Drew B's take on tech PR

Burger King and the new brand hack: an hour of hijacked Tweets

Today from 5-6pm UK time Burger King became the latest victim of a brand hijack on social media. Its Twitter account was compromised and the hackers, according to early reports it was the Anonymous group, took over Burger King's Twitter account and posted a brief torrent of abuse. The Twitter channel was rebranded, as McDonald's. And tweets were a random mixture of "racial slurs, obscenities and references to drugs". 

The Next Web has a good run down of the tweets that were posted and The BBC has confirmed that Budget King asked Twitter to suspend its account while it addresses what happened in private.

Lessons as usual from such an ordeal which appears to be happening all too frequently right now: respond fast to limit the damage. An hour feels like a lifetime watching such a torrent of brand abuse flowing from the mighty Burger King.  

Horses for courses

There's a nice discussion playing out over on a Branch thread I started last week about the horse meat scandal that's developing in the UK. Here's a live view of the Branch for you to join in or just read at your leisure!

Hacking Vine: How to embed a Vine video on to your website

Vine is Twitter's new video sharing service that has digitall comms types all a flutter. 

It's format is simple but different to others: snap a 6 second video or compilation of segments and post it to vine, Twitter and Facebook. 

One very interesting element of Vine videos is they can be embedded on to your website in a couple of ways. 

The most common way you will see Vines embedded is like this: 

To do this you find the tweet with the Vine video in it, click the More link on the tweet and copy the embed code. Paste it on to your website HTML code and you'll see something like the below. Simple!

Stop motion on #vine is SUPER EASY - here's Sunday @33digital vine.co/v/bJK51E9V9Dp

— Peter Sigrist (@psigrist) January 27, 2013

I've been playing about with Vine since it launched and thought I'd share another way to embed videos on your site as it's quite straightforward but not as obvious.

To embed just the video without the tweet, paste the below code into the HTML of your site. Replace the red part of the URL with the URL of your Vine video, and you're done. 

<p><iframe src="http://vine.co/v/bJK51E9V9Dp/card" width="380" height="380" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>

Your video should look like this. 

Thanks to 33 Digital's Pete Sigrist whose video is far better than any I've made to date :)

 

Foursquare data shows UK and European usage and Google Pagerank for the real world

Anyone wondering who still uses Foursquare should read this article over on The Next Web. Foursquare has released a map of the last three months of Foursquare checkins - that's 500 million of them. Check out the map, which lets you zoom in and out and find your city in a search box. 

What I find interesting in Europe is thevolume and the location of the checkins. Like the story in TNW says, this is a real-world version of Google Pagerank. 

What does Facebook Graph Search mean for brands?

Last night Facebook launched its new big thing. Mark Zuckerberg called it Graph Search. Look past the terrible name and you will see a very important move, and one which is increasingly changing the way brands promote themselves and their products.

Here is the news. And here you can sign up for the Beta of Facebook Graph Search.

Graph Search is all about contextualising the things you're looking for online. Call it social search and it makes a lot more sense... If you want to find a coffee shop, a movie, a song or a local plumber, search in your social network. If your friends tag, like, comment and chat about the right kind of thing, then you have a more contextualised result from your search.

This is what Google has been doing with its search results for a long time. Only with Facebook the concept is turned on its head: social moving into search, rather than search moving into social. Foursquare has been doing this for a long time too, with its Explore feature.

What does it mean for brands? Increasingly we will need to look way beyond SEO / search engine optimisation - something intrinsic to most brands with a presence online. We will need to look at SSO: social search optimisation. How can you get yourself and your products talked about in social search now that Graph Search is joining the party.

My view: it's all about getting talked about by the opinion formers and then by the masses. Not rocket science for those that embrace social media for their communications already, but campaigns will need to work on a whole new scale.

Digital disruption a force for change

Reading Ben Rooney's article this morning in the Wall St Journal about digital disruption in the education sector got me thinking. When did disruption, as a term used in business parlance / marketing / PR / technology etc, become a good thing? Not that long ago I was stopped dead in my tracks and asked why I was talking about disruption so much as it sounded like a bad thing. Digital disruption is not only being embraced right now across all industries it seems, as the WSJ article reports, but it's being sought-after and encouraged. 

This is great to see. I feel like ever since I entered the technology and digital sectors in the late 1990s that digital disruption was the big important thing and those firms that could harness and take advantage of this disruption would be the winners. It's great to see reports of the more traditionally-minded sectors embracing disruption too. 

The way I see it, disruption comes in waves. The waves swell and break on different industries at different times. Some surf the waves. Some get the waves break on them and suffer the mayhem of being unprepared. Some wait for the waters to calm and move in after. For me this time of disruption is hugely exciting to be part of. 

 

10 social media trends for 2013: free report #hw33trends

 

This morning we hosted our 4th annual social media report looking at the 10 big trends for the year ahead. It was a packed Soho Hotel breakfast briefing in the main theatre, a great event.  

The full Digital Trends Report is free to download online here and buzz over on Twitter is on the hashtag #hw33trends. Happy planning!

Growth hacking at 33 Digital

We've been busy in 33 Digital of late. We opened our Sydney office two months ago. Team 33 has been busy putting things in place in Paris and Munich which will both be opening soon, and this week I was in New York interviewing candidates and drinking vast quantities of good coffee. 

Four new offices in a year is proving to be an exciting special project, and soon we will look and feel like a very different company. 

If you are in social media consulting, based in Munich, Paris or New York and want to get involved somehow, have a read of this as a background and get in touch if you fancy meeting up for a coffee soon. 

CIPR and location based social media: an overview from yesterday's conference

I had the great pleasure of giving a talk yesterday at the annual CIPR Social Media conference. The topic was: 'beyond PR with location based social media'. 

The main point I was trying to get across is that location has infused into all mainstream social media, with every mobile status update, checking or Instagram having the option to include location data. Then with the continued evolution of dedicated location services such as Foursquare, and new 'body data' trends such as Quantified Self emerging, we're seeing the beginning of something very exciting for our industry. 

I only had 20mins and there was so much to say, I thought a recap and some bonus / backgrounders would be useful. First the bonus bits - aimed mainly at people who caught my talk and want some further reading: 

• My Foursquare experiment: what I found when I gamed foursuare (and reached a week high score of 500)
• What 'New Foursquare' means for brands
• A write-up of the Sentient World concept as delivered by Altimeter's Jeremiah Owyang at Le Web London
• How Quantified Self / Body Data will bring a new dimension to digital comms (from my new blog BodyData.co.uk)

And here is a video overview of my talk, courtesy of the guys at the CIPR.  

 

 

We're hiring for social media roles in New York, Munich and Paris

Some fun times ahead. We are opening new offices in New York, Munich and Paris for 33 Digital. All the info on these roles is over on the 33 Digital site here. Do let me know if you are interested or know anyone wlse that might be. 

Thanks - Drew