Archive for the ‘blogging’ Category

Ben Southall, the Briton who won the ‘best job in the world’ competition to be Queensland Tourist Board’s PR representative this summer has confessed the six month experience has left him tired out and in need of, yes, a holiday.

During his tenure as a one man publicity machine the tourist board calculate that Southall posted sixty blogs on www.islandreefjob.com representing 75,000 words, along with 2000 photo uploads and 750 tweets.

“It was a job that needed 18 to 19 hours work every day,” he said. “Not just the interviews and the social side of it, but also sitting up late at night blogging and uploading pictures, it’s very time consuming.”

The demands on the normally indefatigable Southall’s time show through in his recent Twitter posts: “Bashing out the last of this years blogs - its Boxing Day what on earth am I doing!?!”

Leaving no social media channel unploughed,  Southall also recorded 47 video diaries, the last of which is below.

It’s not all over for Southall though, Queensland Tourism have rehired him on an 18 month six figure contract to promote Queensland around the world. Meanwhile, he’s got a few, very well deserved days off.

The standout figure for me from Econsultancy/Bigmouthmedia’s Social Media & Online PR research is that 54% of companies see lack of resources as the main barrier to better customer engagement.

Tell me about it, maintaining a daily blog or any other type of regular online content is no frivolous task. No way most companies are going to pull that off without some outside help.  While content is hard, you can at least measure the bejesus out of it.

No more mealy mouthed EAV (equivalent advertising value) conjecture for online PR, oh no, the free magic that is Google analytics will tell you exactly how well each post is doing (I have big hopes for this one).

So while there are thousands of similar, fit looking 27 year old footballers turning out all over the country on a Saturday, there’s only one that scored 5 goals in a Premiership match last week. How a good blog became Jermain Defoe I’m not sure, I’m not even a Tottenham fan. What I do know, is he’s a goal scorer (pick him Fabio), as is this week’s Ad Age top ranked viral from Heineken:

YouTube link

Embedded this at the bottom of a post on Wednesday but it really deserves separate billing, especially on a Friday. Indebted to @gsterling at Local Social Summit #lss09 for showing it to us.

Ford Motor Company, who recruited 100 bloggers for its Fiesta Movement social media initiative in March has posted a 5% increase in year on year car sales for Q3, representing a 2.2% increase in U.S. marketshare.

While the bankruptcies of GM & Chrysler and the government’s trade in initiative ‘Cash for Clunkers’ no doubt had an effect, Ford’s bold social media initiative has been a runaway success with figures last month showing 4.3 million YouTube views, 500,000+ Flickr views, 3 million+ Twitter impressions and 50,000 interested potential customers, 97% of which don’t own a Ford currently.

Speaking at Blogworld & New Media Expo in October, Scott Monty, Ford’s multimedia communications manager said ”Companies that don’t acknowledge and engage in this new social Read the rest of this entry »

Based on a survey in August of 1500 businesses by Hubspot, those that blogged had 55% more visitors, 97% more inbound links and 434% more indexed pages.

Most businesses accept, even if they don’t anticipate these sort of figures, that a blog will revolutionise their static corporate website, but trying to get momentum for that internally can be a trying business. Who’s going to write it, what will it look like, who’s going to build it.

Outsourcing the build and content provision makes sense from an operational standpoint, it requires the minimum of internal input and you benefit from the expertise of people who are 100% blog content and blog marketing focussed.

Hubspot say 55% more visitors, on average, anecdotally we’ve seen much, much more than that. How does 1000% more visitors sound (albeit from a low base). Read the rest of this entry »

Whatever your politics, the release of a behind the scenes video showing David Cameron and William Haig chatting about putting together his keynote speech today is an impressive demonstration of how You Tube can work in party politics if the content is right.

In a week when Cameron has been attacked for being an inscrutable toff with a talent for spin, what better way to counter than show him informally at large, in his work place, chatting to class busting favourite William Hague about not making his speech too dull. Read the rest of this entry »

The US Federal Trade Commission has released new guidelines which will force bloggers to disclose any commercial interest they have in products they promote. In the first update to its endorsement guidelines in 30 years, the FTC’s move is seen as an attempt to bring the blogosphere into line with endorsement codes long followed by broadcast stations, newspapers and magazines. 

“We look at it from the perspective of the consumer and the principle being that a consumer has the right to know when they’re being pitched a product,” said Richard Cleland, assistant director of FTC’s advertising practices division. “It doesn’t matter whether it’s an email or Twitter or someone standing on a street corner.” Read the rest of this entry »

Andy Bond, Chief Executive of Asda outlined his new vision for a “transparent” business yesterday, “run for the consumer by the consumer” including web cams of the farms where Asda’s milk and carrots come from and a team of bloggers recruited to tell shoppers about the business, rather than “a bunch of PR consultants” said Bond.

Bond has labelled his new way of doing business as “democratic consumerism” drawing comparisons with President Obama’s politics, “offering openess, transparency, collaboration and dialogue”. Read the rest of this entry »

I spend a lot of my time on this blog advocating the power of blogging and why organisations should be doing it, little knowing that one of my own stories was about to prove the point, and how!

Around about this time on Friday, I was blogging about the Sarah Brown Twitter coverage in The Guardian and noticed that her blog followers had overtaken Stephen Fry’s so I made that the headline and posted it just before nine.

Within three hours it had been taken up by most major UK portals, The Telegraph, The Guardian, The Sun, The Daily Mail, Metro, BBC, Yahoo, MSN, Sky plus a raft of tech blogs in the UK and as far as the US and India. Radio 5  live also picked it up and I was interviewed on their Saturday morning show (43rd minute on the iplayer time bar). Read the rest of this entry »

I truly think Scots are taking over the world, they’re everywhere. Gordon Brown, Susan Boyle, my girlfriend, the plumber yesterday and then of course there’s Mashable, the incrediably successful social media guide with 1.5 million twitter followers and 254,000 RSS feeds - made in Scotland, from servers.

Mashable has just posted their top 5 business blogging mistakes and already has 17 comments. So foolishly I’m going head to head with my own. Come on big man, let’s see what you’ve got (cue Victorian boxer type shuffle and arm movements). Read the rest of this entry »