Monthly Archives: August 2012

Digital corporate affairs – weekly bits and bytes

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Draw a dragon, get a free phone: Almost as brilliant as our Tiger/Giraffe bread letter, this one comes from the guys at Samsung. A loyal Samsung customer (so he claims) posts on Samsung’s Facebook page, saying he has a number of their products and would like a free Galaxy S3. He’s even drawn a dragon. A few hours later Samsung responds, sensibly, saying that they can’t just give away free phones to everyone who asks. But, here’s a drawing of a kangaroo on a unicycle. The exchange is picked up on Reddit, journalists and Samsungs gets a bunch of positive coverage. And the story ends with the customer getting a bit of an awesome surprise as a thank you (thanks to Tom Parker for sharing this one).

This weekend, I’ll be mostly playing with Newsle. We monitor t’interwebs for mentions of Sainsbury’s, our key people and brands and other keywords. This new monitoring tool is based on the premise that as a company we have a social media footprint and online relationships with bloggers, journos and customers. It scans hundred of news and blog feeds looking for mentions of your connections. A perfect digital PR tool, since we need to know who in our social graph is getting media coverage and what they’re saying. These alerts can open the door to conversation and engagement with these influencers.

How to be a Genius: I’m a bit of an Apple fanboy. Macbook, iPad, iPhone. Have them all. And the reason I will be first in line to get iPhone 5 later this year will be because a) their products are always amazing and b) their customer service is always perfect. I’ve had phones replaced because of hardware faults at zero cost to me, iPods restored, hard drives saved. I’ve not left an Apple store disappointed. With this in mind, I came across an article on Gizmodo who have acquired a copy of the “Apple Genius Training Student Workbook”. An excellent (if slightly frightening) look inside how Apple trains their Geniuses. From psychological tips and tricks, to banned words and role-playing, it provides some fascinating insight into how they think and the way they make sure you leave the store with a smile on your face. Make sure you read the bit on empathy – so simple, yet so effective.

Wolfram Alpha’s Facebook Report analyses your Facebook activity: Wolfram Alpha, the intelligent, computational search engine, just launched a new tool that breaks down your Facebook activity into numerous charts and graphs. Not sure if this is awesome or if it scares my pants off, but it sure does show how much Facebook knows about its users. Some stats from the report I just pulled for my profile: My average post is 12.67 words long and I generate 1.7 likes and 2.28 comments per post. My three most used words are run, good and see. It shows me who interacts with me the most, where I’ve checked in, when I use the app vs. the web version. I now know that I have more female than male friends. If you want to try it out for yourself, make sure you’re logged in to Facebook and type in ‘Facebook report’ into Wolfram Alpha.

New Facebook ad tech will let advertisers match your Facebook identity with their customer database: Facebook is working on new ad technology that will allow businesses you already buy from, but are not connected with on Facebook, match your email address and your Facebook identity. By connecting their customer records and your Facebook information, companies will be able to market to you better on Facebook … because they’ll know much more about you. Yikes!

And finally: Google isn’t very happy with the German government: The German government has proposed a law that would make search engines pay for reproducing newspapers’ headlines and first paragraphs. Insanity!

Digital corporate affairs – weekly bits and bytes

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Blogging 101: An interesting post written by a blogger about her frustrations of working with PRs. To sum it up, she makes the point that more and more bloggers are getting approached by more and more PRs and asked to cover products and/or content without getting anything in return. She recommends her readers to demand something in return for their time (usually £££) before agreeing to posting about the brand.

I have seen this from a few of the bloggers that we work with. I make it clear that we do not pay for PR coverage (after all, that would make it advertising). Instead, we look to provide our bloggers with exclusive content, behind the scenes access, or samples of products that aren’t available to the general public yet. We make this clear to them and they understand. But it is a ‘watch out’ for us and something that I think will only increase as bloggers reach a certain maturity and realise how attractive their voice is to brands. Meanwhile, we have to continue to treat bloggers with respect and don’t just ask them to write about things without providing anything in return. 

Tesco face enquiry over ‘lousy’ website security: Particularly relevant given news from the BRC that as more and more people are using their mobile phones to shop online, it leaves the retail sector more vulnerable than ever to internet crime. The Information Commissioner’s Office said it would look into criticisms of Tesco’s website over the way it stores customer passwords and email addresses. 

Ryanair has had a bit of a PR nightmare on social this week: A woman who was charged €300 by Ryanair for printing six boarding passes won the support of more than 380,000 users after she posted on Facebook in just five days. The only response from Ryanair has been a statement in which it reminds passengers that: As clearly outlined in the terms and conditions passengers agree to before a Ryanair booking can be completed, and in emails sent to the passenger before travel, passengers must check-in online and print their boarding card before travel as failure to do so will result in a boarding card re-issue penalty.

Facebook is rolling out sponsored results/search ads: Techcrunch is sceptical about Facebook doing a Google and selling search ads. How often have you searched for a brand on Facebook and not arrived at their official page? Also, as Techcrunch notes,  when people search for an entity on Facebook, they’re typically looking for something very specific, such as a particular game or business, and might be more likely to bypass ads. Either way, Facebook reckons this is “a great way for you to drive more awareness of your Application, Page or Place.” 

That said, how big Is Facebook’s data? Frickin’ huge! 2.5 billion pieces of content and over 500 terabytes ingested every day. EVERY. DAY.

Your mobile phone contextualises your identity: Get ready for some heavy duty new media philosophy. A few weeks ago Rebekah Cox, a product designer at Quora, tweeted  the following message: “The first company to fully execute on embedding your identity into your phone (making a truly first class experience) wins the next decade.” 

She later expanded on this in a full post on Quora: A mobile experience that truly represents your identity — in a way that both resembles and enhances an in-person conversation but still affords you control over how you portion out your attention and provides context — could tie the knot for the myriad communication channels available.

 Cue Robert Scoble who brings it all together with this pithy remark: Identity is only a piece of your context. The new device that takes over the world will know not just your identity, but your context.

A interesting and slightly mind-bending way to look at how the mobile phone in your pocket connects who you are with where you are. 

And finally: a look at the last 10 years on the Internet: a great little infographic all about web nostalgia. I always find it amazing to see how fast the web grows and how it seems to just keep growing. Ten years ago, we only spent an average of 46 minutes each day on the Internet. Today the average is 4 hours. In 2002 there were only 3 million websites. Today, there are around 555 million. Also, I couldn’t resist using this opportunity to check out what www.sainsburys.co.uk looked like in 2002.

 

Digital corporate affairs – weekly bits and bytes

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Life on the dark side: a marvellous post from a hack turned flack about his switch from journalism to PR. Bottom line, and I quote: PR is harder than journalism. [...] The number of stakeholders in PR is considerably higher than in journalism and the loss of autonomy is the most obvious challenge when people switch sides. PRs work in teams, across multiple accounts, all of which have different strains, pressures and requirements. Teams consist of individuals, all of whom have their own triggers and ambitions. Journalists may be part of an editorial team, but writing assignments are usually taken in isolation. Additionally, because PR involves so many more people than journalism, it also results in more politics. This is a challenging environment for someone to come into who has grown accustomed to getting his own way. In case you hadn’t noticed, journalists are often not natural diplomats.

 How London 2012 was Tweeted: all the talk before the Olympic Games was about these being the first true social media Games. The opening ceremony generated more tweets than the entirety of the Beijing Games, and this Infographic goes into some more detail about who the most popular athletes were on Twitter, what were the big trends, what was good and bad (thanks to Kristian for sharing this one). And if you really want to geek out over all the Olympic social goodness, check out London 2012′s Head of New Media Alex Balfour’s Olympic games-time digital report.

Why is story telling so important? A great little clip from MSL Group about storytelling that talks about all you need to know about it: the why, the how, even the science behind it. The 2 ½ minute clip talks about how stories have evolved over the years, how they help create shared purpose, and how telling a great story can help your brand grab attention. And in a world where we send 1 billion tweets a week, where we read 10mb of material a day, where we hear 400mb of sound a day – attention is the one thing there is far too little of. 

7 Ways To Get Actionable Insights From Social Data: with all that data flying around, Forbes published an informative piece on how to make sense of all of the noise and what tools to use, concluding: The flood of real-time social data holds huge rewards for companies that can separate useful information from the noise. The challenge is to avoid drowning in big data. Enterprises need to define a focused strategy and identify exactly the data they need, rather than trying to analyze everything. For those that are able to do this, valuable insights await. And remember, you don’t need to be a billion dollar business to make the most out of social. 

Inside Facebook’s Push to Woo Big Advertisers: the big blue network isn’t having a good week (month?). Investors are able to sell their stocks (and are!) and the share price is at 19.22 at the time of writing. The WSJ spoke to their vice president of marketing, Carolyn Everson about what she’s going to do about reassuring advertisers. A tough sell given Google is winning the race to gain the biggest share of online ads in the US and social advertising on Facebook has slowed. A long but worthwhile read.

Medium & Branch: T’Interwebs is excited about the new services from Twitter co-founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone. Like Twitter, both Medium and Branch are publishing platforms where users can share pictures, articles and text. And both are more or less splinter services to Twitter. Petapixel has a good collection of screenshots of Medium (still in private beta) – clear to see that the future of web content is very much about the power of the image.

Branch is coming out of private beta and is billed as a new way to talk to each other. Between articles, blog posts, and tweets, the internet is dominated by monologues. So we want to build a home for dialogues online, by combining the intimacy of a dinner table conversation with the power of the Internet.

 Instagram goes maps: The new version launched yesterday focuses on geo-location allowing users to view on a map all geo-tagged photos of the network according. Supposedly there’s also behind the scenes tweaking to make the app quicker – here’s hoping the spend some time on the desktop/browser version soon as that is pretty painful still.

And finally: Google Buys Newspaper Ad to Show Why Newspaper Ads Don’t Work: don’t really know if it’s meant to be some sort of joke? Irony?