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PR Week, 26 June 2008
I used to live here... Now it's a conference
Finalist: Best PR Blog at the Business Blogging Awards 2005
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Here's a fairly good article from Reuters on the use of Twitter as a news gathering tool. Gives a (fairly mundane but works ok) example of how Twitter users share news when something major happens, and how the traditional media picks up in comparison.
Interesting bit for me near the end though, is when someone's quoted as saying they see the use of Twitter not for chit chat, but having one "at the ready" for discussion around major news events.
"Facebook nets Google exec to fix poor PR" is one of the headlines that a blogger used when referring to this announcement that I just saw on Techmeme.com's Twitter feed. Google has just lost a PR person to Facebook.
Update from this morning's FT is that Google UK's Rachel Whetstone could be taking Schrage's place on Google's core 14-person senior management group.
Here's Robert Scoble's take on how latecomers learn about social media. All starts with Google it seems.
So it's just happened. London has a new mayor: Boris Johnson. The outspoken baffoon of a candidate is now boss of London. Is he a PR person's dream? More headlines than you can shake a stick at that's for certain.
I first heard rumblings earlier this afternoon on Twitter from Mick fealty, the political blogger, who said that senior sources were confirming Boris' win. Then it was confirmed on the news about 30 mins after. My how news spreads to me stuck here at 7pm on a packed train out west.
But back to the PR. What do you think? Will things start to become a bit more entertaining now that someone with loose lips is going out there on our behalf or are we in for a rollercoaster / banana skin / nightmare?
This morning I started using the much talked-about inbox-sorting gizmo Xobni. One of the big stories online on the blogs last week was the rumour that Xobni was going to be bought by Microsoft. People online had been chatting a lot about it, but it's in private beta, and hard to get hold of an invite (so I sent them my details and waited in patiently). For any PR person, getting your inbox to sort itself is a good thing surely.
I got my invite in the mail this morning and have started fiddling with it. I'm always looking for tips and tricks to get things done more efficiently, so I was gagging to use Xobni to be honest. My first impressions:
In short, I think Zobni doesn't solve email overload. But it's a nice tool to make sorting a bit quicker. If you'd like an invite, leave a comment or drop me an email (contact details at top left of this blog).
Bonus link. My colleague Dom just sent me this Gmail tips post off of a girl geek blog (don't ask).
If you're wondering who to target in your marketing campaigns then a useful barometer is one of the recent Forrester Research charts on consumer trust. Check out this new blog post from Forrester's analyst Jeremiah Owyang who republishes some good graphs which I've seen around before in various guises. Useful nonetheless.
The consensus? We trust bloggers very little, but peers more than the media. The paradox I think though is that surely these two camps can often be one and the same.
I've been pondering this week how I could rejuvinate my rammed-full folder of RSS feeds so that I can enjoy reading them a bit more, again. Make it more useful to track things I like and things I manage for my clients. But make it more fun too. Reading's fun, no?
Over the years I've used RSS socially, to begin with (like hooking up with PR people, journalists and media industry types who write about similar stuff to me) then in a PR context too as time has gone by. What started as a list of blogs, sites and social networks I was reading on a daily basis quickly became clusers upon clusters of key words and phrases that I had to monitor for breaking client PR issues. Training client press office operations on how to use RSS monitoring systems to increase press coverage has been something I tend to do quite a bit now too.
But now my own RSS system is busting at the seams, and although RSS readers are very good at cutting down on information overload, they can still get cluttered.
I am wondering about a few tricks I've seen people use to overcome this, and which would be best for me. Here are the three options for me as I see them.
1. Declare RSS bankruptcy. I could perhaps delete the whole lot (save them offline somewhere for future reference though) and start again. I read once that Steve Rubel does this.
2. Prune my RSS tree. I do this on Twitter, so why not RSS? Get rid of stuff I don't tend to bother checking any more and shape up the rest.
3. Fileage. I think I may just set up a new folder, put it at the top of all the others, and bung all the shiny new RSS feeds in there. Then everything will follow. I'm sure.
Come to think of it, content is king after all, so maybe I just need to find some new things to subscribe to. Does anyone have any recommendations on good feeds I should subscribe to that I might not be reading already?
I booted up my laptop this morning and saw that Facebook has launched live Chat. At first glimpse it looks very cool. This launch has just happened over night. But then, within minutes, 7 friends started chatting to me, and without batting an eyelid I lost a chunk of my morning. A nice loss, but Facebook has just unveiled its time sink.
The way it works is you just log on to Facebook and the chat options are in the bottom right. It tells you which of your friends are online and their chat bubbles pop up as and when they get in touch.
Beware. People around you are about to go quiet while they discover Facebook Chat today.
On the weekend I came across the social site 43 Things. It's not new, but for some reason I had never heard about it. The site mixes an online wish list with a social network buddy list to make a kind of social aspirational sharing website. Sounds obscure but haave a look at it - I think it looks really useful.
So the idea is you write down things you'd aspire to do in your life (the top ones on the site right now include "finding balance in my life", "buy a bespoke suit" and "meditate daily") then you get to see people who want to do the same things as you, and you can also see what things your current friends aspire to do. So you get loads of ideas about the big things you could think about doing one day. I'm crap at that, so I think I'll start using this site and see what trouble it gets me in to.
Twitter broke this weekend, in case nobody noticed. I did, and got bored v quickly, as nobody seemed there to talk back to my rambles. You migt have seen it has been a bit quiet - that's because of a Twitter glitch. You'll see that if you click on the quiet buddies, they're probably actually still tweeting away. Only a few of their friends will have seen it though. It's been happening across the user base apparently. Here's more on it.
Just a few thoughts from things I've been subscribing to and posting up to Twitter from the last few days.
Here's a new blog called PR Advocate from Yeelim Lee in Hong Kong. He used to work in the UK with mr PR-ptagonist, before he joined my department at Hotwire. PR Otagonist told me Yeelim would be worth following.
A former colleague of mine Pete Bowles has just lauched a new blog - PR Hall of Fame. Good luck in your new gig Pete!
Sandrine Plasseraud is blogging over at Buzz Attitude. I'd not noticed her blog before but now I have and it's v good.
And I'm not sure if I mentioned this before, but Chris Applegate is doing some good blogging over at Outside Line - it's his agency blog, but reads nice, not like most agency blogs I have to say. (and check out the vid here - a very slick showreel and to a track I spent a little too long listening to last night).
I see from PR Week that Cake as just poached Fleishman Hillard's digital fella Ben Mason. All the best in the move Ben.
Yesterday I was working from home and noticed a stink outside - like they were muck spreading up the road. I noticed online at the same time from some of my Twitter buddy list that there was a similar smell 70 miles down the road in London. Then by lunch time, the press started to cover what became a story - that a foul smell was descending on all of the south east of England.
Now and again this happens - people start chatting about something on an open social network and it very soon makes it into the news. I'm pretty sure it wasn't a Twitter lurker who noticed the story, but sometimes it is. And you can see how, when you might be trying to create buzz as a PR person, how quickly things spread and the time it takes before mainstream media picks up.
For what it's worth, on Twitter specifically, a site called Tweetscan.com lets you track and subscribe to topics online.
Something I've noticed recently is that most of the people whose blogs I had been accustomed to reading regularly have been using Twitter to keep in touch. It's meant I've been using blogs less for chatty stuff and Twitter more so. And so it was disappointing to learn this evening that Hugh Macleod (the UK's biggest social networker) (who has now moved to the US btw) has deleted his Twitter account for good.
I find that really sad. I will miss Hugh. I hope he comes back in some way. Even if someone has to feed his blog content back into Twitter for him.
If you use a social media tool like Twitter on a regular basis, here's something that could change how you use it. I think it could change Twitter from something you use to talk to friends, to something you use to find friends.
Twitter Local lets you subscribe to any 'tweets' that come from a geographical area. Have a look and see if it works. In theory, and if people use right, you could find new anything from a place near you (news, people, services, etc).
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