Posts Tagged ‘online pr’

Mashable’s Peter Cashmore interviewed live on CNN this week, talking about the major web trends he expects to see in 2010, including location sharing, internet TV and fewer mobile gadgets.

Players from PR, SEO & Digital, competing hard for ground in the newest game in town – social media, now have another entrant to contend with, at least in Australia – a law firm.

A Sydney legal firm, Turner Freeman has teamed up with comms agency SR7 to launch En Garde, a social media monitoring company targeting businesses, government departments and institutions, offering to police social media networks to “prevent social media marketing campaigns from becoming a platform for inappropriate content or attacks on brands”.

Quoted in mUmBRELLA, Turner Freeman partner Steven Penning said: “The management of online risk should be approached with the same diligence afforded to traditional risk factors such as financials, operational and material. Social Media risk can be managed properly if appropriate mechanisms and procedures are put in place and legal counsel who understand the medium are used.” Read the rest of this entry »

Brands like Mastercard and Geek Squad are creating their own news content published direct to consumers via channels like YouTube, rather than pitching stories to traditional media, Advertising Age reports today.

The US advertising monitor cites the declining number of media outlets combined with the growth of quick fire customer engagement through online communities as drivers of a new approach to PR.

Mastercard,  for example has deliberately pursued a low tech video route, interviewing it’s executives on camcorders, editing on laptops and uploading to YouTube. Mastercard’s PR agent, Andrew Foote at Cohn and Wolfe says:

“They’re realizing they can comment on issues and get the points of view of their experts out there and on the record. Once the videos are up, the company will often tweet the links and follow up with reporters letting them know MasterCard commented on the topic.” Read the rest of this entry »

In a post on his blog yesterday Stephen Fry reflected on his role in the Jan Moir Twitter storm last week and also a regretted comment  he made on Channel 4 the week before “let’s not forget which side of the border Auschwitz was on.” Fry explains “The words just formed themselves in a line in my head, as words will, and marched out of the mouth.”

It was odd to see Fry talking politics on Channel 4 in any case, especially in that shirt he was wearing and of course the opportunity to gaffe live on TV as an entertainer is multiplied many times, as Anton Du Beke and Brucey have experienced recently in that highly controversial political show, Strictly.

Writing something first before sending it anywhere at least gives you the chance to weigh up and edit what you’re expressing. My rule of thumb on Twitter is never to say anything too negative, if I can help it. Read the rest of this entry »

So says Weber Shandwick’s US based chief executive Harris Diamond, speaking this week to PR Week’s Danny Rogers. Diamond sees the Italian suited ad execs and Ivy League management consultants ‘walking away’ from the challenge of driving reputation in the era of dialogue and a more strategic place for PR in the corporate pantheon.

On a more micro level, I was in a restaurant in Reigate this week, eating a cheese omelette with some very successful international marketers, talking about social media. The thing that stands out is not the need for technical advice, though there was a bit of chat about blogging platforms, but the need for good quality, on- message communications through new channels which they simply don’t have time to handle. Read the rest of this entry »

There are some tricky questions in this Bloomberg interview last night with Mashable’s Pete Cashmore, ranging from some rather un British ones “How are you profitable?” to the big one, at least where I’m sitting about the difference in story content for social media versus that of traditional media.

UK Google search results for online reputation have risen 41% in the last year, according to data from search specialists WhyCommunicate?

Internationally, the US, followed by UK and Germany are the countries running most searches for online reputation with “online reputation management” and “bad reputation” the fastest rising search phrases.

Interest in online pr has grown over the same period by 27%  and micro-blogging (Twitter) by 72%.

Interest in online pr is surfacing more frequently in the media too. Recent news stories include  the LSE’s findings  that companies with good online reputation grow 4-5 times faster and the slightly surreal recommendation from Gartner that company avatars follow a dress code. Centaur launched a dedicated site to the subject – Reputation Online last month. Read the rest of this entry »

The US Federal Trade Commission has released new guidelines which will force bloggers to disclose any commercial interest they have in products they promote. In the first update to its endorsement guidelines in 30 years, the FTC’s move is seen as an attempt to bring the blogosphere into line with endorsement codes long followed by broadcast stations, newspapers and magazines. 

“We look at it from the perspective of the consumer and the principle being that a consumer has the right to know when they’re being pitched a product,” said Richard Cleland, assistant director of FTC’s advertising practices division. “It doesn’t matter whether it’s an email or Twitter or someone standing on a street corner.” Read the rest of this entry »

Andy Bond, Chief Executive of Asda outlined his new vision for a “transparent” business yesterday, “run for the consumer by the consumer” including web cams of the farms where Asda’s milk and carrots come from and a team of bloggers recruited to tell shoppers about the business, rather than “a bunch of PR consultants” said Bond.

Bond has labelled his new way of doing business as “democratic consumerism” drawing comparisons with President Obama’s politics, “offering openess, transparency, collaboration and dialogue”. Read the rest of this entry »

While video didn’t quite kill the radio star, as the Buggles No1 hit predicted 30 years ago, it certainly diluted the influence of stations like Radio 1, fallen from its 20 million listener, late ’70’s peak to around 11 million today.

Google’s introduction of You Tube into video search results a year after it acquired the online phenomenon, could turn out to be the event that triggered a similar decline in text led SEO.

Video SEO will suit some businesses better than others.  If you put ’motivational speaking’  into a Google web search today, two videos of Peter Bland and Ruben Gonzalez appear, naturally enough, what better format to promote motiovational speaking. The textual results around them look bland in comparison. Read the rest of this entry »