World Public Relations Festival
Posted Wednesday, June 25, 2008 at 12:15pm in Blogging | 6 Comments
On Monday I had the good fortune to attend the first day of the two day World Public Relations Festival (SMNR here) held by the Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR) in Park Lane, London. A ‘world’ PR event it was too, with public relations representatives in attendance from around the globe. I don’t know exactly how many different nationalities were present but I do know from my observations that PR pros from Lithuania, Pakistan, Nigeria, Dubai, New Zealand, Australia and America were either speakers or delegates. I’m sure participants from other countries were in attendance also.
Obviously being a world PR event the topics of discussion covered some big issues. I won’t run through all of Monday’s speakers but these were the highlights for me:
Positioning Winning City Destinations
Michael Hayman, The Communications Group
This presentation discussed how the more established cities such as London, New York, Sydney etc are now having to compete with emerging cities as ‘destinations’. To attract tourists these destination cities have to focus on their point of difference from other competing cities. Hayman cited how destination cities are creating themselves as brands and mentioned there is no city brand logo more known than the one used by New York.
Corporate Communications in Emerging Markets
Chris Dobson, Mmd Group
A great presentation from a great speaker. Dobson focused on the opportunities and issues of PR in the emerging markets, mainly in eastern Europe and Russia given that’s where his company, Mmd Group, is predominantly based. A memorable quote from his presentation went something like, “Romania is a very important fast growing market. We call it our Tiger Economy”, which I’m sure Mihnea will be happy about.
How Gazprom is Meeting the Challenges of the West
Philip Dewhurst, Gazprom
Again another interesting presentation on how Gazprom, Russia’s largest company and third largest in the world, is using PR for reputation management purposes. A comment from one of the Nigerian delegates said that Gazprom reminds him of a dog on a leash which is controlled by the Kremlin. Dewhurst admitted that 51 percent of Gazprom is owned by the Russian government.
All in all an excellent day. I just wish I could have attended the second day too. Credit to the CIPR for hosting a great event and full marks to the people who travelled from all over the globe to participate.
Sidenote: Delegates were shown a brief video of the redesign of the new Global Alliance website (current site here). The new site looks full of Web 2.0 goodness so it will be interesting to have a play around with it when it’s up and running.
It’s easy to be critical
Posted Sunday, June 22, 2008 at 11:19pm in Blogging, PR General | 5 Comments
Back in April I wrote a critical blog post on Innocent Drinks’ foray into using the microblogging platform Twitter for the company’s 2008 annual general meeting (AGM). My thoughts were that the company wasn’t using the platform to its full extent and given the Innocent brand (companies wanna be them, marketers wanna be with them) I thought they could be doing a lot more in terms of interaction and dialogue. Check the comments, not everyone agrees with me.
The particular post in question has recently been featured on Inside CRM’s ‘The Twitter Hall of Shame‘ which was subsequently featured on the front page of Digg and linked to by a number of prominent bloggers. Loads of traffic ensued.
It’s easy to be critical though. And now that this particular post has been featured alongside some **real** Twitter howlers I know I could have been more constructive in my critique while at the same time praising Innocent for its innovative approach to its AGM
Anyway, Ted, the digital marketing guy from Innocent, has recently left a comment so I’ll publish it word for word here as he raises some valid points and gives you insights into his and Innocent’s way of thinking. Incidentally, Ted wrote a post on his own blog about my blog post some time ago which I saw through my referrals but didn’t respond to but I should have.
Ted says:
Hello.
We should have replied directly to this conversation a bit earlier but I suppose now is as good as time as any to join in. I think the original thought of this post and resulting debate raises some really interesting points about the place a lot of brands are in with their use of social media at the minute.
The first point should be that innocent have ultimately benefited from this post and the associated comments. Which is always a good thing, so thank you all. As Stephan points out in his last comment, we did indeed change our behaviours in using twitter directly as a result of this post. As with most things we welcome comment, be it praise or criticism, indeed you often actually get more positive benefits from the criticism. Hence addressing this blog post straight away with our twitter followers ( http://twitter.com/innocentAGM2008/statuses/794949909 ) and then taking on the suggestion regarding following everyone else’s feeds. From that point of view alone our feed, and what both innocent as a brand and our followers as consumers got out of it, ended up better than it was before.
It also brought up the below interesting thoughts as part of the wider context of our own use, and the general use of social media at present…
-no wrong or right way to use social media
I kind of agree with Michael’s & Alex’s thoughts that there is no wrong or right way to use twitter or social media, but probably a set of behaviours or social courtesies that will enable you to get more out of what you are doing. A good example of this for me would be howies blog. They have never had commenting enabled in their long history of blogging but it is no less an interesting or inspiring blog to me. Nor could you say that howies is not embracing openness or the use of digital communities, just have a look at the do lectures stuff they’ve got coming up.
-wearing stuff in, not out
Again as Stephen rightly says, he made these points as he called it when he first came across our AGM twitter feed. In reality this was only a couple of weeks in from when we first set up the twitter feed and quite far off when our AGM stuff really started to get going. The important bit of this though is that social media, and digital in general, tends to get better the more and longer you use it. Hence the thought, that like a nice leather, sofa you’re wearing stuff in, not out.
http://letsbehumanbeings.typepad.com/letsbehumanbeings/2008/04/wearing-stuff-i.html
-direct line to head office
Another thought on this is the way we first came across Stephen’s post (via a Google alert set up on ‘innocent drinks’). I think every brand should have Google alerts set up on themselves to pick up and act on stuff like this quickly for their own benefit.
http://letsbehumanbeings.typepad.com/letsbehumanbeings/2008/04/a-direct-line-t.html
http://www.google.com/alerts
-it’s good to talk
Social media is basically making it easier and more transparent for brands to speak and have conversations with consumers. And as Dan says on the comment to this post (another example of how we’ve benefited from what people say about us and we pick upon), ‘talking is good’.
http://letsbehumanbeings.typepad.com/letsbehumanbeings/2008/06/quick-quick.html
-falling forwards fast
My last thought would be around the context and resulting lessons we’ve now learnt post AGM twitter feed. At innocent we subscribe to the ‘fall forward fast’ principle of doing things in digital (http://www.tomski.com/archive/new_archive/000063.html ). The AGM twitter feed was ultimately a test case in using twitter. In doing stuff like this it’s kind of inevitable that things will go wrong along the way, but in the same light it’s inevitable that you’ll learn invaluable stuff in the process. And learning stuff will absolutely never leave you in a weaker position than when you started.
Hopefully others will be able to take some learning’s out of this as well as us. So we’ll all have learnt something.
Berocca: Stress relief for bloggers
Posted Saturday, June 21, 2008 at 9:33am in Blogging, Business, Photos | 5 Comments
Here’s a great example of some creative blogger outreach by UK vitamin supplement company, Berocca. You may have read in the New York Times blogging is apparently bad for your health, so what better way to create an online buzz about a product than to provide something which could help the very people that can spread the word.
The Berocca website has a dedicated page where you can sign up for a ‘Blogger Relief Pack’ which includes:
• Stress ball
• USB stress button
• Bubble wrap keyring
• Dead Fred pen holder
• Pack of Berocca
A very good idea me thinks. I’ve signed up for a Relief Pack, although it seems there are no guarantees of receiving one and reading the Terms and Conditions (T&Cs) they’re only giving the pack away to the first 50 applications. Another caveat in the T&Cs is that they may use my details for future marketing activity and potentially share them with third parties in relation to Bayer plc, the company behind Berocca.
I don’t fancy receiving spam if I’m honest but by the looks of things they’re planning on including links to blogs that feature the product so they’re obviously monitoring what’s being said.
In which case no spam please Borocca. 
Found via Kieron Donoghue.
BBC’s link love
Posted Tuesday, June 17, 2008 at 8:23pm in Blogging | 5 Comments
The BBC has recently introduced a new element to the news section of its website which scrapes in (and links to) related content from external news sites. So, for example, if you click on the BBC article about the current oil tanker strikes, further down the page, on the right hand side you are given a list of related articles from other news websites. This particular article currently has links to related articles in the Sunday Mirror, Mirror and CNN among others.
Digital Inspiration is reporting that the BBC is using Moreover Technologies (Nick Denton’s old company) to automatically pull in related articles from over 4,000 external news sites. There is no human intervention in the process much like how Google News and Yahoo News both work.
The Beeb gives an explanation as to why they’ve introduced this new element to the site, and it’s a pretty good one, “Our users tell us that one of the things they value most about our service is our policy of linking openly to other websites. These links offer access to more detailed information, the chance to compare sources or check out a different perspective on the same story.”
Fair play to the BBC for linking out and effectively promoting the content of its competitors. One wonders if they are planning to include blogs in this process. Now that would give readers the opportunity to “check out a different perspective on the same story.”
Information overload in the Knowledge Economy
Posted Monday, June 16, 2008 at 12:57pm in Blogging | 4 Comments
Drew B points to an interesting article in the New York Times which tells the story of how some of the world’s largest technology firms are working together to help combat information overload. Microsoft, Google, Intel and IBM have joined forces to form a not-for-profit organisation which aims to “study the problem, publicize it and devise ways to help workers — theirs and others — cope with the digital deluge.”
Dealing with information overload isn’t a new phenomenon. I constantly read people’s blog posts or tweets declaring “email bankruptcy”. David Brain touched on the subject this time last year and discussed the amount of inputs he receives during the work week. His conclusion is spot on: “…if you are in PR the ability to be able to switch from ‘input and scanning’ mode to ‘focus and doing’ mode is an increasingly important skill.”
This skill is becoming harder to do. Each day we’re presented with numerous distractions in the form of emails, RSS feeds, newspaper/magazine articles, tweets, TV programmes, Facebook notifications, YouTube videos, instant messages, text messages, phone calls, meetings and countless other forms of communication. A Blackberry isn’t nicknamed a Crackberry for no reason.
The wealth of information that is presented to us on any given day is often overwhelming. According to the video, Shift Happens (see below), it’s estimated that a week’s read of the New York Times contains more information than a person was likely to come across in a lifetime in the 18th century.
The easy solution would be to just ignore it all. Unsubscribe from all your feeds; don’t log into your instant message account; stop reading and writing tweets; cancel your Facebook account etc etc. But that would be a foolish step to take for those of us working in the Knowledge Economy. Although it is distracting, the information available is invaluable from a personal knowledge perspective to a wider business strategy and ‘moving-forward’ point of view.
In the realm of social media we’re also dealing with relationships. I now know hundreds of people from around the world who I would never have met or corresponded with because of it. This is great and is globalisation at is finest. But it’s not sustainable. It’s been proven that one person is limited to the number of relationships he or she can sustain. Sorry, but you don’t have 800 “friends” even if your Facebook profile says otherwise.
And therein lies the rub.
The topic of managing relationships is worthy of a blog post itself… No, make that a 200-page book, so I won’t try to tackle it here. I wouldn’t know how to anyway. Likewise, I wish I had a ‘10 Step Guide to Tackling Information Overload’ blog post for you, but I don’t. Being able to sort the wheat from the chaff (so to speak) in the knowledge economy is a arduous task and one that takes time, effort, skill and, perhaps most importantly, self-discipline.
Let’s hope Microsoft, Google, Intel and IBM can help us out a bit on this one.