Monthly Archives: October 2012

Digital Corporate Affairs – weekly bits and bytes

Are Apple events the new Friday for tech PRs? During the Apple iPad mini announcement this week, social gaming company Zynga thought the event would be a good time to bury bad news. Still, the Next Web picked up on the news after some ex-Zynga staffers tweeted that 100 people had been fired with about 2 hours notice (normal for the US and I remember it well from my AOL days when I’d had a conference call with colleagues in the US at midday and by the evening they’d been let go).

For a case study on how to attack your opponent in a speech and then make sure that attack keeps going on social, watch this brilliant clip of Barack Obama coining the term ‘Romnesia’ and then read up on how Team Barack made sure it kept going on Twitter, getting the hashtag #Romnesia to trend worldwide that same day. Also, how good is the ‘pre-existing conditions’ line? Zing!

Read this: Social media strategy explained in one slide.

Some mind-boggling (and frankly scary) stats about how children use the web and mobile from Ofcom this week:

Texting is most prolific among 12-15 year olds, who say they are sending an average of 193 texts every week (doubled vs. last year!) and is almost four times as much as the UK average of 50 texts per week
Girls text 35% more than boys
The average 8-11 year old sends 41 texts each week (doubled vs. last year!)
For the first time, 12-15 year olds are spending as much time on the internet as they do watching TV – that’s 17 hours each

Just a little bit more proof on ‘Dark Social’ from “Add This” – the guys that build sharing buttons for website: 70-95% of all link-sharing occurs by copying and pasting a URL, not by clicking a button on the page.

A quick and useful presentation about some of the things you should remember when using Facebook for marketing: A page isn’t a destination, it isn’t a community and almost no one sees fan-posts. Remember to think about how posts will work as part of the newsfeed and the ever increasing mobile usage (some Facebook features like tabs aren’t accessible on mobile!).

Also useful is this great infographic from Vi Knallgrau looking at the performance of Facebook posts from 50 consumer and 50 retail brands in Germany, Austria and Switzerland over a four week period.

Using Twitter to map London’s languages: using GPS data embedded in tweets and by tracking the language they were written in feeds this beautiful graphical representation of how multilingual London really is. English tweets dominate (unsurprisingly) and they provide crisp outlines to roads and train lines as people tweet on the move. Towards the north, more Turkish tweets (blue) appear, Arabic tweets (green) are most common around Edgware Road and there are pockets of Russian tweets (pink) in parts of central London. The geography of the French tweets (red) is perhaps most surprising as they appear to exist in high density pockets around the centre and don’t stand out in South Kensington (an area with the Institut Francais, a French High School and the French Embassy).

Also, did you know that if you use Twitter, you are smarter than those simpletons on Facebook or other social networks? So says a study from Australia. “We found that, while LinkedIn is often thought to be the tool of professionals, those who preferred Twitter were also those with the highest cognitive abilities. To really engage with Twitter requires lateral thinking and attention. It’s an ever-changing, information sharing platform and does require a greater degree of attention, concentration and the ability to retain, organise and apply information And to drill down a complex thought into 140 characters or fewer requires problem solving skills and clarity of thought.” I said last week that I use Twitter, didn’t I? I’m sure I did.

And finally: the lowly button get’s a tech upgrade.

Digital Corporate Affairs – weekly bits and bytes

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Who loses £15 BILLION market value in 8 MINUTES by sending out an unfinished press release? Google. The statement was released several hours too early and had not been finalised (still featuring holding language for a “Pending Larry Quote”), as the results were due to be issued after the American stock markets had finished trading. Because the figures were released early investors were able to dump Google stock, sending them down. And, as the Web loves a bit of Schadenfreude, a @PendingLarry account popped up on Twitter within minutes – but that would be the least of Google’s PR team’s worries today.

As the Daily Telegraph gleefully reported this week The Guardian was going to go digital only and shutter their print operation. Not so, as Rob Andrews writes in Paid Content: “None of those things is actually happening – but the competing chatter illuminates uncertainty and contrary prescriptions for funding the future of digital news.”

So the death of one bastion of print has been averted, but the writing is most definitely on the wall for Newsweek. The news magazine will go digital-only from 2013 after 79 years and will publish single worldwide edition.

A new study shows that the BBC, Mashable and the New York Times have the most reach, influence and lifespan on Twitter among news organizations.

This week, a chap from York called Thomas Cook uploaded a photograph of himself and a friend standing under the Eiffel Tower to Reddit. An unremarkable event normally, but the story of how he got there is quite brilliant and goes to show how closely linked bad customer service and bad PR is in today’s digital age. Let’s just say the travel company Thomas Cook doesn’t have a sense of humour and/or the sense to smell PR opportunities. These types of PR opportunities come about once in a blue moon and it is our job to recognise and use them. I mean, can you imagine if Asda or Tesco had decided to rename Tiger Bread before us???

A brilliant example of how to deal with trolls. Bodyform have used a spoof YouTube video to respond to a message left on their Facebook wall by a disgruntled boyfriend that itself went viral. The original message was liked almost 100,000 times, so Bodyform knew they had to respond. And respond they did. The video has already racked up 2.2 million views on Youtube. Just brilliant.

The Web loves a how-to/top x post and here’s a good one with 7 simple tips to help encourage active participation on internal social media tools.

The biggest app than many people over 25 haven’t heard of: An interesting post by Benedict Evans about WhatsApp who reckons that the popular free mobile messaging service has well over 100m active users, and possible 2-300m. Skype, incidentally, has 254m monthly active users. The Guardian’s tech editor makes a great point when he says: “WhatsApp has several times more users than Instagram had when Facebook bought it for what was then $1bn. With a staff of just 35, plus outsourced development in Russia, that’s a testament to the scaling possibilities of app stores – and suggests that M&A industry is pretty much camped out in the WhatsApp offices.”

Which leads us nicely on to a phrase I’ve never come across before but find very exciting: “dark social”. Putting that in a slightly less geeky way: most sharing is done via closed social networks like email and IM that are difficult to measure. The proof? The Atlantic found that according to new data on many media sites, 69% of social referrals came from dark social. 20% came from Facebook.

People often ask me about why I use Twitter. I usually respond by saying something along the lines of ‘it’s like a personal news wire that has something interesting, funny, fascinating and most importantly new for me’ (also, it’s where I get most of the stuff for these bits and bytes). But I think I’ll add this great new definition from Twitter CEO Dick Costolo: “the most powerful feature of Twitter is the way it can show us what others watching the same event are thinking.”

And finally: the most outrageous way to share a coke.

Digital Corporate Affairs – weekly bits and bytes

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An interesting, if somewhat philosophical post on “Citizen Renaissance” about the clinch that PR (‘those who offer the humanity’) and Marketing (‘those who offer the maths’) finds itself in due to this whole social media/digital revolution thing. Written by Robert Phillips, CEO of Edelman EMEA, this is well worth it and shows what role corporate affairs teams should be playing against this backdrop of the digital revolution: to be a link between HR teams to abolish the false lines between external and internal comms as employees (regular people) become the first line of corporate and brand attack and defence. This is a higher ground that PR firms can happily occupy in order to best face the challenges brought on by the new world order, in which Social Advocates, Employee Activists and Citizen Consumers will drive the reforming agenda.

Magnus Ohlsson, founder of Swedish retail management firm MORM, has posted an excellent presentation about the trends that are changing the retail world on his blog Retailomania. Survival is not about surviving the next season. The ability to adapt products, costs, business models and just about everything else is crucial to survival in a global marketplace. The presentation features a number of global trends that impact retailers everywhere – from the financial crisis to social media to data tracking – and is well worth the browse.

When Tim O’Reilly blogs, it’s usually a good idea to make a cuppa and read what he has to say. In a fantastic post about social media marketing, he posits that the secret of promotion in the age of social media isn’t to promote yourself. Rather, it is about promote others. O’Reilly argues that success comes when your success depends on the success of your customers, your suppliers, and – here’s the clincher – when you spend more of your time thinking about them than about yourself. A long, but worthwhile read.

Facebook has started testing a feature called “Collections” that will help retailers share their products on the social network – and for the first time allow users to click through and buy products through Facebook.

Here’s an interesting Twitter infographic providing an overview for 2012.

And finally: you know how we are ‘crowd reviewing’ our 20 by 20 strategy? Well, there’s good crowd sourcing like that, and then there’s ‘He Texted’. This is a site where women ‘crowd analyse’ the text messages they receive from potential suitors. It’s simple: 1. Women send in the text messages from potential mates to try and crack the digital code that men use to lure/avoid them. 2. Readers can vote—he’s “into you” or “not into you” or “the verdict is still out”. The mind boggles.

Digital Corporate Affairs – weekly bits and bytes

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A must read post from econsultancy about how to avoid social media fragmentation. Just go. Read it now.

Presidential elections in the US are only weeks away and we’ve had our first debate between Obama and Romney. There seemed a collective annoyance at the distinct lack of gaffs from the Republican candidate – surely his campaign could not have been a calculated attempt at underselling him for the past two years? I did come across this great article (or 7 minute recording if you don’t want to read the article) on NPR about how politicians ‘pivot’ from a question to a key message they have been briefed to get out. Important to keep in mind for your next interview and also fascinating to read how far an interviewee can pivot before the audience picks up on it.

It was the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall this week and to honour it, The Times’ paywall – while not completely torn down – now allows for Google to index articles. This has resulted in speculation that Murdoch is getting ready to offload the paper.

The Guardian, being the Guardian, is aghast at the ratio of PRs to journos. Apparently there’s too many spin doctors and not enough hacks and we’re on the brink of anarchy.

In a move that will have PRs and marketers frothing at the mouth, Twitter is to team up with Nielsen to measure brand impact on Twitter for the first time. The new collaboration with will see the introduction of brand surveys on Twitter for the first time. Did you hear that? SURVEYS! So we can produce more stories about how women buy their men their underpants. Yes. I am still outraged by that story.

Ever wanted to know what the hell ‘bounce rate’, ‘impressions’, or ‘MT’ mean? Here’s a handy glossary to get you up to speed in for your next lingo bingo session.

Clever stuff from Gucci who’ve unveiled a pinnable banner ad and from Kellogg’s who opened a pop-up shop in Soho where you paid by tweeting about the product, in this case the newly launched Special K Cracker Crisps.

Facebook hit 1 BILLION active users this week (channelling Dr. Evil here) and what did they do to celebrate? They launched the worst brand campaign ever.

American Express conducted a global study called the 2012 Global Customer Service Barometer. Interestingly (and not unlike what we see for Sainsbury’s), social media is still small for consumers seeking a customer service response. Only 17% of consumers use it in the US – less than 5% of our customer service interactions are on social. But when this small number do use social media the impact is significant. For example, over 80% of customers who used received bad customer service on social media did not complete their intended purchase. Conversely, almost every other customer who experiences positive customer service via social media tells their friends.

And finally: we #LoveUglyFruitAndVeg. Why? Find out on Judith Batchelar’s blog.