Drew B's take on tech PR

Glastotag shows you 70,000 friends you never knew you had (and a way to waste an hour in FB and macro zoom)

The smart people at Poke, the digital agency in London, have just put a project live called GlastoTag. It'a a massive panoramic photo of 70,000 people at Glastonbury which connects with Facebook to show you where your friends are, who you might want to friend from the crowd, and, well, in true Facebook form, it allows you to waste hours on end scrolling through macro zooms of the festival goers seeing who has tagged who. 

Have a poke around. See if you can find lying down bloge and the person who wishes they were on the chair next to him. And any of your mates? 

It's a great implementation of Facebook connect and big props to @jopkins and the Poke crew for this. Smashing job. 

33 Digital is hiring: seeking the perfect project manager

Are you a PR account manager with a passion for social media? So much so you would like to do it full time?  Or do you work in a digital agency project managing kick-ass campaigns and fancy a new challenge? Or maybe you’re an all-star performer from another walk of life looking to enter the world of digital and social media PR.

33 Digital is growing. We are looking for someone with 3-5 years experience in PR and/or social media consultancy to further grow our team. Client or agency side experience would be great. And an ability to conceive and manage some of the most cutting edge social media projects around.

We offer a bunch of benefits you might like. We are based in Clerkenwell, in London. We have copious supplies of good coffee. We will give you gadgets coming out of your ear holes, flexi-time, flexi-location and flexi-rulers to help you do great work the way you like to.  And the salary is designed to attract the best.

Get in touch with us even if you’d just like to hear more – email, Twitter or pop in and say hello. 

Zappos on making word of mouth buzz

Here's an interview between Guy Kawasaki and the founder of retailer Zappos, Tony Hsieh. In case you don't know Zappos, it's the social media darling online retailer that says it doesn't focus on selling goods - it focuses on giving the best customer experience. In this interview, Hsieh says that he uses money that most companies spend on marketing and ploughs it into customer service improvements that inspire customers to promote Zappos through word of mouth in a way that traditional marketing could not achieve. He says that in an age where word of mouth buzz spreads so fast and wide on social media, generating that positive buzz about your brand and plugging into those social networks is crucial and more valuable than a TV ad. Food for thought for marketers and business owners alike.

Future of digital comms: Facebook's boss on the death of email and why it's good for brands

I love and hate email. Couldn't do without it, so much I would like to do to fix it. My use of social networks and messaging systems makes me think a future without email is not far off, and I've written long articles in the past on how technologies can improve our ability to manage internal and external communications for brands. 

So this week, something caught my eye. The chief operating officer of Facebook, Sheryl Sandberg, spoke at the Nielsen Consumer 360 conference this week and touched on the topic of email. "If you want to know what people like us will do tomorrow, you look at what teenagers are doing today," she said. "E-mail--I can't imagine life without it--is probably going away."

Her speech is a bit of a Facebook sales pitch, but also a good fact dump. Fastcompany's write-up of the Facebook take on email is straightforward. This transition away from email presents huge opportunities for brands that seek to engage online:  

"...This transition will be good for businesses and brand marketers. Why? Because while it's very difficult to gain access to a consumer's email address, connecting with them via social networks is quite simple. Indeed, with Facebook's 400 million members and 100 million daily mobile users, the network enables brands to connect with more customers than ever before--or, as Sandberg explains, "On any given day, you can reach twice as many people in the U.S. as watch American Idol --and that only makes up 30% of our global audience."

Here is a video of Sheryl Sandberg's talk, if you're interested in hearing more:

Paid-for trending topics now live on Twitter [with pics] and three ways it will impact PR and marketing

This morning the newest paid-for feature to hit Twitter was launched. Promoted Trends. 

This allows brands to buy their way into the 'trending' section of Twitter - the column on the right hand side of Twitter.com when you are logged in as a user that shows you the 10 most talked-about things right now on Twitter. 

Up until now, getting your story, blog, name, etc, in the trending terms has been social media nirvana. Unless of course you are Habitat, Eurostar, or Nick Griffin. Trending topics are also often an early warning signal as to breaking news. Major world events are regularly reported (or mis-reported) on Twitter first-hand, first. As you can see from the screen grab below, Toy Story 3 is now a trending term, because Disney Pixar paid for it to be there (I took this at 8:30 this morning). 

 

 

This will spell interesting times for people whose task it is to manage brand reputations on social media. Here are a few ways: 

1. Crisis management: If for example you're BP and buying Google ads to promote your agenda amidst a crisis (as is happening now), then you would benefit from buying a trending term to promote your messages too
2. Voucher codes and product buzz: If you have a product to promote that can be bought online, like Dell for example, it might shift a hell of a lot more if it trended. 
3. Engaging communities: Kick-starting communities is a long process and takes work. Trending speeds that up and will be attractive to latecomers to Twitter. 

I'm not sure if I like some of the ways that promoted trends will work. It will be used by many as a shortcut to what other have spent years working to achieve (like size of community, engagement, and so on). But it will be interesting to see how this develops. 

Nielsen and McKinsey launch social media consulting brand

News in NMA this morning that in the US, research firm Nielsen has partnered with management consultancy McKinsey to launch a new offering. They've called it NM Incite. 

Increasingly it seems no advisory firm, whether it's PR, marketing, research or business consulting, can be without a social media specialism. 

For those of you interested in the kind of services that a heavyweight brand like McKinsey would offer in the social media space, check it's products/services page here. Varying from product and marketing optimisation to brand health tracking and understanding customers. Bread and butter stuff for digital veterans, but good to see that that the type of advisory coming from the bright sparks at McKinsey is moving with the times nonetheless. 

The benefit of attracting the digital consumer: Starbucks' free wifi, and study on spending trends

This evening you may see reports of Starbucks' most recent announcement: it will be offering free wifi from July.

Starbucks is the biggest brand on Facebook, with 7.4million fans, as I mentioned in a recent post. It makes me wonder whether this level of digital thinking has led the brand to let go of the revenues it's bringing in through selling wifi access, in favour of the custom of people who like web access for free, but who will buy other things as a result... (Like maybe coffee?!).

A report out over the weekend by Syncapse showed that people who are into social media, specifically free social media like Facebook, spend more money on other stuff in general. It seems to me that Starbucks, with its now large digital fan club, has seen proof first hand that if you attract the right kind of consumer, the benefit is disproportionately greater than if you were to simply charge them at the door. And you don't have to be a company that sells digital technology in order to benefit from attracting digital consumers.

Five surprising uses of Foursquare (after a year of heavy use)

I was on my way into work this morning when BBC journalist Rory Cellan-Jones asked his friends on Twitter about Foursquare. He said he has been using Foursquare for four weeks and wanted to know peoples experiences of it. The response he got from some of the people that I am also following was mixed at best. Rory also quoted a Wired article which says it's cool to compete to become a mayor... Rory said it's naff. 

People always have different experiences from using Foursquare. It is rumoured that the core use of it - to combine your location with your social network - is coming soon to Facebook. And this has got people talking about it. So I thought I would play back five interesting and perhaps surprising uses I have found from using Foursquare for over a year now (check my blog post from April '09 here).

Here's my five: 

1. Local reviews: When you check in anywhere, you receive tips from places nearby from your friends. This means you get to find user reviews based on where you are, of places to eat, shows, watering holes, and so on. My personal favourite - I discovered a Ghanaian food stall near my office because I checked in on Foursquare nearby, and it's now my favourite place to get my lunch. 
2. Friend finder: When a friend of yours checks in after you, you get an alert. I check in at my office, and receive pings on my phone when visitors arrive, when colleagues are on their way up, and when I'm at conferences or visiting large offices, a Foursquare check-in is often the digital ice breaker.
3. Loyalty reward: Shops that sign up to Foursquare can offer you a reward for your loyalty. Debenhams, for example (a client of ours, and an offer on Foursquare that we set up) will give all visitors to their Oxford St store a free coffee from the store cafe if they check in on a Friday. And the 'mayor' gets free coffee whenever they want. Many outlets offer real rewards for online check-ins. Dominos gives out free Pizza across all its UK outlets to its mayors, for example. So for many, Foursquare is worth using just for the rewards. 
4. Attention grabber: I have noticed that companies using Foursquare in interesting ways tend to get noticed. A small coffee shop called Dose Espresso near my office started using it months ago to attract custom from the digital types that are based nearby. It was one of the first businesses in the UK to do a deal on Foursquare, and has been featured in countless mainstream media since as a result. Using Foursquare simply gets you noticed (but this won't last for long I'm sure).
5. Buzz tracker: You should track what's going on over on Foursquare for your business or brand. You can see if people love or hate your products, you can see when people are flocking (or swarming, as Foursquare calls it) and you can learn something in the process. This is how Dose Espresso learnt about its customers' habits - it has 66 active customers using Foursquare (and for a small coffee shop like Dose - it's literally a 3 square metre sized shop - that's a lot of learning).

[note - I don't personally like or find use in the gaming element of Foursquare for badges or mayorship. I know many do, but it's not my cup of tea.]