Archive for the ‘social media’ Category

The Icelandic government’s appeal to it’s 360,000 population to use social media yesterday to promote the country as an ash free tourist destination has met with some success, at least in terms of Facebook fan increases – 10,847 yesterday morning to 17,021 at the time of writing.

It’s not clear though how many of these sign-ups are from potential tourists or from Icelanders themselves. Call me a seer but you don’t need to be told the benefits of visting Iceland if you’re already living there.

This is the problem with social media, it’s pull not push. It doesn’t really matter how many Icelanders go online to promote the country what you need is one spectacular viral creative idea that pulls in your target market, showing that Iceland isn’t actually very dusty at all and should still be top of every discerning traveller’s city break list.

Having said that, ‘Inspired by Iceland‘ is a great tourism site, once you’ve found it, it’s very compelling and truly deserves more Facebook fans. The videos are cool, there’s naked people and everything, see below.

The other curious thing is the launch Read the rest of this entry »

Persuading senior executives of the benefits of social media remains a larger hurdle for B2B marketers than for their B2C counterparts, a survey by White Horse has discovered.

More than a third of B2B marketers said there was ‘low executive interest’ in social media while just 9% in B2C said the same.

Senior management in B2B are more confident in dismissing the worth of social media, 46% of marketers saying it was viewed as ‘irrelevant’ in their organisations, compared to 12% in B2C.

Measurement of social media also varied, 34% not measuring it at all in B2B versus 10% of B2C respondents.

Genius.com/BtoB magazine revealed earlier this month that 50% of B2B marketers don’t blog, 49% don’t use Twitter, 43% don’t use Facebook and 25% don’t use LinkedIn.

R2integrated discovered that lack of measurement and gaining management buy-in  were the two biggest obstacles to running social media campaigns.

There’s a whiff of the batcave about some of these social media applications, high tech gizmos we’ve never seen the like of, geo-locational tools like Foursquare where you become the electronic mayor of wherever you want and Twitter streams where you can see what people are saying in a 20 mile radius.

While Robin cuts a sad, yellow figure on his own, with Batman by his side, he’s super cool and some brands understand this associative effect.

The Pennsylvania Tourist Board for example has just launched a Foursquare tourist trail, with 20 itineraries, 100 tips and badges, not because they think take up will be massive, but because the association instantly turns Pennsylvania cool.

Starbucks has managed to combine the cool halo effect with revenue. Their Foursquare campaign offers free coffee to the mayor of each branch, served with a slight bow. No doubt thousands of caffeine stoked students are plotting mayorial coups all over the US right now.

In the UK, it’s not yet quite so competitive, I became the mayor of the IET this week – venue for the Epublishing Innovation Forum – ha, ha I thought, Kappow!…..but I don’t think anyone has noticed to be honest. Read the rest of this entry »

Thanks to Aeneas McDonnell from The Economist for sharing this great video ‘Did you know?’ about the changing media landscape, at the EPublishing Innovation Forum yesterday.

While it may have been Twitter’s year from a publicity point of view, LinkedIn, the grand old dame of business social networking – who turned seven this month, continues to dominate corporate America. New research from Netprospex shows that 43% of large company employees are members of the site.

Facebook is a distant second with 11% while Twitter languishes back in fifth spot (3%) behind Flickr and MySpace (both 4%). You quite often hear the phrase in relation to consumer social media ‘we need to fish where the fishes are’  but how often do you hear of the same thing translated to B2B, i.e., LinkedIn marketing campaigns

In our experience of LinkedIn marketing, judicious seeding of content can generate 75% of referred website traffic, far more than Twitter can manage, so why not do more of it?

The answer may lie in another recent study, marketers were asked what the main obstacles are to using social media. They said lack of analytics (35%), lack of management buy-in (25%)  and that their audience isn’t yet active on social media (21%). 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?

Company profile

Cisco is a global technology company providing networks for the Internet, for business, government and home communications. It offers hardware, software and service offerings designed to increase productivity and strengthen competitive advantage. Founded in 1984 by a group of computer scientists from Stanford University, it now has over 65,000 employees worldwide.

The challenge

As a truly global company employing tens of thousands of people, it is important for Cisco to establish systems and processes which allow it to monitor activity on the growing plethora of social media sites. This can help both to assess the reputational impact of the many conversations taking place over the web, and also to ensure that staff are not damaging the brand in any way. The investment community is increasingly relying on social media networks to provide official – and unofficial – insights into publicly listed companies.

The solution

Cisco offers training and certification to employees who wish to speak in social networks on behalf of the company. Laura Graves, director of global investor relations and corporate communications at Cisco, says that it is important to assume that Read the rest of this entry »

Maile Ohye, manager of Google’s Webmaster Central Blog, laid out her blueprint for a social media, content and SEO optimised website in an interview with TopRank’s online marketing blog last week.

The question that caught our attention was to do with how she sees the role of social media within website marketing activity, particularly in relation to SEO.

Here’s what she said:

“I think having a solid site: great content, good experience for users (intuitive navigation, responsive), descriptive page titles, standardized URL structure, etc., is of primary importance. A strong site is the foundation where you’ll likely make your online conversions. Once this foundation is established, the social media approach helps drive traffic, builds excitement (and inbound links), that you’ll be able to capitalize on with your solid site.”

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 »