This week, I was asked to be part of a panel for the PR Week video podcast , alongside the Refugee Council’s Gerdi Rees and Charmaine Griffiths from the British Heart Foundation.
The panel was discussing the role of digital in voluntary sector PR, following the news that Oxfam has appointed a digital PR specialist as part of a plan to transform the way it uses online communications:
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I’ve been a fan of Someone Once Told Me since I first came across it last year. I met up with Mario back in November, when this photo was taken, but something happened to the audio interview I did and so we postponed putting the photo up until I could redo the interview and explain the story behind the quote.
Luckily, I bumped into Mario a few weeks back and we took the opportunity to do a video interview instead. Below is the explanation behind “You don’t always have to hold your head higher than your heart”:
If you want to see others’ Someone Once Told Me or take part in the project yourself, all of the details are on the site.
It was a lot of fun to take part in the project, so many thanks to Mario for making it happen!
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I’ve been tagged on the Simple Acts blog to post about doing one of their 20 Simple Acts.
The campaign consists of Simple Acts that have something to do with refugees. If everyone does at least one of these simple actions, we can make a big change to the way refugees are perceived. It’s all in aid of Refugee Week, which takes place from 15-21 June.
I’ve chosen to ‘Read a book about exile‘ as my simple act, and chose ‘We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families‘ by Philip Gourevitch as the book to read.
The book is a graphic account of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, in which the Hutu government led its followers to slaughter 800,000 of their Tutsi neighbors in just 100 days, while the international community stood by.
It’s an amazing account of the tragedy by all means, but Gourevitch also writes the clearest explanation of how those exiled by the violence then in turn affected their neighboring countries. When the Rwandese Patriotic Front, a rebel army led by Tutsi exiles, invaded Rwanda and ended the violence, thousands of Hutus fled into exile. Humanitarian organizations fed and sheltered the Hutu refugees and allowed them to militaarise the refugee camps. The result was that the conflict spilled over into Rwanda’s neighboring countries, with the refugees caught up in worse violence despite living in exile.
The book is not for the faint hearted, but a compelling read and one that will make you see refugees and exile in a whole different light.
If you too want to join in with the Simple Acts campaign it’s, err, simple! Pick one of the Simple Acts to write about and, once you’ve written a post, don’t forget to tag it ‘Simple Acts’ and add your completed action to the Simple Acts website. This post counts as my Simple Act, so I’ve added one more to the actions completed.
You can also follow the Simple Acts campaign on Twitter by following @simple_acts.
I’m also going to tag a few more people into the meme, so I’d be interested to see which of the 20 Simple Acts Dom Whitehurst, Jed Hallam, Anke Holst, Dave Briggs and Rachel Beer will choose.
Tweet This This piece is cross posted with the 33 Digital blog.
Always keen to learn what other people in the industry are doing with measurement and metrics on their campaigns, 33 Digital went down to the latest Measurement Camp in London. Hosted by Will McInnes from Nixon McInnes, the event took place at The Good Agency and was attended by about 60 people.
The format of the event was to have two presentations from different campaigns that acted as case studies for how people are measuring their campaigns. Afterwards, the room was split into four groups, so that each group could take an example campaign and come up with some ideas on how to measure it effectively.
First up from the presentations was Tomas Gonsorcik from Interaction London, discussing how his agency measured a social media campaign for a large software firm.
There were 3 key measures that Tomas used in the campaign:
The campaign generated an increase in coverage in the three areas that were tracked:
Positive sentiment increased across the board, with sentiment also broken down into several themes. These themes were analysed at the beginning and end of the campaign, the results being that the percentage of positive sentiment increased and negative sentiment decreased around each of the themes:
Driving traffic to the campaign microsite was also measured in 3 terms:
At the beginning of the campaign, paid search was the highest percentage method for driving traffic to the campaign microsite. Banner ads and social media both had a small percentage in comparison. But at the end of the campaign, social media became the method with the highest percentage of driving traffic.
The reason given on why paid search is still more effective than social media as a method for driving traffic to sites was that paid search is more advanced as an practice (over social media marketing). But social media and the tools and techniques associated with it are becoming more advanced and are able to more than compete.
As well as generally driving traffic, social media also drives more quality traffic to sites: if someone comes to a site from a social media presence, they are more likely to spend more time on that site than if they came through a search link or a banner ad.
One well placed blog post around a well run event with a well executed social media strategy to back it can have a big impact on the success of a campaign. In this particular campaign, social media was a better return on investment than paid search or banner ads, which led to some ‘interesting discussions’ between the SEO and PR agencies.
Key Learnings: The Bottom Line has to be part of any integrated campaign. Coverage, sentiment and traffic are all well and good, but the most important measure is how this converts to sales and drives revenue.
The second presentation was from Andy Keetch from Content & Motion and Jordan Stone from Text 100 who showcased their work on a campaign for IBM.
IBM had built an online 3D replica of China’s Forbidden City using their Service Orientated Architecture (SOA). The campaign site attracted 280,000 visitors since October 2008.
The aim of the campaign was to take the people that specialise in SOA to attend two seminars that took place in the Virtual Forbidden City, create significant lead generation, identify the influencers in the SOA industry, and ultimately raise awareness if IBM’s SOA services.
Measurement and metrics was a key part of the campaign from the outset. They had put in place a mixture of quantitative data that was used to give the client week-by-week updates and qualitative data that was used in conjunction to give an idea of sentiment towards the campaign.
They conducted a Platform Report at the beginning of the campaign to identify which communities their key influencers were part of. It emerged that Twitter was the most effective platform for both finding and engaging with key influencers.
Using a mixture of free online measurement tools, such as Technorati and backlinks, and unique urls to track incoming traffic, the campaign was successful in raising awareness and getting people sign up to the the 2 seminars. Unfortunately, the drop out rate at the actual seminars was high, but that was balanced to the high value of the leads generated.
Key Learnings:
Overall, Measurement Camp was as valuable as ever and if you’re interested in learning how to improve the measurement of your social media campaigns, you should look out for the next one here.
Tweet This Lots of buzz on online today about the small changes Twitter have made to their replies settings. If you haven’t heard what the change is, basically users can no longer see public replies sent by friends to people they themselves are not following.
“Spotting new folks in tweets is an interesting way to check out new profiles and find new people to follow. Despite this update, you’ll still see mentions or references linking to people you don’t follow. For example, you’ll continue to see, “Ev meeting with @biz about work stuff” even if you don’t follow @biz.”
But by making this change, has Twitter broken one of the social media rules? Reading Andy Gibson’s 45 Social by Social Propositions, a set of fundamental principles to follow to help make a social technology project successful, Twitter seems to have broken many of these fundamental principles.
The main point seems to be that the new setting eliminates “serendipitous social discovery”, a fundamental element of any social platform.
As Read Write Web points out:
“This new Twitter policy breaks one of the fundamental rules of social activity streams: that I can discover new people by seeing who is conversing with the people I already know.”
The best comment on all of this comes from, ironically, a user on Twitter who I don’t follow and wouldn’t have been able to see now these changes have been made:
What do you think? How will this affect your Twitter usage? Has Twitter broken a social media ‘rule’? Are there social media ‘rules’?
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There’s been a lot of buzz on Twitter of late about the rapid increase in FriendFeed follower notifications that people are getting.
FriendFeed recenty redesigned its design to become more in line with Twitter’s ’stream of consciousness’ style. Facebook also recently tried to do something similar with the changes to their news feed.
This was a a smart move by FriendFeed; Not only can you see your friend’s status updates, but also any blog posts, images, videos, and many other social content all from your FriendFeed home page. What’s more, by having the ability to subscribe to ‘rooms ‘ – where a group of people that aren’t ‘friends’ can still post content of potential interest to a group of people – this means that you have a much more content rich micro-blogging platform than Twitter.
Now FriendFeed have gone one step further and made it even easier to add people you know to your Friendfeed profile. With just one click, you can now add all of your friends from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, your email contacts and more.
Which is the reason that everyone has seen a jump in FriendFeed followers:
So what does this mean?
Well, it means that FriendFeed will become a lot busier. It was always a strain to try and keep up with the contstant flow of information, and now with a jump in users it looks like FriendFeed will now become a definite case of ‘information overload’.
With Twitter, a largely text-based platform, it is easier to digest information: reading a page of tweets is easier than reading a page of text with photos, videos and other links thrown in.
I have recently added Troy’s Twitter Script for Greasemonkey, which allows nested Replies, Custom Search Tabs, Autocomplete, Pagination, RT button, Media Embed, URL Expansion, Hash Tag Search Links, and Social Links. In other words, the script makes Twitter a lot more like Friendfeed. It was an experiement, but I find it too much and will soon be uninstalling the script.
FriendFeed made a smart move by making it easy for people to find their friends on Twitter and add them to their own feed subscription. But people might be tempted to press the ‘pause’ button a bit too much to stem the flow of added information that comes from a jump in users and ultimately be more likely to choose, for the moment, to use Twitter over Friendfeed.
So by ‘freeing’ the content stream on FriendFeed and making it much easier for people to subscribe to others feeds, has FriendFeed done itself a disservice?
Thoughts?
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You may have heard the news on the grapevine already, but today we’re officially launching 33 Digital, a new international agency spanning the PR and digital industries, whose purpose is to help brands communicate effectively to digital communities using the most experimental cut-through techniques around.
I’ve been luckily enough to be part of the team that has been incubating the concept at Hotwire for the past 6 months, working with some fantastic people to help get the agency up and running. Drew, Phil, Dom and the rest of the team have been a pleasure to work with and I’m excited about being part of this new venture.
I won’t go on too much, but just to say it’s been fascinating watching the agency grow behind the scenes, what it takes to launch a new business in volatile times, and how the various strengths of the people involved in launching 33 Digital have come together to what we think will be a Digital PR agency with a client roster and an approach that will turn a few heads.
So welcome to the world, 33 Digital.
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I’d noticed that my Firefox browser was running slower than usual, so I Googled “Speed up Firefox” and came across these helpful tips from 2004:
1. Type “about:config” into the address bar and hit return. Scroll down and look for the following entries:
Normally the browser will make one request to a web page at a time. When you enable pipelining it will make several at once, which really speeds up page loading.
2. Alter the entries as follows:
3. Lastly right-click anywhere and select New-> Integer. Name it “nglayout.initialpaint.delay” and set its value to “0″. This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it recieves.
That’s all there is to it and you should find that you’re Firefox is now twice as fast, if not more!
Also check out 100 tips to help you work smarter with Firefox from @jamesstables.
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According to an article on NMA today, a new company is soon to launch which is looking to tap into the demand for commercial services on Twitter.
The company, Twitter Partners, will provide a range of services, “initially on a consultancy basis before expanding into products and automation” according to NMA. Set up by angel investor and entrepreneur Peter Read, Twitter Partners has attracted a high-profile board of advisors including Lastminute.com founders Brent Hoberman and Martha Lane Fox, Last.fm founder Stefan Glaenzer, Lovefilm co-founder Saul Klein, former Sky online marketing director Scott Gallacher and former Yahoo VP Toby Coppel.
It also has some big name brands on board, with Universal Pictures, Virgin Media and Gorillaz among the first brands to launch commercial services on Twitter through Twitter Partners.
So what does this all mean exactly?
Well, the company is starting out with consultancy services, which sounds no different to the Twitter cponsultancy that many PR and Digital Marketing agencies currently offer. It seems that Twitter Partners has just packaged the consultancy and put some big names behind the company, which has attracted big name brands to use their services.
It is when they move into “products and automation” that it will get more interesting. Will it be more than plugging TwitterFeed into the Gorillaz Twitter profile?
The company also plans to partner with one of the many start-ups arising focused on monitoring buzz on Twitter, as according to Read, “No one has yet built an equivalent of Google Trends or Yahoo Buzz for Twitter”.
If anything, it seems like a smart move for Twitter itself and partnering with other companies might be the way that they drive revenue from their service.
UPDATE:
Alberto Nardelli, of Tweetminster and UnLtd World, has been in touch questioning Read on the claim that “no one has built an equivalent of Google Trends for Twitter”. Alberto points to Tweetminster Wire, “a desktop application that lets you track conversations, connect and engage around UK politics and the issues that matter in real time. Analyse conversations, discover the hot topics and follow what politicians are talking about directly from your desktop.”
Although Tweetminster Wire is adapted to politics at the moment, it appears that there’s no reason that it couldn’t be rolled out across a range of different markets.
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So many great quotes in this satire on Twitter:
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