SMNR & RSS
Posted Wednesday, October 17, 2007 at 7:41pm in PR General, Technology | 1 Comment
RSS is a great piece of technology and it’s changed my reading habits forever. It allows me to keep up to speed with countless blogs and news outlets via my computer or even my mobile phone. Even though I’ve been known to complain about information overload from using it on occasion I still couldn’t do without it.
The only other issue with RSS is, once it’s aggregated into an RSS reader, the content often doesn’t come out quite right. It’s a little obscure shall we say. Sometimes images aren’t where they’re supposed to be or the social networking video might be missing. I know my blog feed suffers with it in Bloglines. Sometimes the RSS reader you’re using is to blame and other times (I’m assuming) it’s the XML file.
What’s this got to do with the SMNR as they title of the post seems to suggest, I hear you ask (not). Well, basically, if the SMNR is supposed to be about the sharing of content then you would hope that all that content is distributed through the RSS feed properly and manageable. Luckily ours is, as I’ve tested using the two most popular RSS readers, Bloglines and Google Reader.
The only issue is that Bloglines doesn’t show the YouTube video. But that’s a Bloglines issue me thinks as I’ve never viewed a social network video in Bloglines for about a year now.
The example release I’ve used is the fictional one we did purely for illustration and experimental purposes.
REAL SMNR
GOOGLE READER
BLOGLINES
Link-o-licious
Posted at 9:31am in Blogging, Media, Off topic, PR General | 7 Comments
Some ideas I have for a post often aren’t long enough for a blog post themselves so it’s probably best to provide you with links. So here they are:
WHERE ARE ALL THE STUDENT PR BLOGGERS?
Seems like there aren’t any these days. Unless, of course, they’re aren’t on my radar? Admittedly I’ve been deleting a lot of my feeds of late so not up to speed on everything. The only new student PR blog I’ve come across lately is by Leeds Met’s Paddy Doyle. What a great name btw. So, here’s the deal again: Point me in the direction of your student PR blog and I’ll gladly link to you and subscribe to it like I’ve just done with Paddy’s.
You get the impression everyone’s too busy blogging with £ signs (Ching ching!) in their eyes to care about the educational side of the medium these days. 
Excluding the few of course.
YOU JUST WOULDN’T GET THIS IN UK POLITICS
No way. Can you imagine anyone taking the time, effort, resources and money to produce a video like this for Gordon Brown or David Cameron? Look at how many views it’s had too. Almost 4 million.
WOM UK ASSOCIATION LAUNCHES
My pal, Stuart Bruce, has been involved with the launch of WOM UK which is the UK’s answer to the Word Of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) in the US. Already there are a number of well-known and well-respected PR agency members including Edelman and Frank PR.
If you want to join you can do so by going here. Prices vary. I won’t be joining however. As I noted on Richard Bailey’s blog, the £350 required of me is a bit pricey. And I could be wrong, but the membership fee stucture seems to insinuate that the more money you’re willing to throw at it, the more ‘control’ you have.
Or am I being naive? I could be.
GUARDIAN TURNS ITS 212 YEARS OF NEWSPAPER CONTENT INTO A DIGITAL ARCHIVE
From journalism.co.uk: “Guardian News and Media (GNM) is turning its entire 212 years of newspaper content into an online digital archive. This first phase - available on guardian.co.uk/archive from November 3rd - will consist of content from The Guardian from 1821-1975 and The Observer from 1900-1975.
“Users will have access to exact replicas of the original newspapers, choosing between full page or individual article displays.
“The timespan of the archive will be expanded in early 2008 to cover the whole 212 years of the group’s publishing history, dating back to editions of The Observer from 1791.”
Global PR Blog Week 3.0 - Brits required
Posted Wednesday, October 10, 2007 at 9:41pm in Blogging, Business, Media, PR General, Technology | 1 Comment
Constantin Basturea of Converseon and the PR Meets the WWW blog has today announced the soon-to-be Global PR Blog Week 3.0. For those that don’t know, Global PR Blog Week is a yearly event (although I don’t think it happened last year) which invites PR, marketing and communications professionals from around the globe to submit articles during a one week period relating to best practices in the realm of the new PR and social media. Entries are added to the Global PR Blog Week site where they are debated and discussed.
Constantin highlights some additional new features at this event. These are:
* 2 or 3 keynote/invited contributions
* digg-style voting mechanism to choose the top 3 entries
* live events (example: a daily live BlogTalk Radio show)
* a daily event in Second Life
* video, in addition to podcasting
* daily summaries of the most discussed topics
* real-time updates for the number/titles/authors of entries submitted for each category
You don’t have to be a blogger to participate; you just have to have something relevant to say. And given the amount of UK PR and marketing bloggers there are these days there should be a strong UK contingent.
Don’t stand in the crowd waving the flag. Score the winner. (Youngie’s going to love that one)
Queens of the Stone Age - Avon - Glastonbury 2002
(not a huge fan of QOTSA but Dave Grohl on drums is quality - watch the drum solo at 2.54 in)
Nielsen research confirms Edelman and Forrester
Posted at 7:47am in PR General | 10 Comments
eMarketer’s reporting on a recent piece of research on word of mouth marketing carried out by research firm, Nielson. In short, the conclusion echos both Edelman’s and Forrester’s individual pieces of research on the types of marketing consumers trust. The report says: “There are more marketing channels aimed at consumers than ever. Yet more than three-quarters of consumers surveyed worldwide find that consumer opinions are the most effective form of advertising, according to a Nielsen study.”
Consumer recommendations are a powerful thing as Edelman found with the Trust Barometer where “a person like me is now the most credible spokesperson for companies” and Forrester with “recommendations from consumers” being the most believable form of advertising. (Note: I wouldn’t call a ‘recommendation from a consumer’ a form of advertising - it’s more like PR IMHO. But still, you get the gist.)
It makes perfect sense though. Personally, I look online for recommendations and reviews all the time. I reckon today alone I did it at least thrice. And now with the likes of Facebook you can pose a question to each of your 768 trusted ‘friends’ (depending on how popular you are) all at once.
Again keeping in with the word of mouth theme, eMarketer’s carried another study carried out by Yahoo! and MediaVest stating the obvious I reckon: “Consumers who are passionate about their interests spend a lot of time online keeping up to date.” They’ve also given these people a name: “Passionistas”. **Sigh**
Don’t think there’s anything mind blowingly new in there. However, it’s interesting to see which activities these **sigh** passionistas do online relating to their passions with the largest percentage using a search engine. I assume this means they use a search engine to find content relating to their passions.
The old PR/SEO chestnut issue arises once again. How many times have you used a search engine today?
Social media ‘friendly’ releases
Posted Tuesday, October 9, 2007 at 2:55pm in Blogging, Off topic, PR General, Technology | Leave a Comment
It’s all about the Kaizen. That’s why we’ve been working on a few tweaks here and there on our ‘traditional’ ‘bread and butter’ press release distribution. Can you call online press release distribution ‘traditional’? Anyway, traditional or not, what is becoming apparent is that the old style of press release (You know? With a narrative and stuff?) is certainly becoming more social media friendly. And so they should be.
Why? Well, for one thing, we don’t have the blinkers on when it comes to the Social Media News Release. We don’t believe every news announcement is going to be delivered exclusively via SMNR-stylee for the foreseeable future, that’s for sure. When you work on the front lines (joke), you come up against a host of obstacles. Mainly agency and corporate clients saying: “Yeah this is great but it’s not quite for us just yet.” And that’s fine. We’re a distribution company not a Web2.0 company.
However, that’s not to say you can’t add a few social media bells and whistles to a normal online press release. Already there’s the ability to include hyperlinks, video, social bookmarking, Technorati tags and a company RSS feed. Here’s a few more I’ve been involved in implementing over last week:
Social networking video
The ability to add video has always been available on webitpr’s sendit service. However, until now, it was only downloadable video in the form of a wmv, mpeg, avi, mov etc etc. Now, as well as the downloadable video, there’s the ability to add YouTube, Blinkx, Google Video, Vimeo etc video too.
Facebook bookmarking
Probably because I’m living on Facebook I get a kick out of this one the most. Although quite a simple one really. In short, a user lands on a release distributed by us, see’s the Facebook icon, clicks it and boom! It lands directly into that person’s Facebook Mini Feed.
Two more additons to making a ‘traditional’ online press release more social media friendly. Some might argue that our normal press release is indeed a SMNR. I don’t think it is. Sure, it’s got the feeds, hyperlinks, social bookmarks, social network videos etc but it hasn’t got the ability to post a comment (or a comment moderator for that matter), inbound blog links, links to relevant coverage and the branded experience.
But, case in point. This ‘traditonal’ release here has 21 inbound blog reactions and 12 saves in delicious.
It’s all about being social media friendly. As Antony Mayfield once said: “Make your content better, more attractive, findable and shareable.”
Right on.