PR, the changing media landscape and social media
A refreshingly entertaining agency promo video here from R/GA.
I like it because it focuses not on clients, nor case studies (which are always spun to create the best impression), but the agency’s people. An agency is a sum of its people. Ultimately that is what the client buys, so why not focus solely on them.
No thumping house tune in sight.
HT – one of my lovely Twitter friends, but I can’t remember who exactly. Their Tweet directed me here.
UK PR Week, in conjunction with Diffusion PR, last month released a report on the integration of digital into the PR mix, titled PRWeek/Diffusion Digital Integration Report: The Digital Divide. I missed the report when it came out, but have now reviewed and think the findings are worth sharing.
Having worked in both the UK and Australia I believe the markets are fairly similar in the way organisations approach PR and marketing. Of course the budgets here in Australia are much smaller, but generally the way PR is done in the UK and here is similar, so the report and its findings I believe are also relevant for Australia.
Report methodology:
According to PR Week:
a landmark PRWeek survey of 128 clients, drawn from across in-house comms, marketing and digital departments, reveals exactly how organisations are grappling with the challenge of integrating social media into their existing operations.
Key report findings:
To what extent have you embraced social media and digital PR?
To what extent have you embraced social media and digital PR?
Findings - more than 60% of those surveyed stated that social media and digital PR is being used either as an element of most campaigns or a core part of comms strategy. However, roughly 40% use it on an ad hoc basis or not at all.
My view – this result was not surprising for me based on the work I do with my clients. However, I would argue it is those organisations that have integrated social media and digital PR as a core component of their work that are getting the best results. Like any marketing discipline, social media digital PR works best when it is a continuous program, not something that is turned on and off.
With which external agencies do you work on social media?
With which external agencies do you work on social media?
Findings - 43% do not use an agency, 39% use a PR agency, 29% a digital agency whilst only 8% use a dedicated social media agency.
My view – I was surprised to see such a high number of practitioners responding that responsibility for social media was managed solely inhouse. Not that I am suggesting those inhouse are not suited to social media, quite the contrary in many respects. To me this highlights an unwillingness by client organisations to adequately invest in external social media expertise.
In the traditional space even the best in-house marketing practitioners utilise the support of agencies to deliver their results, why should it be different for social media? Assuming the agency gets it, I think in-house marketing people should be investing a good portion of their budget to extend activities in the social media space (disclaimer – I lead a team of digital PR people at a PR agency).
Where does ownership of social media sit within your organisation?
Who owns social media in your organisation?
Findings – 36% marketing team, 34% PR and comms team, 17% cross departmental responsibility, 7% yet to be decided, 3% dedicated social media team, 2% IT department
My view – social media is about engaging in a two way conversation with an organisation’s customers and public. Whilst there are multiple departments that talk to an organisation’s target market, there has traditionally only been one that has engaged in a two way dialogue – the communications department. As such, it is my belief that the communications department/PR team is best placed to develop strategy and lead direction for social media.
What do you see as the key barriers preventing social media adoption in your organisation?
What do you see as the key barriers to social media adoption within your organisation?
Findings – 45% inability to demonstrate clear ROI, 40% lack of digital knowledge and understanding, 38% lack of resources and budgets
My view – it is not surprising to me that the top two barriers are a lack of clear ROI and a lack of digital knowledge. When people don’t understand something they typically won’t find a value in it. Fix the lack of education and the clear ROI barrier will be lowered, as will the barrier of budget and lack of resources.
How satisfied are you with your current lead agency’s social media and digital PR abilities?
How satisfied are you with your lead PR agency's social media capabilities?
Findings – 19% very satisfied, 32% moderately satisfied, 15% very or moderately dissatisfied, 34% unsure.
My view – these results should be concerning for PR agencies. To me it highlights the fact that there are some, but too few PR practitioners with digital PR skills. Everyone involved in PR should be educating themselves in digital PR and agencies should be investing to ensure everyone has a basic understanding.
I have posted below some more graphics from the report.
What do you think about the report’s findings, are they surprising? Do you agree with my opinions? I would love to hear from you in the comment box.
I wrote the following post for Media Asia.
The ten blue links displayed when you type your company name into a search engine, not your company’s homepage, is where most people first interact with your brand. What they see on that results page, be it positive or negative, will have a lasting impact.
In the same vein, what is displayed when someone types your name into a search engine should be compared with the front page of your CV. If nothing comes up, what does that say about you? Or even worse, if the only things that come up are photos of your drunken exploits from five years ago, then your search engine footprint needs some serious attention.
Below I have outlined seven quick tips to help improve your search persona and ensure your search engine CV presents the right image.
1. Blog. Having a good blog habit is one of the simplest ways to ensure you control your personal online brand, but simply setting up a free account on WordPress.com is not enough. You need to generate content, ideally lots of content. The more posts you write the more content a search engine will have to index, and the more content others will be able to link to; both of which positively impact what appears when your name is searched.
2. Tweet. A step down in effort from blogging is Twitter. The major search engines rank Twitter high in their results and are now including Tweets as part of their real-time results. Aided by the 140 character limit, there is an incredibly low barrier for entry into the world of Twitter, so set up an account and add your Tweets to the 50 million odd tweets that are created each day.
3. Use your name. If you want to be found on the web, make sure you are optimising for how people are most likely to search for you, with your name. If available, purchase the URL for your name. Also, ensure your Twitter handle is your name and customise your Facebook and LinkedIn URLs to include your name. Of course this will be more effective for people with a unique name as opposed to all the Bob Smiths or Li Chens out there.
4. Understand how people search. Use the Google AdWords Keyword tool to understand how people search for your skill set. Put in the word that you think best represents what you want to be known for. For example a search on ‘PR’ shows that ‘communications’ is also a highly searched word. Armed with the knowledge of what people are searching for, use the terms in the content you create for your blog and also use them in your online profiles or bios to help align you with your chosen industry.
5. Be everywhere. When it comes to optimising for search engines, the more online presences you have the better. The popular social networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn, like Twitter, are featured high in searches for peoples’ name. As such, make sure you have a presence in the social networks that are most important in your market and to your industry. Also make sure you have personalised your URL. Learn how to do it for Facebook here and LinkedIn here.
6. Tag your images. Ensure that images you want to be found of you, perhaps the one of you accepting an award at the Cannes PR Lions ceremony, are tagged with your name and industry and uploaded on a photo sharing site like Flickr, so search engines can easily index your picture.
7. Remove the bad stuff. Just as easily as search engines find the good stuff, they will also return the bad stuff. If there are images of you that you wouldn’t want people to see, delete them. Also think very carefully before you post content to the web. Simply think, “Am I happy with this piece of content representing me to potential employers or clients?” and if you aren’t comfortable, don’t post it.
These are but a small sample of tips for improving your personal search rankings. If you have any others, why not add them in the comment box?
This post of a series of posts I am making on SEO tips to improve your personal search brands. Other posts you can view are:
If you enjoyed this post why don’t you subscribe to my blog via RSS or email by following this link. Or alternatively follow me on Twitter.
UPDATE – the video I embedded in this post has been removed from Vimeo and everywhere else on the web it seems. As soon as I can find it again, or a version that is as good, I will post it again.
Heard the buzz about Promoted Tweets on Twitter, but not sure what it all means? Well helpfully the good folk at Twitter have put together a handy 140 second video overview on the topic which you can see here.
[vodpod id=Video.3430988&w=425&h=350&fv=]
Watch the video here if viewing in a reader, or on email.
No doubt promoted tweets will annoy some of the purists out there, but I am really interested to see how this plays out. The process appears to be modeled on the highly succesful Google approach to sponsored links and presently only comes up when people perform a search.
According to Ad Age, advertisers can presently buy promoted tweets in lots of 1,000 and there are plans down the track to integrate Promoted Tweets into the standard Twitter timeline and also Twitter applications like Tweetdeck.
Have you come across Promoted Tweets yet? What are your thoughts? Did it annoy you, or do you accept this is part of the monetisation of a free service?
Below is a nice little video detailing a new tie up between Gowalla and Chevy (a Weber Shandwick client) in the US.
The initiative is simnple. Check in at Austin Airport and you could be given a ride to your hotel via a Chevy Tahoe. Unfortunately the video doesn’t detail how many rides they are offering per day. The initiative was kicked off for SXSW, which was the ideal time to get people talking, Tweeting and generally sharing the news.
For those reasding this in a reader, check out the video here.
I have been playing around with FourSquare for a little while now and think location based services are going to be a big trend over the next 12 months in the marketing space. Privacy issues aside, (good read here about privacy issues) which need some real focus in my opinion, this will be a big trend.
I am interested in hearing from you in the comment box about other examples of location based marketing you have seen, or read about.
Presentation at the bottom of this post.
Yesterday I was invited to speak at Frocomm’s 3rd Annual New Media Summit hosted in Sydney. The event was attended by around 150 mainly PR professionals from across a range of industries in Australia and featured other speakers including, David Quilty of Telstra, Paul Borrud of Facebook and industry colleagues of mine Brian Geisen of Ogilvy PR and Dan Young Burson Marsteller. See the full list of speakers here.
Unfortunately I didn’t get to see all the presentations due to work commitments that kept me in the office, but those I did were very interesting, particularly David Quilty’s presentation on how Tesltra the telecom giant is embracing social media practices right across the organisation.
During the day two panel session, which I sat on with Brian Geisen, David Quilty and Monty Hamilton from UBank, questions followed the general themes of justifying social media to the boss, understanding and qualifying measurement through to how social media can be integrated into the general PR and marketing mix.
Having worked in this industry for a little while now it was refreshing to see, based on the questions being asked, that there is now a general realisation within organisations that social media isn’t a fad and that it represents a fundamental shift in the way we need to conduct business. The audience was keen to learn how they can start embracing and undertaking more social work and it was evident whenever practical advice was being provided that frantic notes were being scribbled.
In addition to the panel session, I also presented a half hour session on building communities in Facebook, which I have posted below (For those reading in a reader, or via email check it out here). I created this presentation in an attempt to provide a platform for PR people to justify a presence in Facebook for their organisation and also to act as a roadmap of sorts for building out a Facebook campaign. I hope it fulfils these objectives.
I would love any and all feedback on this presentation. How do you think it could be improved? Have I left any important components out that you think need to be added?
Finally, thanks to Glen Frost for the opportunity to speak at the conference.
If you enjoyed this post why don’t you subscribe to my blog via RSS or email by following this link. Or alternatively follow me on Twitter.
I am a few months late on this, but Gap in Canada has created a very clever PR stunt to launch its new customer loyalty program Sprize (I am assuming this is meant to reference the word Surprise).
The loyalty program basically provides members with cashback instore credit if an item of clothing they buy is reduced 45 days after the purchase date. This means, if I buy a pair of jeans for $100 on 1 July and then Gap reduces those jeans on 1 August to $50, my Sprize account is credited with $50 of instore credit. The loyalty program is currently being trialled in ten stores in Canada. You can read more about it here if you like.
I really like this loyalty program because it makes a commitment to loyal customers by promising not to undercut the full price items they purchase. It also in effect gives members a 45 day leg up on everyday customers when the obvious sales periods approach.
However, it was the PR stunt that brought all of this to my attention.
The tagline for Sprize is turning shopping on its head, so what did Gap do to launch the scheme? They turned large chunks of the store upside down, hired actors to walk on their hands on what appears to be freezing ground and even flipped a couple of cars out the front. Pretty simple when you think about it, but as I have said before the best stunt typically are pretty simple.
What I wanted to call out in particular is the way that Gap approached this. Five years ago perhaps the stunt idea would have been the same, but the PR team would have relied solely on the media to create the awareness, but not today.
Gap created their own Youtube Channel and created their own content (the video above), which they have full control over, unlike the situation when you invite media to cover something. Further with the magic of Google and keywords when I searched ‘gap + turning shopping on its head’ it was the Gap made video – ahead of all other video news outlets, which was delivered.
Sadly however it appears Gap hasn’t done a good job of linking this content through its other online properties. Stangely it doesn’t appear to be posted on the Facebook Gap fanpage with more than 500,000 fans, nor is it present on the Gap Youtube channel (which also seems very underutilised). It is perhaps because of this poor integration with other online properties that the video only achieved 35,000 views. I suspect it is also this lack of integration why the other videos on the channel have such low views.
All in all an interesting campaign. The Sprize Loyalty Group is good and truly delivers on the promiose of rewarding loyalty, the PR stunt was simple and effective, the creation of the content video content at the top of this post was good and en effective length in my opinion, but it seems the syndication across Gap properties affected its viral results.
Perhaps Gap may have wanted to contain this, given it was such a small trial in Canada, but if that was the case why did they upload content at all to the web?
What do you reckon?
HT to Michael Litman and his Posterous – where I saw this.
Adidas has produced a fantastic video to launch its new Star Wars line – due in stores in Jan.
The videos includes semi-subtle close ups of the shoes, Adidas ambassadors Beckham and Snoop and an awesome remix of the Imperial March. Check it out above.
I came across this outdoor advertising picture on Wally Sabria (http://vicomla.com/blog) and thought it was pretty cool.
I met Wally whilst I was here in LA for a digital leads kick off meeting. A very cool guy he is the creative director for the Weber Shandwick LA office. I wish we had a creative director and design genius in the Sydney office.
Posted via web from Matthew Gain’s posterous
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