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.

This year, Onlinefire helped to kick-start SocialMediaWeek LDN with a bang when we hosted a saucy session on sexy social, or to be more specific, ‘Making Social Sexy: Getting consumers excited about a ‘not-so-exciting’ product’.

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.

Speaking at the event was Melanie Seasons, from Onlinefire, Natasha Ayivor, Royal Mail PR Manager, and me, Charley Hayes.

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.

We gave a nod to Marketing Week for a great piece of research covered recently which identified the 6 Codes which reveal brand personality – well worth a read if you get the chance.

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.

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%).”

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.

Here’s that Lionel Ritchie video:

David Macnamara

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 (http://branchout.com/)

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.

Be Known (https://apps.facebook.com/beknown/)

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.

Hire My Friend (https://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=328891100642)

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 (https://apps.facebook.com/insidecareerinfo/)

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?

David Macnamara

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?
 

Dave Cohen

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.

To help launch, ‘Alone in the Wild‘, a new show from the Discovery Channel, we created a Facebook app that finds your most ‘boring’  friend and gives you the chance to send them out into the wild – in this case, on a Moroccan adventure!

The app works by scanning your friends Facebook statuses for words like ‘bored’ ‘work’ or ‘tea’ and suggests to you the Top 5 who just need ‘to get out more’. There’s also a way for you to enter yourself into the running too.

For those of you who haven’t watched Alone in the Wild, it airs on Wednesdays at 9pm. The show sees eight sport and lifestyle celebrities (Freddie Flintoff, Joe Pasquale, Jason Gardiner, Amy Williams, Tanya Streeter, Donal MacIntyre, Chris Ryan and Aron Ralston) surviving in some of the planet’s most perilous and remote locations.  Each is left completely alone with just a hand-held cam­era to film their struggle. They must find water, food and shelter, and battle against the elements and local wildlife.

Tomorrow night’s episode is with Jason Gardiner. He’s going to be live tweeting from his account @OfficialJasonG about his experience. The hashtag for the show is #aloneinthewild.

You can follow Alasdair on Twitter and read PRWeek’s story below.

Breaking up with Facebook is hard to do

Over 100,000 people in the UK ‘left’ Facebook last month. Why? We have no idea (they’re probably insane). But just in case you want to cut off your social lifeline, this post from PSFK tells you how to do it. A short summary: the ‘delete’ button is rather hard to find, and when you finally do, Facebook will attempt to emotionally manipulate you with pictures of your friends with captions like, ‘Melanie will miss you…’ Evil.

http://www.psfk.com/2011/06/how-can-users-leave-facebook.html

When Does Like Mean Love?

We’ve batted this idea around a few times with Apollo about the value of a Facebook Like, and whether they mean a great deal. Well this has some interesting statistics that suggest they might now.

http://www.promomarketing.info/i-like-you-but-i-dont-love-you/P004366/

9 Tools to Get The Most Out of Foursquare

I know some in the office are a little bit sceptical of 4SQ and some that just don’t like it, but here are some interesting online tools for….well getting the most out of 4SQ

http://oneforty.com/blog/9-tools-to-get-the-most-out-of-foursquare/

Apple patents mobile camera that other people can shut off

Want. Now! My pet hate, is people videoing whole gigs and taking a million pictures. This solves that problem. If only there was a way of making people shut the hell up too, I’d be over the moon.

http://www.boingboing.net/2011/06/16/apple-patents-mobile.html

Tumblr now outnumbers WordPress

For anyone unfamiliar with Tumblr, it’s essentially a blogging tool for people who don’t like to blog. I’ve started seeing a number of sites, most notably Total Film and even MTV adopt it as simple way to put out content, that doesn’t need 500 words to explain it. For something like our Sainsburys/True Grit pic, it’s perfect. And now it has surpassed WordPress, which is probably the daddy when it comes to blogging platforms.

http://mashable.com/2011/06/15/tumblr-surpasses-wordpress/

Is a Twitter Promoted Trend worth $120,000?

Charles L Hayes  isn’t going to elaborate on this link, but from the headline it looks pretty obvious. I think Promoted Trending Topics are something we should push ALL our clients on.

http://t.co/bVaJ0F6

Have a bon weekend!!