The need for an organized approach to community engagement became especially apparent when we started to apply social media techniques to B2B Silicon Valley early-stage companies.  These companies lacked the large customer bases that companies like VMware or Cisco had. To compete with the larger companies, our early stage companies needed to  be more targeted in their marketing campaigns.

The map identifies four target groups within a B2B technology community:

1. customers;
2. technology enthusiasts;
3. market enthusiasts;
4. traditional media.

In order to manage our time and budget effectively, we mapped out the activities that can be applied to each group into three categories:

1. paid;
2. self-published;
3. influenced

Here’s a snapshot of an outline map:

To receive an example Community Pulse Map with example activities filled in, please send an email to info@lewispulse.com and include the words “Community Pulse Map” in the subject.

What was hot on the web this week? Get up to speed on the latest trends, news and services with some of our favorite new stories.

How Google Created Its Epic(-ish) Valentine’s Day Doodle

For Valentine’s Day, Google created one of its most ambitious Doodles yet. If you clicked on the logo on Valentine’s Day, you got to watch a one-minute animation showing the highs and lows of young love – and illustrating that Google can’t solve everything.

Michael Lipman, an animator whose past work includes Happy Tree Friends, was hired by the Doodle team to turn their animatic storyboard into a full-length animation. He noted that an animation of this nature would typically take him nine or 10 weeks – but Google gave him three.

Read more here.

If Pinterest Is The Social Network For Women, Google+ Is The Social Network For Men

With all of the talk about how Pinterest usage is skewed towards women, Google+ is apparently dominated by men, as more than two-thirds of its 90 million members are guys. This is good news for brands trying to reach a male-centric audience.

These stats should give brands an extra incentive to dive into Google+, if they haven’t already. By knowing that this social network tends to be used primarily by men, companies can share specific content with that in mind.

Read more here.

Facebook Embracing Pseudonyms, Verified Accounts and Timeline Brands

Facebook is “pulling another Twitter” and rolling out verified accounts to users with many subscribers. By verifying an account, the users will get more prominent placement in the Facebook “People to Subscribe to” suggestions.

This new system will also allow some users to use nicknames instead of their real names (Facebook already lets Lady Gaga be Lady Gaga). The person’s real name, if they go by a pseudonym, will still be listed on the about page.

Facebook is also set to release Timeline for brands later this month. The Timeline for brands pages will be consistent with the look and feel of Timeline for individual users, but won’t be an exact copy.

Read more here.

It’s pretty obvious why location-based marketing is emerging as one of the most effective techniques to bridge the gap between brands and consumers. It engages audiences based on where they are, who they are with and what they are doing.

Dean was joined on the panel by brand sponsors and marketers involved with both the London 2012 Olympic Games and 2015 Pan Am Games, with additional members joining the discussion live from Toronto! All very exciting, and it promised to be a lively debate.

The opening keynote speech from the LBMA showcased some great examples of location-based technology in action, including these campaigns for McDonalds and Starhub.

With the scene set, the panel discussion could begin. The varying perspectives provided from global brands, agency and start-ups offered a real mix in opinion as the conversation flowed around privacy issues, mobile payment, geo-location tagging, platform limitations, smart phone penetration and even games consoles.

Here’s Dean and the rest of the panel discussing the issues and ramifications of using personal data for marketing purposes.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The Challenge

No matter how advanced and intelligent location-based technology becomes, usability will be the key challenge to successfully drive adoption.

Dean explained during the discussion that “Like any of these things, in order to be successful on a mass-market scale, it’s about the technology becoming almost second nature. In the same way that you don’t have to think about the purchase or download process on iTunes or Spotify, location based marketing has to make the general public’s life that little bit easier.”

It was also agreed that there are still issues surrounding multiple devices and platforms, meaning that industry standardisation has to take place at some point

The Reality

The keynote speech had already demonstrated some excellent examples of how location-based initiatives, such as QR codes, augmented reality and geo-location tagging are being used to great effect.

The truth is, however ‘minority report’ some of these ideas may seem, they are happening, and happening now. Dean pointed out that the age of George Orwell’s 1984 is almost here – except its not governments using information to clamp down on society, but marketers using data to sell more products.

Geo-location tracking has seen the greatest uptake to date. Take foursquare out of the equation and the popularity of services such as Google maps and HAILO (a cab hailing mobile app) prove that users are adopting this technology where it suits them and where they provide the greatest convenience or value, but not necessarily for the sole purpose of using the tool itself.

What next?

Network providers and startups must work together in order to make this new era a reality. As debated by the panel, the challenge was viewed as three-fold. Infrastructure providers need to make the technology possible, brands need to ensure its appealing and the technology providers need to make it simple to use.  Only then will consumers make use of location-based services without a second thought.

Overall, the sense from the panel was that the role of location based marketing is only going to increase. With all the panelists agreeing that it is not a matter of if, just of when.

A really interesting exchange and some great views put forward. You can view the day unfolding across social media via Storify by clicking here. Location Based Marketing is just one of the many new practices being used thoughout digital marketing. Download our latest guide, The Changing Face Of Communications and learn about other key digital techniques necessary for modern communications.

Thanks for having us Social Media Week. See you next year!

This was the basis for our Tech Trends 2012 event held recently in Sydney.  We assembled a panel of highly-experienced IT industry journalists to discuss existing and emerging trends in the tech space with an audience of marketing and communications professionals from the technology industry. What did we learn? Tonnes!

Whilst time was spent discussing some of the ‘mega-trends’ such as cloud, mobility and ‘big data’, our panelists also touched on some of the newer, emerging trends such as the socialization of business and gamification. The latter in particular was identified as a trend that is expected to accelerate rapidly in 2012.

We also discussed how media reporting on trends evolves over time in a fashion not perhaps dissimilar to the Gartner hype cycle.  Our panel dissected how mega-trends often break down into smaller trends, such as the issue of data sovereignty in relation to cloud, or BYOD as a sub-set of mobility.

In addition to discussing reporting trends, we also took time to prompt our panelists for some comments around how the PR industry can interact more effectively with the media in the digital age. Perhaps unsurprisingly, according to our panelists, it still comes down to the basic fundamentals, such as:

• Understand the media you’re pitching to
• Get to know the needs of journalists
• Know what makes good news
• Follow through on what you say you’ll do

Not too difficult, yet still we hear horror stories of PR people getting it awfully wrong.

Tech Trends 2012 was very well received and we’ve had some fantastic feedback from attendees.  In fact, the general consensus was that we could have extended the discussion well beyond our stated 60-minute run time, perhaps even a half-day, with a deeper dive into some of the more significant trends.

We’ll be running more of these ‘trends’ based events in the future, so if you’d like to get on our event mailing list, do get in touch. I wonder what the big trends of 2013 will be?

As a communications professional, you have probably heard about the semantic web or Web 3.0.  But have you ever wondered how it already affects the work of a PR agency?

What is Web 3.0?

Semantic technologies are changing the way the Internet operates and how relationships between data are built. Here’s how Tim Berners-Lee originally expressed it:

“I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A ‘Semantic Web’, which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The ‘intelligent agents’ people have touted for ages will finally materialize.”

Specialists are still struggling about the definition of the semantic web and about the question whether we are, indeed, building one. Nevertheless, we can draw the conclusion that the way data on the web is connected is getting better by the minute. For example, take a look at the introduction of “Search Plus Your World” by Google. Other striking examples? Think of those advertisements on LinkedIn that perfectly match your professional profile.

The principles of the semantic web, as Berners-Lee defined it, are integrated into the services we use nowadays. And these principles just might be the answer to the amount of irrelevant press releases that PR professionals are notorious for sending to online publications and influencers.

How does it work?

Applications like Flipboard, websites like Scoop.it, and services like LinkedIn today are examples of semantic technologies that influence the way we consume news. These technologies make it possible for news to be delivered you tailor-made; it perfectly matches your interest and presents it into one ‘publication’ – picture a magazine filled with articles about each of your interests like finance, rugby and wine.

What does it mean for PR?

This sort of news consumption means a shift for PR professionals. Press releases need to be social, interesting and full of rich content to make it into these ‘social news’ applications. But PR will also become more about publishing instead of media relations. The separation between journalists and the individual may disappear since we no longer use mass media, but rely on individual news channels.

As we still don’t know what the future of the semantic web will look like, the above effects of its technologies on PR are still subject to debate.

I’m curious to see how you think that Web 3.0 will change the role of PR. What are your thoughts? Let me know in the comments section below.

Analysts are predicting that the accident will have a long-term “material impact’ on revenues for the ship’s owner Carnival, which is the world’s largest cruise operator.

Chris Lewis is the founder and CEO of LEWIS PR. He is an expert in crisis communications and he’s been talking to Ian Williams, a senior consultant at LEWIS PR…

LEWIS Costa Crisis Podcast

Click on the image below to watch a video of Chris Lewis being interviewed on the crisis by Bloomberg TV.

Organic search is a vital channel for communications pros to leverage for reaching journalists / influencers, building inbound traffic, and getting found by current and new prospective customers.

But without integrating optimisation as a layer within your PR and social media efforts, they’re falling far short of their potential.

While savvy online marketers have made optimisation a natural part of their marketing for years we recognise it’s still new to some.

Download our latest guide, The Changing Face Of Communications and learn how to integrate SEO with your PR efforts along with 11 other digital techniques necessary for modern communications.

Last week’s debate, The Media: A Female Politician’s Worst Enemy, marked a fiery first meeting of the Women in Parliament All Party Parliamentary Group.

The panel was chaired by George Pascoe-Watson, former political editor at The Sun, and comprised women poised at both ends of both the political and media spectrum.

While some may have been disappointed that no male panelists were available for this first debate, an encounter between the politically opposed Janet Street-Porter and Louise Mensch didn’t fail to provide an instance or two where the panel could occasionally lock antlers: “If you’re going to have your picture in GQ, you’re going to invite a certain amount of comment,” scoffed Street Porter.

In the midst of this, Sky News’ political correspondent Sophy Ridge contributed some intelligent insights into differences between how male and female politicians use the media to their advantage, reminding the audience that building relationships is key to good coverage.

Male politicians, Ridge observed, actively call bookers during the week whereas women rarely do it at all. The Sky production team, she said, tends to book more female guests at the weekend, often due to the guests’ family commitments. This suggests that family life is still a constraint to many female politicians. And as Anne McElvoy reminded the audience, “women make a decision when they decide to enter into public life”.

This may have reminded the audience of when Mensch, during the Home Affairs select committee that made her name, famously asked to deliver all her questions to News International so she could leave early to pick her children up from school.

Whatever your thoughts on her actions, Mensch gained column inches in making a statement on how she chooses to balance her life in the public eye with her home life.

For a few members of the panel, the woman’s role, with its maternal responsibilities, necessitates a greater professional resolve for dealing with the media. Street-Porter advised women to “stop whinging”, which bolstered the consensual argument that a female politician needs a steely reserve.

The issue of how women are often portrayed in the media was also discussed. Mensch disagreed with Street Porter, rejecting her opinion that women are a large part

of the problem because they are usually the main consumers of sexist stories. Mensch said: “Women have plenty of political and interesting things to say, but the newspapers just aren’t letting them say it.”

But thinking GQ and other titles perhaps aren’t the best outlet for communicating serious political views, the panel were deaf to the argument. McElvoy jibed: “Put your cleavage away if you don’t want it commented on.”

The media is a commercial beast. It tries to spice up politics by personalising it, as otherwise there is the worry that the public won’t take notice. So their reporting of Vince Cable not being able to find his car after a Cabinet meeting is the same tactic as publishing photos of Theresa May catching her kitten heels in the pavement.

Women in positions of power don’t read such stories. Theresa May wouldn’t have got where she was today if she was worrying about what people thought of her Russell & Bromley collection. It’s clear that more female politicians need to learn how to handle themselves in the media, McElvoy argued.

Another point raised was that male politicians get both silly and serious coverage, whereas with women it is often either or, as with Theresa May’s recent Total Politics article.

Mensch openly criticised The BBC for not adequately representing women both in their ratio of male to female journalists, as well as guests across flagship political programmes. However, the situation is only so, not because of the media, but because of the imbalance that exists within society as a whole. The percentage of male guests on The Today Programme is not down to BBC bias but to the shortage of women in boardroom positions in the UK. Politicians need to address this problem before they point the finger at the media.

It’s an issue we’re seeing take precedent across the technology sector amongst others, with innovative companies leading the way in driving greater gender representation at board level. It needs to become the general consensus that employing the best candidates for roles will always be better than setting gender quotas.

Here at LEWIS, we employ talent and our executive team is made up of some of the best female leaders within the industry. I don’t think for a minute they let gender issues get in the way of business, but are passionate about ensuring all employees, no matter what their background or gender, benefit from the best career opportunities that will inspire others to climb the ladder.

Although panellists offered no clear solutions to the problem, it was clear that the debate could have continued well into the evening.I hope future events may help to shed some light on  issues which were not addressed during the course of the night. Namely, the commercial engine that drives the media, which could explain why female politicians are treated differently from their male counterparts. In addition, the social issue of how to reconcile a woman’s personal and professional roles in public life.

The most important take-away was the need for a wider debate on the role of women in public life. It should not be, as Street-Porter argued, about quotas, but a step change at grassroots level in schools and businesses, as well as politics.

There need to be more opportunities available to aspirational women in all areas of society so they can finally begin to offset the imbalance and to inspire more women to engage in public life.

What was hot on the web this week? Get up to speed on the latest trends, news and services with some of our favorite new stories.

Dogsly: Instagram for Your Furry Friends

Dogsly is a new photo-sharing app, much like Instagram, but exclusively for puppy pictures. Available only for the iPhone, Dogsly lets you share photos, see a stream of the entire community and share them with your friends on Twitter.

Fun features include a retweet option as well as photo editing tools powered by Aviary. I don’t have a dog of my own, but I’ll have a lot of fun with this app.

Read more here.

Facebook Files for IPO 

Facebook took its first steps in becoming a publicly traded company when it filed for an IPO Wednesday, seeking to raise $5 billion. It’s on track to becoming the largest Internet IPO—larger than Google’s in 2004.

However, many close to the company say that Facebook is aiming for a far greater offering that could value it as high as $75 billion to $100 billion. If that’s the case, Facebook would be much bigger than many longer-established American companies, including Kraft Foods, Goldman Sachs and Ford Motor.

Read more here.

YouTube May Introduce Subscription Service

At the D:Dive Into Media conference, YouTube CEO Salar Kamangar said his company could potentially create a service that could enable content providers to create their own subscription-based video offerings on the YouTube platform.

Kamangar estimated that about 20 percent of all video revenues — both online and off — come from sales or rentals, with 40 percent coming from subscriptions and the final 40 percent coming from advertising. He thinks the amount of ad sales will grow as a percentage compared to some of the other business models.

Read more here.

President Obama Hangs Out on Google+

President Obama held the first all-digital White House interview on Monday, making his debut on a Google+ Hangout. Over 227,000 viewers submitted questions, but only five lucky winners were selected to chat with the President face-to-face (kind of).

The forum provided a unique opportunity to harness available technology to make politics and our political leaders more personal.

Read more here.

There is hardly any doubt that data journalism (also referred to as data-driven or database journalism) is one of the most interesting recent developments in journalism. And it might just be one of the next big things in PR, too.

Data journalism uses the abundance of existing data, analyses them and presents the results in a graphical way. The Guardian and New York Times even have dedicated teams focused on data journalism. According to the Guardian’s how-to guide, anyone can do it. Basically there are two approaches to it: you either start with asking a question (‘do speed cameras cost or save money?’) and gather data that might answer it.

The alternative is to start with what you have: databases within your own organisation and open data.

Half your brain

This is where PR comes in. We are always looking out for soft news angles, creating topics that show the expertise of our organisation and giving journalists valuable input that they can use for an editorial article. Presenting the data in a visual attractive way (like an infographic) helps to attract the attention to your message. According to experts from Stanford University in an interesting video report on data visualization half of our brain is hardwired for vision. Data journalism and visualisation takes advantage of this.

If you want to see how this works: this tool visualises your LinkedIn network. Pretty cool, huh?

A great example of how PR is starting to realise the enormous potential of data journalism is the Dutch TV show Nederland van Boven (similar to Britain from Above and Deutschland von Oben). The programme combines beautiful footage shot from a helicopter with data visualisations on different aspects of our lives. For one of the episodes (on communication) the editors turned to Vodafone to ask for data on the use of mobile phones. Not only was Vodafone willing to provide the data, the communication officer even helped to analyse the data. His initiative was rewarded with an internal innovation award. And it’s easy to see why – the results are stunning, with the data presented in several interactive maps, like the one below:

The above map allows you to calculate how far you can travel from our Eindhoven office in 60 minutes, the lower one displays the routes that dog owners take when they walk through the forrest.

How hard is data journalism?

As data journalism is reaching the adult phase, the cases of successful use in PR are growing: PR Daily recently published four interesting examples, including an analysis of the average viewing time of online videos. Ooyala, a provider of video services, found that tablet users not only finish videos more often, but are also more engaged.

These examples showcase that you can put as much time and energy in data research and graphical presentation as you want. Sometimes even the most simple analysis can generate good content: online fashion outlet Vente Exclusive performed some research on its own database and discovered that Dutch women buy bigger bras than Belgian women (based on the purchases of 15,000 women). As you can imagine, the press release received very good pick-up.

Sharing knowledge

This is just the beginning. I’m convinced that we will see many more successful cases of data PR in the near future. One could even argue that PR pro’s (and many journalists alike) still don’t take enough advantage of the availability of (open) data. According to Nicholas White, co-founder and CEO of The Daily Dot, data journalists require a totally different mind-set and skills:

In the information age, journalism needs to go further. Information bombards us. What is scarce is insight, understanding and knowledge.

For PR this means that we have to start putting more effort in analysing data ourselves and make beautiful visualisations (using tools like those offered by our client Tableau Software). Another way to enter the world of data journalism is by opening up databases to journalists, for their research.

After all, it’s all about sharing your knowledge.

What are your favourite examples of data journalism? Have you tried it yourself?