I wrote in a post on PRmoment recently that traditional PR needs to go into Superman’s phone booth and come out wearing a new set of digital clothes. US Social Media author Shel Israel (Twitterville, Naked Conversations) speaking here in 2007 sets out his vision of what PR should look like in a social media world.
He calls for PR to ‘deprogramme’ itself, stop sending meaningless press releases and help their clients change their identikit, meaningless websites – amongst other interesting stuff.
So tweeted Labour Twitter Czar, Kerry McCarthy at 23.04 last night as news broke that The Sun’s support for the Labour Party was disappearing over the Brighton horizon – off to join ‘the boy Cameron’ after 12 years.
Is this true? Can Twitter replace The Sun for Labour? Well no. Twitter is just a channel, it’s content voters warm to and no matter how hard Labour might try to send out interesting tweets, they’re not going to prise 2 million Sun readers away from their favourite daily.
It’s true that Twitter has given some people a powerful new voice. One moment of tweeted irritation by Stephen Fry earlier this year, about HP printer software had their PRs on the phone to fix is within minutes of the tweet going out. “Use your power wisely young Skywalker” was Fry’s reaction. More »
Under mounting criticism for using topical hash tags to boost their tweet circulation, on 24th June 09, Habitat stopped posting. Suddenly, yesterday, tweets started-up again.
An apology was followed by an acknowledgement of past mistakes “This time we want to get it right” and sensibly their tweeter wouldn’t be drawn on information about the mysterious intern who was blamed for the original micro-blogging misdemeanor. More »
Freedman, who specialise in global marcoms implementation, is switching from traditional to online PR in a bid to interact more closely with their international audience of marcoms professionals who use Freedman to design and run pan-regional brand campaigns. More »
Tower Bridge’s official Twitter, set up to alert tourists to when the world famous bridge will be ‘lifting’, has triggered a surreal competition for attention from a neighbouring bridge.
ImLondonBridge, purporting to represent the interests of Tower’s non-lifting rival, has been poking fun at the repetitive nature of TB’s tweets which plot the daily passage of high masted boats, e.g., More »
If you still need convincing that Twitter is going to be important for your business, consider this latest information from Hitwise on its effect as a source of traffic to your website:
“One consequence of its phenomenal growth is that Twitter has become a key source of traffic to other websites. During May 2009, Twitter was the 30th biggest source of traffic for other sites in the UK, accounting for 1 in every 350 visits to a typical website. More »
I guess there was always a danger that working for progressive digital marketing clients might rub off on us and after six years, we took a good look at ourselves and realised that fundamentally we’re a digital PR agency.
PR Week has the outline story of our rebrand here.
There’s more coverage on our digital thoughts in an interview with our favourite local paper – The Wharf.
Online marketing author Dave Chaffey underlines the close relationship between PR and SEO, specifically link-building in his latest blog, quoting SEO guru – Eric Ward, writing in Search Marketing Standard. Here are some outakes:
“1. Link-building is nearly indistinguishable from public relations”
“If you regard links solely as an SEO function, link-building initiatives may end up creating an unnatural inbound link profile. Fix this by working toward more cooperation between the public relations, marketing, sales and SEO teams”.
Via a thoroughly modern media route – an email feed from a blog post leading to BBC’s iplayer – I witnessed a throughly old school masterclass from Peter Mandleson on how to disarm a journalist holding some fairly hefty ammunition.
Whatever your political view, it’s an impressive display of bamboozle and rhetoric through which the normally sure footed Andrew Marr struggles to maintain his path.
Listen out for Marr’s acknowledgement of Mandelson’s perfomance accidently caught on the studio mike as the credits roll – here.
So tweeted Labour Twitter Czar, Kerry McCarthy at 23.04 last night as news broke that The Sun’s support for the Labour Party was disappearing over the Brighton horizon – off to join ‘the boy Cameron’ after 12 years.
Under mounting criticism for using topical hash tags to boost their tweet circulation, on 24th June 09, Habitat stopped posting. Suddenly, yesterday, tweets started-up again.
Tower Bridge’s official 
If you still need convincing that Twitter is going to be important for your business, consider this latest information from 
I guess there was always a danger that working for progressive digital marketing clients might rub off on us and after six years, we took a good look at ourselves and realised that fundamentally we’re a digital PR agency.
Online marketing author 
