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.

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.

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…

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…

To me, the whole idea of speaking to someone you never knew existed, without any kind of agenda, or any boundaries, seems to be completely absurd. So what is the appeal?

Is it just a site for complete and utter wierdos seeking a new channel to promote self-published entertainment? Or does it have any commercial use whatsoever?

This well-put-together, hilarious video by Casey Neistat sums Chat Roulette up in a nutshell:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwnCJbf7SD8

It also, thank god, gives me enough of an idea about what Chat Roulette is all about without having to login myself.

For those of you who are tempted to find out more, before you do, here is snapshot of what lies in store:

• You can click “next” any time, or stay with your current pairing.
• You might see people in horrifying masks dancing around.
• Chinese users seem to love virtual high fives.
• One person’s shtick is a puppet who makes like a caring psychotherapist and will sit with you for hours.
• A man holding up a sign that said, “Assroll?”, and promptly rolling over backwards, naked. (Nudity is hard to avoid.)

Strangely, I can see the concept of Chat Roulette taking off in the world of online dating, and possibly environment in sport, e.g. in football forums of betting platforms such as Betfair.

In sum, think of YouTube, with even more exhibitionism because everything is live and there are no boundaries…

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…

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:

Do people read it in the morning because it’s convenient, i.e. their local train station does not sell other newspapers and the local newsagent is not on their way? Or is it a question of price, i.e. reading it instead of The Times everyday saves them £20 a month?

Decided it was a convenience thing first and foremost, and then price. Reckon most people read the Metro as it’s light entertainment first thing, and then rely on the internet when they get to work to get more factual, industry related news.

We then got onto news aggregators and discovered that many people have many different habits, e.g. iGoogle, NewsNow, Ananova, Press Gazette and Yahoo! News etc.

Also found a useful website detailing a list of web-based, desktop, email, mobile and browser extension aggregators: NewsOnFeeds.com.

I then spared a thought for the paper boy…

What’s he up to in this digital news age? Do people still get a paper delivered in the morning? Is he out of a job? Has he evolved? If so, how? And would people be interested in receiving news from an electronic paper boy?

A quick Google search curbed my excitment (ThePaperBoy.com), but, as always, am convinced I could do better…

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:

The Sky Player will provide video-on-demand service and access to live TV on 24 channels including movies and sports.

It will also provide a range of “unique interactive services”, including apps that allow viewers to communicate real time via XBox Live avatars while watching Sky Sports, and Twitter and Facebook apps in association with TV programmes.

For the app loving, football following, social media sort it seems a dream come true…

But there’s a catch. You’ll need an XBox Live Gold subscription for this one, and you’ll also need to be subscribed to Sky Movies and Sky Sports.

Find out more here