In days gone by, you would have pupils trawl through the phonebook to get your details and phone you up, annoying you – now they do it on social media instead, forcing teachers to use locked accounts or not be on platforms for fear of what is said if they engage with pupils.

And now, along comes this idea that teachers should provide out of hours support via social media to pupils – and the NASUWT union, along with Dumfries and Galloway Council want to stop this from happening.

Which is wrong, because you know what? It’s a bloody brilliant idea. For everyone concerned – teachers, pupils, the country.

Pupils struggle with homework, that’s pretty much a universal fact. Not all the time and not all the pupils, but many do struggle from time to time. And parents can’t always help because it could be a topic they don’t know, the parent isn’t well educated or there’s only one parent present and they don’t have time to help due to other concerns. So what’s the child to do? Just go daft?

But what if teachers went online for a set period of time – say 6-7pm or 7-8pm – and said to pupils (for example): “OK, I’ll be on the school’s Facebook page (or even on the GLOW network if it has a forum style facility) to answer any questions. I won’t give you the answers but I’ll give you pointers and help. If I can’t help, perhaps another pupil can help if they are online.” Or if it’s a small group, set up a Hangout on Google+ and chat to a group of up to 10 pupils, solving their issues.

Who wins here? Everyone – the pupils not only get help with their homework but they are also brushing up on their ICT skills, using technology and social media to engage. For the teachers, pupils are getting their homework done which aids with less disruption during classtimes and helps keep everyone closer to the same pace. The teacher and pupils are also getting to build up a positive relationship, which hopefully increases good behaviour and so on. Who knows, the Scottish Government may even increase funding for wireless and IT access in Scotland on the back of it.

But why should teachers do this out of hours. Well, children are doing stuff out of hours aren’t they – and they aren’t getting paid to do homework. Aside from that (and I appreciate that teachers already have an out of hours workload) it’s using social media the same way businesses are having to – you go online and engage when your audience is online and engaging.

But surely teachers shouldn’t have to befriend/like/follow their pupils – teachers don’t want pupils to see their postings and updates – some of which may be of a more adult nature than a pupil should see.

That’s a fair point and there’s a fairly radical solution to that (spot the sarcasm) – create a second account or use something work-only like GLOW. That or just point out you’ll only answer homework questions at certain times just as some businesses only operate on social media during certain hours of the working day.

Aside from homework, this also gives pupils a place and a chance to confide in teachers in issues that are bothering them and they need some support/help with. Even better – unlike a spoken conversation – there’s a record trail of what has been said – by whom and when.

I can’t see a downside to this – yes, it’s a wee bit more work for teachers, but most of us are having to do a wee bit more workload these days – but I fully expect that come the weekend, the union and the council will get full backing and this great idea will be shot down.

And it won’t just be the pupils who are losers in the long run.

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And you know what? For a lot of businesses, screw that potential.The average digital or social media strategist – as well as those in the trenches – has busy days – especially the further you get away from the land of San Francisco and businesses are more sceptical about platforms and online engagement (in other words: Scotland) – convincing people to even be on the big hitters – a blog, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter – can be an effort and then getting the content for them is another battle.

To go to clients/customers/the C-suite and say “here’s another platform with a lot of potential” is going to cause no end of grief in the following ways:

• Being asked to develop a strategy for it (yes, I know you don’t always need a strategy but you can’t go to the boss and say “we need to do this because it is cool”)
• Find the content, share the content
• Build the relationships online

There’s a lot of new – or twists on old ideas (like Pinterest) – platforms out there and if you were to try and build them all up – because of the potential – then you would be exhausted. Equally, your bosses would get fed up really quick with you running to them all the time. They would also get fed up when they found out how much they were spending on sites with potential that had failed/gone bust/failed to attract a decent sized audience.

Ah, but you say, the difference is that Pinterest has proven potential. It’s been getting talked about for a few months now. Yeah, so did Quora. There’s been many a platform with potential.

Every sentence has the potential to be one that makes us laugh or cry. Most don’t. Is that failed potential?

Every baby is a potential president or astronaut, but there’s been more murderers than presidents. Is that failed potential?

The point is this – not everything gets to realise its potential. Sometimes it’s bad luck, sometimes it’s a product ahead of its time, sometimes it’s just the wrong idea in the wrong place.

But from a business point of view, here’s what matters. The bosses want to know where their money and staff’s time is best spent. If Facebook didn’t have 902million active users you think as many businesses would want on it? No.

In a recessionary marketing era – like right now – bosses want to spend their money on places that will get them the best results. Do you think that’s on a site with potential or a site that’s realised like Facebook or Twitter or blogs?

So potential is nice but most businesses prefer to deal in more concrete terms. And if Pinterest does realise the potential that Jeanne thinks it has, you can bet businesses will go to it. And will people care that they were late to the Pinterest party? No. Just as people don’t care about when companies started blogging, tweeting, doing video or Facebook. So why bother taking the punt on the potential when you can spend time/money on the platforms known to deliver?

Or should we always take the punt on potential?

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And it just got better for people in Scotland…

I’ve always maintained that in terms of information design/sharing, it’s very hard to beat a well done newspaper page – there’s lots of information at your eyeballs without having to click on anything – a glimpse tells you all you need to know. That’s why it has always baffled me that so many newspapers seem hell-bent on having terrible websites or apps that make it hard to read.

PressReader solves that problem by giving you a choice – the newspaper as it looks in the physical world or just a text dump. I love it because every morning it automatically downloads a bunch of papers for me, including the P&J, Herald, Scotsman and a few English titles. Later in the day, it downloads the evening titles for me and once a week it downloads the likes of Marketing for me.

(And as I say, it does all this for less than £20 a month – and if I had time I could download all 2,100 titles from across the globe every day – for under £20).

For me it works for two reasons: one – it’s really hard to get a same-day Evening Express or Evening Telegraph in Glasgow, so this lets me keep up to date with what’s going on (contratry to popular belief, not everything makes it social media networks yet). Similarly, I can see what’s happening in certain trade sectors – The Engineer is on there for example.

Ultimately, all it is, is a really slick distribution app. But it’s not perfect as it depends on the publishers putting titles on it. And in the UK, for a long time, that meant you just got the national – English – edition and for some, that was a deal breaker.

But over the last week that seems to have changed as the Scotland on Sunday, the Scottish Daily Mail and the Scottish Mail on Sunday have all been added. Why is this relevant for Scottish PR/social media types?

Well let’s have a look…

If I wanted to buy every day/weekly a decent representation of the Scottish/UK media…

• Herald
• Scotsman
• Press and Journal
• Dundee Courier
• Evening Times
• Evening Express
• Scottish Daily Mail

UK

• Guardian
• Daily Express
• Independent

(The Evening News still isn’t on it)

Let’s assume that each paper costs 50p (I have no idea what a paper costs these days) – that’s £5 a day, £30 a week, £120 a month – before you even look at the Sundays.

Or £20 a month. And you can look at other papers too, free of charge.

Even if you had to buy an iPad/Android tablet, it pays for itself within months by the savings on newspapers.

But in an age of apps should newspapers be on PressReader?

Yes (and not just because it suits me). Newspapers – if they want to survive in any form – have to grasp one simple fact: they go where the readers are and that’s a multiplatform future. You can have your app and your website, but you should also have audio versions for hard of hearing, be on PressReader for the traditionalists and so on. One product on many platforms.

Why should social media types care?

It’s obvious for PRs that they need to still monitor the daily, traditional press but why should social media types care? Quite simply because they will get some fantastic ideas for content from the papers, they’ll see what’s being discussed that day, what matters, what’s relevant. And on top of that, they’ll be getting informed, which is no bad thing.

Any downsides?

Two. It has a search-like function (kind of like Google Alerts) but in all honesty, it’s not that great and rarely works as advertised. The bigger issue is the fact that not everyone is on it – the Mirror titles including the Daily Record aren’t there, neither are the News International titles.

But in a recession where everyone is looking to save costs (and waste – many PR offices are over-run with old papers), to me PressReader looks like a simple way of saving a four figure sum each year.

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Sadly, that’s still the attitude by so many which is why I’m applauding what Ed Staite did with The Sunday Times over the last few days…

For those not sure what happened, The Sunday Times set up an undercover interview with Crisis Media chap Ed Staite, trying to see if he would promise access to a minister – perhaps even George Osborne – in return for cash, something that is considered a no-no (though I think it mistakes access for influence, but that’s an argument for another day).

Anyway, obviously that’s not something that people just say “Yeah, give me £250K and I’ll give you George,” so journalists have to act like fake companies. It’s a well-known trick, did similar myself back in the day when I was a journalist (at a different level admittedly).

Anyway, Ed hears on Friday night that the Sunday Times is going to run something, so what does he do? Panic? No. Ignore it and hope it goes away? No. He gets onto the web and publishes everything on his blog – the full pitch/proposal that he offers and his impression of how the meeting went.

The Sunday Times disagree with what he says but the sting was taken well and truly out of their story – Ed had more than 24 hours to get his side out there, people online spread it and The Sunday Times comebacks were, frankly, pathetic.

What Ed did Right:

1. He had a blog and he used it. He put everything out there, explaining it from his point of view
2. He didn’t put his head in the sand
3. He used his other networks like Twitter to spread the story
4. People who have read his blog and follow him on Twitter – the followers he had built up from spending time online – came to his defence, spread his message
5. Replied quickly and immediately
6. His Iain Dale interview plays him up as one small sole trader fighting against a big corporation. Nice touch.

In all honesty, all The Sunday Times has done here is give Ed Staites a fantastic advert into how good his crisis comms services are. Now any PR/SocMed/Comms expert worth their salt would have done the same but the fact that so many don’t is what makes this so impressive.

But – as one person said – let’s assume Ed Staite is protesting too much (I don’t think he is – heck, he hasn’t even taken out Google ads on his name), what can The Sunday Times do to try and win this one:

Where the Sunday Times Failed

As I say above, this has turned into nothing but a great advert for Ed Staite. If I was him, I’d take an advert out in next week’s Sunday Times.

(Quick disclaimers: I’ve worked for the ST in the past as a freelance journalist, I don’t subscribe to The Sunday Times – I refuse to do so until the app includes the Scottish edition – and I live in Scotland where people would rather be called a bastard than a Conservative, so I’m not coming at this from any bias.)

Some other good reading/listening on this can be found at Peter Sigrist’s site and Iain Dale’s audio chat.

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1. Don’t lose sleep over “is social media marketing, PR, customer engagement or sales?” It’s all of them.
2. Reach out to other like-minded tweeters via the likes of wefollow, twellow and twellowhood
3. In the case of The Clothes Tree make strong efforts with the likes of mummy and daddy bloggers (on their blogs, Twitter and Facebook), leave comments.
4. Make sure your blog link works. You don’t need to craft screeds of original material – but how about even a round-up of interesting – and relevant blog links you’ve seen that week? Make that your Friday update.
5. Another weekly update is to point out what the most popular/looked at items are each week – “10 most popular boy’s clothes” and so on.
6. It also screams Pinterest to me – pictures of clothing? Winner. And tie it into Facebook and Twitter networks.
7. Ensure all your social media efforts are on business cards, websites and so on.
8. Try and update your social networks at least once a day – and at the optimum time for each network.
9. If blogging regularly, try and have a theme for each day – and be consistent.
10. Go follow everyone on Twitter that your competition follows. Also monitor what’s said to them and see if there’s opportunities.
11. On Facebook, get ready to fill out the Timeline with information that will help people connect and empathise with you.
12. Tell your story. The Clothes Tree Twitter stream is full of people talking about Mhairi’s tale. Use that to your advantage (If you’re Mhairi – other people need to find their own story).
13. Don’t just talk about clothes. Feel free to reach out and talk about tangentially related items. Or staff.
14. Don’t go overboard in spending hours on this. For most small businesses, a strong and healthy social media presence can be built an hour a day (with check-ins at other points).
15. When getting others to reference you online, try and get them to link to you with your preferred SEO phrases and not just the name of your shop.

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While there will be the usual rush and pressure on firms to go and buy either industry level domains like whisky.scot or company names like myfirm.scot thinking that they need to safeguard their name against squatters or get a competitive advantage on others.

The truth is it will gain them no benefit in the long run unless they actively do something useful with the website – and then it’s just another website. Even Google has pointed out that people grabbing new gTLDs for SEO benefit won’t see much, if any, of a boost.

Also, at the end of the day – and there are those who disagree – a .com is still the king. Yes, others sell well, but there’s still something incredibly authoritative looking about the .com in my opinion – as I said in Feb 2011.

If you’ve got the spare cash, sure throw it on some websites and new domains. But you could probably do more with that cash investing in what you already have, though some of the new URLs may be nice for stunts.

In closing, .scot and so on are nice ideas but no one should be panicking this morning about it.

UPDATE: To get the ball rolling on this will cost – before staffing, hardware, etc – just under £117,000. By the time you add in everything, you could be looking at costs of up to £500,000. Secondly – as a few people have asked – I’m very pro-independence and while it’s a nice idea, I really don’t see any benefits to this. Companies will still chase .com names, even in a standalone Scotland.

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Google desperately on 24-hour emergency veterinary Toronto: get a hit down, click (idiots, what kind of emergency clinic doesn’t have phone number and address on the splash page where’s the phone number?)

It’s great we see websites with email, Twitter, Facebook and other contact details but always keep in mind function – in this case, it’s more likely that people will pick up the phone in an emergency so make sure people can contact you and find you easily.

As I’ve said in training courses, sometimes the best thing you can do is think like a punter.

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Go to a social media training course or have someone present a social media plan to you and the odds are it will tick the following boxes:

• Strategy
• Staff policies
• Blogging
• Twitter
• Facebook
• LinkedIn
• Mobile/location
• YouTube/video/podcasting
• ROI

Even now in Scotland, where companies are afraid to tread in digital engagement, you could say that’s a good covering of the basics. It’s a solid foundation.

But there’s so much more – you could argue sharing content on Slideshare and Prezi is being social, there’s Instagram, Pinterest, Path, Google+ and that’s just the platforms off the top of my head. Path’s usage is going through the roof, Pinterest is going great guns, Instagram has been a phenomenon (even moreso when you consider it’s only available on iOS).

But what does this mean for social media and PR/marketing agencies? What about businesses?

Businesses, don’t panic

If a business hasn’t jumped into using social media yet, then there’s no need to panic. As with all companies, start out slow – pick out one or two platforms that you want to use/that your customer base is already on. As you get comfortable with those, expand into other ones you want to use and remember, don’t be afraid to experiment.

PR/Marketing agencies, panic

Yes, this fragmentation is probably only going to continue which means we need better monitoring tools, more time to digest and analyse data and so on – all without any increase in client fees probably. It makes it vital that you know exactly why your brands are on each platform and that they are playing to their strengths. (And if you’re a PR firm that just says you know social media (you know who you are – you probably claim social media is about big numbers) then you’re hosed. But that’s good, because you should be sticking to what you’re good at to, so get back to calling reporters and asking if they got the press release.)

The Future

It may well be that web3.0 won’t be social search as many seem to believe but an age of smaller communities – some gathered around forums, but others gathered around apps and specialised sites. Facebook may well remain top for a while yet but just as Coronation Street got used to declining viewer figures, so will Facebook. Advertisers will be in for a hell of a time though so they better enjoy Facebook while they can.

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Whyte has issued a statement that hasn’t done anyone any favours and we’ll explain why in a moment. But let’s look at the statement (as seen on ScotZine):

“In the most lurid terms, the Record accuses the Club’s management and, specifically me, of using supporters’ money to help fund the buy-out of Rangers. Not true. The Club is accused of not paying £5million in VAT. Not true.

“I can categorically assure supporters that when I launched a takeover bid for the Club it was funded entirely from one of my companies and that was demonstrated clearly to the satisfaction of the previous owner, Lloyds Banking Group and professional advisers.

WHAT WHYTE SHOULD HAVE SAID #1

If the club has paid the £5million bill then show a piece of proof – a JPG of some kind with any sensitive details blacked out.

He should also have stated which company of his funded the purchase.

A statement from Lloyds would have been good too.

It goes on…

“What is true is that Rangers, like many other clubs, has a financing arrangement in place with a company called Ticketus which enables the Club to receive revenue from a portion of season ticket sales in advance.

WHAT WHYTE SHOULD HAVE SAID #2

He should have named the other clubs that do this. Would have given the scheme more credibility. After all, if Man Utd, Liverpool and others do it, it must be OK mustn’t it? Ticketus should also have been backing Rangers up with a statement of support.

And then…

“This is a perfectly straightforward way of raising working capital for the Club. Money from season ticket sales goes directly to the Club and is used for the Club’s operations and that remains the case. In effect, all this financing arrangement does is release the revenue to the Club earlier.”

WHAT WHYTE SHOULD HAVE SAID #3

He should explain exactly what the deal is. There’s no need to but he’s currently on the defensive. Giving all the detail gets him back on a better footing, it shows there is nothing to hide (and I’m not saying there is)but the more open he can be, the better.

WHY WHYTE NEEDS TO SAY & DO MORE

Some – including those close to Whyte – may be wondering why he has to give so much information. Why can’t they just put out a normal statement and leave it at that. Quite a few reasons:

He’s being accused of various things. By being transparent and offering factual information he’s showing that he’s completely above board and being open. Being open builds trust.

Providing everything you can will also build allies and experts can look at the material provided and go “he’s completely above board, this is all legit, the Daily Record is full of nonsense.” There are Rangers fans who are lawyers, accountants, heads of big businesses who would analyse this stuff and endorse it, giving Whyte even more credibility. What businesses must never forget is that in a 2.0 age, there are people out there cleverer than you and they can make you or break you in their analysis of what you put out.

Putting out more information also heads off the second set of questions – naming the businesses and sums involved.

It would also give him a platform from which to go on the offensive. Every time someone tweeted or blogged a negative comment, his team could fire back with “See what we said in this link. We answered your point.”

He should also have put this out as a video statement and audio. And then followed up every few hours with more video and audio updated.

BUT IT’S ABOUT MORE THAN THE PRESS RELEASE

That’s only the start. Giving all the information in one place – in this case the news site of Rangers FC – is just the start. There should be people out there hitting every tweet, every blog post, every Facebook update going “here are the facts” and setting the record straight. 

THIS ISN’T JUST FOR FOOTBALL

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Now, some may scoff but the smart, switched-on operator will be seeing plenty of potential in this sort of thing. Press releases in games? Perhaps as historical documents? We may not be too far off from that. There’s a lot of ways the canny PR or social media type could get coverage this way.

Of course, most will stick to just calling the news desks of the declining traditional press and ask: “Did you get my press release? What edition will it be in?”

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