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We don’t have any competitors!

14 Aug

Hands up if you have sat in a new client kick off or creds meeting and asked the contact opposite you who they consider to be their competitors and heard, “what we do is so unique that we don’t really have any competitors”. I despair at the amount of times I have heard this.

Companies may not be an equal but there is always a competitor out there otherwise companies would have a monopoly of the market…..and they probably wouldn’t need a PR company to raise its profile.

The simple question I now ask when I hear this is: What are the key words that you are using for SEO? If a company appears on the first page of Google alongside a client when you type this term in, then it is a competitor regardless of what they may think.

It also suggests that the potential competitor is targeting a share of its business so you need to be aware of them. What are they saying, who are they talking to and where are they doing it? All of these can be found out quickly and should become the corner stone of any good rapid response/press office function within your future PR campaigns.

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Do you monitor social media during an event?

9 Aug

Cowes Week 2010

I have been a little quiet on this blog and Twitter over the past few weeks. This isn’t because I have been kicking back during the quiet summer months but in fact because it has been bonkers in the office. We have kicked off our new account Kaspersky Lab, supported our clients social media event at The Ivy, managed and facilitated a journalist event during Cowes Week as well as making sure the bread and butter stuff wasn’t dropped. Who ever said PR was dull has never worked at Berkeley PR!

During the trip to Cowes Week my colleagues and I experienced first hand how instant social media has made reporting on your press event.  We set our journalists off on their yacht and made our way by ferry to Cowes with all of the equipment and presentation materials ready for thier arrival at lunch.

While sat on the deck watching the wonderful sight that is the Cowes Week regatta taking place around us my colleague Lauren started checking her Twitter account on her phone. It was at this point that we saw our journalists were sending pictures on Twitpic, posting links to their Facebook pages and generally leaving positive comments about their experience.

It gave us added emphasis to ensure that the day was continued to flow smoothly and guarantee the success of it.  I’m happy and proud to report that the feedback from the event was some of the best I have ever seen with a couple of the journalists stating that it was the best event they had ever attended.

This is all obviously good, but it also highlighted to me the importance of monitoring your journalists during the event. Every thing may seem fine on the surface but you never know what is happening elsewhere. Sometimes the journalists are just too polite to complain but are more than willing to complain on Twitter.

As with our event, it is always good to see the good reviews but it is also worth monitoring what is said on-line during an event to see if you can improve anything at any point. It shouldn’t just be after an event that you review social media to check the buzz but it is just as important to monitor it during the event.

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Why we buy online

4 Jul

Why we buy


Following a conversation with the impressive Andy Budd at Clearleft I recently purchased Why we buy by Paco Underhill. Increasingly this science is being applied to the online retail world and I want to apply the methodology to the PR industry. Understanding customers is essential if you want to communicate with them.

I was talking to a friend of mine who has just gone through the pitch process on the client side (God I wish I could do that) and they told me that all of the PR agencies spoke about Twitter and Facebook as a way of communicating with their audience but there was no intelligence behind it. They all said they should run a Twitter campaign and set up a Facebook fan page but none had an answer,  when pushed,  about why either was the correct tool to speak to their customers.

Ultimately, the question that should be asked is which tool best allows you to speak to your target audience? I sometimes feel that social media tools are just buzz words in our industry and people throw them around without remotely understanding them.

I read an interesting piece of research from Com Score which looked at how the advent of social networking sites has seen an increase in eCommerce opportunities. According to the research, users of Twitter are more likely to purchase online than people from facebook. I wonder how many people review research such as this or the demographics of networking sites before asking clients to part with vast sums of money on campaigns?

This would be invaluable to companies such as voucher code companies or sellers of personalised gifts but I wonder how many of their PR agencies understand this or are aware of it? Surely, if this is the tool that will allow you to drive more sales then this is where the greater percentage of your communications campaign should be emphasised on?

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Fed up of FAIL?

22 Jun


Is anyone else fed up of seeing the Fail hashtag? It just makes me think of a time when everyone said NOT after Waynes World came out (showing age). Fail as a concept is quite funny… but in moderation. I can’t remember a day when I didn’t go onto Twitter and fail at the end of a tweet. I just dropped my toast FAIL or missed my bus FAIL. Surely this type of trivial use of a hashtag takes away its original point or am I just being grumpy? Quite possibly :o )

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Have you checked your Twitter page rank?

21 Apr

Google page rank


I read a very interesting post on Andrew Bruce Smith‘s blog about how most people don’t realise that they have a home page with a high page rank. I have been working on this blog for almost two years now and have spent many hours writing and sharing some of my thoughts.

I also have a Twitter account which I also love but spend far less time populating. So it came as a bit of a surprise when Andrew highlighted that the page rank for your Twitter page could be higher than your blog. Surely not but upon investigation I found that this was actually true.

As he says in his blog, most people will have achieved this without even thinking about it. I certainly did.

Worth thinking about the next time a client asks you about the merits of starting a Twitter account. If you can build up a high page rank to your Twitter page you potentially have a powerful SEO tool for providing backlinks.

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How do consumers use Facebook fan pages?

6 Apr

Facebook election page: Democracy UK

I wrote a letter today for PR Week about an article I read by Peter Hay looking at how the Conservatives were using Facebook the most out of the three top parties. In it, I tried to make the point that I believe Facebook is a great tool for trying to engage with the general public, especially with its 33 million plus users in the UK, as it clearly represents an ideal platform to communicate and canvas the voting population.

Then this evening, I saw a piece of research by Morpace which states that not only are consumers joining Facebook fan pages that are managed by businesses, but they use Facebook as a means to offer and receive product recommendations.

Among the primary reasons consumers join a Facebook fan page are: “To let my friends know what products I support,” (41 percent) and “To receive coupons and discount offers,” (37 percent). More than 36 percent of consumers consider Facebook to be a useful tool for researching products.

Nearly 68 percent of consumers say that a “positive referral from a Facebook friend makes them more likely to buy a specific product or visit a certain retailer.”

These findings interested me as rather than list how many people are on Facebook it actually gives some insight into how a consumer may use the platform. For those of us who work in PR who need to communicate with potential customers to drive sales or interest in our clients the ability to understand consumers Facebook is essential. There is no point just being on facebook for the sake of it. You need to be clear about what you are communicating and why it would be of interest to prospects otherwise you are simply wasting your clients time and money.

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Superb stunt by Heineken

17 Mar

I found the following stunt by Heineken on Twitter this morning and absolutely love it.
Genius.

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What is Posterous?

3 Mar

Posterous

I have been playing with Posterous over the past couple of days and I have to say I like it. Posterous lets you post anything online really fast simply by using email. It has the look and feel of a blog but you simply get your photo, video, audio file, documents or links and email them to post@posterous.com and the site replies back to you instantly to let you know that the blog has been updated.

I have seen a growing trend for people sharing the links they find on Twitter by posting link after link on their blog inbetween interesting content they have written. I generally feel this feels cluncky and ugly but I understand why people have done it. You have found some cool things online that you want to share with your network, so why not post it.

I think that Posterous fits perfectly in the middle ground. I personally plan to use Posterous as a virtual scrap book for images, videos and any other files that I want to share with people while continuing to use Twitter and wordpress as my blogging platforms of choice.

I read a great post on The Next Web by Martin Bryant which lists some great ideas for ways to use Posterous:

As a blog
Use it to update your existing blog
Use it to post anything almost anywhere
Use it to work as a group in private
Use it as a podcasting platform
Use it as a ‘Web Scrapbook’

This is such an easy platform to use and I think that any marketing manager could find a reason to use it to help promote collateral that the company is putting out into the public domain. What do you think? Is it one more platform that you won’t use or will it replace something else in your online world?

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Is PR becoming public again?

1 Mar

Online PR

There was a great article in last weeks issue of Marketing about online PR. It really struck a cord with me as it discussed how online PR was all about influencing the people who can influence your target journalists. Ten years ago PR agencies almost solely contacted the media to get their message out there to buyers. The world has changed.

At the recent Apple iPad launch Stephen Fry was in attendance because they knew with his different channels he would be able to influence and communicate their messages better than a single journalist. But you don’t have to just target the Stephen Frys of this world to drive sales.

The internet has helped to make PR public again after almost exclusively focusing on the media. PR professionals are starting to wake up to the fact that the web allows direct access to information about their clients and are starting to use it to help promote them.

Blogs, online news releases and forums are allowing communications experts to contact buyers directly. This isn’t only possible with B2C but it can be just as effective with B2B. You just need to know the right channels.

My question to you is are you joining conversations with your customers or prospects? If the answer to this question is no then you may be missing a trick. If this is the case don’t worry you are not alone and you are not too late.

For the vast majority of my clients, coverage is still king but more and more I am trying to show them that it is time to start looking beyond simply generating X amount of press clippings and to begin looking at how they can spend their retainer on directly driving sales. The B2B world has been slow to the party but is starting to realise that it isn’t just digital or consumer brands that can communicate directly with customers – businesses can as well.

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Vodafone and *that* Twitter message

10 Feb

It’s been fascinating to watch Vodafone’s unfortunate Twitter incident unfold over the past few days. You’re no doubt familiar by now with *that* tweet so I’m not going to cover old ground by going through it again. My interest has been watching how Vodafone have dealt with the aftermath.

Vodafone has run its Twitter presence as a customer support channel for some time now alongside its efforts on other social networks such as Facebook, YouTube and its own eForum. Looking at how much effort Vodafone is putting into its online engagement, it’s pretty easy to see why they acted so swiftly when the rogue tweet was published.

I personally also think it’s also clear that, far from panicking or being forced into action as some have suggested, Vodafone’s actions were transparent, swift and albeit a little clunky, addressed individual Tweeters directly, for which I think they should be applauded. Dan Bowsher, a former colleague of mine who is now part of the Vodafone team, demonstrated how seriously they are taking this mishap with his detailed explanation of their actions in response to the Reputation Online blog from earlier this week. I also thought that it was interesting that Jakub, head of web relations at Vodafone also contacted the blog to explain how the incident actually took place. Fair play and kudos to both of them – many would have just apologised and left it that.

My biggest concern is that the whole episode will be used by some to justify why business, in particular large businesses, should avoid engaging with social media and this is massively unfortunate. If anything, Vodafone’s very public experience simply illustrates how – with the right approach and attitude – a potential disaster can be averted.

I’m not saying that Vodafone can’t learn from this – I’m 100 per cent certain that they are :0), but anyone that thinks this illustrates big brands’ inability to handle channels like Twitter and Facebook is missing the point somewhat. Surely the benefit that customers have received from the service for the past seven months is greater than the inconvenience of seeing a writings of one idiot now looking for a job.

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