Weekly Media and Comms Round-Up – 7 Oct 2011

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News this week of the PRCA introducing individual memberships was received negatively by the CIPR, who accused them of copying the CIPR’s model. PRCA Director General, Francis Ingham, posted a thorough response to the news reported on PR Moment.

This week we also saw the founding of a coalition between the Association for Measurement and Evaluation of Communication (AMEC), Council of Public Relations Firms (CPRF) and Institute for Public Relations (IPR), with the aim of establishing global standards for social media measurement. The coalition aims to address challenges such as setting standards in ‘content sourcing, influence, sentiment, engagement and ROI among others’.

Facebook, for its part, is making marketers’ lives easier by launching new metrics as part of its Insights capability, allowing companies to measure user engagement. Wildfire on the Wall explained in detail what this means for marketers. Google+, meanwhile, suffered a slight embarrassment this week as Michael DeGusta revealed that senior Google management simply aren’t using the platform, or rather, ‘not eating their own dog food’.

Given the industry we work in, it would be remiss not to mention the biggest news story of the week, so I will let Mashable do the leg-work here with their article on the Top 10 most quoted Tweets about Steve Jobs.

Finally, Glide’s own Alistair has published the fourth part of his 5-part series on The Newsroom of the Future, this week focussing on how to use your newsroom to facilitate conversations elsewhere, with some really great examples.

The Social Media Newsroom Part 4: Facilitating Conversation Elsewhere

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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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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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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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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 Imagehttp://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?

Comment from a member of the public on GE Reports 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.

Comment in GE Reports Blog

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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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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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!