Drew B's take on tech PR

Sacked for complaining online about their job

All over the news right now is the story of a teenage office worker from Essex who has been sacked for saying her job's boring on Facebook. Is it really a sackable offence? This seems to have divided the opinion of the journalists and broadcast presenters I'm hearing right now.

Apparently her boss stumbled across her comments and didn't appreciate the attitude, so let her go. Here's the Mail's (as you'd expect) perspective.

For years employers have toiled over issues like this. Most recently with Facebook, and before that other social networks that let us express ourselves, share photos and vent online. Remember the 'Bastardstones' blogger? This is not new at all.

So it's not hard to imagine yourself in a position of HR and comms departments in a organisations that are coming to terms with how social networking is affecting staff morale, company reputation and plain old person to person relations. It's not just the 'sackable offence' that needs to be predicted and planned for. It's the way semi-private / semi-public online discussions can affect a workforce, customer base and stakeholder group that needs to be considered.

PR Week's Twitter feature - look deeper and elsewhere for the real strategic PR vision

Today I opened PR Week to a chuckle (from my own mouth and that of my boss) as I had at last made it... To page three.

For on Twitter, it seems I'm the PR industry's loudest, have been on it the longest and my company is the industry's most active.

Yes, there staring at me was, well, me, judged as being the ring leader for Twitter in the PR industry. Uh oh, I could see the tidal wave of abuse from the Twittering classes on its way to PR Week for this. And it came.

All PR Week's contentions have been strongly argued today by the rest of the industry (although gladly nobody's confronted me on my quote). Some say the measurement criteria of the league table is wrong, and that the numbers aren't accurate - that the agencies listed actually have more people on Twitter than reported. I agree. They're not accurate for us and I'm sure they're not for others. But the measures used are perhaps not the best to rank agencies either. Numbers like this could be 'gamed' quite easily. What's stopping XYZ PR tomorrow setting up 40 new Twitter accounts tomorrow to get to the top of this table. Nothing I suppose.

But you have to start somewhere, and hats off to PR Week for researching, getting help from the industry, and putting some numbers to the story. Many don't even try *cough sunday times*.

Then, who cares any way about which people use Twitter, say some. It's a bit like when phones first were invented, seeing a magazine do a league table of which PR people use their phone the most. True. But everything geeky and new gets articles like this written about it (not that Twitter's brand new exactly). Look at the Sunday Times' top 100 blogs features that have been running this month. New shiny things always get sensationalised. And Twitter's new and big at the same time now.

But the main point, and this is something I tried to get across in my quote, is that Twitter is not all about who's on it and who uses it the most. It's what you do with digital media that counts. And Twitter's just the current poster child of the social media movement. Sure, brands need to know their agency 'gets it' first hand, but we just need to look at the case studies pages of PR Week to see how it's being used well, or read about what great digital campaigns win awards for their creativity and execution. This is what will show Twitter's craftsmanship at the hands of the industry horde. To balance out the league table number crunchiness.

I stand by what I said in the article and look forward to the next iteration of the magazine's research into the Twittering classes.

Dr Aric Sigman's technology blindness

Dr Aric Sigman was all over the TV, press and web yesterday talking about how, he has discovered, social media can give you cancer. His theory is, this loneliness brought about by more time spent in front of electronic devices, doing social networking, does something to our genes. When we're social, we have reduced morbitiy in our genes. When we are the opposite (lonely) then we get ready to kick the bucket. Anchoring his theory is the notion that time spent using social media is lonely time. Here are his words, so that you can see where it's coming from. 

"Couples now spend less time in one another's company and more time at work, commuting, or in the same house but in separate rooms using different electronic devices…"

[I violently disagree with this sweeping statement, but let's give Sigman some space]

"...a trend that looks likely to continue."

[if this was the trend I'd agree, but he's still swinging his carcinogenic scythe]

I'm not sure if time spent using technology to socialise is as lonely as Sigman suggests. Sure, a poke on Facebook isn't the same as a hug [a point taken from Sigman's press release]. But there's a balance between the impact social media has on bringing people together - people that would otherwise have had less contact with one another, and the time it takes up in your life taking you away from hugging people.

If I am to stay true to my digital roots though, I'd actually go back and challenge Sigman's belief that spending more time in front of devices in different rooms is a growing trend. Connections to the social web are increasingly mobile. Laptops are on in the sitting room, Twitter and Facebook are on the mobile, and smartphones often negate the pull to the computer in the other room. Look at this photo from a recent feature the New York times as just one example.

I see a future where connections to the social web are ubiquitous, they don't pull us away from one another, they enable us to maintain our social, face to face lives, whilst devices that fit easily around us, not anchor us to solitary places, empower us to connect with those we could not do without the web easily.

Top 10 list of UK PR people on Twitter

Sometimes a brand needs to consider how they measure the quality of their online mentions - quantitative analysis of a campaign just isn't enough. It's something that was debated at length at the London MeasurementCamp working group this morning. As there's no such thing as AEV for mentions on Twitter, one way you can do it is to use Twitter Grader. At this morning's session we talked about how to segment tiers of online coverage of a story, and how, on Twitter, Twitter Grader can be used to do this. 

For example, your story is picked up by 50 people on Twitter, 20 of which are tier one (top notch), the rest tier two (little reach or influence). So as a measure, you'd look to improve how many tier one Twitter mentions you get for the next story. To give yourself a target that can be measured. It's applying traditional segmentation to the Twitterspere. 

Recently Stephen Waddington started a PR league table of Twitter influence. My how things change in a few months. 

Here is an up to date top 10 for the PR industry on Twitter, which I've compiled using Twitter Grader. I'll leave a top 100 to someone else. Watch our for Peter Hay at PR Week who may be working on something bigger also. Rank in brackets is the person's old position. 

Rank %     Name, company

1. (1) 99.98    @jangles, Bond-i 

2. (2) 99.96    @drewb, Hotwire (me)

4. (13) 99.94    @vikkichowney, Six Degrees

3. (3) 99.93    @stedavies, 3W PR

5. (11) 99.8     @litmanlive, Consolidated

=6. (5) 99.7     @davidbrain, Edelman

=6. (6) 99.7     @benrmatthews, Hotwire

=6. (10) 99.7     @lewiswebb, Shiny Red

=6. (17) 99.7     @jazcummins, Mindshare

=10. (7) 99.6     @stuartbruce, Wolfstar

=10. (8) 99.6     @dirkthecow, Cow

And there's more...

=12. (4) 99.5     @prgeek, LEWIS

=12. (9) 99.5     @mseasons, Onlinefire

=12. (19)   99.5     @jedhallam, Wolfstar
=12. (38)   99.5      @robbrown, Staniforth   
=12.         99.5      @katiemoffat, freelance
=17. (14) 99.3     @simoncollister, Weber Shandwick

=17. (18) 99.3     @jopkins, Shed

=19. (16) 99.2     @jkerrstevens, Central Government

=19. (24) 99.2     @wadds, Rainier

21. (15) 99.1     @marshallmanson, Edelman 

22. (12) 98.9     @rosemontjd, Weber Shandwick

- I'll expand on this list and try to refresh it over time, but let me know what you / I could add in. Some of the rankings I know will be wrong, so let me know and I'll fix. 

 

Twitter's next stage in development

Bit of a busy week for Twitter. Some stats have come out on it skyrocketing user base, and just try looking at what's been happening with the Twestivals around the world. Now, news has just come out that Twitter has just accepted an offer it couldn't refuse. In the words of Twitter's Biz Stone: 

Twitter is growing at a phenomenal rate. Active users have increased 900% in a year and even though our web traffic is amazing, we see twice that traffic to the APIs. Interacting with Twitter over SMS is also getting more popular every day. Our relatively small team of 29 employees has accomplished quite a bit lately but it's obvious that we have the world ahead of us.

Reports online are of Twitter securing $35m in funding. What's really interesting is that, according to TechCrunch, Twitter wasn't looking for the money. It was literally an offer they couldn't refuse. It just shows how, when the bug is caught, a piece of technology becomes a community and can become something very valuable indeed. 

I'll be really intrigued to see what comes with this round of funding. New functions of the service? New acquisitions? Expansion of the team?

And only 29 people! I knew it was a small team but that's going some. Well don @biz @ev and @jack. 

What happened when I spoke to the new generation Twitterati

I've noticed a recent trend. That the Facebook generation is raiding Twitter to see what it's all about. It's a strange experience as Twitter was first populated by technologists, media industry professionals and the digerati. If you were a serious blogger, you were on Twitter. And if you were Generation Y, it was Facebook.

About three years ago Facebook opened its doors to non-students, and soon you saw the digerati push it to its limits. People like Scoble adding tens of thousands of friends. Hugh MacLeod was covered in the press as the UK's biggest Facebooker. But these old geeks were so *not* Facebook that, to many, it seemed like grandad had crashed the party.

Now it's the other way round. Twitter is all of a sudden receiving a tremendous amount of mainstream media coverage and so Generation Y are checking it out. Celebs are now more famous than the digerati. Who'd have thought Twitter would mimic life! So people that follow celebs... Including Young People!! And Normal People!!... Are flooding Twitter.

I'm getting new "followers" on a daily basis who I can't imagine would want to read anything I write. They're young, write in tx spk, and follow Russell Brand and Chris Moyles, not Steve Rubel or David Brain.

I wrote to one seemingly Generation Y-er the other day to try to find out how they're using Twitter:

"Hi. Serious question!! How did you find me on Twitter? I don't know why people keep adding me!! Cheers. Drew"

She replied:

"duno am new to this jat add any1 a c :-)"

Well there you go!

What next on Facebook status? Tracking, openness and social media

Facebook's just opened up its API. In laymans terms, that means anyone can programme a new piece of software, an application, a widget, whatever, that makes Facebook statuses do new and exciting stuff.

What can this be compared to, and why is it important to digital PR and online communities?

Because here's the kind of stuff that could concievably happen new that the API is open (this is what happened after Twitter opened its API, like two years ago)....

- You could post your status to your blog
- You could search statuses and track for consumer trends
- A status could be open, not closed, whereas your photos are still private
- Yous status could plug into other social networks and social media, like Flickr photos, Delicious tags, Evernote pictures or Upcoming events
- More to come... I'm just having a think :-)

The coming attention crash - the evil side of digital media

I may start sounding like a broken record very soon, but have a read of this article from Wired. 

It's an interview with the author of a new book on the 'attention crash'. It compares the benefits brought about by digital and social media for communication with the downsides, and links interruptions and information overload to stress. 

I'm seeing a pattern, that more and more focus is being put on how communications technology is making good and bad changes to the way we communicate, in equal doses. I'm seeing more articles in the media, more blogs and bloggers talking about it, and it's a topic almost always brought up at events. It's not just about wading through emails, it's about an attention crash in general. It seems being wired is as much a cause of burn-out as long hours. So have a read, and here's a few bits of the article in case you're short on time :)

"These are the problems of attention in our new world. Gadgets and technologies give us extraordinary opportunities, the potential to connect and to learn. At the same time, we've created a culture, and are making choices, that undermine our powers of attention.

"Interruptions are correlated with stress, and a cascade of stress hormones accompany that state of being. Stress, frustration and lowered creativity are pretty toxic. And there are studies showing how the environment shapes brain development in kids.

"In Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age, Jackson explores the effects of "our high-speed, overloaded, split-focus and even cybercentric society" on attention. It's not a pretty picture: a never-ending stream of phone calls, e-mails, instant messages, text messages and tweets is part of an institutionalized culture of interruption, and makes it hard to concentrate and think creatively."

The (real) death of the press release (again) (seriously)

I don't know about you, but I *love* Google's writing style and tone of voice when it launches new products via blog posts. The most recent example of this is overnight, when Gmail launched a new service out of its Labs team called Multiple Inboxes. 

Out with the intro line of a press release that starts: "Today, Acme inc, the world's leading bleurgh launches...". Gmail begins it's announcement of multiple inboxes with the line: "I'm seriously into filters and labels." 

So I'm wondering how quickly this trend of first person, casual but emphatically written blog post announcement style will catch on outside of the web allstars? We see it quite a lot with dot coms, it's nothing new there. But you won't see too much of it elsewhere. When will PR training courses in the UK, for example, teach press release writing and blog post writing in equal doses? And when will the traditional "five W's" style of a press release die out altogether, if ever, I wonder. 

Is all marketing futile?

Check out a couple of blog posts from Hugh 'Ignore Everybody' Macleod. The first is about how Hugh feels great examples start off with something futile. He lists a bunch of things he's achieved and some campaigns he admires too.

In an earlier post he explains a bit more about his Blue Monster idea, focusing on the Microsoft employee who loved it so much he got it tattooed on his arm, but then was laid off. Read the full post it makes out there's a happy ending in there (we all love happy endings).