senior colleagues given that they are 'digital natives'.
However, for all the criticism that Gibbons will come in for over this article, I happen to agree with his finishing paragraph:
"My advice to anyone wanting to “get into PR” is to increase your areas of interest/expertise and widen your knowledge of business. Do short course. Do PR for a local charity free of charge. Work in an agency on your day off. It’ll give you more experience of PR than a thousand PR “degrees”. And you can also avoid those “Work in PR” type ads in the Guardian."
So yet another confusing article that will worry those hoping to "get into" PR - especially those studying for a PR degree now. But for all Gibbons' harsher points, it may be a strong dose of reality for those looking for jobs in the PR industry about what senior PR executives are expecting from them.
Personally, I may not have the most authority on this subject as I took the student journalism route into PR. But I'd really like to hear what the current crop of PR students and their tutors have to say about Gibbons' views. And just so he can see the talent that is coming through the ranks on the courses he dismisses, here is a list of excellent PR students and their tutors who would be happy to tell him the worth of PR degrees:
First MEGAs award winner for PR Campaign goes to Weber Shandwick
Weber Shandwick were among the winners at the first MediaGuardian Awards for Innovation, or MEGAs, presented last night.
The awards, launched to recognise cutting edge innovation across the media industry, received more than 400 entries from different sectors.
Shandwick won the award for "PR Campaign of the Year" for the KFC 'Face from Space' campaign, which involved the execution of a giant 87,500 square foot KFC logo in the Nevada desert - claimed to be the first brand logo visible from space (You can view the associated press release here):
But, according to googlesightseeing.com, the KFC logo was not the first logo (or brand) visible from space. In fact, it’s debatable whether or not it’s even really visible from space at all (See the introduction to this book for a more complete examination of this argument). Either way, KFC’s big logo isn’t actually that big.
The first logo visible from space should have gone to the Readymix logo in the Australian desert. It measures 3.2km across, and 1.6km high and has been there since 1965, so as the first logo visible from space this probably qualifies:
Not to take the the prestige of winning the award away from Shandwick though, as the award went to the best PR campaign rather than for the first logo to be visible from space, and for that Shandwick presumably deserved to win the award.
Thursday, 6 March 2008
Why I Love Twitter
I've previously spoken about how I find Twitter useful, but the deeper I get involved in the Twitter community (and I believe it is a community, not a micro-blogging platform or whatever else anyone has described it has) I discover many, many more reasons as to why I love it.
Firstly, I find more and more that I am part of the community. When I first joined Twitter, I was unsure about it. But now, after warm welcomes from the people I started to follow, I now do the same back to new followers of me - and most of them, especially the new ones, a grateful for the warm welcome.
Secondly, it is now one of my top resources when I need to find out something or gauge an opinion. I put a question out there and I usually get about 3 or 4 replies that, if not answering the question there and then, point me in the right direction. It's like the number of contacts I can ask for help has just multiplied a hundred times.
Thirdly, it is one of the most inventive and fun communities I'm involved in. Just some recent examples include:
- Chinposin - A project to get people chinholdin - basically posing with a hand on their chin, but so much more. Why not make it a Fun thing for Friday on Twitter. Twitter users just need to make their avatar pic a chin pose and then follow @chinposin. Take a look at the Chinposin blog for more info.
- The Twitter Mexican Wave - @Thayer ha the brainwave of creating a Mexican Wave where various twits tweeted their own wave. There are some great photos of the results on @Thayer's blog and aggregated together at Terraminds.
- Inanimate objects are on Twitter - for example, Tower Bridge is on Twitter. Developed by Infovore, Tower Bridge can now tell you when it's opening and closing, what vessel is passing through, and which way that vessel is going. The times are determined by taking the scheduled time for the “lift” and subtracting five minutes for the opening, and adding five minutes for closing - the official site suggests that, at rush hour, lifts should take five minutes to open and close tops.
Also, once you get involved for a reasonable amount of time, Twitter becomes a very friendly place to be. There are constant tweets of various halloos to other Twitters, and repeated mentions of twits meeting up offline in the real world. for example, @bmcmichael's latest tweet was that she was taking the day off for her birthday. And what happened today? A torrent of happy birthday messages leading to yet more happy birthday messages as other people in the Twitter community picked up on the fact that it was @bmcmichael's birthday.
Lastly, unlike other social networks, there are virtually no spammers. Facebook bombards everyone with application requests ("Bob Jones wants to find out "Are You interested?!?" - "Er, no..."). But with Twitter, because it's like an RSS feed - you choose to read it - and nobody so far has worked out how to spam a feed, there is no spam.
Unless you count the A-lister Twitters - characterised by a huge volume of posts per day, follow a small number of people yet have a large number of followers and rarely engage in conversation - as @wadds discusses over at his Tech PR blog.
As an article in today's Guardian argues, "On Twitter you can choose to follow anyone whose tweets catch your eye; and similarly, unless you limit your tweets only to your friends, anyone can follow you even if you choose not to follow them. Not everyone follows everyone who follows them. You follow?"
So that's a rundown of why I love Twitter and here's a few links as to why others do too. If you're not on Twitter already, get involved and tell us how you get on - you can follow me (@benrmatthews) and I'd really like to hear why you other twits like using it.
Wednesday, 5 March 2008
Making PR a 'Golden Apple'
I've just finished reading a great article called "What makes Apple golden" by Betsy Morris, senior editor of Fortune.
The article argues that Apple, the creator of the iPod and iPhone, sets "a dazzling new standard for innovation and mass appeal, driven by an obsessive CEO who wants his products to be practically perfect in every way."
For example, the Fortune article states that Apple doesn't use focus groups:"At Apple, new-product development starts in the gut and gets hatched in rolling conversations that go something like this: What do we hate? (Our cellphones.) What do we have the technology to make? (A cellphone with a Mac inside.) What would we like to own? (You guessed it, an iPhone.) "One of the keys to Apple is that we build products that really turn us on," says Jobs."
The article continues:"Apple not only has upstaged the likes of Microsoft but has set the gold standard for corporate America with an entirely new business model: creating a brand, morphing it, and reincarnating it to thrive in a disruptive age."
This is also an area that innovators in PR understand well - the need to reincarnate brands to "thrive in a disruptive age." While for many this may be simply persuading a client to update their website, the innvoators are experimenting with the way brands can use the internet to create an even stronger brand identity. Social Networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace are the most notable examples of this, but there are countless others - YouTube channels are being used to showcase video and further expand brands through video mashups; applications such as Twitter, are being used in ever more inventive and innovative ways, as used to great success by both Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton in the race to be the leader of the Democrats in the next US election.
That covers the tools that the PR industry is innovating with, but what qualities do the innovators themselves possess?
"The decade coincides exactly with the return of Jobs as Apple's maestro, bringing his particular mix of genius and obsession, as well as a tendency to play by his own rules. His utter dedication to discovery and excellence has created a culture that has made Apple a symbol of innovation."
I'm sure many PR innovators recognise themselves in Steve Jobs - an obsessive genius with utter dedication to discovery and excellence. But this obsessive genius even carries over to Apple's employees:
"You don't get a foot in the door here unless your eyes light up when you talk about your Mac... The place is loaded with engineers, but it's not just the skills that are important, it's the ability to emote. ("Emotive" is a big word here.) The passion is what provides the push to overcome design and engineering obstacles, to bring projects in on time."
Most PR innovators often belong to an innovative firm, a company that is prepared to experiment and innovate in order to gain a competitive advantage in the industry:
"Apple's philosophy goes like this: Too many companies spread themselves thin, making a profusion of products to defuse risk, so they get mired in the mediocre. Apple's approach is to put every resource it has behind just a few products and make them exceedingly well."
Sure, many big PR companies pile their clients high and knock out mediocre work for them, but the mosty innovative PR agencies exploit every resource they have to meet their clients needs, often going above and beyond the call of duty to deliver added value to their clients. After all, this is how they make their name in the PR industry and get their clients coming back for more
"Apple's DNA has always been to try to democratize technology," says Jobs, in the belief that if you make something "really great, then everybody will want to use it."
"If you make something really great, then everybody will want to use it." Which PR innovator wouldn't agree with that?
Monday, 3 March 2008
PR - supplanting advertising, but what about marketing?
A great article appeared in today's Media Guardian. Headlined as 'If you like that ... you'll love this', it examines the rise of PR through online communities and discusses how the internet is now a playground for the PR industry.
It discusses the relationship between PR and advertising but, as far as I could see, largely leaves out marketing. Here are a few highlights:
"Public relations is growing ever more powerful, as companies wake up to the benefits of appearing in journalists' copy - and thereby weaving into the online world of links and recommendations, where products benefit from the viral-like recommendations that swirl around the web, their reputation boosted by the seemingly "independent" source of opinion. In many cases, PR is supplanting advertisers."Issues of transparency arise here, linking how the spin behind newspaper articles is now being applied to the online world. It's very interesting to read that PR is supplanting advertising - but no mentions of where marketing fits into this though.
"Indeed, traditional display advertising has been shunned altogether by the social networking sites and web companies. Facebook and Google have spread by word of mouth, not billboards, pop-ups or adverts in newspapers."Yes, Facebook and Google spread via word of mouth, but again no mention of marketing's place in these success stories, or how PR helps when these stories are not successful - although Facebook's trouble with Beacon is mentioned, albeit briefly.
"Of course, to claim PR as recession-proof is something only a PR man could do. But downturn or no downturn, PR agents are optimistic that, as the internet gives customers a growing field of sources to harvest, companies' obsession with being talked about online will only strengthen - as will their eagerness to keep a hold on their reputation; a second major driver for the PR industry."No mention of how PR is used to explain a recession and downturn in the economy, and how reporting of poor financial results actually increases demand for PR activity.
Colin Farrington, the director general of the CIPR, in a token comment at the end of the article had this to say:
"PR is more recession-proof. People want to interconnect, want more of a dialogue, and people are very concerned about their reputations."
This appears to be talking more about traditional PR practise rather than online communications, but is a useful summary of the rest of the article, and perhaps a good summary of the current demand for the PR industry in general.
The article catches on to how great PR practitioners adapt to new developments, whether are based online or elsewhere. Advertisers seem to be struggling to keep up with the innovation in the PR industry, perhaps why PR is now supplanting it in many cases.
Ultimately, PR has come to supplant advertising in many online areas through innovation and a real desire to make the most of these new technologies. But will PR come to top marketing in the long run and become the dominant player in the marketing mix?