Simonsays

Berocca's Blogger Relief - #PRFail?

2008-07-24T21:06:23+01:00

Last month all round pick-me-up product Berocca generated a nice bit of online buzz among bloggers by giving away 'Blogger Relief Packs'.

The packs contained a tube Berocca and other neat giveaways and to get one you had to register by entering a set of personal details. But as Stephen Davies pointed out at the time:

"it seems there are no guarantees of receiving one [pack] and reading the Terms and Conditions (T&Cs) they’re only giving the pack away to the first 50 applications. Another caveat in the T&Cs is that they may use my details for future marketing activity and potentially share them with third parties in relation to Bayer plc, the company behind Berocca."

Standard T&Cs perhaps or a underhand way to spam bloggers? Either way I signed up for a pack.

But a month on and no pack. I Twittered to see if others received their packs and Clashcityrocker she had indeed received her pack.

Now, I get that there were limited packs available, but why not a short email from Berocca to say they have run out and I've not been lucky. The whole affair seems a bit short-sighted, lazy blogger relations and a #PRFail if you ask me.

Technorati tags: Berocca, blogger relations

"Terror outrage: BRITNEY, ANGELINA and OBAMA all unaffected as hundreds die in SEXY agony"

2008-07-21T22:17:17+01:00

The story I blogged last week - and followed up by Shane Richmond - about UK newspapers using SEO to boost their online readerships continues to rumble on.

The Guardian's Neil McIntosh adds his perspective to the debate and links to the most amazing piece by Guardian columnist, Charlie Brooker, who highlights the inanity in what is, to most of us digital types, common sense. It also contains possible my favourote non-headline of all time as used in the title of this post (hopefully it'll bring me some extra traffic too).

Brooker's piece also neatly provides the tail to this story. What began life in the once-acerbic satirical magazine, Private Eye, has now itself become satirised by one of the UK's leading satirists after one-time collaborator, Chris Morris.

Technorati tags: SEO, Daily Telegraph, Charlie Brooker

Sneaky snaps of new Downing Street website on Flickr

2008-07-20T17:27:52+01:00

The digital comms team at No 10 Downing Street are currently on fire doing all the right things in the online space.

Not only have they started using Twitter in a way that should be a case study for other government departments and administrations around the world they are using their Flickr photostream to give people a sneaky look at the new Downing Street website.

I won't go into too much detail about the site and its features, as Simon Dickson (who's company, Puffbox, has been involved in the development) gives a thorough overview on his blog.

However, expect lots of social media-type functionality as the new site has been built using Wordpress!

Via Neville Hobson / Simon Dickson

Technorati tags: Downing Street, Gordon Brown, Wordpress

Telegraph.co.uk's SEO - Shane Richmond responds

2008-07-16T23:26:05+01:00

I posted earlier this week about a story in Private Eye about Telegraph.co.uk ensuring their news stories are chock full of realtime SEO key word goodness.

Well, I asked the Telegraph's Communities Editor, Shane Richmond, if he could enlighten us any further and he has kindly posted his response on his Telegraph blog.

What Shane says makes total sense and (perhaps unlike the ultra traditional Eye) I see no reason why media outlets shouldn't optimise their content.

In keeping with this idea, Shane provides a great insight into what other UK newspapers are doing - or reportedly doing. Shane writes:

"we’re [Telegraph.co.uk] far from unusual. As far as I know, staff at the Times get an email telling them what search terms are bringing people to their site, the Guardian, it's rumoured, has begun training staff on SEO and the Mail has recently hired an SEO manager."

Intersting times indeed.

Technorati tags: Telegraph.co.uk, Shane Richmond, SEO, Newspapers

Telegraph's web traffic chasing secrets revealed by Private Eye

2008-07-13T16:00:36+01:00

One of the few paper publications I still buy (jndeed subscribe to) is Private Eye, the UK's only satirical magazine.

In this fortnight's 'Street of Shame' (the section exposing the often shallow hypocrisy of the media) there's an interesting insight into how the Daily Telegraph achieves such high online traffic:

According to Eye:

"news hacks are sent a memo three or four times a day from the website boffins listing the top subjects being searched in the last few hours on Google. They are then exepected to write stories accordingly and/or get as many of those key words into the first par of their story."

Of course, most Private Eye material needs to be taken with a pinch of salt and to the ultra-traditional Eye journalists basing stores on digital consumer demand is a terrible thing. It is also the cause of the Telegraph's growing obsession with celebrity and news-lite entertainment stories.

But that's unfair, as the Telegraph has made some significant and well-thought out investments in the digital space under editor, Will Lewis. For example it was the first UK newspaper to reorganise its enwsroom to recognise the primacy of the web in the news cycle.

I wonder if the Telegraph's blogger Shane Richmond has anything to add to the Eye's story. Shane?

Why MPs Will Be Redundant in 10 Years Time - A Mini-Essay

2008-07-08T21:47:13+01:00

This blog post is intended to provocative; I hope it will succeed.

It is prompted by last week’s decision by UK politicians to keep their second home allowance of £24,000. It is on a theme about which I have been ruminating for several months – and will no doubt continue to refine in the future.

That theme is: the increasing redundancy of Parliament, parliamentary process and MPs. Consider this post a first articulation of my argument for a – perhaps naïve – return to participatory democracy and towards an Internet-enabled anarchism.

So to return to my starting point: I heard one MP on BBC Radio 4 explaining his decision to support taxpayer-funded second home allowances tell the interviewer: “Without the allowance I wouldn’t be able to afford to be an MP.”

I choose this as my starting point for two important reasons that have relevance to the argument against Parliament.

Firstly, it is a great example of how wrong MPs are getting the reputational relationship between Parliament and the electorate. As Weber Shandwick’s UK CEO, Colin Byrne, rightly points out: this kind of excuse won’t wash with the electorate and will only draw attention to the fact they appear to be feathering their nest at a time when the rest of the country is battening down its hatches in the face of economy turmoil.

Secondly, the MP’s comment highlights that fact that he sees being an MP as akin to employment. That is, it is something you choose to do that has to earn you a living. This nicely forgets that the true role of an MP is to act as a democratically elected representative to act on the behalf of their constituents. While I totally accept that as part of this process there has to be a financial incentive to encourage people to become MPs, it can be argued that this relationship between democracy and financeial reward has passed into a purely transactional relationship that has rather forgotten the roots of the role.

Both of these points underline the growing – and widely accepted - distrust in Parliament and MPs. If anything this trend continues to grow and grow.

At the same time the internet use continues to increase and with this increase comes a growing empowerment of individuals to think and act for themselves.

The significance of this shift in power from organisations and institutions cannot be under-estimated. Harvard academic, Yochai Benkler, in his book Wealth of Networks argues that the Internet has transferred information production away from centrally organised bodies (commercial or otherwise) and put it in the hands of individuals.

Specifically, Benkler argues that “The declining price of computation, communication and storage have, as a practical matter, placed the material means of information and cultural production in the hands of a significant fraction of the world’s population.” As a result, “The networked information economy improves the practical capacities of individuals along three dimensions.” Two of which are particularly relevant to the argument here:

[the networked information economy] improves their capacity to do more for and by themselves
it enhances their capacity to do more in loose commonality with others, without being constrained to organise …in traditional hierarchical models of social or economic organisation

To draw specifically political conclusions from Benkler’s arguments, the Internet gives people the opportunity to make more (and better) informed political choices, find others that share their political views and co-ordinate political action that previously would have been the responsibility of political organisations or parties.

In short, the Internet encourages and empowers people to participate in politics and by extension, the democratic process.

All of this is great, of course. But what implications does this growing political self-determination have for democratic engagement and Parliamentary process?

To answer this question, let’s switch to a bit political philosophy. At a very crude level, two kinds of democracy exist: participatory democracy - whereby the public actively take part in the selection and agreement of legislation – and representative democracy – where the electorate select individuals to represent their interests. This is currently in place in the UK and most Western, liberal democracies.

From a hypothetical perspective, participating in the democratic process is the most desirable option. As Jonathan Wolff writes in his Introduction to Political Philosophy:

“Theorists of participatory politics claim that only active, democratic involvement in all matters of concern can achieve freedom and equality for all. Only when we are involved in making decisions which structure our lives in all spheres are we really free”

So why then, do we elect MPs to represent our political interests? This is a particularly pertinent question given MPs tendency to represent a minority of the their direct electorate at any given point in time, to have their representation determined purely by ultimately) arbitrary geographical boundaries and to seem to demand, even expect, unreasonable financial compensation in return for their duty.

The reason is representative democracy has been the best compromise available to those concerned with establishing democratic processes. Truly participatory democracy has simply been too impractical to be considered an option – until now at least.

If we now return to Benkler’s argument and replace “cultural production” with “political prodcutioin” we can recognise that “The declining price of computation, communication and storage have, as a practical matter, placed the material means of information and political production in the hands of a significant fraction of the world’s population.”

With the participatory web comes the ability of citizens to be empowered, enact political will for themselves and participate in the democratic process. As Internet penetration grows it becomes much more likely for people disenfranchised with the existing political and democratic process – calcified by process-creep and stagnant from institutional corruption – to take political and democratic decisions away from the bureaucratic official channels of parliament and into their own hands.

As this activity gathers pace and shifts from low level, local examples it will begin to challenge the entrenched and inefficient processes of parliament which are already fighting to catch-up with contemporary society.

Smart politicians, civil servants and technocrats will realise this before it is too late and understand that to regain public trust in politics and the UK’s political and democratic processes political parties and the state must adapt to empower the public to make and shape their own democracy. However, this is unlikely given the atrophied environment in which modern British politics and democracy operates.

What is likely instead is a ceding of control from traditionally organised institutions to the public over time without anyone acknolweding this gradual shift and the political status quo being maintained in the short term and historians picking over *exactly* what happened to British political democracy during the early 21st century in the longer term.

What may possibly happen is that the political classes may become scared by the inevitable loss of control over political and democratic power and attempt to regulate the use of the Internet, social web tools and participatory websites. If this happens then expect to see another 5th November - this time powered by the Internet.

Technorati tags: politics, Internet, Anarchism

Spot the difference: academic theory or marketing concept?

2008-07-07T21:27:44+01:00

Ian Delaney has a great quotation from Lincoln University's Dr Brian Winston from the MediaFutures08 conference the other week:

"We are in a condition where we conveniently forget the years of discovery, exploration and mistakes that lead to whatever is in today’s headlines. We’re also conditioned into accepting the rhetoric of marketing as fact. Web 2.0 favourite theories like ‘the wisdom of crowds’, ‘the hype cycle’ and ‘crossing the chasm’ are actually commercial products, not independent academic studies."

This is something that a lot of digital, marketing, PR and advertising types should really take into account - and I mean *really*.

We all need a reality check from time to time and this is the best I've read for long time.

The significant point here is that we are all quick to grasp concepts that shore up our prespective on the marketing and communications industry, but how often do we check to see whether what we evangelising is 100% proven.

I'm not suggesting that there is no truth behind the Wisdom of Crowds or The Long Tail. However, I am saying that empirical evidence can easily be misunderstood or misrepresented to make an argument. This situation is compunded where there is a financial or commercial imperative for specific results or results that support a particular world view.

UPDATE: On looking up the Wikipedia entry on Wisodm of Crowds I discovcered the following Wiki-warning:

"This article is written like an advertisement. Please help rewrite this article from a neutral point of view."

Which seems to me a clear enough reminder - if one was needed - of the theory's commercial purpose.

Technorati tags: Ian Delaney, Dr Brian Winston, marketing theory, PR, Wisdom of Crowds, The Long Tail

10 immutable laws for measuring conversation

2008-07-07T10:27:05+01:00

Er... so it seems Edelman held an academic social media conference the other week in Chicago.

There is a good round up of some of the topics discussed at the conference live blog, but I like this post from one of the delegates, Karen Miller Russell, who teaches at the University of Georgia, about measuring social media.

Readers of this blog will know that I haven't brought myself fully into the 'how we measure' social media debate because I haven't yet decided why we need to measure social media (apart from the usual "so we can justify our existence to the client" which is the one reason not to use to develop metrics, IMHO).

However, the following list of "10 somewhat immutable laws of measuring conversations" from Sean Moffitt helps get us a step closer to defining why we measure social media:

REACH—how far does it go?
RELEVANCE—does it support your intended direction?
INFLUENCE—who shares and with who? How many generations of impact?
AUTHORITY—how trusted is the source?
ENGAGEMENT—how involved do they get?
INTERACTION—did they do anything with it?
VELOCITY—how fast does it travel (viral)
ATTENTION—how much time do they spend?
SENTIMENT—how positive are they?
NET PROMOTER—are they recommending you to others? Would you recommend Brand X to a friend or colleague? (On a scale of 1-10, the formula is "People who say 9-10 (extremely)" minus "those who answer 1-6" = your score). And this is what really matters most.

Hat Tip Karen Miller Russell

Technorati tags: Edelman, social media measurement

Hollywood teaches us the ethos of social media

2008-07-04T23:36:33+01:00

I watched the film, Be Kind, Rewind, on my way back from South America this week and discovered a line in the film sums up the ethos of the social web and social web in one nifty phrase.

In case you're not familiar with it, the film is about a couple of guys running a VHS-only video store who accidently wipe their stock. faced with the prospect of going out of business they set about making their own versions of blockbusters. As the film progresses and their idea becomes popular they start letting their customers appear in their self-produced hits.

Jack Black describes this as:

"Making our customers stockholders in their own happiness"

Ok it's a bit schmaltzy, but isn't this what social media and the social web is allowing us to do? The moral of the story is that their customers loved being involved in the film more than simply watching it. So let's see more of us PR people advising our clients that involving and empowering our customers isn't just a fad or marketing ploy - it's a reality that makes people feel good and drives sales (if you're cold hearted enough to only care about the cash).

PS. as a footnote I could add that the moral of the story could have been about the signifncant tensions the social web is putting our outdated copyright laws under. There's a scene involving the film industry's copyright police which isn't fully explored - but then it's a Hollywood film so they aren't going to examine their dirty laundry in public are they?

Technorati tags: Be Kind, Rewind, copyright, customer service, public relations

Twitter case studies: Bad and er... bad

2008-07-04T23:17:26+01:00

This isn't a particularly constructive blog post, but I thought I'd share two great examples of bad Twitter use.

The first one I didn't even bother clicking to view their profile page, because frankly why would I want to having received the notification email pictured left?

I mean, that's not even trying is it? It's not even setting up a Twitter stream as an affiliate link farm and pretending to be a real person.

It's just doing what it says on the tin: Top Affiliate1. Still, I suppose it's at least 'authentic'.

The second example of Twitter abue is slightly less forgivable. I received a notification that Coca Cola Zero was following me on Twitter (albeit in Portuguese) so I took a look at their profile thinking how interesting it would be to see what the brand was doing on Twitter.

Amazingly (and presuming it is an official Coke branded site - although I have no reason to think otherwise) the Twitter feed is more or less being used as a spam site. Take a look at the screenshot below:

You should be able to make out that the user is following about 5,000 people (me included despite not speaking Portuguese) while only having 200 followees. Also, although you probably can't make it out, they have only posted two tweets in over two weeks. That's a FAIL in my books.

As a footnote, I was in Brazil last week speaking to PR professionals - so I wonder if someone I met works on the Coke Zero account and has added me. If it was - feel free to drop me an email and I'll tell you where you could improve :)

Technorati tags: Twitter, FAIL, Coca Zero