Drew B's take on tech PR

Two months in at Battenhall

It is two months since I launched Battenhall. This blog has been quieter than normal of late, as all my blogging action has been over on the Battenhall blog. So I thought it would be worthwhile writing down an update on how it has all gone so far. 

• We have been busy and been fortunate enough to be asked to do some very exciting work, and that is awesome beyond belief
• The team is now 8 people, and we're still hiring at all levels
• We have 14 clients, including Sanctuary Group, minicabit, Shoreditch Works, Jimmy's Iced Coffee, E-Tale and Talking Heads (we can't talk about all of them just yet)
• We have moved office once already, up from the 6th to the top floor in our Bonhill Street offices in London's Tech City
• We have published two of our regular reports already - Battenhall Monthly is free to subscribe to here
• We are ahead of budget (phew!) by 90.1%
• We have bought most of Shoreditch's supply of good coffee

Thanks as ever for all of your support, and you can keep up to date on things happening at Battenhall over on out blog. 

Battenhall's new clients, social media training and other news

Two weeks into life at Battenhall and we're busy little bees already. We're close to being able to announce a bunch of new client wins, and the first is already out in the open. Back in the very early days of this blog, 10 years go in fact, I worked with the awesome Lis Anderson at integrated agency BCLO. She's now one of the people behind Talking Heads, and I'm excited to say that Battenhall has been appointed to run a range of social media training courses for Talking Heads, starting in April this year. You can read all about them over on Talking Heads' website. 

Battenhall has also been busy on a few other fronts. Last week was the launch of the 2013 PR Week Powerbook, and Battenhall made it in. And in the last week the judging panel of the UK Social Media Communications Awards was announced, with me making it in as a judge which is something to really look forward to later in the year. We've also been putting together its first Battenhall monthly social media report, which you can subscribe to over on Battenhall.net at the bottom of the homepage.

Exciting times all round, thanks as ever for your support.  

10 things PR and advertising can learn from the papal conclave

Inspired by a humorous tweet from Matt Locke, we thought both advertising AND PR deserved an analysis of the last week and how the Conclave dealt with the process of announcing that Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio will be the new Pope.

1. No embargo: live news is better than embargoed.
2. Timing: boy did they build up suspense, everyone watching Twitter for the words 'white smoke!'
3. Flip it: all the headlines are about how 'different' the new Pope is. There's your story right there.  
4. Things in the sky get lots of coverage (especially smoke): many of the best-covered stunts have been done in the sky. Like this and this. Note for the next stunt planning meeting.
5. Act fast: from resignation to new appointment was faster than a multinational can admit to having horse meat in their burgers.
6. Don't sell an exclusive: how much do you think Hello would have had to pay for this one?
7. Allow photography: you know those launch events where you can't take photos. This was like the opposite.
8. Check the mic: how many press launches get botched with dodgy sound levels.
9. Get stuck in: 'first day on the job - mass with the Cardinals' reads CNN's top story.
10. Tweet: @pontifex has been used, sparingly, no hashtags, bit shouty, but used all the same.

(disclaimer, this blog post is meant to be for fun)

Recap of launch day at Battenhall

Launching Battenhall

Today I'm incredibly excited to be launching my new agency Battenhall. My aim is to be able to build the next great agency. The launch announcement is over on the new site. Wish us all the best in this new chapter!

Battenhall

Today was my last day working at Hotwire and 33 Digital. This friday I am launching a new agency called Battenhall. Exciting times. 

My eight years here at Hotwire and 33 Digital have been epic. I have had the good fortune of being able to set up a social media agency and work in an integrated way on global, traditional, digital and social media briefs. And most recently as UK CEO, do a lot of business management. It will be very sad to leave these fond memories behind. But I am excited about what lies ahead. 

Battenhall will be a communications agency for the social media economy. I feel strongly that the agency model and how organisations try to manage the media and their own brands is ripe for disruption. So I am going to be building an agency that is set up to thrive in this new era - an era that is here to stay. A business that will, I hope, be the next great agency.

Thank you for your support so far. I hope it will continue for the next chapter.  

My experiments with Twitter, Jeremy Kyle and list bots

Last week along with my colleage Tim Bond I ran some experiments in trying to automatically create lists of people who talk about certain topics on Twitter, then to analyse the topics of conversation they use. This could potentially help in campaign planning or strategy formulation. 

Using If This Then That, you're able to create 'IFs' that are RSS feeds. And Twitter still supports search results through RSS. So this is the first step; to choose the search terms you want (Tim and I went for Jeremy Kyle just because he was trending on Twitter at the time... more on the importance of that search term later!). I've shared my IFTTT recipies so you can see exactly how this works (incidentally since I shared the list 4 days ago it has been used by 26 other people on IFTTT, see below). 

 

Then for your 'That' choose Twitter as an output, and specifically the Lists output. There are two ways to set it up, I've shared both over on If This Then That. One creates lists of people talking about your topic, the other creates lists of people mentioned in the same tweet as your topic. 

What you can then do is run topic analysis on these lists to see what the trending topics are for example - probably not for Jeremy Kyle, instead go with whatever your brand, product or project might be. This would give you some really useful insights. And lists, when public, are shareable so colleagues can follow your new shiny creations.  

So what happened when several hundred people got added to my Twitter lists because of a mention of Jeremy Kyle? About one in 100 people got a bit grumpy with me, both male, and both in the early hours of the morning. Here are their tweets :)

Lessons learned: if you're going to be auto-adding people to public lists, label the lists clearly and expect a little feedback if you pick a topic of the kind that I chose. 

Later I will post some conversation analysis from these lists, stay tuned!

Burger King and the new brand hack: an hour of hijacked Tweets

Today from 5-6pm UK time Burger King became the latest victim of a brand hijack on social media. Its Twitter account was compromised and the hackers, according to early reports it was the Anonymous group, took over Burger King's Twitter account and posted a brief torrent of abuse. The Twitter channel was rebranded, as McDonald's. And tweets were a random mixture of "racial slurs, obscenities and references to drugs". 

The Next Web has a good run down of the tweets that were posted and The BBC has confirmed that Budget King asked Twitter to suspend its account while it addresses what happened in private.

Lessons as usual from such an ordeal which appears to be happening all too frequently right now: respond fast to limit the damage. An hour feels like a lifetime watching such a torrent of brand abuse flowing from the mighty Burger King.  

Horses for courses

There's a nice discussion playing out over on a Branch thread I started last week about the horse meat scandal that's developing in the UK. Here's a live view of the Branch for you to join in or just read at your leisure!

Hacking Vine: How to embed a Vine video on to your website

Vine is Twitter's new video sharing service that has digitall comms types all a flutter. 

It's format is simple but different to others: snap a 6 second video or compilation of segments and post it to vine, Twitter and Facebook. 

One very interesting element of Vine videos is they can be embedded on to your website in a couple of ways. 

The most common way you will see Vines embedded is like this: 

To do this you find the tweet with the Vine video in it, click the More link on the tweet and copy the embed code. Paste it on to your website HTML code and you'll see something like the below. Simple!

Stop motion on #vine is SUPER EASY - here's Sunday @33digital vine.co/v/bJK51E9V9Dp

— Peter Sigrist (@psigrist) January 27, 2013

I've been playing about with Vine since it launched and thought I'd share another way to embed videos on your site as it's quite straightforward but not as obvious.

To embed just the video without the tweet, paste the below code into the HTML of your site. Replace the red part of the URL with the URL of your Vine video, and you're done. 

<p><iframe src="http://vine.co/v/bJK51E9V9Dp/card" width="380" height="380" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>

Your video should look like this. 

Thanks to 33 Digital's Pete Sigrist whose video is far better than any I've made to date :)

 

Foursquare data shows UK and European usage and Google Pagerank for the real world

Anyone wondering who still uses Foursquare should read this article over on The Next Web. Foursquare has released a map of the last three months of Foursquare checkins - that's 500 million of them. Check out the map, which lets you zoom in and out and find your city in a search box. 

What I find interesting in Europe is thevolume and the location of the checkins. Like the story in TNW says, this is a real-world version of Google Pagerank. 

What does Facebook Graph Search mean for brands?

Last night Facebook launched its new big thing. Mark Zuckerberg called it Graph Search. Look past the terrible name and you will see a very important move, and one which is increasingly changing the way brands promote themselves and their products.

Here is the news. And here you can sign up for the Beta of Facebook Graph Search.

Graph Search is all about contextualising the things you're looking for online. Call it social search and it makes a lot more sense... If you want to find a coffee shop, a movie, a song or a local plumber, search in your social network. If your friends tag, like, comment and chat about the right kind of thing, then you have a more contextualised result from your search.

This is what Google has been doing with its search results for a long time. Only with Facebook the concept is turned on its head: social moving into search, rather than search moving into social. Foursquare has been doing this for a long time too, with its Explore feature.

What does it mean for brands? Increasingly we will need to look way beyond SEO / search engine optimisation - something intrinsic to most brands with a presence online. We will need to look at SSO: social search optimisation. How can you get yourself and your products talked about in social search now that Graph Search is joining the party.

My view: it's all about getting talked about by the opinion formers and then by the masses. Not rocket science for those that embrace social media for their communications already, but campaigns will need to work on a whole new scale.

Digital disruption a force for change

Reading Ben Rooney's article this morning in the Wall St Journal about digital disruption in the education sector got me thinking. When did disruption, as a term used in business parlance / marketing / PR / technology etc, become a good thing? Not that long ago I was stopped dead in my tracks and asked why I was talking about disruption so much as it sounded like a bad thing. Digital disruption is not only being embraced right now across all industries it seems, as the WSJ article reports, but it's being sought-after and encouraged. 

This is great to see. I feel like ever since I entered the technology and digital sectors in the late 1990s that digital disruption was the big important thing and those firms that could harness and take advantage of this disruption would be the winners. It's great to see reports of the more traditionally-minded sectors embracing disruption too. 

The way I see it, disruption comes in waves. The waves swell and break on different industries at different times. Some surf the waves. Some get the waves break on them and suffer the mayhem of being unprepared. Some wait for the waters to calm and move in after. For me this time of disruption is hugely exciting to be part of. 

 

10 social media trends for 2013: free report #hw33trends

 

This morning we hosted our 4th annual social media report looking at the 10 big trends for the year ahead. It was a packed Soho Hotel breakfast briefing in the main theatre, a great event.  

The full Digital Trends Report is free to download online here and buzz over on Twitter is on the hashtag #hw33trends. Happy planning!

Growth hacking at 33 Digital

We've been busy in 33 Digital of late. We opened our Sydney office two months ago. Team 33 has been busy putting things in place in Paris and Munich which will both be opening soon, and this week I was in New York interviewing candidates and drinking vast quantities of good coffee. 

Four new offices in a year is proving to be an exciting special project, and soon we will look and feel like a very different company. 

If you are in social media consulting, based in Munich, Paris or New York and want to get involved somehow, have a read of this as a background and get in touch if you fancy meeting up for a coffee soon.