Drew B's take on tech PR

Wanted to say thank you to my colleagues for their kind note (that's you @philsheard) re the PR Week Powerbook

While I was in a meeting yesterday my colleagues put up a note of congratulations, so this is a note back. Thanks team, you rock. Thank you, too, PR Week. 

"Congratulations to the gaffer: Drew added to PR Week’s ‘Power Book’ 2010"

 

I'm flattered to be in this book. It's not too British to mention such a thing. So didn't until now :) But as well as the book, there's the social... this week I thoroughly enjoyed in catching up with a few friends at the networking do for the annual PR Power Book from PR Week. Whilst the majority of people there were from other sectors, generations and walks of life, it was also very nice to meet some of my digital peers, like Speed's Steve Waddington, 1000 Heads' James Whatley, Ruder Finn's Ged Carroll, Diffusion's Daljit Bhurji. and good friends like Ruder Finn's Nick Leonard.

Foursquare UK and brands; 17 out of 1,300 brands on Foursquare are in the UK

Foursquare has just celebrated its first birthday and has been live in the UK over five months now. As social networks go, it's pretty new in the grand scheme of things. Twitter and Facebook were much older when people working in PR and marketing started clamouring feverishly over their technology. 

But the focus from the media right now in the UK is squarely on how PR campaigns and brands in a broader context are using this new social network, 

Foursquare's UK growth is still rather modest, but it's not the community's sheer size that matters. It's the buzz. Foursquare is written about daily in the PR and marketing media, so it naturally follows that brands are seeing it as the new way to engage. 

For some background on how it works in the UK, check these recent articles out: 

• PR Week's podcast on Foursquare, brands and privacy (Speed's Steve Waddington and I agreeing lots)
• Rax Lakhani's blog post about how PR agencies are beginning to learn about Foursquare (nice overview)
• Marketing magazine's overview of the main British brands using Foursquare (client mentions)
• A full list of businesses globally using Foursquare (1,300 in total, only 17 in the UK. A great resource)
• Chart of the users with the most friends on Foursquare (ropey but not many people know it exists)

The jury's still out on how far the Foursquare craze will go in the UK, or what the measure of success will be... (I think it's pretty rudimentary to measure follower or check-in numbers as some of the above articles have done, for example, as you can see from the second and last links above), But I'm personally a bit of an addict and am doing some work directly with Foursquare's people myself, so am following this particular must-have with great interest. 

My new no-Google experiment: round two. Bring on Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare

Last year I ditched Google for a week as an experiment in using Twitter whenever I felt the compulsion 'to Google'.

It was (based on my humble preconceptions) a success - I found that I needed Google less than I thought, and that asking Twitter or doing a search on there instead brought more useful information. Not quite as quick, but far more useful. It got me and some people thinking. 

Since that experiment Facebook has launched stream search - you can do searches in peoples status updates and wall posts that aren't marked private (try it here). Also, Foursquare has been gaining critical mass. You can see tips on locations and I have more friends there now than Facebook, so it's worth testing out. 

So for the next seven days, every time I have an urge to use Google, I will turn to one of my trusty socialnets instead. I'll update this blog post below with random updates. 

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Update #1. My car broke down and at very short notice I needed to find a garage. Twitter, Foursquare and Facebook were useless. Round one to Google. 

Update #2. Even more than my last experiment, I found I rely almost entirely on Twitter, Foursquare and Facebook any way! I rarely use Google it seems. 

Update #3. I successfully found things like: Who's with me at a party (Foursquare swarming), what are people saying about client stories (Facebook's new open search streams), finding out when trains become un-cancelled (Twitter and Foursquare in Euston when all trains were cancelled), and I crowdsourced some things (Twitter told me to use Photobox for my pic prints but I know to expect the UI to be poor. Thanks Twitter). 

UK social media campaigns to be regulated by ASA: Less of the jiggery pokery

News came out today that from September, social media campaigns in the UK may need to adhere to an extension of paid advertising regulatory frameworks from the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA). In other words, there could be a bunch of new rules to govern what goes on in social media marketing. 

What does this mean for the social media sphere? Here at 33 we've got a heritage in public relations, which means (for reputable practitioners at least) campaigns always lean on the whiter than white side of the transparency, honesty and sensibility balance. It's all about managing reputations, so there's not so much of the shortcuts to get extra clicks or mentions. Less of the jiggery pokery, to use the scientific terminology.

Social media however is full of jiggery pokery, and I'm sure that if the ASA starts influencing social media marketing that it will have a real impact on some high-profile campaigns.