Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
Brian Solis and Chris Beck define the future of being social
August 27th, 2010
I’ve been following the series of video conversations between Brian Solis and Chris Beck, which are extraordinary in their breadth and depth. They are ‘must see’ for anyone involved with social media PR and indeed for anyone who is interested in the future of online communication.
What strikes me is the clarity of thought, the strategic minds at work here. These guys inhabit ‘social’ but also understand the commercial imperatives that underlie many online conversations. My favourite is the discussion on privacy and what constitutes the ‘online self’.
At a time when some commentators are questioning the existence and value of social networks, Brian and Chris offer a positive, inspiring view of the possibilities. Is social media dead? No. Does it present problems? Yes. Can we rise to the challenge? Take a look at these videos and make up your own mind. Personally, I’d say that with people like Brian and Chris leading the discussion, we’re in very safe hands.
You can see the complete series on Brian’s website
David McCandless explains the power of infographics
August 26th, 2010
Here’s a treat - David McCandless explaining the power of visual information design/infographics at the recent TED Global conference in Oxford. There’s plenty of good for thought in his lively talk and he shows some wonderful examples of how complex data from different sources can be presented in a way that makes it more graspable. He also shows how new understanding can come from the process - and so change the ways we think.
My only concern is that the adage “garbage in, garbage out” applies even more to the production of infographics. There has to be a way of assessing the quality of the research data - and as Ben Goldacre proves every week in his Bad Science Guardian column, there is no shortage of questionable data online.
iPhone 4.0, Steve Jobs and killer PR
July 18th, 2010
Hands up, who does not want an iPhone 4.0? No really, be straight. Thought so – and just about everyone else wants one too. They did before the Apple press conference on Friday – and they do – more – now.
Want to see marketing and PR on a roll? Just watch Steve Jobs hitting the stage at 10 am Cupertino time. His audience? The financial analysts. He wooed them with absolutely the right messages at the right time and place.
He annoyed just about everybody else, except the distributors (that largely the network operators) but won the day. Why? He talked about how, right now, handsets (and networks) don’t deliver.
Sure, they connect, they can play, they can download and roll, The Smartphones have a way to go – but, as Steve Jobs said on Friday, they’re all getting there. It’s just that the iPhone is getting there quicker and with more style
Is the iPhone an issue? Not now, not really. Steve told us that the other “Smarts” have the same, solvable problem. At the technical layer its about a hardware/software workaround. Next time they’ll get it right.
At the network layer, it’s about integration – exactly how disparate mobile devices connect and communicate through this thing we call “the Web”. A theme for another post… but yours idea would be very welcome.
At the marketing layer, it’s about feeding desire – and Steve nailed this on Friday. Here’s the script: apologise, involve people with the problem, make it general, offer a bonus – then stoke the market with a time-limit. Beautiful.
So here’s the thing. In the next year, who do you think will sell more handsets – Apple or the Droids? My bet is still on Jobs to deliver, because the iPhone is still an object of desire.
Price-point is an issue but the difference between the Droids and Apple deals here and in the US mean that the corporates can still justify the added spend, if only on the base of desire. Professionals want to be seen using them.
But the iPhone does not only win there. Its nearest rival, HTC has produced beautiful products, the Desire and the Hero among them. The reviews are brilliant and all just point to a central sales flaw – the base. Open Source obviously means less control, more potential but at the same time means less control at the User Interface. If the Droids get the UI right, they will win the Apple war.
At the same time as we’re debating the benefits of Open Source, Apple, in the mobile sector, is winning because it has brand trust, brand affiliation, and a deep sense of its own rightness. It also does killer PR – in ways that we need to learn.
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!
Steve Jobs, Apple, insanely great friends and how to live your life
April 23rd, 2010
I caught up with two old journalist colleagues, good friends, last night - Merlin John and Sean Coughlan. We put the world to rights, celebrated Sean’s promotion to education Correspondent at the BBC, and argued geek-pop-politics until forever.
We most definitely raised our voices around the subject of Steve Jobs and Apple; I found myself trying to defend the insanely great man against accusations that Apple had moved away from education, was trying to take over and control the Web, and that the iPad sucked.
One point we did agree on was the potential for the iPad and other slates to give publishers a lifeline through connections to new and old readerships. Sean’s been busy writing books, available online only so he has a keen interest in how this market will develop. Whether Jobs wants to and can effectively wall the internet garden is still up for debate but for now, for me, he remains a hero.
This morning I replayed the Stanford University video to remind myself why I respect Steve Jobs so much - if you have time, it just might be the best 14mins 30 secs you’ve spent. This is the way I’d like to live my life, most certainly.
Digital Economy Bill: It’s time for the community to speak out
March 16th, 2010
Last night you could have been forgiven for thinking that we’d stepped back 10 years in internet history, when the House of Lords approved the controversial Digital Economy Bill, which is now expected to be rushed through the Commons before the general election.
The bill, put forward by Business Secretary Lord Mandelson, could give courts the power to block websites which are infringing copyright, and includes plans to suspend the internet accounts of people who persistently download material illegally. This could result in sites such as YouTube – which has, in the past, been criticised by rights owners for hosting unsanctioned video clips of their artists or TV shows – being shut down.
It seems that the rights of the creative artist or “rights holder” are far more important than those of the wider internet community. Once we begin restricting online behaviour, it sets the foundations for greater censorship and ‘Big Brother’ monitoring. The internet has always been a place of anonymity and freedom of expression, but under the new bill, internet freedom could be severely curbed.
If the music industry in particular has a problem with no longer being able to monetise artists’ content effectively owing to the volume of illegal content on the web, then that’s their problem to resolve. One might argue that it’s time they updated their revenue model, rather than attempting to impose draconian measures on the internet community at large.
The BBC’s Bill Thompson puts it really nicely. “We are on the verge of building so many restrictions into online activity that the creativity, inventiveness and sheer joy of life on the net will be squeezed out just to ensure that over-hyped comedians are able to censor videos of their fans waiting for the show to begin.”
Now is the time for people to speak out and defend their rights in the digital world. Social networking provides individuals with the power to get their voice heard…so let’s make the most of it!
** These are my own views, and do not necessarily reflect the views of Liberate Media.
What’s this Facebook status message craze about?
February 5th, 2010
Last month I blogged about why women on Facebook were changing their status messages to a colour, which as you now know, was related to a guerilla campaign promoting Breast Cancer Awareness.
Since then, the Facebook status message craze has reached epidemic proportions.
If you’ve missed them, we’ve had:
- My fine is…. - a Facebook group that encouraged users to calculate a fine for their misspent youth (i.e. smoked weed £10), and enter the result in their status message. The group is less than a month old and already has 440,837 members, attracting an astonishing 79,181 members on the first day of opening.
- Celebrity doppelganger week (or month – it seems to have taken on a life of its own) - encourages Facebook users to change their profile picture to that of a celebrity who they’ve been told they look like.
- Urbandictionary.com - Facebook users have been changing their status message to the Urbandictionary.com definition of their name. Mine by the way is “intellectually attractive woman” which I completely agree with! The Urbandictionary.com Facebook group has almost 14,000 members.
Well at least those are the crazes that I’ve picked up on!
So what’s the point? There was a clear agenda to the Breast Cancer Awareness campaign, but not so for the others. So why are they are attracting thousands upon thousands of fans?
The answer, I believe, is a tribal one. As users’ lives become increasingly ingrained in social networks such as Facebook, they feel the need to align themselves with certain tribes. All of the above examples enable an individual to tell more about their personal narrative, be it how naughty they were in their teens, or who people have told them they look like. By participating in these status message crazes, they are managing their online tribal identity.
If this line of thinking interests you, it might be worth checking out the blog of Michael Bayler (who is a client), who has written a lot about consumer identity and the new tribalism.
I’m sure brands will be trying to cash in quick on the Facebook status message craze…so expect more of them…but I don’t suspect the trend will last if every brand jumps on the bandwaggon.
The Apple iSlate changes everything - maybe even its name
January 26th, 2010
In a few hours’ time (10.am PST – 6pm GMT) Steve Jobs will unveil the new Apple iSlate (iPad, iPlank, iWant1) at the Yerba Buena Centre for the Arts Theatre in San Francisco and change everything, again - except the global network his new baby will join.
Guess what, he’s not alone. Hewlett-Packard CTO Phil McKinney took Steve’s cue and boosted his company’s Slate – announced first at the CES show- again on video this week. Phil has been raving about the potential for these devices for the past year and might feel more than a little miffed by the Apple landgrab. HP is due to market their slate later this year. It’s the consolidated concept made real - the all-in-one device (based on Windows 7, naturally).
For now, though, Apple has the stage. No company creates desire better than Apple – and nobody does it better than Steve Jobs. We don’t know the details (desire), the Apple website is very slow and anyway is ignoring the future of computing - so we put dreams and nods and winks together. Here’s mine: 10-inch multitouch screen, aluminium or rough surface body, webcam, MacOS 10.7, wi-fi/3G access, Apple-crafted ARM-based chip, App Store enabled, games and widgets…
Its one weak spot – no keyboard. Touchscreen boards suck – ergonomic hell and we will want to communicate. It’s the iPhone’s major failing and I don’t know how Apple is going to address this flaw.
What it will do is to outshine all the beautiful design and tech specs. Apple’s timing is, again, spot-on as the traditional media push back against the embedded culture of “free” and look for a means to make paying for content a pleasure. With the iSlate, newspapers and magazines have just been given a new lease of life.
It will be cool again to pay for trad media content because Apple will make it desirable and flexible. No need for an annual subscription, Apple will provide the payment platform that gives you options. Micropayments suddenly make economic sense to publishers, including the New York Times and the Washington Post.
Who else wins? Education – facing unacceptable cuts in funding from nursery to post-grad. In the US, Apple has a sizable share of the education dollar and institutions have already bought into the eBook as a means of reducing library costs. The iSlate will extend that market selling point globally and will tough it out against HP and the other PC Slate builders.
Book publishers will benefit not only from academic sales and reduced costs of production/distribution. Tie-ins with the big supermarkets should enable them and the Slate makers to make a killing at the expense of the traditional booksellers and the first generation e-reader manufacturers. Amazon must be working on a game plan for Kindle 2 (a Slate?) or talking hard with HP and Apple.
I bet we’ll have to wait in Europe for our version of the iSlate – maybe until the Summer, although that won’t stop the publishing giants from knocking hard on Apple’s door. Or us, for that matter.
Privacy and the currency of disclosure on social networks
January 15th, 2010
Comments by Mark Zuckerman, founder of social network Facebook, have reignited the debate on the value of individual privacy, an argument expanded in an elegant blog post by Kieron O’Hara, senior research fellow in Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton.
Kieron argues that privacy is actually essential, not only for the individual to act freely but also for society to function effectively. While his argument addresses broader issues than the impact of social networks, it acts perfectly as a test for these communities.
Social networks redefine the notions of individual privacy. We join tribes of people who we may have never met and who do not “belong” to our physical community. Our individuality is reshaped as we adopt new or different personas to mesh with the norms of these groups and to engage successfully with these tribes, we need to disclose ‘personal’ information.
In these exchanges, the essential, private “me” is revealed to be a chimera. Online, we are who we choose to be and we do so because it a benefit to aspects of our multi-faceted selves, and to the communities we belong to. The selective disclosures we make blur the line between private and public spheres in positive ways for both us as individuals (playing the game) and our communities.
Of course, communities are not simply atomised “game players”; they are also host to business entities, and the individuals who play the role of corporate sentinels. Communities have swiftly educated companies who thought that they could hide their commercial purpose and the sentinels also find that the selfish, disingenuous strategy has no place in these open, sharing groups.
In this sense, communities are self-healing and corrosive activity, which damages the tribal members and the tribe as a group is kept to a minimum. Information is exchanged “on my terms”.
The isolated, private individual whose engagement is limited mainly to passive adoption of social and commercial transmission is the ideal consumer unit. Association with social networks, with a subscription paid in the currency of disclosure, is clearly a benefit to both individual and community, offering multiple reference points for informed choice.
Does the Zuckerman imperative then present challenges to the legal concept of “reasonable expectation of privacy”? Responsible consent informs this challenge and there is little doubt that unwitting disclosure of personal data by an individual – and its misuse by third parties – would be deemed unreasonable. If the agent enabling that misuse is a commercial entity, like Facebook, then the consequences for that company would be terminal.
Facebook’s business strategy is almost wholly dependent upon the currency of disclosure. It is in Zuckerman’s interests, and indeed all those leaders of social networks, to ensure that this currency is exchanged equably.
There are certainly issues over how the multi-faceted individual reforms and represents aspects of his/her online selves. The networks archive snapshots of personas, which do change and the management of these progressions is complex. It requires continual disclosure and responsible openness – neither of which is in itself harmful; quite the opposite.
Unexpected and catastrophic use of personal information by government or commerce must surely educate individuals to understand the true value of their personal information, which persona they adopt and how much they give away.
There is a recent and shocking UK legal case in point where a woman who alleged she was raped by a group of men had IM messages she had posted used against her by the defence. According to reports, her credibility was “shot to pieces” with the submission to the court of excerpts from her MSN messages, which showed that she was “prepared to entertain ideas of group sex with strangers”. The judge at Preston Crown Court ordered the jury to return “not guilty” verdicts.
Should the messages – fleeting representations of her changing thoughts and ideas – have been kept private? There is a strong viewpoint made on the F Word about the case. I personally find the court judgement extraordinary and dangerous. Whatever the view, the judgement is a clear lesson on the need to understand the currency of disclosure.
A regular guest on the Liberate Media blog, Lorraine Warren, Director of Postgraduate Education and senior lecturer in Entrepreneurship and Innovation in the School of Management at the University of Southampton, has blogged on the complexities of privacy, freedom of speech and management of relationships on social networks like Twitter. We’ll be picking up the arguments and discussion on privacy with her and hopefully with Kieron over the next few weeks. There’s a world of ideas to explore - and we’d love to hear your views.
Trade press concerns about blogging
April 17th, 2009
The digital marketing trade press has embraced blogging to varying degrees. While Haymarket has recently relaunched many of its magazine websites and simultaneously stepped-up the intensity of its blogging, other publishing houses are yet to rollout blogs for their flagship titles. Magazines such as NMA and Marketing Week, for example, are still without blogs.
What’s apparent is that some trade publishers have been nervous about blog content undermining the value of their magazine and online editorial, often failing to grasp where blogging can add value.
Having been following the progress of the Haymarket blogs and watching what other trade publishers are doing, as well as discussing the practicalities of blogging with journalists in our sector, I thought it might be helpful to offer some insight into some of the shared concerns, and for what it’s worth, my views on how these problems can be addressed…
* New demands for journalists to produce magazine and online content are high enough. Adding blogging to the list will lead to poorer quality of writing and less time for investigative reporting - this is a genuine concern that is shared by every trade editor I speak to, and journalists are similarly reluctant to take on extra writing responsibilities. Compile this with the recent redundancies that have taken place across most trade media, and the average journalist is over-worked and over-stressed.
However, this line of argument is missing the point about the role blogging plays in news consumption, and failing to acknowledge what magazine audiences want nowadays. Blog content can be equally as important as magazine coverage, if not more. Now is the time for publishers to be re-evaluating their content priorities.
* If content is now being broken online and followed-up in the magazine, what can we write about in a blog?- every new blogger worries about finding subject matter to write about, but journalists shouldn’t really have this problem! As a former trade journalist I know so many stories never make it into the magazine, or you have fascinating conversations with contacts that you wish you could do something with editorially. A magazine blog can be the perfect place to write about titbits of information that might otherwise get lost, or to start debate on subjects that you might feel passionate about. Although magazine editorial guidelines will most likely still need to be adhered to, the blog should be a place where journalists can publish independently and have a bit more freedom with subject matter.
* Blogging just doesn’t draw in the level of traffic that we’d like -magazines that have tested the water with blogging, but not dived in wholeheartedly, often cite this as a reason for delaying the launch of a proper blog. There can be many reasons for a magazine blog not taking off properly, but frequently the reasons are that the blog is hidden away on the website and not signposted clearly enough, that content is not interesting or updated frequently enough, and that measures have not been put in place to share the content socially or allow for comment and conversation.
* There’s no budget for professional blog set-up or consultancy, so we’re looking into it ourselves - it’s clear that times are tough for the trade publishing industry, and having worked on a trade magazine, I know what a battle it can be to make money available for these sort of projects. I would argue that this is a sign of a blog not being given the priority it should be, but that isn’t offering a useful solution to the problem.
Launching a magazine blog is a serious business (well it should be) and it’s important to bring in experts who know what they’re doing. It’s crucial that you have advice on the platform you’re going to use, as well as how it’s going to be designed and optimised etc. Particularly within the digital marketing industry, I’m sure there are companies out there who would be willing to advise the likes of NMA etc on a blog strategy for free. Now is a time to make the most of your contacts!
* We’ve already added ‘comments’ to our stories, so why do we need to blog? -this is probably the lamest excuse that I’ve heard for not blogging, but it’s come up a lot in conversations that I’ve had! If you’re a reader of sites such as NMA.co.uk and Revolutionmagazine.com etc, you’ll know that stories very rarely receive comments. Ticking this box is not a reason to delay launching a blog.