A new chapter for Liberate Media

June 21st, 2010

As you may have seen, I recently completed a deal to acquire the remaining shares in Liberate Media from my former business partner.

Since starting the company back in 2006, we’ve focused on integrating more traditional PR methods with social media strategies and approaches. It’s been a very successful time, and we’ve enjoyed living in a sector that has developed so rapidly, and exploded into the mainstream PR, search, digital, marketing and advertising spaces.

The lines between these disciplines are getting increasingly blurred, and although we all have our own opinions on how the future will take shape, it seems the communications sector in whatever guise it appears, will be a very different beast in the years to come.

At Liberate Media, much like our sector, we’re also changing, but it’s a change that I feel is important to position us for the ongoing development in the market. You’ll be seeing a few new focuses and developments in the near future, while maintaining our core expertise in communicating to brand audiences online, offline or where ever they are, but more on that another day.

When we started Liberate Media, I quickly grew to appreciate the advantages and disadvantages of working day-to-day with a business partner. However, in May 2009, when Wendy took a break from the business, returning earlier this year, I realised that my personal ambition for the company was to continue its evolution and focus on delivering a service that not only reflects the sector’s development, but also our client’s growing need. This will be our focus moving forward, and I hope to be introducing a few new faces along the way.

So, for now, please stay in touch and let us know what you think.

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Wendy McAuliffe signing off…

June 21st, 2010

Sadly this will be my last contribution to the Liberate Media blog, as after four adrenalin-fueled years, I am leaving my post as director and moving onto pastures new.

Setting-up Liberate has been an incredible experience, and I’m eternally grateful for the support that we’ve received along the way from friends, family (my husband in particular!) and industry peers.

Back in 2006, we saw the huge potential that social media would create for the PR industry, and we wanted to be a part of that change, leading by example. In the four years since, the industry has undergone a rapid transformation, and we’ve always endeavoured to keep Liberate Media evolving in terms of our knowledge, approach and positioning. Last year we set-up our own Social Media News Release service Pressitt, which has been a great success and I will continue to be a part of.

Setting up a business from scratch isn’t easy. At the start there were a lot of lost weekends and holidays, but it was worth it for the satisfaction that you get out of building something that is our own. I’ve always kept a close network of trusted mentors (you know who you are!), and they have been wonderful at guiding and advising me along the way, and sharing leads and contacts where ever they can. We have always taken the approach of building the business through word-of-mouth and recommendation, and from my experience, this has always helped to create great client relationships and distance us from the pitching circuit, which I still believe is an ineffective way of selecting a PR partner.

Time is always what I wanted more of! When you’re working flat out and the business is established, it’s easy to forget to take time out for business planning and creative thinking around the next stage of the business. At times we were guilty of getting too caught up in day-to-day work, but when we did make time for blue sky thinking and planning, it was always worth it in terms of re-inspiring and re-energising, and positive changes always resulted.

For old time’s sake, I thought I’d dig up the first ever post that I wrote for the Liberate blog: ‘Liberating our Online Identity‘. It goes to show how far we’ve come.

If you’ve been a regular reader of my blog posts, thank you for your time.

I wish Liberate Media the best of success for the future.

Over and out!

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Pressitt SMNR re-launches with platform upgrade and Google News listing

March 25th, 2010

The Liberate team and our web design partner Best Served Cold have been working hard behind the scenes on the latest version of Pressitt, our social media news release platform, which is free to use.

We hope you will forgive the shameless plug, further details below:

Social Media News Release (SMNR) service Pressitt today announces that it is coming out of public beta and re-launching with a fully upgraded platform and host of new features and functionality. In addition, all Pressitt releases will be featured in Google News ensuring higher visibility for all SMNRs created and published via the service.

Pressitt is the only free Social Media News Release (SMNR) service currently available in the UK. Its feature-rich platform revolutionises the traditional, text-heavy press release format, providing journalists, bloggers and consumers with a new and simpler way of gathering information.

The upgraded Pressitt 1.0 service has been redesigned to offer greater performance and usability, based on user feedback. New features include improved search functionality across the site, and the ability to tag releases to assist with visibility.

Improvements have also been made to social publishing functionality to encourage users to share their Pressitt SMNRs.

A new authentication system with enhanced security features will also underpin Pressitt 1.0 to ensure it is only distributing quality content. Live form validation has been introduced to make the registration, login and creation process slicker and more intelligent to use. In addition, human moderation controls have also been increased to offer a double layer of protection against unsolicited news.

Since its public beta launch in April 2009, Pressitt has successfully encouraged a large number of respected PR agencies and businesses to adopt the SMNR format for the first time, and hence share their news announcements with a social media audience.

The Pressitt SMNR template offers all of the core information found in a traditional press release, but additionally takes advantage of linking, multimedia and Web 2.0 shareable features. It allows users to host downloadable hi-res images within their releases, along with PowerPoint presentations, and PDFs - YouTube videos can also be embedded. Each brand using the service is assigned its own RSS feed, and press contacts can be reached via LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.

So why not give it a go. We look forward to viewing your Pressitt SMNR.

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New client case study: Tamar

March 22nd, 2010

Liberate Media has just completed the first four months of a new integrated PR campaign with Tamar, the search and social conversion agency, which has produced some very effective results, including two Sky News interviews, national and extensive trade coverage, as well as wide online pick-up.

We’ve written a case study focusing on the success of Tamar’s Political Search Index, which is part of our ongoing campaign focused on building the agency’s reputation as the natural search and social conversion experts.

Tamar case study: http://www.liberatemedia.com/case-studies/tamar-political-search-index-campaign/

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Following me, following you (ah-haa)

March 19th, 2010

This post has been brewing for some time, and recent conversations have brought it to the front of my mind. It’s certainly not a new debate, but it is still relevant, and never quite seems to go away as a topic of discussion.

Allow me to set the scene. I am a Twitter user (shock!), I’ve been using Twitter since December 24th 2007, according to How long have you been tweeting and although it took me sometime to truly warm up to Twitter, I now find it a very useful conversation tool both personally and as a part of my role at Liberate Media. But friends, I do not follow back all of those that follow me.

This is not a steadfast rule, I don’t refuse to follow people that follow me, I always take a good look at new followers (maybe not straight away) and evaluate if following in return would add to my community and the focuses that I am interested in.

This approach has of course lost me followers, and earlier this month one such follower made their reasons for this following - unfollowing procedure clear. Without going into too much detail this person had found me via a colleague, thought I would be interesting to follow (in fact they followed all of Liberate Media’s team) but unfollowed me within a few weeks for the sole reason that I did not follow them back. I know this because they said as much in an email, confirming that an agency of our type should be aware of its followers and follow them back as a matter of course, and as we didn’t they have unfollowed and wouldn’t be coming back.

The point that we may have looked at this person and decided not to follow them back didn’t seem to cross their mind, and by communicating this sequence of events as a failing of the agency seemed to suggest that reciprocal following is some sort of unwritten rule or etiquette.

Before I get into my opinions on the issue, let me state that everyone is entitled to their opinion, there are no official rules of Twitter, other than the obvious, and we all have a right to use the platform as we see fit, so this person is of course free to act as they wish.

In my case however, I choose not to follow reciprocally. I choose not to mass follow thousands to get nearly the same number back, I see no value in it as in my opinion it doesn’t help to build a conversation - it’s just a numbers game. Of course we’re all interested in our follower numbers, that’s just human nature, but some equate value in the number of followers, some equate value in the difference between followers and following, some equate value in the quality of conversation and the exchange of knowledge. I fall into the last category, that’s my decision, it works for me.

Some people may feel that my favoured approach is in fact anti-community, and I am not interacting with the whole. I would argue that the size of the community is not the issue, but the relevancy that each person has within that community and the value that each person brings/derives within the community, whether it’s 10 strong or 10,000, is the issue.

I know there will be some that agree and others that disagree, and that’s a good thing in my opinion. Our social media community, which encompasses many platforms and networks, allows us the freedom of choice to do as we wish and develop our communities in the way the suits us best. That’s why I don’t think there should be community rules that say things like we have to follow people back that follow us.

It’s not rude, it’s not anti-community, and it doesn’t go against some social media sermon that was supposedly written in days of yore.

If I’m not following you back it’s not because I have slighted you or your family, it’s not because I don’t believe you are interesting, it’s simply a choice that we all make based on a number of elements. After all, do we welcome every person we meet into our network of friends? Do I have to become friends with those that my friends introduce me to? Isn’t that an individual choice that we each make, and have the right to later change?

So, what are your thoughts on the subject, how do you build your community? Here are a couple of pieces that look a little deeper into the pros and cons of reciprocal following:

Why you should follow everyone who follows you on Twitter by Don Reisinger

The evils of reciprocal following by Doug Braun

If you really want to know who is not following you back, check out Friendorfollow

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Is the Press Release still effective?

January 12th, 2010

The Liberate Media team would like to ask you a small favour, which will take 30 seconds of your time in the name of research.

We have put together a very small survey asking 4 questions on the effectiveness of the traditional press release.

Over the last few years there has been much talk about the need for an updated press release format, similar to our own service; Pressitt, but as one journalist tweeted the other day: “If you don’t like press releases, you’re in the wrong industry.” Is this a common view shared amongst journalists, or do you think otherwise?

The survey is best suited to journalists who read/use press releases on a daily basis, but if you have strong views on the traditional press release, feel free to take the survey.

Of course we will share the results with you once they have been finalised.

Many thanks in advance, the Liberate Media team.

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Should we be predicting the future, or joining the conversation?

December 18th, 2009

It’s that time of year when we’re all looking forward to a Christmas break, and busily trying to finish off our actions to get away on time. It’s also the ‘predictions’ and ‘round-ups’ time of the year, when the great and good of, well everything, look back at the year and offer their pearls of wisdom on what the next 12 months has in store.

Before you click away, and think ‘oh no, not another one’, fear not, I will not be offering you either, well not intentionally, as I tend to sit in the growing camp of people that are very board of these already. Afterall, what do the majority of predictions actually achieve? Other than occasionally making people look very silly, as Danny Sullivan pointed out in his post on Search Engine Land this week; Is SEO Dead? 1997 Prediction, Meet 2009 Reality quoting a great prediction from 1997, which you can read on the post, but the highlight for me was this closing:

‘So in closing, I submit that search engines are dying. In fact, I would say they are dead already and just don’t know it yet - gone the way of the reciprocal link exchange and the “you have a cool page” award as an effective promotional tool. A victim of their own success.’

For those that don’t know, Google launched the following year, enough said…

So other than an easy piece of content to write with mince pie in hand, or something that your audience/clients expect as a regular feature, what purpose do predictions serve? Does anyone actually use them, do they shape the future?

In most cases I don’t think they do, but to some extent - perhaps, so let me give it a go: 2009 wasn’t a great year - but we survived, and actually did better than most - (well done, of course you did) and 2010 will be better, ‘and’ it’ll be the year of…(enter appropriate prediction: social media, mobile, Twitter monetisation, the end of obvious predictions) good, glad we’ve got that out of the way. I’m sure to look back on that in December 2010 and be content with my accuracy and insightfulness.

The other reason many people write predictions, and in fact offer these rather outlandish headlines (see above) is because they tend to attract reaction, debate and drive traffic, which is always a winner for those looking to bolster their readers/subscribers/visitors, etc, and it works, at the cost of reputation and maybe trust.

Was that too harsh? Possibly, and I really do not wish to tar everyone with the same brush, so allow me to clarify by highlighting those predictions that do prove useful and relevant. I’m not going to offer links or examples, just a profile of the people that will write useful predictions.

So who are these people? Well undoubtedly they’ll be the same influencers, call them what you will, that you look for on your tweets, the same RSS feeds you are subscribed to, and the people you would go to an event to meet.

It’s the same people that share useful and either new, or perhaps insightful, information throughout the year, and it’s the same people that you should be listening to and conversing with all year around, and yes it’s the same people that have gained your trust and built a reputation. They are also the same people that you want to emulate and perhaps be more like next year.

These people are those that have taken the time to listen, get involved in the conversation, and build reputation. These people predict, revise and discuss the future all year round, look at case studies of success and failure, and offer a balanced opinion of the issues in their relevant sector, industry, or area of expertise.

These are the people that we can call social communicators, those that ‘get it’ (if that is still a relevant term) those that have experimented, learnt from failings and can offer the benefit of their experience.

So no, not all predictions are space-filling, traffic-seeking, uninspiring deletion magnets, some are interesting, useful, educational and relevant. It’s just that these useful predictions are not a one-off, the great content is there all year round.

Perhaps, that would be the ideal prediction for 2010, that we all become more social in our communications and our approach, and just join in. In fact i think it’s a great resolution, and one that I will be trying to stick to.

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Three years in social media/PR - where next?

September 11th, 2009

This week marks the third anniversary of the launch of Liberate Media’s blog, which naturally got me thinking and reminiscing about the launch of our company and how the environment around PR, social media, and everything in-between, has changed over the years.

Casting my mind back to 2006, I know it’s really not that long ago but play along, social media as an opportunity for brand communications and an opportunity for the communications industry at a whole was still at a very early phase of development. Sure, we’d experienced the now infamous and much discussed Dell Hell case study, so the evidence was mounting on the effect and power of online communities, but only a small percentage of agencies and brands were experimenting, let alone embracing social media.

From personal experience I’d discussed the effect of social media on PR with my then boss, who assured me that it was just another fad and ‘nobody cares what I’m doing every minute of the day’. That kind of summed up the traditional PR agency approach at the time, which is why my co-founder and I decided to get out fast and set up our own consultancy that would embrace social media and any other medium that helped us to embrace a more community driven and conversational approach to PR, rather than the hard sell and ‘who cares what a few nutters think’ approach that had done so much damage to PR over the preceding years.

Admittedly, over the first year or so it was trial and error with social media, but wasn’t it, and in fact isn’t it still, the same for everyone? Clients were not as willing to invest in social media and generally experiments with projects were as far as we were allowed to take it with many brands. The main issue was education and evidence, the move from traditional marketing to understanding a social environment was a huge leap and the good old ROI question became an excuse not to engage in some quarters, rather than a real search for measurement as it is in many others, even though the ROI of traditional PR was questionable at best.

As brands became more comfortable, saw more success stories and understood the benefits of engaging with their communities the debate moved beyond making a case to prove social media, at least for the pioneers, and leaned more towards experimentation and development to find the best way of building campaigns. In reality there was and is no handbook, no real experts or gurus who have it nailed, although some like to label themselves as such, what we have is development and learning, those with more experience and those with less.

What has changed is the belief in social media and the hunger to get involved. Now the cynical may say that the explosion of those people offering social media services, from web developers to PRs, to social media specialists to SEOs to digital agencies, advertising agencies, and their mothers, over the last year or two is because there is money to be made, and the simple economics of the situation would back that up. However, in too many of these cases each person/agency/company that has a rightful claim to be involved in developing a relevant element of social media is in fact trying to stake a claim for ownership, even though they know in their heart of hearts they can’t do it all. Social Media should belong to PRs/digital agencies/SEOs/ (delete as appropriate) well it shouldn’t, it doesn’t and it won’t.

The one thing that social media has proved to me over the years is you can’t fake it, at least not for long and those that are trying to own social media are missing the point. To understand social media and therefore operate with in the spectrum of skills required to run relevant campaigns you need multiple skills, not just marketing/PR/digital/search/content but all of it.

That’s where I believe the evolution will take place over the next three years. Not in one sector taking ownership, but a new sector developing, not just of people who ‘get it’ but of those that forget ownership and build skill sets not just departmentally but as individuals, who understand PR/content development/search/digital as a whole and those that can become actual social media consultants not just pushing budgets towards their slice of the social media pie.

So, I said at the beginning that this post will be a look back at the development of social media and PR over the last three years, and I’ve banged on about social media in the main, mostly because I feel that is a large part of the future of PR. Traditional PR, in my opinion, will still be relevant, just as search and the many other digital disciplines will remain relevant, but as a part of the wider offering. The confusion begins when we refer to social media as the online aspect of the campaigns we run, the conversations we have and the development of community only online. At its heart the social aspect doesn’t have to be online. One of the most natural parts of human behaviour is the need to be social and communicate, and not just online, the theories are relevant to communications as a whole.

This is where I believe we are heading, to a new space outside of petty bickering about who is right and who started it and who owns it and blah, blah - who cares? It’s really not a hard concept: we listen, we understand we get involved by being useful and develop relationships and reputation. I think that’s a pretty relevant description of social media online or offline. Although it probably will become redefined, relabelled and rewired, that’s where we need to be heading as communications professionals, be that online, offline and everything in between.

Will we get there in the next three years? Probably not, but we’ll keep experimenting and improving.

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The changing face of PR

July 10th, 2009

I’m a bit late to the party, but two articles struck me in last week’s PR Week. The first was the piece titled ‘journalists should beware PR option‘ about the increasing numbers of senior journalists joining the PR industry and the second was ‘PR ponders place in marketing mix‘ after ad agencies won a whole host of awards with PR-led campaigns at Cannes Lions ad festival (to be fair I’m not sure that’s a great measure as Cannes Lions is an Ad festival, but still). Why did they strike me? Well, to my mind, both of these articles are relevant to the same ‘future of PR’ discussion.

Let’s begin with the latter. ‘PR ponders place in marketing mix’ Well about bloody time in my opinion! As anyone who knows anything about Liberate Media, and the reasons that Wendy and I set it up, will know we believe strongly that PR must evolve. Evolve out of traditional PR and develop an understanding of how to communicate online. Evolve out of a blinkered view that no one else can do what we do and instead learn everything we can about a broad spectrum of marketing techniques, and evolve to realise that actually if we can do those things we are in a strong position to take more responsibility in the marketing mix.

Before I continue I wish to make something clear: I’m not here to say PR people are better suited to take the lead in marketing or social media than any other discipline, or any of that pathetic argument that has been raging for so long most people have either lost the will to continue, or never cared in the first place. I was, and am, the latter by the way. If you want to ‘take the lead’ you fill your boots, we’ll just get on with it. No, I’m talking about what PRs should be good at; developing communications strategies, identifying audiences, telling a story and getting the job done.

If PRs can understand the other elements of the marketing mix, pull together the skills or partner with likeminded agencies within these areas to get the job done, why shouldn’t this situation be a positive? Yes Ad agencies have the backing and the power, yes clients will probably look to them first, but we have to prove our worth.

PRs can’t sit there and say Ad agencies can’t do PR and expect everything to continue as before. We know for a fact Ad agencies are skilling up in terms of digital, we know they can move quickly in any sector if there is a profit, (ask search and digital agencies) but why can’t PR agencies develop their knowledge to keep pace?

Some PR agencies already have, but most haven’t and as I’m sure they are realising if they haven’t already started to expand their knowledge and skills, they had better soon get on with it otherwise they will very quickly disappear.

So that leads me to the second point. ‘journalists should beware PR option’. Now we all know journalists becoming PRs is not a new phenomenon, it makes sense and many great PRs have been journalists. In fact we have two on the team at Liberate. The reasons they make great PRs are also the reason that we now need to get more skills into agencies, because they see and understand things that traditionally trained PRs don’t see easily. We need search, web development, content development and broader communications skills, etc. PR agencies need to be the sponge of the comms industry and suck up this knowledge as quickly as we possibly can.

At Liberate we’ve followed this approach from day one and it has worked brilliantly. Not because we did it when we had to, not because of a recession, not because it seems to be the trend, but because it’s the only way PR can survive, it’s as simple as that. That may sound big headed, but it’s not supposed to be. It’s the simple truth, and it was as clear three years ago as it is today.<-->

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Devaluing PR

June 1st, 2009

Be warned this post contains a PR-based rant, not a new one, but a valid one, and one that has been raised by many others in the past. Well now it’s my turn, and I’m afraid it comes from recent experience.

So what is the problem? And how does it devalue PR? Well it’s very difficult to be more literal about devaluing PR than actually offering the service at a massively discounted price for the sole purpose of taking a client from another agency, or for the purpose of having the client on your roster in an attempt to win additional business.

This is far from a new issue, it’s been a problem for at least the last 11 years that I’ve been in PR and I suspect it goes back much further. I’ve seen it happen before, and I’ve known agencies that have done it, but let me make it clear; I think it is wrong on so many levels.

Why? Well, without wishing to repeat myself, IT DEVALUES PR. How can you say a service is worth X one day and the next it’s worth next to nothing? It also demotivates teams and makes them feel worthless. I’ve been on such a team in the past and don’t underestimate the effect this can have, there’s nothing worse than working hard to service a client that has zero respect for your agency/team and knows that when things pick up they’re off. It’s also disrespectful to our peers. Sure, in the bad old days we were all supposed to hate each other, while secretly trying to see if we might get paid more by moving to a rival agency, but haven’t we moved past that, at least to some degree? I really thought so.

So, when a client came to me recently and said; “Look, there’s no easy way of saying this, and it’s nothing to do with you guys or the campaign, but I’ve been made an offer I can’t refuse and I’m under pressure to take it. You know how it is in the current climate,” it was difficult to take.

Obviously I asked the client to tell me about it so that I could at least understand the situation and see if there was something that could be done. Then the bolt from the blue, the other agencies’ ridiculous deal smacks you in the face.

To cut a long story short, that’s it, end of discussion. Alright there may have been a few more discussions, I’m not making it that easy, but fundamentally that’s it.

So where does that leave us? Well, as far as I know the agency might actually be decent, I don’t know as I haven’t had any experience of them, and I’m sure they have their reasons, but I don’t think I would agree with them.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not doing this to ‘out’ the agency or the client, I’m not going to mention either, and I’m not doing this because I’m bitter. I’m doing this because it’s so short sighted and damaging to us all.

Can this even be a viable new business tactic? I’m struggling to see the pay off. I think we’re all agreed that PR, as an industry, needs to wake up to a whole host of challenges, and the last thing we need is to be destroyed from the inside. Have we really been demoted to scrabbling around fighting each other for an ever decreasing pool of clients?

Isn’t it time we stepped up and took responsibility for our actions and stopped shooting ourselves in the foot when the going gets tough? Sure, you can say it’s just business, or it’s the client’s choice and I’d agree, at least in terms of it being the client’s choice. But how can it be ‘just business’, when my point is there’s no ‘business’ to be had if you’re going to quote crazy prices. What do we think will happen when the agency eventually wants to put the fee up, try justifying that.

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