While the majority of these reasons don’t apply to the corporate world i.e. PR agencies trying to convince clients to take the jump into social media, I thought they were great.

So, with thanks to Briana Ford, here are seven reasons why we’re addicted to social media:

1.    It’s the shiny new thing: Like Pogs and Pokemon cards once were for my generation, social media is the shiny new thing. Everybody’s doing it, everybody’s talking about it, and if you’re not, then people look at you with disgust. “What do you mean you’re not on Facebook?” Not being involved in social networking has become a cardinal sin of some sort.
2.    All the cool people are doing it: Yes, it’s true. Celebrities are all over social networking. Ashton, Diddy, Demi, and a sleuth of other A listers (even B, C, and D listers) are involved in social media of some sort. If you’re following them on Twitter or you’re a fan (or these days if you “like” them) on Facebook, you want the inside scoop of their every move, every purchase, every waking moment (and sometimes sleeping).
3.    It makes it easy to keep in touch: Remember in high school when you wrote in everyone’s yearbook KIT? Social networking has made that so much easier. No more overflowing address books. No more memorizing so-and-so’s number or sending them invitations to your baby shower if you’re not sure if they still live with their mom. It’s easier than ever to avoid being home sick from hometown friends, meet new people, or connect with people you just met using social networking.
4.    You can get a job: LinkedIn‘s new following feature gives you an inside scoop on if your dream job is available. Using your connections has never been easier. You can ask if someone could introduce you to a certain someone that you didn’t even think your former coworker knew.
5.    It’s readily available: Mobile is the next big wave for social media. Applications are everywhere, making life simpler and more fun to participate in. With easy to use mobile sites, people can stay connected with the happenings of their friends and family with a simple glance at their smart phone.
6.    It’s easy to use: Depending on what you’re involved in, social media is relatively easy to use and get into. There’s a huge community of mommy bloggers out there as well as any other group you may belong to. Forums, chats, and groups have made it easy to convene with like-minded individuals.
7.    Instant news: Never before has it been so easy to be in the know about what the heck is going on. You now have things to talk about at get togethers. The news is only a status update or e-mail away.

When a client asks: “Can you get us higher visibility in Google?” the answer tends to be: “Well, it’s not that straight forward!”

For those of you who understand a little about SEO, you’ll know it’s a combination of how a website is structured technically, the content that is on it, and the volume and PageRank of websites that link to it. And a few other things that nobody really knows, except Google!

Of course, there is always the option to run a pay-per-click campaign, which is particularly useful in a crisis, but some clients either don’t have the budget to do this, or they are more focused at getting better organic search results. The latter can take a great deal of time and money.

However, there is a relatively quick and simple way to ensure your client’s news and press releases appear in Google News. Which, from a PR point of view, makes it even more important to write press releases with key search terms in mind and include links to the client’s website or content on other digital platforms i.e. YouTube.

To check if a client’s website is not already registered to be crawled you need to go to the Google News search box and type: site: www.[clientwebsite].com and click ‘Search News’. For example.

Google News search for Bell Pottinger website

If results from the client’s website do not appear (like above), then you need to complete the following form.

The benefits of doing this will be:

• Your client’s news / press releases, which include the brand name in relation to key search terms, appear in Google search results

• A greater chance that journalists, bloggers and customers will see this information through search or Google News alerts, which they may have setup for the client’s name or associated industry terms

• More opportunity that the release will be picked up by news aggregators and portals, which could lead to more inbound links to your client’s website, particularly if you have included them in the original press release

Finally, for those of you who have your own blog or have recently set up a new website for a client, it is also a good idea to submit the website to Google so that it adds the URL to its index. You can do this here.

Had an interesting chat the other day about the concept of two paradigms existing within the PR world: 1) traditional PR i.e. media relations and 2) digital relations. So I thought I’d jot it down…

Basically, the concept highlights a divide in the mindset of today’s PRs. The first paradigm said to encompass those traditional PRs who view digital as a means for pushing the same message down different channels. The second, those PRs who use digital channels to create communities and speak directly to stakeholders. Think column inches vs Facebook friends.

It swiftly moved onto a debate about whether PR is actually best placed to own the ‘digital relations’ paradigm, given that sometimes there is no media involved, or whether it was one of those other marketing disciplines (shudder).

Naturally, I was fighting the PR corner.

For me, the term ‘digital relations’ consists of the following disciplines:

1. Social media relations: creating and distributing content to the likes of blogs, social network users, on forums and message boards etc. and then interacting with them
2. Digital media relations: the online form of what PR people do offline, but to ‘newsbrands’ like the BBC, Times Online and The Guardian, rather than ‘newspapers’. This approach also includes finding alternative ways to provide content, e.g. video, graphics, animation, images etc.
3. Creating digital communities: establishing a community, or communities, of influential stakeholders within key digital platforms and using a combination of the to simulate the community and increase its size
4. Traditional media relations: generating press coverage offline to generate a buzz and drive search online

My argument was / is that the PR industry is best placed to own the business of creating communities and building relations without a media filter, directly to the stakeholder, rather than other digital marketing practices, because it is what we have always done: tailor messages, phrases and words, and communicate with stakeholders on our clients’ behalf.

You’ll notice in the above list that I’ve included both digital and traditional media relations. I’ve done so because I don’t believe that you can create ‘effective’ communities without using third-party sources, like the media to generate a buzz.

I don’t believe that the media, or journalism, will ever die. We PR people will always need a filter for one reason or another. Whether it is to create a buzz offline, secure third-party endorsement, or leverage the authority of a particular journalist / news brand.

Either way, if you strip the different disciplines of ‘digital relations’ back to basics, they are fundamentally about using words, messages and phrases to get a clients’ point of view across. As well as building relationships with key stakeholders and influencing them to endorse your clients’ brand to change the behaviour of the individuals within a relevant community.

So basically, what digital PRs do and what PRs should be doing. This is why we are best placed to create communities rather than any other those other marketing disciplines…

Great story on the BBC website yesterday: Was the media hoodwinked by Sarkozy rumours?

So, it appears the great Sarkozy affair was only a social media rumour after all. So why did the Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail print it? Surely they must have known / been able to find out?

Seems to me that as long as the papers can trace it back to someone to blame, they’ll print whatever sells a story.

Sacrificing editorial respectability for short term commercial gain and social media ‘credibility’ is lazy journalism – shame…

Stumbled upon a good investigative blog post by BNET yesterday, which details a patent application filed by Google titled: Web-Based System for Generation of Interactive Games Based on Digital Videos…

After reading through the abstract below it seems that what they want to do is patent the process of using video annotations to develop simple games. A bit like what Crime Stoppers did with its brilliant ‘A Different Ending’ campaign (have a play below), but a little more fun.

Full abstract of Google’s patent:

“Systems and methods are provided for adding and displaying interactive annotations for existing online hosted videos. A graphical annotation interface allows the creation of annotations and association of the annotations with a video. Annotations may be of different types and have different functionality, such as altering the appearance and/or behavior of an existing video, e.g. by supplementing it with text, allowing linking to other videos or web pages, or pausing playback of the video. Authentication of a user desiring to perform annotation of a video may be performed in various manners, such as by checking a uniform resource locator (URL) against an existing list, checking a user identifier against an access list, and the like. As a result of authentication, a user is accorded the appropriate annotation abilities, such as full annotation, no annotation, or annotation restricted to a particular temporal or spatial portion of the video.”

If the patent is passed, and YouTube works this into an interface for its users which includes some basic editing software, we may just start seeing people starting to create their own games.

It also has potential applications in advertising mechanics too.

I will eagerly watch this space…

Read a couple of reviews about Google’s Nexus One during my two hour commute (bloody snow) into the office this morning.

While I’m sure there are genuine improvements to the Android operating system, possibly even functions that are better than the iPhone, it seems that thanks to Google’s PR team, the poor Nexus One was on a hiding to nothing before it was even launched.

One of the first rules of PR is to avoid over-hyped headlines in press releases, but to continually leak information that suggests it’s an ‘iPhone killer’ seems ludicrous. They’ve certainly minimised its chances for success…

However, PR gripes aside, history tells us that when it comes to hardware Apple is rarely beaten.

For me, you only have to look at the failed attempts of MP3 companies to take on the iPod to know that the Nexus One will not beat the iPhone.

But as they say: “time is a healer”. So let’s see what positives both customers and Google’s PR team have to say about it in the coming months.

In the mean time, I’m sticking with my iPhone and the video below shows one of the many reasons why:

SideWiki allows members of the public to contribute information next to any webpage. You install it as a browser sidebar and once installed, you can read and write entries along the side of the page.

Having already been sidetracked by the new gizmo and a client with poor reviews, I am of the opinion that it will be another important thing for digital PRs to manage.

While there are some safeguards built in, it is essentially a licence for web-rogues to have a pop on any website they want to.

Some say it’s a good thing for the legal professional, but for PRs is it just another thing to monitor in a long list?

To be fair it probably is. But lets not get too down-beat – I’m sure it will present many ‘opportunites’ too. Besides, some clever-tech will soon design a programme were you can monitor all your important websites in one. That’s if Google has not already done so…

More info below:

PRWeek revealed the results of its inaugural digital survey yesterday (here) which, surprisingly, only received 64 responses.

But rather than debate the reasons for why this could be (confidentially breaches to uncovered industry blag) I thought it would be interesting to focus on the 61 per cent of respondents that found themselves pitching against non-PR agencies in the last 12 months.

For me Porter Novelli’s, Kerry Gaffney, hits an important nail on the head when saying: “Many clients are appreciating that PR is the natural champion of an organisation’s message and reputation, regardless of the particular channel used to deliver it.”

But, while this should be the case, in my experience ‘many clients’ still invite digital, advertising, social media, marketing and search agencies to tender. And who blames them? After all, they’re paying the bills so they unquestionably deserve to find the best agency for the job.

For me, the PR industry still lags a little behind the others. Over the next year or so I envisage the PR industry changing at a speed far greater than witnessed so far and at a level comparable to the impact of the internet on the advertising industry.

As clients and consumers become even more digitally-savvy the challenge will be put upon PRs to reach online communities, e.g. online media, bloggers and social network users, ahead of traditional print media. And in many cases, there will be a need to go direct to the consumer – bringing PR and other specialist forms of marketing, closer together.

There will also be a shift in the way PRs deal with video, audio, graphics and pictures. Indeed, news organisations like the BBC, Daily Telegraph and Press Association (PA Video Wire) have already changed their models to cater for video and digital graphics. And to fulfil this growing demand for content PRs will have to provide quality, rich multimedia content more frequently than before. Again, bringing PR and other specialist forms of marketing, closer together.

While advertising and digital marketing agencies have already embraced this ‘digital marketing communications revolution’, the road ahead remains rocky for the PR industry. PR agencies that have prepared, or are preparing for an increasing ‘digital demand’ will succeed if they can convince clients that their PR agency can not only web-build, run social media campaigns, create content etc., but can also get results, add value and measure all of the above.

However, for those agencies who fail to do this, they will lose clients, stop winning new business and fall by the wayside.

So, the onus is therefore on us, as PR people, to stamp our authority on the ‘digital marketing mix’ and grab valuable market share of this emerging communications market for our industry.

There are still many clients out there who do not understand how this ‘digital revolution’ is changing the way they need to communicate. As such, there are many opportunities for digitally-savvy PR agencies to explore, many potential client hands to hold and many long-term relationships to build…

Up until yesterday I bet if you asked 100 people to name a football team from Nottingham, 90 per cent would have said Nottingham Forest first. But now? I’m not so sure…

I could be here all day analysing Sven’s move to Meadow Lane from a football point of view, but I’ll get this out of my system later at pre-season training, so I’ll just touch on the PR perspective for now.

It’s a cracking story and a fantastic reminder how to use the right celebrity to dress-up a dull news story.

Whether Sven has moved for the money, or “the biggest challenge of his life”, it doesn’t really matter.

And it may not necessarily be financially good for the game but at least the lower tier of English football is now back on the map.

I expect fans to flock en masse to the County’s first few games of the season, but even Severance-Sven will not continue to pull in the crowds or player unless they get the results on the pitch.

Football clubs can do the best PR in the world, but if they lose 5-0 every week the fans will soon turn.

In fact, I may look into the price of Sven taking over from Ian McParland before Christmas…

Ex-NOTW editor Andy Coulson came out on top of today’s Culture Select committee meeting, despite attempts from Labour spin-doctors to move the story into the political agenda and score valuable points over the Tories.

David Cameron’s recently appointed aide delivered a text-book case of reputation management by admitting guilt, welcoming an investigation, and generating some sympathy for himself – oh and humouring his audience with some clever name dropping: “I never asked for a Gordon Taylor story, I never commissioned an Gordon Taylor story, I never read a Gordon Taylor story, I never published a Gordon Taylor story,” he replied.” With all respect to Gordon Taylor, he is hardly a household name.”

The inconclusive evidence will leave many disappointed and Coulson’s careful handling will prevent a repeat of the ‘banker’s barrage’, featuring Fred the Shred et al, being played out in the media.

But for those wanting to air their disgust, I strongly recommend joining John Prescott, LabourMatters and Catherine Mayer and co on Twitter (#hackgate).