Posts Tagged ‘online pr’

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 »

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’.

Managed hosting provider NetBenefit has appointed Furlong PR to implement an online pr and social media strategy, following a three way pitch.

Furlong will also undertake traditional media relations work for NetBenefit in the UK

Kristel Scattergood, Marketing Manager for NetBenefit commented, “We appointed Furlong PR because we were impressed by their ability to combine expertise in online pr and social media, with an ongoing traditional media relations service.”

NetBenefit is the third new client Furlong PR has added to its portfolio in recent weeks, following appointments by FESPA and Freedman International.

Ross Furlong, CEO of Furlong PR commented “Online pr is generating a lot of interest from companies who seem just a little jaded with traditional pr approaches. Online and social media pr strategies are proving an attractive proposition, not least because their success is more measurable” Read the rest of this entry »

Twitter has announced its number of daily status updates or tweets has now passed 50 million, closing in on Facebook’s claimed 60 million.

Announced on its blog, Twitter describes the exponential growth of the service since it began:

“Folks were tweeting 5,000 times a day in 2007. By 2008, that number was 300,000, and by 2009 it had grown to 2.5 million per day. Tweets grew 1,400% last year to 35 million per day. Today, we are seeing 50 million tweets per day—that’s an average of 600 tweets per second.”

According to a report by RJ Metrics last month, while Twitter is adding accounts at the rate of 6.2 million per month, only 17 percent of these are active each month.

For those indie-minded old grumps hiding in the home office, like me while the X Factor saga rumbled to its depressing conclusion last night, a last minute hero has emerged.

A self-described stay-at-home mum from Essex, Tracy Morter set up a Facebook group in mid November, proposing ‘Rage against the machine for Christmas No1′

By the magic of Facebook and an alignment of media interest around X Factor, Tracy Morter’s idea may now determine the outcome of the Christmas singles chart.

There are 714K members of the Facebook group at the time of writing and between 250K and 500K purchases of “Killing in the name of” are estimated to be needed to secure the spot. The song is already number one on iTunes.

No wonder Simon Cowell is coming over as a bit cross in interviews about the campaign he describes as ’silly’. With all his TV ratings power, it looks like he’s still no match for a mum with a social media platform. Read the rest of this entry »