Last week was Social Media Week, an annual event which takes place in nine global cities including London, where people come together at (usually free) events to talk about emerging trends in social and mobile media.
Our wonderful Royal Mail colleague joined us at One Alfred Street to discuss how brands that might not usually be perceived as cool can compete in the world of social media.
Our session focussed on how to create brand desirability, no matter what the product, and how to convey that allure through different styles and language.
Melanie and I ran through some cracking case studies from Onlinefire (even if I do say so myself!), including Royal Mail Stamps, Elastoplast, Direct Ferries, Brother and a campaign from last year that we both love from Pedigree in NZ, called Doggleganger.
If you didn’t make it to Social Media Week this year, then make sure you put it in your diary for 2013 and we look forward to your company then.
Further to my post on using social networks to help in your job search and network, this is an interesting infographic that looks at just who these job seekers are and how they’re utilizing social networks to land jobs.
What is remarkable, given my points the other day, just how many people who had found their current job through social networks, did so through Facebook (85%) over LinkedIn (56%) and Twitter (45%). And given the facilities of the Facebook apps profiled, just how many of those described as Super Social Job Seekers “modified their Facebook privacy settings with work in mind (32%).”
Wednesday was a momentous day in the history of the Internet. It was a day that saw some of the biggest sites in the world effectively close down in protest at proposed US legislation known as SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) – a bill designed to fight online trafficking of copyrighted intellectual property such as music, films and video games. For 24 hours sites such as Wikipedia, Tumblr and WordPress (to name just a few) “blacked-out” their content in protest to what they feel are measures that go further than stopping online piracy, and instead, censor the internet.
Why is a free Internet so important, and how would a censored Internet affect the PR industry? By placing a bar on the freedom of information and investigation, working with journalists to build stories could become nearly unworkable. While we all know you can’t trust Wikipedia implicitly, for PRs and journos, it is a starting point. The fast-paced world of online journalism would be forever changed without it. It may seem to be a huge leap, but the consequences of there not being a “free internet”, would – in the grand scheme of things – mean that user-built sites whose lifeblood is content created by its users wouldn’t be possible and in turn the sharing of news and information that’s become part of our everyday lives.
You could argue the Internet is now ‘too big’ to be destroyed, however, if SOPA was in place in 11 years ago, sites like Wikipedia would in all likeliness not exist today. Incidentally, Wednesday, my first port of call to find out when Wikipedia launched was to check Wikipedia, which just goes to show how valuable a tool the site has become and how often we can take it for granted. And that was the point of yesterday’s black-out, these sites are as much part of our daily lives as BBC News or Coronation St. If they didn’t exist, our lives would be lesser for it.
Think of how many times a day you Wiki something or look up a video on YouTube. It could be for inspiration for a pitch or because you have to write a press release on the banana export legislation of Costa Rica. We get inspiration and information from the Internet. Hell, you could even think of a great campaign idea based on that video of Hello by Lionel Ritchie made up from film clips that seems to be going around. So what would really happen if SOPA went through?
In a nutshell, more trips to the library – and no wants that.
There has always been talk of personal/professional social media profile consolidation – with no solution. Facebook is personal and LinkedIn is professional.
But will this always be the case?
Even if one network is theoretically easier, the challenge has always been how you prevent your not-so-employment-friendly Facebook persona from becoming a scary CV (even though bits of it could actually represent a decent example of where you sit within your working network).
A recent NY Times piece (http://nyti.ms/yv3aqx) brought a few new social media tools to my attention that I think solve that common question: How can you bring LinkedIn’s ethos of professionalism and career focus to Facebook? Can there be a common ground (as the article suggests) between the overused sentiments that Facebook is for fun and LinkedIn is for professional purposes?
BranchOut and Be Known essentially do what LinkedIn do, but display what you want perspective employers to see and filtering your profile from what you do not. So how do they shape up?
BranchOut is a professional network itself. When you visit a BranchOut profile page, it immediately doesn’t look anything like a Facebook profile. The clean display and simple layout make it easy to navigate, and it’s easy to find people who you have professional relationships with. By importing your details, it gives the impression of an independent outlet, without you having to worry about keeping different profiles updated.
However, networking is slightly stymied by having to ask to make a connection with someone in order to see their network, taking the discretion away from the viewer, and so in a way, defeating the purpose. None the less, it is still a useful tool, and since it is retained within the Facebook platform, makes it easy to maintain.
Sitting within the regular Facebook template, this app immediately feels like it’s just a tab on your profile. It is as much part of Facebook as your photos and notes. While you are expected to input a certain level of background information, it doesn’t feel that much different from adjusting the privacy setting on your profile page. (Which does in itself raise a question: Couldn’t this whole debate be settled by adjusting those privacy settings, and using some of your better judgment and remove those tags of those infamous photos from Ibiza?)
And just in case it’s not you looking to network on Facebook, there are a few useful Facebook recruitment apps for your friends.
Promote your Friends who are job searching to your other Facebook Friends with the Hire My Friend Facebook App. You can include a brief description of their skills and a link to their LinkedIn Profile.
CareerFriend uses your Facebook friends’ employment information to find potential job opportunities within your network. After connecting with your Facebook login information, CareerFriend creates a report that includes your friends’ employers, occupations, and reviews of related careers.
Of course it does raise the question, is the whole exercise even necessary? Maybe it’s better to keep your personal and your professional profiles separate? While the line between the two can often be blurred, how often do opportunities come up through a friend of a friend?
On the 25th October, George Monbiot wrote an astoundingly vitriolic attack against the advertising industry, an industry that Eulogy! is proud to be well acquainted with. Our expertise within the marketing services sector brings us into contact with many agencies and brands who tirelessly work for their clients and companies as well as a plethora of charitable and worthwhile causes, which I’m pretty sure don’t burden us with debt, restrict our freedoms or do any number of things that Mr Monbiot’s article claim.
Of the clients I regularly work with, I see inspirational work that highlights plights and causes the world over. Just a snapshot of these include work with inner-city schoolchildren, leukaemia and cancer sufferers and budding athletes eager for their shot at glory. Advertising plays a huge part in communicating the message that these often ignored areas of society attempt to broadcast, and in doing so bring in attention, funding and advocates.
Just a look down the street in the past few weeks will have shown the sea of poppies that flooded our streets in support of those who give their lives for the UK, a campaign that receives huge support from the advertising industry in terms of creative production as well as advertising placement. Case in point: a slot during X-Factor worth £3m was given to them free of charge for this year’s appeal. A media infrastructure that allows companies to spread such important social messages should not be so readily dismissed.
Yes, Mr Monbiot may dislike many of the products, services and messages (he’d probably just seen another ‘Go Compare’ advert) that are communicated through billboards and TV ad breaks, but there are constantly ideas and reports covered by the mainstream newspapers that could be deemed equally influential, misleading and morally questionable, and so I feel his footing in the argument is far from sound. In the end, surely there are more important things to discuss and critique than the too often used scapegoat-for-society’s-ills that is advertising?
My latest guilty pleasure is Katie Price Signed (probably unsurprising coming from the girl that religiously records Jeremy Kyle everyday). Last week’s episode however, was actually educational from a PR’s point of view – that’s dedication for you. It was all about creating viral clips. The final nine hapless contestants were tasked by the Grande Dame of page 3 to “create buzz”. Each group were given 200 quid, a camera phone, a location and told to make a film that would go viral – other than that there were no directions. Whichever clip when posted on t’interweb garnered the most hits would win.
Chaos ensued as only two group members were allowed to star in the video and the other person had to film – inevitably this ensured that the point of the challenge was missed. Instead of spending the eight hours available to them coming up with a creative concept which might warrant spreadability, they bickered about who would be front of camera.
The results were pretty woeful. One group did a skit on Prince William and Kate Windsor (nee Middleton) on their honeymoon night, another also centred on the sex sells theme and spent the afternoon dressed as nuns flashing anyone that passed by and the third took the comic route of having someone dressed in a sumo suit exercising on the edge of a pond who was given a shove by a very Jim Carrey Riddler-type character. Despite being allowed to send the clip to one contact per group to spread the word and get the metaphorical ball rolling between them they didn’t manage even 1,000 hits. As one of the judges waspishly commented: “About as much buzz as wasp flying into a window”.
This just goes to show that creating a viral isn’t easy. What you may consider funny, isn’t to other people. The key is to think about what would make you forward something onto your friends. The programme rightly said that ad agencies (and indeed PR agencies) are increasingly turning to viral as a medium as it is a cost effective route to gaining wide scale awareness – however it is only cost effective if it does create wide scale awareness – otherwise it would probably be cheaper to place an ad in Downstream magazine (a specialist title for the Oil and Gas industry) which has more reach.
Viral isn’t easy and it just goes to show that not everyone with a camera can generate buzz; it is all about understanding how to get the clip correctly seeded out so that it does get those all important views. It is here that PR comes into its own. We have the skillset, the contacts and the heritage in creating conversations – both online and offline.
Diffusion’s Head of Digital and Marketing Services has joined our team as Director of Business Strategy. As PRWeek reports, he’sforming an integral part of our carefully recruited team, helping us provide clients with strategic social media counsel.
You can follow Alasdair on Twitter and read PRWeek’s story below.
Every week at Onlinefire we do something called The OnlineWire, where some of our sharpest minds have a look at the online stories we found the most interesting in the past week. Then we thought “why be so greedy?” so we decided we’d share it with everyone. So here you are, enjoy, debate, comment, abuse, spam…..well maybe not spam, but we’d love to hear you feedback and opinion on any of the stories below.
Gagaville
Combining two of the things Melanie hates most in the world, Lady Gaga is taking her little monsters to Farmville to promote her new album through unlocked objects such as unicorns and sheep on motorcycles (she’s just so crazy and original – didn’t you know?). We suppose it’s clever since a whopping 63 million people use Farmville every month and this is the first time an ‘artist’ has capitalised on it, but as far as we’re (ok, maybe not Andrew) is concerned, they can have each other – maybe that way we won’t have to hear her as much on the radio…
I didn’t know this until relatively recently, but Facebook is the worlds largest privately owned collection of photographs, because every pic you upload, FB owns. Twitpic are getting in on the act, the scamps!
This was published before the twitter storm around the superinjunctions took place over the weekend, which adds a whole new context to it. It’s an interesting debate to be having; there’s been a lot of talk of how twitter is running wild and unregulated. Personally I think it’s a step to far – one of twitter’s selling points is that it’s such an untamed animal. What d’ya reckon?
Being Irish-owned, at Onlinefire and our sister agency Eulogy!, we celebrate Paddy’s Day in a big way! We thought our friends would like a taste of the fun too so we sent out a little tipple as a treat.
An Irish Ale is a ‘traditional’ Irish cocktail, consisting of Irish whiskey, ginger ale and lime. Mixed over ice in a highball glass, it’s a venerable drink for the discerning Irish lady, gentleman, rogue, misfit, PR/Marketing/Media professional. Just look at the faces of my colleagues as they sample the drink in the instructional video David (Onlinefire’s additional Irishman) put together for us. Pure joy.
Do enjoy your tipple and celebrate St Patrick’s day with us in true style. Please get in touch if you have any thoughts or questions; it’s great to hear back. You can leave a comment here, follow us on Twitter (@onlinefire, @Eulogy_London and @dibbledabbles ) or give me a call – 020 7927 7520.
Wednesday was a momentous day in the history of the Internet. It was a day that saw some of the biggest sites in the world effectively close down in protest at proposed US legislation known as SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) – a bill designed to fight online trafficking of copyrighted intellectual property such as music, films and video games. For 24 hours sites such as Wikipedia, Tumblr and WordPress (to name just a few) “blacked-out” their content in protest to what they feel are measures that go further than stopping online piracy, and instead, censor the internet.
