Drew B's take on tech PR

How social technologies will consume email (efail)

Last time I wrote a post about how social web technologies are changing the way we communicate how we do PR, I started with this quote: 

"I only use email to communicate with old people" 

From the blog of Forrester web strategist Jeremiah Owyang, April 2007

This time around, I'll start with this one:

"So much off-the-cuff Wave hate. They're trying to fix email, people. Do you like email? No, because it's awful."

Alex Payne, works at Twitter

What's led me to want to come back and talk about how social web technologies are changing business comms is this new system in the making at Google. 

It's called Google Wave and it combines the functions of instant messaging, email, wikis, blogs and it adds in an open API, which means anyone can build stuff to make it better (like how there are loads of apps that work with Twitter, such as Tweet Deck or Twitpic). Words can't describe how awesome it looks. Google soft launched it to a developer gathering this week, and to see it, if you have a spare hour and 20 minutes then watch for yourself (note the audience in giddy excitement at functions like live IM, threaded emails, conversation playback and live blog comment conversations). 

So how do I think systems like this might change business comms? Here's a few thoughts: 

• Speedier and more efficient communications - Combining presence with email will mean you can have real time online conversations when appropriate or just send emails if the recipient's offline. Without having to switch to an instant messenger to do it
• Better team work - Email chains can be treated like a wiki, an IM or played back from the beginning like a video of the thread. It means the 'reply all' culture of many organisations gets distilled down to something simple to work with
• Social media everywhere - The benefits of short, open chats that technologies like Twitter have shown us will, through Google Wave, become pervasive in the enterprise

Another thing I think is smart - Google Wave's first accounts were given away to the audience of the demo. They will, no doubt, become the advocates who begin seeding Google Wave when it launches in private Beta later this year. Gmail was launched in a similar way and that was a cracker. 

Google stealthily launches public comments on search results - what it means to brands and consumers

This evening it's been reported that Google is trialling a new function. The ability for anyone to publicly comment on search results. The inside scoop is here at ZDNet.

 

There's been a conference taking place today where Google officially launched a whole raft of new services. But this one was not mentioned at all. Stealthy launch indeed.

So what does this mean for the consumer?
It puts Google results into the hands of the swarm, not just the web expert and the algorhythm
In other words, what you say goes. Not what the web crowd say, the brand or the software (or thereabouts).

What could it mean for the brand looking to manage its profile online?
Transparency and consumer interest are key. You've got fans? They'll be super visible now, and all over you online. The PR person's job is to help bring this to the surface.
For brands with a thing or two to hide, well, there will be far fewer places to hide now!

More to come as this rolls out further across Google.

[pic courtesy of ZDnet]

Announcing the launch of 33 Digital

I've posted this on our new company blog, over at 33 Digital. Today, we launch. Exciting times ahead...

In the last 12 months we’ve seen the media landscape contorting beyond recognition. To the PR campaign these shifts are both creative and destructive, with opportunities for those prepared to ride the tidal wave. Speed, ease and control of information have led the charge in forging this change in the way people consume media, in the plugged-in generation and deep into all parts of society.

Bang on target: Daily Mail calls the internet out as tedious and virtual

I read an article this morning in the Daily Mail which is so anti-internet it doesn't warrant an ABCe-boosting link. But it's so marvellously positioned that I just had to share some highlights.

It's titled: "Too much information! From Facebook to Twitter, WHY do so many think we care about the minutiae of their tedious lives?" I'm not sure which bit of this feature about tedious social media was more amusing. The fact that the author has weaved her entire argument around promoting her book, or the way that she calls messages sent over the internet 'virtual messages' like they don't exist or don't get to their destination. A coffee with a neighbour is as fulfilling as 1,000 virtual messages, she says.

Still, my grandmother would completely agree: messages sent online are not real! And how tedious this online communication is. Bore off Daily Fail. Now, off to find this author's book.

MeasurementCamp - One year on

Last week marked the first year anniversary of MeasurementCamp, the movement / meetup / workshop set up by Will McInnes to bring the digital world together to help create best practice and accepted standards in digital campaign measurement. This session we followed the usual format of group hacking of real life digital campaigns then presenting back our findings. Here are some pics from Josh Hallett.

It was the biggest event so far, this time put on by We Are Social, and it was the first to have global perspective, as two of PR firm Voce visited from the US. What heppens next will be an exciting step for the future of MeasurementCamp as the Voce team has taken on the task of turning it international.

Starting soon, and you can see more details on the wiki, MeasurementCamp US and Dublin will be kicking off. For anyone in the US, take a look at what it's about and how it works and then please join in.

How Time magazine was manipulated by the 4chan swarm

Earlier this week I wrote about some new social sites to take a look at. One was 4chan.org. It was a bit of a strange one to put in there... hardly anyone I know has heard of it and as pointed out in the comments to my post, some people find the site's content very offensive indeed.

But this week the power of the 4Chan community revealed itself again when it completely manipulated the Time 100 Most Influential People list to such a degree that all of the top 21 ranked people in the Time list spelt out a message from the 4chan community to the rest of the world.

As one of the first reports from a 4chan believer put it:

"What TIME doesn’t say is that their poll was so totally manipulated that the results of the poll are not an indication of who is the most influential, but instead they stand as a monument to Time’s incompetence."

[pic courtesy of MusicMachinery]

At first glance, it seems that in a short space of time well over 30 million votes engulfed the Time poll, sent by 4chan. But what actually happened was that 4chan users hacked into the poll and controlled it completely, but under the radar in a way that went undetected.

I still believe the structure of 4chan as a social site will change the way online communities will organise themselves online, similar to theway that Twitter changed the blogosphere.