Weekly Media and Comms Round-Up – 15 June 2012

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Posted on June 15, 2012 by Sam C

The PR measurement world has this week been focused on the annual Association for the Measurement and Evaluation of Communication (AMEC) conference, this year taking place in Dublin. As you’d expect from a room-full of communications professionals, there’s been a very active and insightful Twitter hashtag on best practices in measurement and insights, which you can follow at #AMEC2012.

In social media, Mashable have written a 9 step guide to providing a social media health check for your brand, with suggested KPIs including share of voice, key influencer mentions and sentiment analysis. Twitter has announced the launch of expanded tweets, allowing users to see extra content within tweets from selected partner brands, without having to click through to their websites. As well as partner news brands such as the New York Times and Wall Street Journal being able to provide headlines and introductory news text, non-news publishers such as Buzzfeed and Dailymotion will also be providing image and video content.

Following on from Facebook’s announcement last week about mobile monetization, the platform has now revealed it will introduce real-time bidding (RTB) on display adverts within weeks. This will allow brands to target advertising to users based on their off-site browsing history, rather than traditional user profile keywords and ‘likes’ targeting.

Influence marketing firm Crowdtap has published a study into online influence, concluding that in terms of purchasing decisions made, we are more influenced by our friends and networks than celebrities. You can view an infographic summary of the report’s findings on influence here.

Finally, as a constantly evolving industry, PR Daily looks forward eight years to predict the skills PR professionals will need in 2020. Until next week!

Weekly Media and Comms Round-Up – 8 June 2012

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Posted on June 8, 2012 by Sam C

It’s the time of year again when the world shifts its attention to the UK and all eyes focus in on the Queen’s four-day Royal Jubilee celebrations. It has been interesting to see media globally talk of the resulting success of ‘Brand GB’ and the huge shift in (positive) perceptions of the British Royal Family. Mark Borkowski highlights the ‘Wills and Kate effect’ as a shining case study of how to do PR – “[it] epitomizes all that is great in good communications: healthy cynicism, transparency, definition, strategy, digital fluency, mutual understanding and, above all else, a compelling set of stories”.

For when things do inevitably go wrong, however, PR Week’s recent Crisis Communications conference has provided a number of key best-practice takeaways on how to stay in control during a PR crisis. Advice includes how to plan at a very micro-level how you would respond in a crisis, how to handle social media, and how best to present your messaging. We also recently blogged on crisis communications for social media following a NASDAQ OMX breakfast conference in San Francisco, which you can read here.

One company facing such a crisis this week was LinkedIn, as rumors leaked out of 6.5 million passwords being posted online. The company has come under criticism for its ‘indirect’ approach to communicating about the crisis by updating journalists and consumers solely through its Twitter channel. The lack of a formal response by the company led to security experts elsewhere being widely quoted, with the press stating that the company itself had refused to comment.

In other social media news, Twitter’s advertising revenues are predicted to hit $1 billion in 2014, Facebook is attempting mobile monetization for the first time with news-feed sponsored stories just for mobile devices, and Sean Parker announces the launch of Airtime, video-chat based around shared interests. Finally, Ragan’s PR Daily also presented us with the fascinating 52 cool facts and stats about social media.

NASDAQ OMX announces the launch of Media Intelligence

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Posted on May 15, 2012 by Sam C

The proliferation and democratization of the media universe over the past few years has brought about huge changes to the role of the PR and corporate communicators. Traditionally, a company’s reputation was largely in the hands of a number of key influencers, with PR being the liaison between an organization and its key media.

Now, with the rise of social media it is increasingly harder for a company to manage its reputation; as conversations about brands mushroom, it becomes harder to identify and track influencers. Individual bloggers have larger Twitter audiences than some leading media outlets, and even those with a small following can within minutes find themselves at the center of media attention.

Listening has never been more important, along with the ability to see in real-time who is driving conversations about your brand, and how these are being perceived among key audiences. The challenge, of course, is being able to identify these influencers across an ever expanding universe, understand their effects on your brand, and having real-time actionable intelligence to be able to react.

Enter Media Intelligence, the latest product in the NASDAQ OMX Corporate Solutions suite of services. Media Intelligence brings together all of your relevant media content across print, online, broadcast and social media in one platform, allowing you to see at a glance, in real-time, who is talking about your brand, and where (and even that of your closest competitors to keep you ahead of the game…)

Moving away from the traditional model of retrospective media analysis, and helping you keep on top of a large and complex landscape, MI’s powerful Natural Language Processing capabilities also provide real-time sentiment analysis across all your media. Understanding that a piece in the Wall Street Journal may be very different to a tweet, MI’s analytical engines are able to interpret and analyze different language types, even when that language is non-traditional (ie. LOL, J, #epic).

Warren Buffet once commented that it takes 20 years to build a reputation, and only five minutes to ruin it, something which chimes true especially for social media. Being able to see and understand who is talking about your brand in real-time gives you the time to react, before it’s too late. While MI is an excellent tool for helping prove ROI, its value also lies in alerting you when something’s afoot, keeping you ahead of the curve.

As you can probably guess, we’re pretty excited about this. If you’re in charge of your company’s PR and would like to see MI in action, please do feel free to reach out to your local rep to schedule a demo. We’d be delighted to show you the future of media monitoring, whether you’re in the New York Times, Le Monde, or just keeping track of #epic LOLs.

What can we learn from the Shippam’s paste Twitter affair?

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Posted on November 8, 2011 by Sam C

Let’s start at the beginning… A few weeks back a Twitter feed appeared, purporting to belong to Shippam’s Pastes, and manned by ‘Ben’, an ‘executive social media intern’. Being new to the world of social media, he was quite honest about his intentions and shortcomings:

The feed read like a social media engagement for beginners’ rulebook, sometimes perhaps a little too literally:

The Tweets led many to question who was behind the account. Was it a hoax? A genuine attempt at ‘engagement’ from a naive intern? Or a stroke of marketing genius from a largely forgotten brand (à la Old Spice…)? As the Guardian revealed over the weekend, it was indeed a hoax. The man behind the account explained, “faking a spectacularly inept attempt to ‘do Twitter’ just seemed funny – as did picking a real, but nearly forgotten, brand to do it. A large part of it was also simply wanting to see what happened.”

Funny is certainly how the feed was perceived, picking up over 9,000 followers before it was closed down. We learnt of Ben’s nights out in Wetherspoons, and his failures in seducing the local chip shop girl, as well as admirable attempts to help us consumers engage with fish paste, of course:

Having seen so many corporate failures on Twitter, as the author remarked, “A company attempting to get involved with an internet ‘thing’ like Twitter and cocking it up entirely is also completely believable.”

The feed played on the idea of ‘engagement’ being seen as the holy grail of ‘doing’ social media and ensuring the whole thing is ‘fun’. In reality though, the feed had very little engagement, being largely a broadcast of disparate thoughts and product references. It broke all the best practice social media ‘rules’, and yet was a great success.

So what can we learn from this? Largely a reminder of the old mantra that content and creativity are key, and even more so in social media, where everyone’s fighting for our attention. Ironically, given the account was fake, original ideas such as this is what brands should be doing. Content which is genuinely engaging and disruptive will attract our attention and make us click ‘follow’ (as the success of the Waterstones Piccadilly feed testifies, as well as our old friend, the insurance quote comparing meerkat).

We must not of course forget that this account was not authorised by the brand, Shippam’s. I would, however, be very interested to see their web analytics for the past few weeks, and also to see if there’s been any rise in sales. If I ever feel like a ‘batenberg sandwich of the sea’, I certainly know where I’ll be heading.

Weekly Media and Comms Round-Up – 4 Nov 2011

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Posted on November 4, 2011 by Sam C

Causing a social media stir this week has been an entirely unsuspecting contender – Shippams fish paste. The brand’s Twitter feed is supposedly run by a social media intern who helps users ‘engage’ with the brand’s crab paste. As The Wall pointed out, “The account is clearly having a laugh at the marketing industry and its need for brands to have a digital media strategy, no matter how established or tedious, like crab paste, the brand may be”. Whatever the motives, the feed is genuinely amusing and has grown to almost 9,000 followers, as well as drawing a lot of attention to the company’s products, of course… *

Westminster Council’s director of comms and strategy recently unveiled their guide, Evaluating Your Communications Tools: What Works, What Doesn’t, suggesting that evaluation programmes should be based on ‘real outcomes’, including ‘measurable changes in audience perceptions and awareness’. The report has the backing of the PRCA and AMEC, and can be found online here.

Meanwhile, Adam Singer writes about metrics ‘Your PR team isn’t tracking… but should be”, focussing on web analytics, including referring sources, branded search engine traffic, and inbound links.

Providing insights into where best to place links in Tweets to maximise click through rates was the focus of a recent study by Dan Zarrella. Sampling 200,000 bit.ly links, Zarrella created a Tweet heat-map to highlight CTRs, concluding the most effective place to insert a link is at around 25% of the way through a Tweet.

Finally, our friends at PressIndex have continued their study into the UK’s top PR agencies, this time looking at levels of engagement with fans. Perhaps unsurprisingly, We Are Social were found to have the most popular fan page, and were also the most active.

*At the time of proofing this blog (11am), the Shippams Twitter handle no longer exists. More details when we have them.

Weekly Media and Comms Round-Up – 28 Oct 2011

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Posted on October 28, 2011 by Sam C

Although this particular blog may be biased (for the first time ever, I hasten to add), perhaps the biggest story of this week has been the acquisition of Glide Technologies by Nasdaq OMX. You can read the full press release here, but essentially what this represents is the ‘first and only fully-integrated workflow solution for investor relations and public relations professionals’. It’s certainly an exciting time here.

In other news this week, PR Week reported on the changing role of PR based on the findings of the PR Census 2011, in conjunction with the PRSA. Topping the list for growth in importance over the last two years was online comms, along with reputation management, SEO and comms strategy development, all of which are also predicted to grow in importance over the next two years. Areas highlighted as having decreased in importance for PR were event planning and organisation, sales promotion and publishing and editing.

Evaluation-wise, the Green Book Blog has published an interview with analytics strategist Seth Grimes on sentiment analysis. Grimes is interested in using integrated analytics, such as linking content-sourced data with data from transactional and operational systems, to produce valuable Business Intelligence insight. The blog makes for an interesting read for anyone looking to take media monitoring to the next step.

One company looking into this is HP, who this week launched a study showing that data from social media can be merged with company data (ticket sales, customer demographics etc) to predict customer behavior with up to 90% accuracy. It highlights how critical it is for marketing to be integrated with IT to truly provide business value, allowing correlations to be drawn between conversations online and real-time transactions, for example.

Until next week.

Weekly Media and Comms Round-Up – 21 Oct 2011

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Posted on October 21, 2011 by Sam C

‘Can you use social media to predict the future?’ asks Fresh Networks from Wired 2011. Social media obviously produces a lot of content, and Professor Hertz argues that the key is to mine what is useful, highlighting that “the X Factor is ‘research gold dust’, as not only does it generate a great amount of social media buzz, but it also involves a public vote”. (My own efforts to predict last year’s winner of Big Brother were sadly unsuccessful).

MediaWeek has published a comprehensive article on how the recession has affected media agencies, as ZenithOptimedia predicts that global advertising spend will grow by around 4.1 per cent this year.

A study by the Ipsos Mori Reputation Council report found that Comms Directors engage less with social media now than in 2010. The findings led Anthony Hilton to muse, is social media monitoring worth it? Hilton likens engaging with bloggers as intervening in a pub argument. The comments section has prompted some lively debate.

PressIndex this week released a study of the top 150 PR agencies and their social media presence, concluding that “taken in isolation, the number of Facebook fans or Twitter followers a PR consultancy has is meaningless” and crucially, “It’s not the size of your social community; it’s what you do with it that counts.”

Finally, the FT this week highlighted the evolving role of the CIO, highlighting that they are now more responsible for Business Information, pulling insights from social media and executive dashboards to drive strategy, for example. How this role compares to the Chief Influence Officer written about by Phillip Sheldrake will be interesting to see.

Weekly Media and Comms Round-Up – 14 Oct 2011

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Posted on October 14, 2011 by Sam C

After Apple’s dominance of the news agenda last week, it was Blackberry’s turn this week. I’ll refrain from repeating any of the jokes circulating on Twitter, and mention what seems to have angered users the most, namely RIM’s handling of communications around the crisis. CorpComms Magazine provided an analysis of the damage to RIM and Blackberry’s reputations, including insight from Glide’s CEO, Sam Phillips.

PR Week this week reported of the sale of College Group to a private equity firm, suggesting it could pave the way for more PE deals in the PR industry. Danny Rogers believes that despite all the doom and gloom, the sector does have some strong growth areas, notably digital content solutions, and reputation management.

A new study from ISBA and Havas Media Social shows that seven out of 10 marketers believe their CEO understands the importance of social media, while nearly eight out of 10 view it as a long-term investment.

Another study of CMOs this week, however, from IBM showed that although 82% say they plan to increase their use of social media over the next three to five years, only a minority actually currently track brand conversations happening online. The research lead highlighted the benefits of real-time monitoring to companies: “CMOs who successfully harness this new source of insight will be in a strong position to increase revenues, reinvent their customer relationships and build new brand value.”

Whilst on the subject, here’s seven free tools to use to help measure your social media effectiveness. (Regular readers will be aware of my views on tool number 7…)

Until next week.

The Social Media Newsroom Part 4: Facilitating Conversation Elsewhere

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Posted on October 7, 2011 by Keith

This is the fourth instalment in my 5-part series about Social Media Newsrooms – to read more about the series read my introductory article here.

Parts 3, 4 and 5 of this series look at some specific suggestions for things you can do to make your Newsroom social, with some good and bad examples of where other companies have done so. Today I’m having a look at how to use your newsroom to support your social channels and in part 5 I will look at how to make your content more personal.

How to use your Newsroom to encourage conversations elsewhere

Conversations don’t necessarily need to happen on your newsroom as you probably will need to moderate these comments and might not have the resource to do so. You may want, for various reasons, to actually have conversations with people elsewhere. In which case, use your newsroom as a way of directing visitors to the places where they can have a conversation with your business or individuals within it.

Example: SEB, Erica Blomgren, Twitter

SEB have a nice newsroom (I wouldn’t go as far as calling it a “social media newsroom” though) and one thing I do like about their site is that they are open enough to show contact details for their experts across a range of subjects in the newsroom site. They give direct dials and email addresses opening the way for offline conversations to happen. They are risking more spam and unwanted sales calls by doing this but they clearly think this is a price worth paying in the name of openness and accessibility. Credit to them for that.

When one of the experts listed is active on twitter they also show a link to their twitter profile. One expert that is using twitter on a daily basis to communicate news and opinion on her area of expertise is Erica Blomgren. What I like about the way she uses twitter is that it’s very focused, so people following her know what to expect, she posts regularly, and she is willing to respond to questions and give people answers online. Overall a great example of how to use twitter in a financial services context. Now SEB just need to encourage some of the other 50 experts to do likewise!

Example: BASF, Facebook

Now check this out for an impressive example of making the effort to respond to people!

BASF, a leading global chemical company based in Germany, has a Facebook page and they use to share stories about concrete in English. You read that right. Concrete on Facebook.

So they share the story and what happens? For a start 32 people ‘like’ the story but three people also post a comment in response. One comment is in English, one in German and one in Malay. What do BASF do? They respond to each post in the language of poster! Bravo.

The interesting thing here is the interaction between Facebook and the company’s newsroom. The conversation on Facebook has taken place because they posted an interesting story on their newsroom and people have responded to that. There is the possibility to comment on the article page itself but no-one has chosen to do that, preferring instead to post on Facebook.

What BASF should try and do next is bring some of these channels together more – for a start allowing people to like an article, tweet or share it is a simple win (I’m surprised this feature is missing given how well they’ve done other things) but perhaps they should also use the Facebook social plugin or a tool like Disqus to make it easier for people to respond to their articles? Maybe then they’ll truly deserve the moniker of ‘Social Media Newsroom’ that they’ve given themselves?

Now if a company as “boring” as a chemical company can post interesting content on a regular basis on their Facebook page and engage with people there, your company can probably do so too! Where there’s a will there’s a way.

In the fifth and final part of my series I will be talking about how to make your content more personal and to bring out some of the expertise of your own staff as individuals into your news content.

Weekly Media and Comms Round-Up – 23 Sept 2011

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Posted on September 23, 2011 by Sam C

If we were to take Twitter trends as a news barometer, the most important event in the past 24h (even outside of Comms) seems to have been the next batch of changes Facebook announced at the f8 conference. The good folk at Mashable have summed up everything you need to know here.

The platform shows no signs of slowing down as it passed 800 million registered users this week. Even offline luxury brands are now seeing the benefits of digital strategies, including Porsche who spoke to econsultancy about their strategy and how they measure digital campaigns.

Another luxury brand, Burberry, marked a social media first this week as they launched the world’s first ‘Tweetwalk’, partnering with Twitter to release backstage photos of London Fashion Week collections before they hit the runway.

In analytics news, the IPR and PRSA North American Measurement Summit was held this week, with a focus on social media reporting. You can view Tim Marklein’s presentation “Goodbye measurement, hello analytics” here, highlighting the need for real-time analytics. Fleishman-Hillard’s Don Bartholomew has also published a free ebook evaluating social media listening platforms.

In more light-hearted news this week, a cautionary tale has taught us the value of keeping passwords safe, particularly if you fire your copywriter…

Weekly Media and Comms Round-Up – 16 Sept 2011

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Posted on September 16, 2011 by Sam C

Twitter was in the news again this week, as they announced the launch of a new analytics platform, providing insights into how many links and Tweets are shared across the platform. Techcrunch TV covered the event as it happened here. The presentation also highlighted that Twitter had passed 100 million users for the first time, and around 5 billion Tweets are sent every month. We also learnt this week that Twitter sentiment is being used by a hedge fund to predict short term stock market price changes (with up to 87% accuracy…).

A fascinating study by Market Sentinel on fan engagement on Facebook showed that despite huge numbers of fans liking pages, only around 0.002% actually engage with the page more than once. Given the way Facebook’s edgerank calculations work (determining what appears in feeds), if people do not engage with a fan page or piece of content, that ‘like’ will disappear from users’ feeds.

Fast Company explained IBM’s latest thinking in transforming companies into social businesses, including insights being derived from the way people interact digitally to improve various functions in the business. The BBC’s Deputy Head of the Newsroom also wrote about how social media is changing the way the BBC operates, and the shifts in the way people consume news.

Finally, the next instalment in the guide to social media newsrooms is here, where Alistair discusses comments and engagement on corporate blogs.

The Social Media Newsroom Part 3: Comments

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Posted on September 15, 2011 by Keith

This is the third instalment in my 5-part series about Social Media Newsrooms – to read more about the series read my introductory article here.

Parts 3, 4 and 5 of this series will look at some specific suggestions for things you can do to make your newsroom social, with some good and bad examples of where other companies have done so. Today I’m having a look at comments, Part 4 will be about using the newsroom to support your social channels and in part 5 I will look at how to make your content more personal.

When looking at how to bring in some two-way dialogue to a company’s newsroom one obvious place to start with is allowing members of the public, or the specific community you are targeting, to post their thoughts, comments and questions on your site in response to your news pieces, blog posts and even press releases.

However, one thing I really don’t like to see on a corporate newsroom or blog is spammy comments! If you see a blog that has comments that are clearly spam lingering around on their site for days, weeks or even longer what does it say to you? What it says to me is that there is clearly no-one moderating the site and probably no-one actually bothering to read what people are saying in the comments.

Comments spam and ignored questions – HP blogs

HP has a pretty-looking blog site that is actually a hub pulling together a number of blogs on various topics.

But are they really taking the comments seriously or is this just another gimmick? Take a look at this post title “Answering your questions”. Ironically, given the title of the post, no-one has bothered to reply to the people who posted questions in the comments in response to this post. The last post here from “leo” is clearly spam trying to get some link juice from the HP site (and if you look around other posts you’ll find plenty of spam). What do you conclude by looking at these comments? HP isn’t really paying any attention to the community on their site…

Allowing comments and responding to them – Microsoft Hardware Blog

Microsoft have a vast array of blogs on a variety of topics nicely laid out with a summary of the latest posts. Not all blogs allow comments and you do find the occasional spam but what I like about many of these blogs is that Microsoft does actually respond to the comments people post.

Microsoft Hardware Blog Image http://www.microsofthardwareblog.com/we-want-your-feedback/

This shows a much more genuine attempt to use comments as a way of engaging with people through the site.

How much freedom should people be given to say what they want? Should negative comments be allowed?

This is a tricky question to answer and a lot depends on both the wider culture of a company and also on regulatory requirements. Aside from preventing abusive posts, spam, blatant self-promotion or links to indecent or illegal content, how far a company goes in allowing people to air their views is really a matter of discretion.

One really interesting example of a company that takes a very tolerant approach to comments on their own site is General Electric.

Take a look at this post about the nuclear meltdown in Japan after the Tsunami and the role that GE played in tackling the crisis. There are over 111 comments in response to this article, many go beyond negative and are quite damning, it doesn’t really get much worse than being blamed for a nuclear disaster, does it?

The people posting are a broad mix with some people claiming to be engineers and even nuclear experts themselves. GE have not responded to individual comments but it is interesting to see how commentators with differing views interact with each other.

Do these posts damage GE’s reputation? GE obviously don’t think so. Everyone coming to the site first reads GE’s official statement and there are links to other information and posts from GE about the issue on this site. The community that has developed on this site has also developed a degree of self-correction with individual posters correcting the most blatantly erroneous statements from other posters and there is quite a lively debate about how to tackle the nuclear problems in Japan and the pros and cons of nuclear energy more generally.

There isn’t the usual level of spam, off-topic posts or self-promotion on this site which suggests to me that someone from GE is moderating comments. Meaning that these negative posts are not there simply because no-one has noticed.

Now the question is, would you let someone say this about your company on your blog?

But look also how the community on the site supply each other with information. There are a lot of well informed commentators taking part in the discussion.

I will be interested to hear people’s thoughts on whether such an approach is good for GE but what you can’t deny is that this is ‘social’ in a real sense and also quite ‘brave’ of GE to permit such criticism in a space they control.

In the next part of the series I will be looking at how to use your newsroom to facilitate conversations in other channels. Thanks for reading!

Weekly Media and Comms Round-Up – 9 Sept 2011

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Posted on September 9, 2011 by Sam C

In the first of a new weekly series, I’ll be sharing a collection of top news stories across the communications industry to keep you up to date at a glance. Of course, if you see any great news or stories throughout the week, feel free to email me with them (sc[at]glidetechnologies.com) and I’d be delighted to have a read.

In social media news, Twitter now plans to roll-out advertising on the channel to UK companies, following an established presence in the US. Brands can pay to have Tweets appear in users’ timelines and for their chosen topics to appear as trends. Meanwhile, Reuters this week reported that Facebook’s revenue for the first half of 2011 had doubled to $1.6 billion, although the revenue split between advertising and Facebook credits is unclear.

SEOmoz this week published a very comprehensive post on social media metrics and how to track KPIs, whilst Hubspot wrote about 5 ‘vanity’ metrics, which should not be measured, and offers some alternatives. On the subject of ‘vanity’ metrics… love ‘em or hate ‘em, Klout and PeerIndex continue to grow in popularity as they attempts to measure online ‘influence’, and this week the Ministry of Sound announced it is set to use the latter to help target a book launch.

Url shortening site bit.ly published a blog on the half-life of links, looking at how long people will pay attention to them, highlighting that Youtube links had a longer half-life than those on Twitter or Facebook.

Finally, Glide’s very own Alistair began a five-part blog series this week on the future of the corporate newsroom. You can read the first two parts here and here.

The Social Media Newsroom Guide Part 2: The Golden Rules of a Social Newsroom

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Posted on September 8, 2011 by Keith

This is the second instalment in my 5-part series about Social Media Newsrooms – to read more about the series read my introductory article here.

Parts 3, 4 and 5 of this series will look at some specific suggestions for things you can do to make your newsroom social, with some good and bad examples of where other companies have done so. In Part 3 I’ll look at comments, part 4 will be about using the newsroom to support your social channels and in part 5 I will look at how to make your content more personal.

But first, here are my 3 “golden rules” about what constitutes being social in a corporate communications context:

The 3 Golden Rules of being Social in Corporate Communications

Rule 1 – Conversations must be two-way

You can use as many social media channels as you like but if the mode of communication on each channel is still only one-way broadcast are you really gaining anything? Just posting on twitter doesn’t mean you are being social any more than being in a gym means you are exercising.

Rule 2 – Communication must be personal

Your business is made up of your people. Your PR team is a team of people. Do you always have to communicate behind the mask of your corporate logo? Bring out the individuals in your business – they will often have their own networks that you can connect with through your site. Put a name and a face to your communications as often as possible. In order to be social you have to first of all be human.

Rule 3 – The focus is on the audience

One thing that makes ‘social’ communication distinct from traditional PR is the willingness to share content that isn’t directly aimed at promoting the brand or selling goods or services. This can involve inviting people from outside the business to create content on your site or sharing links to content not created or related to your business. The goal here is to create or direct people to content because you think it will be interesting to them not because it’s directly beneficial to you.

I could talk about communicating with an audience where they are but I’m focusing here on things that can make the newsroom social, not more widely on how businesses can be more social in general.

If you want more on the specifics then come back next week when I will be publishing the remaining 3 parts of the series. Thanks for reading!

The Social Media Newsroom Guide Part 1: How to Fake it

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Posted on September 6, 2011 by Keith

This is the first instalment in my 5-part series about Social Media Newsrooms – to read more about the series read my introductory article here.

Many companies want to be seen as “social” – there are now numerous case studies showing how social engagement online can be beneficial for business of many types. Certainly, many marketers and PR people want to be seen to be engaging in social media as it’s the latest thing to be seen doing as a marketing/comms professional.

But sometimes the priority can be on “appearing social” rather than actually being social and this can be seen in the way many companies approach communications through their website. This is most apparent when you look at the company’s newsroom section – i.e. the place where they publish company news and/or press releases.

In terms of what qualifies a newsroom for the additional badge-of-honour prefix “social media” I think the recipe, in the minds of some companies, works as follows:

Step 1
Take one tired looking online press office.

Step 2
Stick in a few Facebook Like/Recommend or Tweet This buttons so people think they can share the story on their social media channel of choice. These buttons don’t actually have to work, just make sure the buttons are clearly visible. Throw in a few other channels for good measure (LinkedIn is popular, Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon too and if you are really current try Google’s +1).

Step 3
Instead of hosting your videos on your site host them on YouTube. Everyone knows YouTube is “social” – don’t worry, you can disable comments if you don’t want people saying your videos are boring and your company sucks on a channel you can’t moderate.

Step 4
Make sure you put a few pictures on Flickr. Some people still use Flickr and people will instantly recognise the logo so it will create a warm fuzzy social media feeling inside.

Step 5
Tag clouds! Every web 2.0 site HAS to have one of these. They also make your site look like a blog and blogs are social, right?

Step 6
Show your latest tweets. This may be just a feed showing tweets telling people what’s on the page that they are already on or it may be a stream of tweets to various people apologising that their experience of your company has been bad and telling them to speak to customer services. Either way, twitter is super-social, so just shove it in. It doesn’t matter if the tweets you are displaying offer no information whatsoever to the person on your newsroom that they a) want and b) didn’t have access to already on that page.

Step 7 (optional)
Add some pictures. Podcasts are also funky; if you have them throw them in too. If you have some presentations, why not stick these on Slideshare too? The more logos of recognised social media channels you can squeeze in to your site the better.

JOB DONE! You now have a “social media newsroom” which you can tell the world about.

“Social” – really?

Don’t get me wrong. Sarcastic comments aside, I’m not saying that any of the things I’ve listed above are bad – in fact many are actually good things that I would recommend. Tag clouds, for example, are a useful way for people to navigate through your content. And there’s certainly no harm in putting videos on YouTube or pictures on Flickr. Many of the self-styled “social media newsrooms” that I’ve seen are actually quite good as far as a corporate newsroom goes and often give a better user experience than newsrooms from other companies in their sector.

What I’m objecting to here is the notion that there is actually anything genuinely “social” about these sites. In my view, the self-applied moniker “social media” is often nothing more than a gimmick – reinforcing some of the more negative stereotypes about PR as a profession in general, i.e. doing something for a headline when the substance doesn’t match up.

But why do it? If a site is genuinely social do you really need to call it ‘social’? Shouldn’t it be up to the people visiting a newsroom to decide for themselves if the site is social or not? If they think it is they will ‘vote with their fingers’ by sharing/recommending your content and by taking part in a conversation with you.

Subscribe to our blog or follow me on twitter to get updates on my next posts in this series.

Next in the series: The 3 Golden Rules of Social Engagement in a Newsroom

The Social Media Newsroom – a 5-part Guide

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Posted on September 6, 2011 by Keith

Last week I came across news of yet another corporate newsroom site launched under the headline of “company X launches social media newsroom” and I found myself again wondering, as I browsed through the site, ‘why have they called this a “social media newsroom” as opposed to just a “newsroom”’.

I’ve seen a number of examples where companies have called their corporate news site a “social media newsroom”. Some of these sites do look rather good and have some nice functionality in them, both for journalists visiting the site and for the public. But when you look through the site it is hard to find anything particularly social about it.

All of this has gotten me thinking about what exactly it is that makes a newsroom social? Are we sometimes confusing what represents best practice, in terms of web design, functionality and usability, with actual social engagement? I think we often do, as I’ve seen a number of these “social media newsrooms” receive praise from some for being groundbreaking when in fact they aren’t really doing anything social at all and it can come across as a bit of a gimmick.

So this an introduction for my guide to building a more social newsroom for your business. I’ve resisted the urge to name and shame the worst offenders when it comes to undeserved “social” badges but I will be mentioning a few examples of companies that I think do a good job of it.

Small Business vs Large Corporations

Some of the best examples of using social media in corporate communications actually come from small businesses, but my experience in working in this area mainly comes from working with large corporations. Bigger businesses have both opportunities and restrictions when it comes to engaging in social media that smaller businesses don’t have – so my focus in this series (as with all my posts) is on the larger organisations. If you have good examples from smaller businesses do please share these though!

Part 1: The Social Media Newsroom – How to Fake it

Social Media gets serious

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Posted on August 23, 2011 by Sam C

With the possible exception of Paul Daniels being hospitalised by a yellow pizza-throwing puppet, this year’s ‘silly season’ has been somewhat disappointing. In fact, it’s hard to remember a summer when so much serious news has happened. What’s been interesting to watch is the interplay between mainstream and social media, and see how the two have broken news, driven agendas and influenced each other in these big stories.

One of the summer’s biggest stories, reports of phone-hacking at The News of the World was a piece of investigative journalism broken by a national paper, The Guardian. It was Facebook and Twitter which then started the mass grassroots revolt against companies advertising in the paper, leading to several pulling their contracts. Whilst I do not accept that it was ‘social media wot won it’ and led to the paper’s closure, its power in quickly amassing large groups of people to action, and influencing significant brands’ decisions cannot be denied.

We cannot, of course, speak about social media’s power in driving large groups to action, without mentioning the recent riots. A lot was said in print media (and by the government) about the ‘darker’ sides of social media and BBM in driving the riots; less was said about the massive clean-up responses orchestrated on Facebook and Twitter. I’ll refrain from commenting, but as a social media professional, you probably deduce my personal views.

Finally, looking at the unfortunate death of Amy Winehouse, in this case the mainstream media were playing catch-up as Twitter broke the news first, with reports emerging just an hour after the police entered her flat. As the singer started trending globally, with nearly 10% of all Tweets worldwide mentioning her, it was Twitter which drove the mainstream stories, as national papers produced articles dedicated entirely to celebrities’ reactions on the channel to the singer’s death.

It’s exciting to see social media continue to rewrite the rulebooks. It’s nothing new that as well as breaking news, it also makes the news, but in new and ever-changing ways. For the moment though, I would welcome a break from all the bad news, and wouldn’t grumble at a return of cows with regional accents.

Who is driving the conversation online?

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Posted on August 8, 2011 by Sam C

Last week I blogged about why social marketing may not be flawed, in response to a recent FT article. Without wanting to become too preoccupied with the same piece, I am returning to it for the final time to probe a little further into its definitions of influence.

It is perhaps of no surprise to any seasoned tweeter that 90% of tweets are never re-tweeted, and most of the remainder are only re-tweeted by those in the person’s immediate followers. The research quoted also claims that it is impossible to predict which tweets will be re-tweeted. This is perhaps the case, although other research refutes this. Either way, this is not what interests me. For PR people, it is perhaps less important to understand what sort of content is likely to ‘go viral’ (leave that to marketing), and more important rather to understand who is driving the conversation online, and who, therefore, are the dominant influencers potentially affecting a company’s reputation.

Whilst re-tweets are certainly one metric which can be used to look at content success, if we consider the definition of influence to mean “the action of producing effects on the actions, behaviour, opinions, etc., of others” they are clearly far too simplistic in themselves. What if someone simply reads a tweet about a product and later purchases that product in a shop with no further online trace? It’s a problem that plagues word of mouth marketers – how to link online and offline activity.

Influence is of course a very tricky concept, and there is no silver bullet or one-size-fits-all metric, although it’s clearly high on the measurement agenda. With that in mind, despite now heading off on holiday, I’m already looking forward to my next blog instalment where I’ll take a closer look at some of the influence tools already available, and how PRs can use these.

Happy summer!

Sam C

Tea anyone?

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Posted on August 4, 2011 by Keith

You can’t escape the latest reality show; Obama versus the Republicans – I probably shouldn’t joke about it, given the global havoc we are told the US debt crisis will wreak. But, (to mix my metaphors,) it’s a game of two halves, in this case the media and the Social Media channels. GlideIntelligence News and its sister Social Media platform has the ability to map the causes and effects between the two ‘worlds’ – interesting to see where they connect, and where they don’t…

I say this because President Obama’s election campaign was widely reported as a ‘Twitter’-led phenomenon, yet it’s this very phenomenon which allowed the Republican Tea Party to mass broadcast its views and appear to take control of a political debate all the way up to the US Senate (which bowed to pressure to delay a vote while the established political parties try and get a grip). Love them or loathe them, the Tea Party raised a much more interesting issue – just how connected to ‘opinion’ is the established media? A few numbers: courtesy of GlideIntelligence. Media reaction to the Tea Party involvement in the debate was about three days, time taken for the Tea Party to react to print news – about 12 minutes – and under 45 minutes to have over 1,000 posts out in the ‘twittersphere’.

Another aspect is the fact that the media (including many of the ‘heavyweight’ financials) was full of reports about how little is known about what will happen if the politicians failed to reach a compromise – really? They should have looked at the traffic between twitter, Facebook (public) and LinkedIn.

In the post Murdoch (no privacy invasions) world maybe they were overly cautious?

And lastly, for the politicians, read the message walls will you: 86% of posts on the topic from ‘non-political’ posters were screaming at you to just get on with it and compromise – there’s probably a new series of ‘come dine with me’ or ‘glee’ scheduled and it makes for much better reality TV viewing.

Keith

Social Marketing, Peter Serafinowicz, and a price-comparing meerkat

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Posted on July 25, 2011 by Sam C

Tim Harford recently wrote in the FT about why ‘social marketing doesn’t work’. The article was based on a study by Yahoo! Research which tried to predict how to identify ‘influencers’ and what sort of content is likely to ‘go viral’ or be retweeted extensively. Harford claims the results are ‘not encouraging’, citing one of the paper’s author’s fruitless efforts to promote his book on Twitter. It may not, however, be the channel’s fault…

The comedian Peter Serafinowicz has built up a Twitter following of over half a million people, based on his ability to provide a constant stream of original, witty and topical content. Despite a relatively modest TV career, his social media success was highlighted as the main factor in his first DVD selling out completely on Amazon even before its release date. Here’s someone who has fully embraced social media and converted this into a very successful (free) marketing campaign.

Price-comparing meerkat, Alexandr Orlov, is another good example of how social PR and marketing can be done very well. Harford notes that we are likely to overestimate the likelihood of success in social media because we ignore the failures, and highlight the great successes. The same, however, is true of all media. Great ideas, and great adverts and campaigns will always stick in our memory, regardless of the channel. The dull will not.

The danger, of course, is unnecessarily overestimating the importance of social media, and the need to ‘do it’, because everybody else is. A luxury car manufacturer I spoke to not only has no interest in social media, but online media as a whole, and to an extent even print media. As the company knows each of its buyers personally, and given the cost of its products, social media do not even feature on the marketing plan.

The old mantra will never change: the right message, to the right audience, through the right channels. It’s the marketers’ and PRs’ jobs, of course, to work out what they are…

Sam C

Oh what a tangled web we weave

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Posted on July 19, 2011 by Keith

Oh what a tangled web we weave,
When first we practise to deceive!

Sir Walter Scott, Marmion, Canto vi. Stanza 17.
Scottish author & novelist (1771 – 1832)

Maybe the News of the world should have put this in their front page instead of “Gotcha” – that headline has already returned to haunt them (1,479 times – I wonder how many more times before I finish writing?).

GlideIntelligence’s soon-to-be-launched social media module has proved itself a useful thing to have around recently – it has a click counter on activity which for the News of the World we saw jump from about 45/minute – to 170/minute to 290/minute and rising – clearly, something was afoot.

One of the great things about GlideIntelligence is its ability to ignore much of the everyday and mundane content as it sweeps through the social media space and zeros in on clumps of data which are collecting around a single theme – and all without human intervention. In the past it has spotted a protest group gathering for a ‘meeting’ to let their feelings known to their local bank manager, and it picked up a cluster rivalling the NoW when Sony at first, and then a whole group of organisations, started getting hacked.

The success of the system comes in two forms – first it can use its language and symbolic analysers (it does emoticons, slang and even obscenities without blushing) – and yet can spot a trend in a heartbeat (literally) and warn you something’s up. The second part is the fact that you can break the trend into meaningful chunks – who are the most vocal? what is their status? (customer, member of the public, newspaper owner…?) and show you why their language got noticed.

Using natural language processing (NLP), it’s a world away from the old keyword way of doing things, “the DJ is going down a bomb at the party” with “I’m off to the (insert your choice) Party HQ with a bomb”.

Much has been pedalled about the failings of automated analysis – humans, the naysayers insist, are the only way forward. When real-time and accurate analytics are needed, even a roomful of humans would struggle to read, aggregate and score 10,000s of pieces of content an hour. Leave it to GlideIntelligence – not only will it not complain, it will also show you the quickest route to the best house party…

Keith

GlideIntelligence +1

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Posted on July 14, 2011 by NASDAQ OMX

Having hit my first full month at Glide now as Head of GlideIntelligence Services, I thought it may be time to introduce myself. With a work history across the media monitoring and analysis industry and extensive experience in social media, I was brought on board to help manage Glide’s media monitoring and evaluation service, GlideIntelligence.

Without wanting to sound too much like a client testimonial, I saw GI a few months back, and was quite literally blown away. Having met with a select group of Communications Directors over the last four weeks as well, their response has also been overwhelmingly positive to the system (“I’m not sure you realise just how good this is”, being my favourite quote so far).

In an industry that is in constant evolution, the intelligence tools for media have somewhat lagged behind, either technologically or always needing to rely on human input. GI has filled this hole by providing real-time analysis and actionable insight across all media content. In practice what this meant for a client who recently faced one of the largest reputational threats in their corporate history, was an analysis report of all their media coverage sent every two hours throughout the entire crisis. Not a report based on a sample of content, weeks after the event occurred.

If this sounds of interest, I’d be delighted to discuss this in more depth with you and your communications teams, either on the phone or in person, to see how we can help you out. Please do feel free to get in touch. I’m fairly certain that once you’ve seen the future, you won’t look back.

Sam C

Public Service Announcement

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Posted on July 8, 2011 by Apollo

Our blog will be undergoing some infrastructure upgrades this weekend, as a result the blog may become unavailable for some of the weekend. In addition there may also be some visual changes while this is taking place.

Do not be alarmed, normal service should be resumed next week.

Have a great weekend.

Update – we will be working on a few tweaks over the coming week so don’t be alarmed if a few things change as we do this.

Apollo

Measurement Tools – helping us understand or drowning us with data?

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Posted on July 4, 2011 by NASDAQ OMX

It remains a curious irony that in a world never richer in data than it is today we are sometimes poorer in information terms than we were, say, a decade ago. This is certainly true for anyone trying to manage a brand or company reputation where the ability to collect millions of items about brands, products and customer insight is relatively easy – but the volumes and complexity of the data has made getting any useful information out of it harder than ever. Many tool vendors in this space don’t help matters – like people who confuse precision with accuracy. They confuse data with information, some even confusing data with knowledge or even intelligence – not good at all.

To what extent can metrification help?

Before we go anywhere near metrics and dashboards there are a few basics to cover. The foundations of any successful system are going to be: access, accuracy and context. It’s the last one which lets most systems down. They struggle to assign arbitrary values based on nonsensical assumptions that ‘absolute accuracy’ is a valid concept. On its own accuracy is impossible without the context within which to frame it. And therein lies the problem: how can an automated system ‘know’ what someone is looking for? To quote a long-time client: “…finding 20,000 articles about my company is easy – finding the 20 I need to know about right now isn’t”.

Two things to note here:

The ‘right now’ introduces a fourth element which though not part of the system solution is nonetheless a very valid concern. With results timing is everything. Want to know last week’s lottery winning numbers? Thought not.

Now imagine having to track every lottery combination manually before the draw. Impossible? You bet it is.

While in the traditional media space human analysis may at least be theoretically possible, in the social media space the volume would overwhelm any attempt to analyse this data within an actionable time frame.

That’s not to say there isn’t a strong role for human analysis but let’s not turn them into glorified data entry clerks which brings us to what’s now possible with real-time automation.

Learn to love your automated analyser and it will love you back!

Enter the new generation of analyser which combines natural language (so you don’t need to learn all manner of combinations of AND, OR and NOT) when asking questions with the ability to use your specific context as a guide to filtering and refining results. Science fiction? Not anymore.

The beauty of using such advanced techniques is that they don’t require you to understand much, if anything, about how they work. Put simply, if you want the system to tell you how well a new product ‘X’ is being received, you can type in “what are reactions to ‘X’?”. Then leave the analyser to figure out all the variations it needs to answer the question from your perspective. Getting perspective right is the key to accurate sentiment. Of course, you (with the assistance of the system provider) have to define what it is you want to know at the start. This is typically something that takes a few hours and then it’s done. The smartest of this new generation have some feedback or learning capabilities to help the system evolve as your company changes and improve its guesses and scores for context.

Compare that to the current crop of ‘staples’ in the industry. Some actually make a point of showing how complicated their processes are. For example, I’ve seen one query which filled a whole screen just to make sure that if you are interested in Apple smart phones your query didn’t bombard you with cookery tips or news about where to buy an orchard.

A side benefit of the new method is that it may actually help you to learn how to better engage with your customers by looking at how they express their opinions. And because it’s quick to try new ideas you can afford to try different approaches without having to worry about wasting time if your first ideas are wrong.

If the worst aspect of an analyser is that it forces you to think harder about your brand, business or communications strategy then I’d call that a success.

Keith

Do you see what we see?

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Posted on June 21, 2011 by NASDAQ OMX

When Glide set out to transform the current market for monitoring and sentiment analysis, we recognised that to succeed our solution must be both timely and deliver new value for customers.

Not much has changed. The two pertinent questions as we go to market remain:

Why now?
Why a technology-enabled solution?

Here are three reasons that shout “now”:

The sheer volume of comment
The emergence of multiple channels
The fast-moving nature of news

And, of course, the answer to the second question lies in the confluence of those three reasons. Simply put: there is now an obvious mismatch between the established methods of monitoring and evaluating the news and today’s media environment.

The ‘old’ methods reflect a set of circumstances that no longer prevail. Now, stories unfold and gain momentum within hours rather than days. Comment flows and intersects across multiple channels. The ‘window of opportunity’ within which to respond in an informed and effective way continues to shrink.

Not surprisingly the needs of organisations have evolved. New circumstances create new challenges and opportunities. They require new tools that are fit for purpose.

And so to the last question. If the very nature of media environment is increasingly driving organisations to source solutions that can meet their needs then what are the pertinent questions they might legitimately ask:

Do I need separate solutions for print and online media?
Can I synthesise social media and traditional analysis?
Can I source analysis in a timeframe that enables me to respond effectively?
Will it enable me to measure results against planned outputs?
Will I be able to track the correlation between sentiment and business performance in real-time?
Is the old, content-based pricing model still relevant?
How far can technology help me and where is human input best applied?
Can new technologies deliver more value for less cost?

If your organisation is unaffected by the changes in the media environment and your need remains a summary evaluation report on a quarterly basis, then new solutions will have little relevance.

On the other hand, for many organisations, perhaps the majority, they see what we see: new opportunities in the new media landscape to grow their brand but also new threats to brand value that must be guarded against.

Apollo

If you’re not quick, you’re not relevant

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Posted on May 19, 2011 by NASDAQ OMX

At Glide we know that things don’t always run smoothly. This is why we have a suite of tools to help communicators deal with crisis communications in an efficient, responsive and brand strengthening fashion.

Dark Sites
Activated as and when needed, these websites show the world how seriously you are taking things and how committed you are to providing fast honest updates. Combined with our social media module you can display all of the press releases, updates, tweets, Facebook and blog posts that you’ve been managing in this crisis. All under one tightly controlled roof.

Call Logging & Incident Management
Behind the scenes the phones will be ringing off the hook. Help your team manage this by using our incident manager with updating ‘lines to take’ feature. They can see what the latest ‘for offer’ and ‘not for offer’ information is to help them manage the deluge of enquiries and ensure consistent messaging.

Tracking the Conversation
Does anyone care about this? What’s the real impact to your brand, your stock prices, your sales? Track the conversation and make sense of it all using GlideIntelligence services – daily analyst reports, top stories cherry picked for you, realtime sentiment analysis – the works. You can even poll your customers via GlideInsight.

Dark Sites: A key component of digital crisis management

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Posted on May 16, 2011 by NASDAQ OMX

Our 24/7 connected world feeds our thirst for “real-time” information and with so much available at our fingertips (Google how we love you so) the speed at which crises now gain momentum adds to the impending threat. Unfortunately it seems that bad news travels faster than good news and remains visible (searchable) for longer. Here’s the rub: reputational damage can be incurred faster than ever and take longer to address and recover.

On the plus side, these same technological advances also offer a raft of opportunities for reputation managers so it’s not all doom and gloom.

Here’s why one organisation built a dark site. The organisation has a global brand in a highly competitive market place. The company’s brand is critical in driving customer preference and sustaining and building the organisation’s equity value.

The comms director’s worst nightmare goes something like this: Confidential customer data gets lost. Within 2 hours ten blogs have picked up the story. Mainstream media gets wind of the stories. Broadcast and print articles will quickly follow. The Twitter sphere explodes with comments. Most of it highly opinionated and inaccurate. Within 8 hours Facebook has kicked off. The others follow. Flickr, YouTube, Digg and co get in on the action. The story spreads like wildfire. Within 15 hours there is editorial comment and the early adopters are now the top search results. The comms director knows how difficult it is to dislodge results once they are top of the news.

A key part of a comms director’s job is to avoid this nightmare scenario and to protect the organisation’s brand and reputation. Increasingly, dark sites sit at the heart of effective digital crisis management. They provide a central hub for all incident related information. In a nutshell, they support three key pillars of crisis management by:

Ensuring accurate information is available immediately
Presenting information to guarantee absolute transparency
Providing a forum for dialogue with stakeholders

A well designed and appropriately deployed dark site can be the difference between an organisation managing a crisis effectively and sustaining significant long-lasting reputational damage. To return to my previous metaphor, it is perhaps the difference between a few sleepless nights and an organisational nightmare.

Apollo

The press release that got over 30k unique visitors

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Posted on April 14, 2011 by NASDAQ OMX

It’s all about optimising content. Watch my video about the press release that got over 30k unique visitors here.

If my video is about effective engagement, this blog is about opportunities missed.

What opportunities do corporate PRs forgo if they fail to optimise content?

What risks do corporate PRs run if they remain wedded to comms practises that are no longer aligned to the environment in which they operate?

So here’s my top three list of lost opportunities:

Journalist-only focus: Here’s what a global VP of marketing told me last week. He said two years ago it was all about journalists and corporate stakeholders. Now that no longer adds up. Most people that come to his website are not mainstream media or investors. So the newsroom is not just for journalists; it’s for current and future employees, customers, bloggers, investors, sustainability advocates, and community leaders. The lesson here is we ignore our expanded roster of stakeholders at our peril. Not a risk worth taking.
Not providing options to share on social networks (tweet this, Facebook like, Stumbleupon etc): Yesterday I had a session with a comms director for a major retailer. He told me a critical objective for him is to “make more noise”. I asked him how many employees the company had. Turns out they employ over 130,000 people and the majority of those people are from the “Facebook generation”. So he recognises he has an untapped asset that can communicate his core messages (“make more noise”). Of course the content has to be composed and packaged appropriately so that it can be shared and re-shared easily. Imagine this company has a campaign around organic fresh food. Let’s say they communicate this with their own employees and one in ten like the campaign enough to share it with their family and friends on Facebook. On average people have 130 friends on Facebook so that’s potentially a personal recommendation of your story to over 1 million people – that hasn’t cost you anything. And that is just one group of stakeholders. As an ex-journalist himself he noted that journalists share content with each other via twitter. So it makes sense to make it easy for them to do so. Point made.
Not linking to relevant content: So let’s say a blogger has read an article about your CEO and sustainability that a friend shared with them via twitter. The article has got a link back to the original post on your site. So now what do you do? If your story is about sustainability then why not have a list of related stories on the same subject alongside the article? Now this blogger can find out more about your initiatives in this area and has access to additional content. He’s able to write his own story and add something new to the discussion rather than just repeating what’s already been said. The blogger is happy, the PR is effective and the CEO’s message has increased exposure. Job done.

This list is not exhaustive. These are just three quick wins. Please feel free to add to the list.

Alistair

Are your evaluation reports out of date by the time you get them?

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Posted on April 7, 2011 by NASDAQ OMX

Today’s media environment exposes the limitations of traditional methods of sourcing and evaluating market intelligence. For many marketing communications and PR professionals, these methods are too slow, too inaccurate, and too limited in scope. To quote Gideon Spainer of the Evening Standard: “Consumers can now voice opinions and make decisions in real time. They expect brands to do the same.”

Consider the following:

Are your evaluation reports out of date by the time you get them?
Would you benefit from in-depth analysis covering large volumes of coverage in real-time?
Have you had to reduce the number of sources you monitor to lower costs?
How often are your evaluation reports delivered to you in time to act?

The need for “actionable intelligence” is greater than ever, however the challenge in delivering timely intelligence is also growing. The window (of opportunity) to respond is shrinking, while the volume of comment and channels is growing.

So what are your options?

Aggregate coverage from all channels (print, online, broadcast and social media), create a detailed evaluation brief and utilise a small army (or 3rd party) to analyse all that coverage.

Pros:

Yields high levels of accuracy per article
Allows for additional qualitative analysis provided by human interpretation (e.g. position on page and associated imagery)

Cons:

Human analysis is subjective so it is difficult to ensure all parties are analysing and scoring coverage consistently
For organisations that receive large volumes of coverage this is either very expensive or forces you to analyse a small sample of overall coverage

Technology based models are not constrained by the same volume limitations as a people centric approach. They offer a cost effective way of delivering clear and concise reporting in real-time, giving you time to act before the window of opportunity slams shut.

Pros:

Can analyse larger coverage samples, resulting in increased reporting precision
Is consistent (e.g. human evaluation may show more positive coverage one month to the next simply because a different person is doing the analysis and has a different opinion). Sometimes the rate of change (trends) is more important than an individual snapshot
Is far more scalable than people, therefore much more cost effective when dealing with large volumes
Can process raw data much faster than humans

Cons:

Can sometimes miss-interpret terminology specific to an industry or service (e.g. “big” can be a positive term in some contexts and negative in others)
Does not create commentary or give an interpretation of results
Can require some time to configure to achieve optimal results

In order to ensure you are acting on quality, defensible intelligence, it is important that you are able to interrogate and challenge the raw data, down to article and comment scoring – this is the only way to ensure accurate evaluation.

GlideIntelligence is our solution for monitoring and analysing your brand’s exposure. It addresses the challenge of delivering “actionable intelligence”.

Sam

The evolving role of the online newsroom

Posted on July 23, 2012 by Sam C

The NASDAQ OMX Communications Suite team yesterday presented a webinar on “The role of the online newsroom in the age of social media”, highlighting an ever-increasing need in Corporate Communications for such a media hub.

The webinar was hosted by NASDAQ OMX VP, Sam Phillips, who gave us an industry background of an ever-expanding media universe and brand conversations, and also an increased need for companies to be transparent and accountable. Part of that means readily available information and resources, and in a social media driven environment, these must be easy to find and share. We were also fortunate to be joined by Stacy-Marie Ishmael, writer, blogger and former FT journalist, and Hector Marinez, Senior Corporate Communications Manager at global technology company, Nvidia, both of whom shared some excellent insights into how best to achieve this.

As a journalist, Stacy-Marie focused on the ever-increasing time and resource pressures on media publishers, and how we, as content publishers ourselves for our companies, can make journalists’ lives easier. There is no longer the traditional next-day deadline – all journalists are now like wire journalists, argued Stacy, with copy being filed on-line first with very quick turnaround. Few outlets also have the luxury of a picture desk, yet readers are keen for a rich media experience.

A media center can help journalists by centralizing all of a company’s resources (whether IR or PR), with easily downloadable hi-res images and B-roll video to embed. Crucially, the media center must also have named PR contacts and direct email addresses, as generic ‘info@’ and contact forms to fill in rarely bring timely results (if at all). Mobile numbers are always helpful as copy is often filed outside of office hours, and pdf attachments were strongly advised against in emails – keep any text within the body email, and embed images and videos as necessary. Finally, Stacy’s advice of ‘don’t be creepy’ on social media translates into not ‘friending’ journalists on Facebook, or following on Twitter using anonymous or misleading accounts. As ever, transparency and accountability are key.

Hector took us on a tour of Nvidia’s new media center, and its transformation from something fairly static and dry which previously took 48h to update, to a dynamic, multimedia content hub, updatable within minutes. He described the newsroom as being a “vehicle to serve journalist needs in a timely manner”, something which is evident from the center’s homepage:

Journalists can quickly find Nvidia’s latest press releases, top stories, and social media and blogs aggregated. An ‘In the News’ section allows journalists to see Nvidia’s recent media mentions, fully searchable by keywords and categories. The multimedia gallery provides easy to search and download multi resolution images, and broadcast-quality video (something which will soon replace slow and expensive hard copy delivery to journalists).

Integrating all of Nvidia’s social media feeds allows journalists to quickly find relevant user conversations around the brand and individual products with keyword searching, all without leaving the newsroom. The integrated blog allows moderation control, and being owned by PR within the newsroom, ensures consistent brand messaging across channels. Finally, the newsroom lists all of Nvidia’s official social media channels, something which is increasingly useful to clarify as unofficial spoof and protest social media accounts proliferate against high profile companies.

What’s clear is the ever-expanding number of touchpoints an organization now faces, with social media driving the agenda. ‘Traditional’ influencers such as journalists are under more pressure than ever to find and deliver relevant content and stories around your company, and ‘non-traditional’ influencers on social media are keen to read and share your content amongst their niche audiences. The media center has become less of a static repository to more of a dynamic content hub, with us, the communications professionals being the key gatekeepers of this content creation and delivery.

NASDAQ OMX group designs, delivers, and manages corporate newsrooms across all sectors. More information around the webinar is now available for download, and if you’re interested in seeing how we can help, and understanding some more best practices across your industry, please feel free to reach out to sam.phillips@nasdaqomx.com +44 (0)207 033 7543 and we’d be delighted to help.

Weekly Media and Comms Round-Up – 2 July 2012

Posted on July 2, 2012 by Sam C

One of the challenges for brands working out a social media strategy is deciding on which platforms to be active. New data released this week shows that Pinterest is estimated to be behind 40% of all social media driven purchases (with Twitter barely making an appearance), highlighting this platform’s ever-growing importance for consumer brands.

On the subject of brand promotion, Mashable published a provocatively titled article this week, Sorry Marketers, You’re Doing Twitter Wrong, which quickly went viral across several networks. The post explains the mistakes marketers are making on social media, such as tweeting too much on the wrong days, not using hashtags enough, and simply not asking for retweets.

Microsoft has now officially announced that it has acquired social networking site Yammer for $1.2 billion, with the intention of integrating the service into its existing Office Suite software. The site is aimed primarily at companies, and has been described as a “Twitter for internal comms”. A lot of skepticism remains, however, around what success the software giant will have with the platform.

The UK’s Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR) has published new guidance suggesting that PRs should not edit the Wikipedia pages of their clients, given the site’s authority as a source of information. Rather, PRs should make recommendations to regular contributors on the site, and “escalate with kindness”.

PR Week has written about a recent shift to ‘owned’ media from earned and paid, whereby brands (and celebrities) can by-pass traditional third party sources such as newspapers and communicate directly with their stakeholders through new digital channels. The idea has also been applied to this year’s Wimbledon, with content now being streamed live on Wimbledon.com, rather than exclusively on the BBC.

Finally, here are 25 signs you work in social media. I think we can all associate with some of these…

Until next week.

Crisis Communication In The Age Of Social Media – Sixteen Top Tips

Posted on February 23, 2012 by samp0000

It was a great morning yesterday at the NASDAQ OMX Glide event in San Francisco. Chairing such a lively and knowledgeable panel was thought-provoking, fun and educational. A big thanks to all the panelists: Richard Brewer-Hay of Ebay, Rachelle Spero of Brunswick, Ed Terpening of Wells Fargo and Larry Kamer of Kamer Consulting. Thanks too to everyone who came along. It was fantastic to see a packed room and there were some excellent questions and comments from the audience.

Here are my Sixteen Top Tips that came out of the discussion:

Define a crisis by how much impact it will have on your business
Manage your social media on a 24/7 basis, not just when there’s a problem
Many of the basic principles of crisis management have not changed. The one big change is the speed at which issues break and develop
Informal stories work. Richard authors company blogs and also talks about personal issues at the same time. Drives better coverage in the media.
In a crisis, don’t make the mistake of putting your most important audience at the bottom of the list. It’s not always the press.
When managing a crisis there are two things you need to do:
1. Manage the information
2. Manage the message
The industry needs regulators to embrace social media and define best practice e.g. SEC
Communications practitioners must work hand-in-hand with IR, Legal and the other corporate functions
It is essential to create common ground with the legal team
Companies need “social media lawyers” i.e. lawyers must be trained and versed in social media best practice
One of the real benefits of social media in crisis comms is the opportunity for learning that it affords. There are so many case studies out there that we can all learn from.
Encourage and promote use of social media in your employees. Don’t be afraid of it. E.g. Morgan Stanley is putting 8,000 brokers on Twitter
Rule of thumb for blog posts – I should be able to read it to my 12 year old daughter (language, appropriateness)
Never start a conversation you are not willing to have
Social media is a great way to spot talent in the organization. E.g. if one of your employees is demonstrating a talent for handling customer enquiries effectively, you can spot it and maximize their skills
When preparing for a crisis:
1. Listen first
2. Define your objectives
3. Dedicate resources. E.g. don’t dive into Facebook unless you have a Facebook community manager
4. Build a cross-functional team
5. Consider what is in the mindset of your adversaries. You will always have competitors who will be seeking to exploit your misfortune
6. Create a step-wise planning model starting at the beginning

Weekly Media and Comms Round-Up 11 Nov 2011

Posted on November 11, 2011 by Sam C

Following on from last week’s round-up, it transpires our Shippam’s paste friend was indeed a hoax. My blog explains the revelation, and also what we can learn from the affair about social media content.

PR Week has taken a close look at what makes a digital PR specialist, highlighting key skills such as knowledge of data and analytics, a forward-thinking approach, being social online, the ability to work in a team, traditional PR skills, and finally, experience.

Future Buzz has written about the benefits of corporate blogging, with the provocative If your team hates blogging, you need a new team.

Wall Blog has taken a closer look at the world of paid-for celebrity tweets by the company Ad.ly, in which celebrity ‘influencers’ are paid $10,000 to endorse a product (in 140 characters).

On the subject of paid-for endorsements, the UK’s Internet Advertising Bureau has just announced its guidelines around payment for editorial content in social media. The guidelines are certainly worth a read, and come amidst confusion across the industry, as brands are still unwittingly putting themselves at risk.

Research from Searchmetrics has looked at how many times stories from the leading 12 national papers’ websites were shared across six social networks. Whilst dailymail.co.uk has almost three million links a week being shared across social networks, thetimes.co.uk (now behind a paywall) languished in final position with just 256 links/week shared.

Forbes has written about the social enterprise, integrating technology, people and strategy, and offers 10 strategies to help achieve this. Top tips include hiring a Chief Social Evangelist, using social analytics to drive key strategic decisions, and replacing traditional marketing with content marketing.

Finally, the BBC’s Rory-Cellan Jones has taken a look at Silicon Roundabout, and its cluster of new media, design and software start-ups, a year after David Cameron unveiled his plans for the area.

Glide Technologies Blog

Our blog on digital PR, corporate communications, social media and measuring social media

Weekly Media and Comms Round-Up – 28 Oct 2011

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Weekly Media and Comms Round-Up 11 Nov 2011

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