Job goin’ at Cake
Posted Thursday, March 27, 2008 at 9:23pm in PR General | 8 Comments
Favour for a mate:
Digital Account Executive at Cake
Cake are looking for a digital account executive who understands PR, marketing, branding – and the effect the internet has on all of them. Someone who is prepared to tutor their peers in the latest web thinking and spread knowledge of the work that digital does within the PR floor. The ideal candidate will be someone who has a great understanding and passion for the internet and is a ‘digital native’, who knows how to behave online and interact with groups and individuals who fall outside of the remit of traditional digital PR practice.
Contact: claire[at]cakegroup[dot]com (making the necessary adjustments)
Reflekt - Need to Feel Loved (from the Brit flick It’s All Gone Pete Tong)
Vote for us!
Posted Thursday, March 20, 2008 at 12:12pm in Off topic | 6 Comments
Seriously, it will take you two seconds! Webitpr’s entered its Social Media News Release into the North East Digital Awards, a local award ceremony held up here in Newcastle for digital initiatives. The award we’re going for with the SMNR is Best Use of Emerging Technology which is under the Digital Innovators category. But you don’t have to look through them all to vote - HERE’S THE DIRECT LINK. Simply click on it and it will take you directly to our entrants page and all you have to do is click on the ‘vote’ button. Easy.
The first 100 people that vote for our entry will receive a round-the-world cruise courtesy of us and the runners up will receive a brand new Sony Vaio laptop also. 
Sorry, just kidding - you won’t receive anything but we’ll be eternally grateful and it’s good karma on your behalf too.
A few ideas to improve Twitter
Posted Wednesday, March 19, 2008 at 9:27am in Blogging, Technology | 12 Comments
It’s been almost four months since I began participating in the…um, Twittersphere (shoot me now) and needless to say I’m pretty hooked like the majority of its members judging by its continuous growth. It really is a great tool. I used to think it wasn’t a viable means of connecting with new people but how wrong I was.
That said, it really is quite minimalist in its features and let’s be honest, there’s not much to it. I appreciate that one of the reasons people like using Twitter is because it is simple by design. However, personally, I think it can be improved to make that tweeting experience all the better. Here are a few random ideas:
TEXT EDITOR
To help you emphasise the points you’re trying to make in your tweets wouldn’t it be great if you could add bold and italics to the text? For example, say someone posed the question: “What did you have for dinner today?” I could reply, “A splendid coq au vin was served and it tasted beautiful!”
Because I eat foods like coq au vin every night, of course.
Okay, the example I’ve given here isn’t great but hopefully you get my point. One thing I’ve noticed through blogging and writing other drivel online for the past few years is Americans love using itallics. They love them. No really they love them. This idea should get a thumbs up from some of them.
HYPERLINKS
Trying to explain one’s self in 140 characters is sometimes quite hard; particularly when you’re discussing complex and descriptive issues such as Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. Often you might want to include a link to backup your argument and prove your notion which, by the time you’ve converted said link to TinyURL, you’ve used around 25 characters. Bummer!
With this in mind, wouldn’t it be far easier to create links in your already written text? That way you have more characters to play with and you’re also giving fellow tweeters more of an idea of the content of the link they are clicking on. Everyone’s a winner, baby, that’s the truth.
IMAGES & VIDEO
A picture paints a thousand words and you might say a video paints a million. If Twitter provided an unintrusive method for users to include images or embedded video into tweets then it would A. Save users time by not having to click out to another webpage and B. provide more context to their tweets.
Obviously nobody wants to see huge YouTube videos in people’s tweets; they would take up far too much of the user’s screen real estate and it would just look cluttered. However, if there was a way in which a small link could be provided and, should a user want to view the video, it would expand and play in the Twitter page itself after it was clicked then definitely a benefit in my opinion.
TWEET-TO-TWEET
If you use Facebook (and let’s be honest who doesn’t?) then you’ll know that the Wall-to-Wall facility comes in useful as it allows you to read conversations between two of your friends. One thing that annoys me about Twitter is sometimes you one only see one side of a conversation and, if you’re a nosey inquisitive person like myself, often results in clicking multiple links to discover the full topic of conversation.
What would be great if Twitter provided a means to view discussions by conversing members in a chronicle order cancelling out non-related tweets in the process. In a Tweet-to-Tweet type stylie.
What do you think? One or two useful ideas for the evolution of Twitter or just dumb thoughts that could potentially ruin it?
SM milestone: Oldest blog turns 10
Posted Tuesday, March 18, 2008 at 8:50am in Blogging | 1 Comment
Kottke.org, generally regarded as the oldest blog that is still continually updated to this day turned 10 on Friday. On the 14 March, 1998 Kottke.org’s first post was conceived. 14,500 blog posts, six designs and countless other personal experiences later the blog celebrates its first decade of existence. Certainly a milestone in blogging terms and perhaps one in wider social media terms also, but what it signifies to me is how young this thing is. When I say ‘this thing’ I don’t just mean blogging but the internet in general. It really still is a baby.
Before your eyes start glazing over let me first explain that this isn’t a post to start making wild predictions about where everything is going. The reality is no one knows and I would be as equally a fool as all the others who make their pronouncements every New Year. But when the oldest functioning blog turns a mere 10 years old, chances are we’ve got a lot more to come yet regardless of what the ‘blogging is past its peak’ bellowers proclaim.
In ten years’ time do you think TechCrunch and the other technology blogs below it will be the ‘must read’ blogs? I don’t think so. Why? Well, for one thing, I don’t think web start-up news is going to be a major interest to the masses (yes I mean mass audience because there is still such a thing as far as I’m concerned). Currently it is because I believe we’re still in the early adopter phase. Blogs with a wide public appeal will be king. Time will tell ’suppose.
Happy birthday Kottke.org.
The SEO benefits of blogger outreach
Posted Monday, March 17, 2008 at 8:41am in Blogging, Business, Media, PR General | 9 Comments
Blogger relations, or blogger outreach as I like to call it, is a relatively new concept in the PR and marketing arena. Prior to blogs and other forms of social media, people working in our industry have never had such direct access to influential people from all walks of life. The advent of these new platforms has also enabled us to tap into real insights, views and opinions on various products, brands and issues which in-turn have allowed us to have open and transparent *relations* with the *public* (public relations, get it?).
As proved by Edelman, Forrester and Nielsen, the opinion of the every-day person is increasingly becoming a more trustworthy source of information. The public is more ‘media savvy’ than ever before meaning marketing messages no longer have the same effect as they once did. If they ever did. Is it any wonder that PR people, marketers and the respective companies they represent are increasingly seeing the value in blogger outreach?
Using myself as guinea pig and my involvement in the O2 blogger outreach campaign. The company working on the initiative, VCCP, probably looked at this blog and classified it with having a niche audience. With around 1500 RSS subscribers I can safely assume that I don’t hold great powers of influence. Not to say this blog doesn’t hold *some* level of influence; it does. To what extent, though, I really don’t know, but I’m sure the guys working at VCCP have their own reasons for including me in the outreach.
So let’s assume that after I wrote both posts on the O2 Xda Orbit 2 I ‘influenced’ some of this blog’s readers. By “readers” I mean people who are subscribed to the RSS feed or email alerts and are updated as and when I publish new blog posts. How I actually influenced them is another matter. Did they rush out and buy the phone as soon as they read my review? Maybe not. Did I at least increase awareness of the phone to some of the readers? I presume so. Either way, some level of influencing was in play.
Job done? Maybe not.
What’s struck me the last week or so is the amount of traffic I’ve received by people looking for information on the Xda Orbit 2. Quite a lot in comparison for this itty-bitty blog. So-much-so that since I wrote the two posts about the phone on the 20th and 27th February they’ve proved to be the top two most popular blog posts from those dates to present time. Take a look:
Note: The Homepage and About page have higher traffic but these are static pages and not blog entries.
Again, if you look at the top ten keywords used to get to this blog since I wrote the two posts you’ll see that four out of the ten are related to the Xda including the most popular two keywords:
This, to me, is pretty impressive and it puts blogger outreach in a whole new different light. In hindsight, it’s pretty obvious that SEO plays a part in all of this but maybe I was too caught up in the ‘direct approach’ and ‘two-way conversation’ ways of thinking that I didn’t give it any thought.
In fact, the SEO benefits could out-perform all of the other benefits of blogger outreach. Two reasons:
Relevance - You can see by the keyword data that people who landed on either post through a search engine were actually looking for information on the Xda. The people who subscribe to my feed weren’t necessarily - I published it and they may have read it. No guarantee there, though.
Volume - If the search engine traffic to each post continues which, chances are, it will then those two posts will have received a lot more attention from Google and the like than they did through an RSS feed.
These two reasons make the point that SEO should not just be considered when initiating of blogger outreach campaign but should be high on the agenda. The measurement and evaluation process of the campaign should include any traffic and SEO data that are available to gather. They could be the most valuable results you’ve achieved!
The underlying objective of a blogger outreach campaign is, of course, to generate positive and authentic opinions on your product or brand. But if what you are promoting is a lousy, useless or even mediocre product, however, then the next title of a blog post could be “The SEO nightmare of blogger outreach.”
It’s all about the quality of the content or product you’re promoting at the end of the day.