Archive for the ‘PR’ Category

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 »

Politicians are failing to take advantage of new media’s huge potential to engage voters with 79% of Britons unable to recall any online electioneering, a survey by the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts found earlier this month.

And this was supposed to be the new-media election – yet TV appears to be stealing the show. The debate on ITV on April 15th was watched by 9.4m Britons – 37% of the prime-time audience – and led to a ten-point swing to the Liberal Democrats.

E-mail, blogging, social networking and tweeting have all had some impact – but arguably nothing comparable to this. As the political debate rages on, a report in The Economist this week describes the televised debates between Nick Clegg, Gordon Brown and David Cameron as “a triumph for old media.”

The Economist also reports that Get Elected, a political-research outfit, has examined 100 tight races, where online campaigning should presumably be fierce. It found that only 45% of the candidates in those races had Twitter accounts. Read the rest of this entry »

NB, update from freshegg 3:10pm: “www.timesonline.co.uk is now back in Google’s index.  They went from having 0 pages indexed this morning to a quarter of a million just now.  The SEO guys at the Times are saying there was a technical issue of some sort causing the dropout – I am unconvinced and cannot see how any technical problem (which no SEO I know could detect) could simply take an entire site out of the index and then pop it back in again.  All I can say is I can imagine both Google and The Times offices have had busy mornings with plenty of heated phone calls.”

Coinciding with the launch of Times Online’s much debated paywall, Google appears to have removed the paper’s online site – www.timesonline.co.uk –  from their index entirely.”

According to a report by freshegg, by way of Malcolm Coles, searches for “times online” or for the entire subdomain return zero results.

Freshegg says: “it seems that Google has manually removed the entire timesonline.co.uk site from its index, either at the direct request of Rupert Murdoch (or his best minions), or perhaps this was an initiative from Google itself”

Subdomains such as  business.timesonline.co.uk and technology.timesonline.co.uk are currently still indexed though this may change down the line.

Nod to Garry Davis at WhyCommunicate? for bringing this to our attention.

The influential parenting site, Mumsnet, is playing an increasingly active part in social debate, with George at Asda becoming the first retailer to seek approval from the site’s members before putting a potentially controversial product on its shelves.

Whatever we think of this as a PR move – and it’s an interesting one – it serves to underline the impact that key social networking sites can have on brand reputation. Mumsnet receives more than 1m unique visitors each month. Its discussion boards attract about 20,000 comments daily. Even the upcoming General Election has been dubbed the ‘Mumsnet Election.’

George at Asda, Boden, House of Fraser, Mothercare and Start-rite have all signed up to the site’s ‘Let girls be girls’ campaign, after members expressed concerns about products on sale in high-street stores. It aims to get retailers to agree to end the ‘premature sexualisation of children though their products and marketing.’

Writing in his Editor’s comment this week, Gareth Jones of Marketing magazine is sceptical as to whether Asda’s decision represents an intelligent PR coup. “Mumsnet is a hugely powerful force that brands should seek to harness but, in this case, it seems George at Asda may be going a step too far,” he says. Read the rest of this entry »

Chad Hurley, one of the founders of YouTube predicts that the next five years for the site will be all about “stickability” and convergence of channels.

In order to encourage people to stay on the site for hours rather than minutes, he says, “we need to create a much more seamless experience across devices.”

Interviewed in The Telegraph, Hurley says “People think about the world of TV and the world of online video as being different ways to distribute video, but what happens when every TV is connected to wi-fi with a browser? What does that mean for your distribution opportunities? And these budgets dedicated to digital online – that proportion spent on video versus the big dollars that are being spent against TV – what happens when those worlds collide and is it just one thing? That is what we envision.” Read the rest of this entry »

Sarah Brown, who remains the UK’s most powerful political Twitter voice with 1.1 million followers, posted a video on YouTube yesterday to explain how she will use her Twitter account now the election has been called.

While she says “I’m not really going to change anything” continuing to report on her day as usual, she also says “of course I’m going to be out there campaigning to re elect a Labour government.”

The message seem to be that while there will be no overt political messages contained in her daily tweets, she will still be looking for ways to bolster the PM’s campaign, perhaps explaining the appearance of several photos of Gordon kicking off his campaign via Twitpic yesterday.

It may be that the prime minister’s wife may bring her Twitter power to bear in pictures rather than words in the run up to the election, using a sort of Twitter enhanced photojournalism approach to electioneering.

The one above titled “only quiet moment of the day as Read the rest of this entry »

29 percent of us would vote for The Green Party in the UK General Election, based on policies alone, a live online survey of more than 17,000 voters has discovered.

The survey, set up by Vote For Policies is aimed at helping voters compare the policies of six UK political parties in a choice of nine major policy areas – Crime, Democracy, Economy, Education, Environment, Europe, Health/NHS, Immigration & Welfare.

When you take the survey you don’t know which policy relates to which party until the end when your real political preferences are revealed.

Vote For Policies is the brain child of three website developers who decided to try and help voters make decisions based on policies, not personalities.

“There’s a lot of personality focused, negative spin distracting voters from what really matters – improving how we live, ” explains one of the founders, Matt Chocqueel-Mangan, “our aim is to help voters make a more informed, unbiased decision about which party to vote for.”

Voters can find out who they really should be voting for by taking the survey at http://voteforpolicies.org.uk/

New York City ballet dancers are offering followers an insight into the normally opaque world of professional ballet dancing, The New York Times reports today.

And it’s no air brushed version, with dancers revealing the pain they suffer for their art: “Hi, I’m Devlin and I’m an MRI-aholic” reads one. “Once again I took 2 days off this week. My body is wrecked. At the chiropractor now getting fixed.” says another.

One dancer, Mr Alberda even indicated a possible dispute with ballet master in chief, Peter Martins, writing “I’ve heard the voice of God and he is an angry God with a Danish accent who doesn’t like my acting”

Management of the ballet is taking a relaxed attitude towards the tweeting, City Ballet’s Katherine E. Brown said: “We rely on them to use their good judgement and discretion. We really don’t put parameters around it for them. This is really their personal thing.”

The deli made famous by When Harry Met Sally – Katz’s was so packed today, that it was actually trending on foursquare. I counted nine people checked in and on the premises – which gives an idea of how popular foursquare and the deli are here.

I’ve been in New York for three days and picked up as many badges, newbie, explorer and the best one – school night – for checking in after 3 am on a week night, though its a bit of a cheat, having more to do with jet lag than late night festivities.

We’re here for one more night and so I’m still holding out to become mayor of the hotel we’re in but bearing in mind the demographics of this place, next door to an Apple store in the meatpacking district, I’ve probably more chance of becoming the actual mayor.

I checked in at Econsultancy earlier in the week, the mayor of which is the inestimable Rebecca Lieb, who remains the mayor of The Eagle in Clerkenwell she tells me, which says something about foursquare take up in the UK at the moment. Read the rest of this entry »

Lady Gaga  has become the first artist to break a billion views on Vevo/YouTube reports Mashable, the combined views of three hits -“Poker Face” (374,606,128), “Just Dance” (272,941,674) and “Bad Romance” (360,020,327).

Her latest release, “Telephone” a 9 minute epic co-starring Beyonce is already up to 23 million views on Vevo. I find it strangely compelling, not so much the music as the visual imagery – the police tape bikini is a bit special..