Archive for the ‘online pr’ Category

“It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, but the size of the fight in the dog” said Keith Weed, new CMO of Unilever at Cannes last week, answering the question “do big agencies do the best work…or small agencies”.

Interesting too that he was saying it to Sir Martin Sorrell, CEO of WPP – one of the world’s largest comms groups (138,000 employees in over 2,400 offices in 107 countries) for whom Unilever is a major client.

Weed goes on to say that when working with a big agency, his aim is to make sure he has that agency’s best people on his account, implying that in a big agency, employees are a mixed bag.

While it’s feasible to demand the best staff if you’re Unilever with a budget of £5bn a year, if you’re looking for a PR agency and have say £60K a year to spend, the size and quality of the agency you’re dealing with become more mission critical factors. Read the rest of this entry »

A senior PR agent at a large agency once said to me, rather cynically, that if a client asks ‘can you do this?’ the answer is always yes, then you go and figure out how to do it.

No doubt there’s a bit of this when it comes to online pr and social media, levels of purported expertise vary hugely, so here are seven questions I’d recommend asking a prospective online pr agency/agent, to establish if they really ‘eat their own dog food’.

1) Do they write a blog? If they aren’t blogging at all, put the phone down or call a taxi. If they’re blogging less than once a week, you have to question their content led online pr strategy – do they really believe in it?

2) How many connections do they have on LinkedIn? – Anything less than 100 connections and they’re playing at it.

3) Are they a mayor of anywhere on Foursquare? OK, this is quite new but if they say yes, you’re talking to a proper social media geek that’s interested in what’s next, not just what’s popular now. Read the rest of this entry »

Furlong PR is pleased to announce an expansion of our product offering to include a full search engine optimisation service, in partnership with search engine marketing experts WhyCommunicate?

We see this as a natural extension to our core blog management and social media services which are focussed on creating inbound website traffic for clients in the technology & corporate sectors.

There’s such a close relationship between online pr, social media and SEO and each discipline ultimately has the same goal – raising brand profiles online. And while SEO companies are not experts in PR, neither are PR agents experts in SEO. We need each other.

We’re initially offering two products – an SEO audit which grades websites and blogs for SEO effectiveness and a reputation management service which measures brand sentiment and recommends ways to influence negative comments posted online.

Online pr helps unlock the IP lying dormant within corporations and SEO makes it discoverable to those you want to see it –  add in social media marketing and the combination has a powerful effect on website traffic.

On your wish list?

David Miliband is not only William Hill’s favourite to win the Labour Party leadership at odds of 4/9 but he’s also by far the most accomplished exponent of online pr and social media, judging by a review of the nine potential candidates’ websites.

Miliband’s smoothly designed website is the only one to include a blog and the only one to employ all of the most powerful core social media channels – Twitter, Facebook, Flickr & YouTube along with an RSS feed.

Ed Balls’s site is the nearest competitor for social media leadership, with Twitter, Flickr & YouTube channels appended to what is a very badly designed site indeed.

Harriet Harman and Andy Burnham are the only other potential candidates to run a Twitter account from their sites while the only concession to online pr being displayed by Ed Miliband and Alan Johnson is the inclusion of an RSS feed.

While I wasn’t particularly surprised that Peter Mandelson & Jack Straw haven’t bothered with a personal website at all (bravo), Ed Mlliband’s site is a bit of an eyebrow raiser – functional yes, a work of design beauty it is not. In Chrome the minute text over-writes the pictures, though they are so small it hardly matters. Read the rest of this entry »

Erik Qualman’s music-enhanced, statistics-based video of social media’s wildfire growth was one of the B2B viral video hits of last year. With social media moving so quickly, he’s already updated it for May 2010 with yet more revelatory intelligence, including that Facebook has now overtaken it’s own country of origin as the third largest by population in the world, behind India and China. When Zuckerburg was programming ‘the facebook.com’ – as described in David Kirkpatrick’s new book, he knew he was on to something big, but this!?

The PR profession has hit a technological glass wall. I can see all these slick communicators pressed up against it, looking at all the weird buttons, lights and gizmos, wondering whether they’re looking at their future or their demise.

The grey haired leaders, who brought them to this point, are getting angry, like the DVD player at home, they can’t work out how to program it and are too damned long in the tooth to be bothered with these tricksy things now.

Somewhere at the back, a few youngsters have Foursquared their location and are now sending abuse to each other on Twitter. One of them says something derogatory about the MD’s lack of tech savvy and will get sacked later on.

All the while, behind the glass, in amongst the lights, cables and myriad computer screens,  the rock star techies are playing warcraft and eyeing up a big pile of cash with ‘online pr’ written on it.

One of them is on the phone, you can just about hear him saying – “certainly we can provide content for the organic SEO, keyword optimised, linked to product pages, yes no problem. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn – oh yes we can do that too”. Read the rest of this entry »

Unmeasurable ROI is seen as the main obstacle to implementing a social media strategy, a new poll of US marketers has discovered.

35% of marketers in the R2integrated survey said there was not enough data or analytics available to measure ROI of social media, which the majority would like to use for lead generation.

Getting buy-in from senior management was seen as the second biggest obstacle, 23% citing this reason, followed by 21% who believed their audience were not yet active on social media.

35% of the companies surveyed believed they were making money as a result of social media activity with those who have a formal strategy in place, twice as likely to be making money from the new channels.

An overall majority of marketers stated that social media is ‘invaluable’ to their business, but measuring just how valuable and convincing the upper echelons seem to be the main sticking points.

(Source eMarketer)

Twitter has long kept secret the number of its registered users, reports Adweek, however the figures were finally revealed at the company’s Chirp Conference on April 14, along with a few other key stats:

Lady Gaga’s ‘Bad Romance‘ is now the most watched YouTube video of all time, with 180 million views, overtaking the home video phenomenon “Charlie bit my finger.”

Last month Gaga became the first artist to break a billion views on Vevo/YouTube with the combined views of three hits -’Poker Face’, ‘Just Dance’ and ‘Bad Romance’.

Starbucks’ 6.5 million Facebook fans are worth the equivalent of a $23.4 million annual media spend, according to calculations by social media specialists Vitrue, reported in Adweek.

The firm has worked out  that, on average, a fan base of 1 million translates to at least $3.6 million in equivalent media over a year, or $3.6 per fan.

Vitrue arrived at its $3.6 million figure by working off a $5 CPM, meaning a brand’s 1 million fans generate about $300,000 in media value each month.

Vitrue analysed Facebook data from its clients’ 41 million fans and found that most fans yielded an extra impression. That means a marketer posting twice a day can expect about 60 million impressions per month through the news feed. Read the rest of this entry »