Archive for Social Media

Social Medialympics

13 August 2012 Rachel News, Opinion, Social Media One comment

Social media joined the Olympics this year. We may not have seen a Tweeting competition; however we did see the Games shared over social networking faster than the news sites could manage.

Unfortunately I did not manage to watch as much of the Olympics as I would have liked, but not at one point did I feel I missed out on an important achievement. I felt delight as Mo Farrah got his double gold, I felt the pain as Rebecca Adlington missed out on the medal she wanted and I shared the wonder as Usain Bolt showed the world just how amazing he was. I may not have watched it, but I definitely did not miss out. As one Olympics played out on our screens, another could be seen developing on our mobile phones, tablets and computers.

My Olympic view

I was able to have my own Olympic experience as I went to watch the Women’s Hockey on the first Sunday of the Games. We were actively encouraged to participate in the social discussion through the use of hashtags on Twitter.

Reading through the Sunday Times this morning, there was a report on Olympic sponsors using social media during the Games. This should come as little surprise to any of us, basic marketing comms theory teaches us that sponsorship requires a communication campaign to support it and make it truly effective. Common sense probably tells us those texts are unnecessary! Having paid millions to affiliate their names with the five rings, it would make little sense to try and disguise this association for many of the companies.

Social media has also been bad, we’ve seen Tom Daley through Twitter. However this is something we have grown to expect. Social media has been known to give people too much freedom to target people. It also lets people hear the criticism they don’t want to hear and we don’t necessary know how to take that.

It seems quite sad that the Olympics has already been and gone, but I loved it this year. I loved being able to keep track by Twitter, how about you?

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Social media: not just for the young

12 August 2012 Rachel Communications, Featured, Opinion, Social Media One comment
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The speed and ferocity with which social media has adopted itself into the business world was quite shocking. Many organisations did not expect it, many organisations are still only just picking it up and plenty of organisations are still getting it wrong. One place that a lot get it wrong is through thinking that because the young are on it that they know how to use it. There is a huge difference between having a personal social media profile and being able to run a tactical marketing campaign using Twitter or Facebook.

During placements and work experience I have frequently been asked for ideas about using social media and while I hope not to have let down my generation, I also think it is important to acknowledge that this is not a tool exclusive to those born post 1985.

Social media may work differently to other forms of marketing communication tools, it moves quicker and allows direct audience reactions, but to harness its potential it still should be approached with the appropriate business skills. The reality is these business skills are rarely natural and usually require education and experience. We know younger people have a tendency to feel comfortable with social media, but we need to teach them how to use this comfort to create effective results, instead of expecting them to know.

This is not to say we should underestimate the power of a childhood growing up with technology. While I was at school I remember the use of blackboards, the implementation of an ICT lab when I was well into my primary education and we still used old school projectors even in the later half of my secondary education. This is different for my sister, 10 years my junior. The world I knew was one of technology being adopted, the world she knows is of that technology being enhanced. While I consider myself to have very strong computer and internet skills, I have to accept that my sister, who has never known life without a computer or without the internet at her finger tips, will grow up with the potential to be more competent than me. And this is only in 10 years. Imagine how these 10 years will look like in the workplace.

Younger people can bring a wealth of knowledge about the benefits of social media in the workplace, and I don’t mean to undervalue that at all, all I wish to reiterate is the importance of having experienced strategic knowledge to back up social media use.

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Making a dog’s dinner of blogger relations

16 June 2012 Rachel News, Social Media No comments
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What happens when you get blogger relations completely wrong? You may find yourself trending on Twitter. At least that was the case for Argyll and Bute Council when they asked 9 year old blogger Martha Payne to stop taking photographs of her school dinners, fearing that they were a misrepresentation of their services.

While Martha has since been allowed to continue taking pictures for her blog, this story offers up some important lessons for anyone dealing with blogs.

1) Never underestimate the power of blogging

Blogs continue to be on the up, they provide people with a perception of word-of-mouth information and recommendations that work to our preferences. It is still in marketing terms a relatively new form of communication, having only gained popularity in the last decade or so, and as a result many people still do not understand its power and how to use it.To gain perspective on its power let’s look at a few statistics:

  • 4 out of 5 internet users visit social networks and blogs (The Social Skinny)
  • 61% of social media are willing to give feedback on brands or products (Salesforce)
  • And finally, one 9 year old schoolgirl from Scotland has raised £45,889.46 through her blog (Never Seconds)

If numbers the don’t convince you, the final one should. Through the buzz around her blog Martha has had over 4,264,492 views (a count that was increasing rapidly when I last looked) but more impressively raised enough money to feed over 5,000 in poor countries. Now that’s impressive.

Not all blogs have gain the same visibility as Martha’s, but this does not mean they should be underestimated. Many blogs develop small, but loyal followers and all have the potential to hold influence over your potential public.

2) Do not try and hush a problem away

The local council felt that Martha’s blog misrepresented the meals they were serving, their solutions appears to have been to try and get rid of the problem by telling Martha she could not take photos. Did this work? Martha’s blog ended up on international news websites, trended on Twitter and had more page views than most blogs have in their lifetimes. Sometimes trying to hush a problem is the worst thing you can do. This is where effective blogger relations come in handy. There are many positive examples littering the web showing companies who have engaged with bloggers after negative reviews and salvaged their reputations.

Blogger relations is an area of growing importance, and one which I have barely scratched the surface of here. Done correctly and it has the ability to build important relationships with customers, done badly and it could be disastrous!

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Are you following me?

20 April 2012 Rachel Blogging, Social Media No comments

I love to blog. However, there are times of year when I have to neglect this hobby of mine, such as exam season. Do not worry, I am still around, and while I am not in the library you will probably still find me micro-blogging, pinning and tweeting. So, are you following me?

Click the pictures or titles for links to my profiles.

Linkedin

Follow my professional progress and read about how I am developing my skills on my career journey. I prefer to connect with people I either know or with whom I am in contact.

Twitter

Ask my friends and they will tell you I am quite the Twitter addict! I check the site regularly and like to join the conversation. Follow me for a bit of a chat!

 

Tumblr

Sorry to disappoint but the pirate image is a bit misleading. Rather than share my travels across the seven seas I use Tumblr to share all the interesting things I consider too big for Twitter but too small for my blog. Expect a lot of videos about PR campaigns, sports or just really cool stuff! I am quite new to tumblr’ing so would love to find new accounts for me to follow, sharing equally cool stuff!

 

Goodreads

I joined Goodreads in the hope it would encourage me to read more books and start reviewing them more often. So far, my progress is slow, but I would love to connect with you and see what books you are rating and recommending!

 

 

Pinterest

Following the Pinterest hype we experienced earlier this year I jumped on the bandwagon. I did not expect to enjoy it so much, but I found I loved pinning and repinning images. Follow my pins to see brilliant images of sports, fashion, architecture and the odd social media infographic.

 

Google Plus

I will be honest with you, I am still unsure of the role Google Plus will play in my life. However, I think we should not be hasty and dismiss it too soon. Feel free to connect with me over Google Plus and perhaps we can work out its purpose together!

 

 

Undoubtedly I will be back to my blogging as soon as my deadlines pass, so please remember to follow this blog! In the meantime come and join me on other social media platforms. Through sharing and interacting maybe we could all learn something new!

bloglovin

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Life without Facebook

12 April 2012 Rachel Social Media 2 comments
Facebook Notifications Feed

Facebook Notifications Feed (Photo credit: dannysullivan)

I’ll Facebook you. When a brand name migrates into a verb you realise that it has made its impact. Very few would argue that Facebook has not made an impact, in fact many consider that it has revolutionised the way we communicate. It has only been with us since 2004, and I would guess the majority of us joined post 2007/8, yet it has become an integral part of our lives, or has it?

I wanted to consider the impact Facebook has had on my life. I am a heavy user, according to my browser Facebook is my number one most visited site. Notifications come straight to my phone, and I still regularly visit the mobile site. I did consider as an experiment deactivating my Facebook account for a while, but I realised that I could not do this. Why? What has Facebook done to have become so vital to me? There are three main reasons:

  1. In Summer I am starting a new job in a new town I do not know. The easiest way for me to connect with new people I meet is by Facebook. It is also the easiest way to keep in touch with family and friends when I move away.
  2. I am active in my sports team (I have written a lot about it here). As a group we communicate entirely by Facebook, we have an emailing list, but we do not not use it, why? Because Facebook has proved itself a more reliable tool. I lose Facebook and I lose this connection.
  3. I have friends and family who I solely contact by Facebook. They live over the world, sure I could get their email, but it isn’t likely. Facebook has become the easiest way to communicate with people.

Why is it so important to us? Facebook took an important part of our lives and digitalised it. We are social creatures, we live to connect with other people, we love to gain information. Facebook put this online, made it easier for us to interact with our friends and acquaintances. Quickly we integrated this into our lives, because it made life more convenient.

Who can predict the future of Facebook, indeed I think I once predicted its downfall on this blog, which did not materialise. It continues to keep going! Perhaps one day the Facebook babies of the world, the ones who we have actually watched from the womb to birth and as they grow up, perhaps they will one day find themselves Facebooking!

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Smart Car drives Twitter

11 April 2012 Rachel Communications, Social Media No comments

I saw this video on The Next Web. It demonstrates a fun and clever use of Twitter as a tool for promotion.

Have you seen any other great and interesting uses of Twitter?

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What is influence?

26 March 2012 Rachel Social Media 2 comments
Blue question mark

Blue question mark (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In the past 10 years the world of Digital PR has grown at a frantic pace. It is now widely accepted that being online is not just the sign of a modern, innovative organisation, but a necessity for life in the modern world. The thing is, we are able to understand the importance of being online, but otherwise, we do not really understand how digital PR works.

I think this is brilliantly demonstrated through Michael White’s post on Facebook. Another important area which suffers from much confusion is measuring online influence. Undoubtedly there are loads of benefits to being influential online, from raised awareness of your cause, to increasing online sales. From a student perspective, having online influence can be a good way to gain opportunities and begin working life at an advantage.

How can we measure influence? Influence is subjective, it depends upon a combination of audiences, platforms and messages. There are a number of services available which will measure your online influence including Klout, PeerIndex and Kred. Each one taking your online activity and interactions then grading them according to their own specifications, the results is a number which represents your online influence. How accurate is it though?

Let us look at Social Student, a list of the most influential PR students in the UK compiled by Richard Bailey at Behind the Spin. The list uses PeerIndex and Klout in order to determine the influence of all active British PR students on Twitter. After a few shakey weeks trying to establish the list, it soon took a good shape and now I would say the list is a pretty decent representation of active Tweeting students. In this case you could say that measuring influence has been successful. It is important to note that this should not be the only form of measuring influence, there will be plenty of future PR stars who are active on Twitter but do not feature on the list.

The thing is, while Klout and PeerIndex can offer a guide to influence it is widely accepted that they cannot measure it. A post on Mashable defines influence at:

Influence = (Personal Brand * Knowledge * Trust2)

It explains that this can be measured through engagement, incoming links, incoming traffic, connections, recommendations etc. This goes back to the idea of systems like Klout and PeerIndex being able to measure your influence.

Brian Solis recently published a report on digital influence (available here) in which he claims that sites such as Klout and PeerIndex do not measure influence, but in fact they measure the individual’s capacity to influence. Influence is subjective and does rely on the nature of people, which is something that is hard, to impossible to program a system to measure. However the sites do show how influential a person is able to be, a very useful piece of data. If you realised you had the capacity to be influential, would you not take advantage of it?

The rising importance of digital influence will continue to shape the online world, and we are certain to see more, new and improved influence measuring tools. How do you think we can measure influence?

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Save the Hobbit

16 March 2012 Rachel News, Social Media 3 comments

I visited the Hobbit in Southampton some years ago, and while the night itself is hazy (not necessarily as a result of alcohol, rather the length of time that has since elapsed), the place made its impression on me and I was enchanted. So, when I heard that the pub was facing legal action from the Saul Zaentz Company, a Hollywood company holding the rights to many of  Tolkien’s works, I was as shocked as many of the other fans of the pub were. They were being to asked, or should I say told, to rebrand an image they have had for 20 years, an image key to the identity of the pub.

The support for the Hobbit has been remarkable, from almost 50,000 fans on their Facebook, over 6,000 on their Twitter and several celebrity supporters including Gandalf (or Sir Ian Mckellen to non-middle earthians) and Stephen Fry.

According to reports the Saul Zaentz Company is willing to offer a licensing agreement to the pub. However the campaign clearly is not over according to their own page.

It seems that this whole thing could turn out to be advantageous to the pub, as long as they are able to retain their name. With new support from huge celebrities and new UK/Worldwide coverage, they could see themselves benefit from a boost to business, particularly with the release of the Hobbit film. As a one-time customer who fell slightly in love with the place I completely support the success of this campaign and I hope that the hobbit succeeds versus the evil of Mordor! Now excuse me as I start a 12hour LOTR marathon!

Update:

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How to follow up #Kony2012

14 March 2012 Rachel Communications, News, Social Media 8 comments

Only last week #Kony2012 took over Twitter. One video created the single biggest response that I personally have ever seen from the online world, so strong that there were claims that this was an example of social media’s power to change the world.

A week later it is no longer trending on Twitter, but people are still talking about Kony. If I was in charge of the campaign, this is what I would be doing now.

Follow up on the original hype

With over 72 million views on the original Youtube video it is clear that Kony 2012 grabbed the world’s interest. Facebook, Youtube and Twitter all went crazy with reaction to the video, it sparked passion from its audience and left millions of people wanting to help make a difference. A week later, people are still interested, the original video gained their interest but it is important to follow that up, continue to send information to those people interested about the campaign and what they can do to help. Once you have got their attention, make sure you use it!

Respond to the critics

With the buzz caused by the video came many critics, with claims of Kony 2012 being irrelevant, out of date and the work of privileged foreigners, including critics from Uganda. One of the best criticism, or at least one of the most relatable ones, I read was not directed at the #Kony2012 campaign but at the earlier work of Invisible Children but remains relevant, it came from Ilto blog:

“Imagine that today you heard about what happened in NYC and Washington DC on September 11, 2001 for the first time. You were shown a video of footage from that day. You saw the planes hit the towers, you heard President Bush’s address, you saw the Pentagon wreckage, you watch in horror as you see people plunge to their death, jumping from the burning towers. Now imagine that you are inspired by this disaster. You want to something to help. What if you went to NYC today, expecting to see piles of rubble to clean up? What if you went, expecting that there would be thousands of people in the streets crying, looking for loved ones? But what would happen when you arrived and discovered that there was none of this, but a whole host of other problems?”

Some people were convinced by the story, but wanted to know how they expected social media support to help the issue. People also questioned what was happening with the money!

The best way to respond to this is through being open and honest with the interested publics, and while researching this post I found that Invisible Children had done just that, they created a brilliant video full of information about how the organisation works.

Thank you, KONY 2012 Supporters from INVISIBLE CHILDREN on Vimeo.

This video is a brilliant PR response to the criticism and I think it is important to continue sharing this information with interested publics.

Continue hype over event

An important part of the campaign was the Cover the Night event, the Leeds event alone has 7,500 confirmed attendees, now it will be interesting to see how this turns out. A lot of people signed up in the full buzz of the campaign, but this event has the potential to be an important and exciting part of their campaign. I would work to continue to create a buzz around the event to keep people interested in the whole campaign.

From a strategic point of view, this campaign is in a brilliant position and they seem to be doing everything right at the moment. As long as they continue to capitalise on their current success and develop this to support their campaign then it could be an example of one of the biggest successful social media campaigns.

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Who is Kony?

7 March 2012 Rachel News, Social Media 4 comments

We can write for years about the potential of social media but every do often along comes an example which demonstrates the power and ability social media has.

We all know social media has changed modern communications. When my parents were at university they used a phone box and letters to speak to their parents. I send texts, Facebook messages and Skype my parents. I do not often read actual newspapers (should a PR student admit to this?), I get my news online, from Twitter links, newspaper website, news agencies, blogs, Facebook. Our lives have been changed by the internet.

I think social media has a lot of power, much of which we have yet to recognise and release. It relates to our need as humans to connect and helps pull down barriers caused by modern life and far away families and friends.

Last night #Kony2012 took over my Twitter feed. I had no idea what it was, where it came from, who was behind it. I had heard of child soldiers, but never of Kony, and I do not think I ever understood the reality of the situation. I am not alone, most people do not know who Kony is, what he does and who he does it to. That is the point of #Kony2012. A campaign designed to educate us about this situation and help us change it.

It took over Twitter. It took over Facebook. It took over Youtube. It took over blogs. Its popularity was such that its website crashed!

The campaign appeals to human behaviour and motivations. As a species, despite all our faults, morally we cannot accept injustice and harm to people. We want to change it and give everyone the chance of a great life. The campaign video hits people where it hurts, it is emotive, shocking and inspiring.

Let us hope that #Kony2012 does not disappear overnight like so many previous trending topics, but that the campaign’s goals are realised. That will show us the real power of social media.

Want to find out more about the campaign? Visit the website, Kony 2012.

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