Posts Tagged ‘liberate media’
Your Company Brand Or Your Personal Brand On Twitter?
June 17th, 2008
What’s better, promote yourself as an individual that works for a brand/company, or be the voice behind a brand/company?
Let me give you some examples of relevant Twitter profiles:
andymerch
Name: Andy Merchant
Location: Brighton
Web http://www.liberatemedia.com
Bio: Social media consultant for Liberate Media
seroundtable
Name: SE Roundtable
Web http://www.seroundtable.com/
Bio: The Pulse of the Search Marketing Community
xoost
Name: Xoost
Web http://xoost.com/about.php
Bio: Do you Search >100 times/day and you’d like to share your search skills? Xoost is the place for you! If you like join the BETA TEST PHASE!
I am the individual that works for a brand.
The second and third Twitter examples choose to promote their various brands through a user name and thumbnail.
What’s the best way to do it?
I could have quite easy had my username as Liberate Media and the Liberate Media logo as my thumbnail, but my feeling is that I would not have the same freedom of expression and speech if I was confined as a Liberate Media spokesperson. As an individual I am still linked to my brand/company and have its best interests at heart, but this way I have the freedom to create an online personality with the flexibility to go one step further than a corporate structure would usually allow me.
Tools such as Twitter have helped individuals linked to brands/company’s to grow beyond being just known as ’so-and-so’ who works for ‘whoever’, into recognisable figures with online authority that are best known for their online presence.
Take a look at your Twitter followers. Can you tell me who they work for? Most of them still have day jobs.
To follow me on twitter click here and I promise to follow you back!
E-Consultancy roundtable: Who owns online PR?
May 23rd, 2008
Yesterday I was lucky enough to be invited to attend E-Consultancy’s quarterly roundtable event on the topic of Online PR.
I’m told it was the busiest it has ever been - clearly Online PR is a hot subject of discussion at the moment. The room was packed out with marketing and PR managers from a wide range of sectors including finance, technology, travel and publishing etc. In attendance on the agency side were myself, Simon Collister of Edelman, Drew Benvie of Hotwire, and Karl Havard of search agency Propellernet.
At the heart of the two-hour discussion was the burning question: “Who owns Online PR?”. Although we jumped around discussing related subjects such as research and measurement, budget and resouce allocation, to name but a few…the crux of the argument repeatedly came back to how we define Online PR, and ultimately who should own it.
One brand-side attendee summed up many people’s thoughts exactly: “Are you talking about sending out your views to your audiences who happen to be reading it in an online format rather than on paper, or are you talking about SEO? SEO is often treated as a different silo and managed by a different division, who are unaware of what the marketing department is doing. That is where the definition becomes a bit blurred.”
On the PR side, there thankfully seemed to be a conscenus of opinion that what we’re talking about here is PR- whether we’re defining it as offline or online. Online PR is no more than PR in the digital space.
From my perspective, social media is taking us back to the original cornerstone of PR - that being two-way conversation. There is a danger in continuing to segregate ‘Online PR’ as something separate, that should have separate ROI and budgets attached. This will continue to reinforce the problem of Online PR existing as an afterthought or bolt-on to wider marketing and PR efforts.
Surely it’s better than we focus on breaking down these silos, as has happened to a certain extent in the advertising industry, so that we can start to achieve a truly integrated campaign that shares the same objectives and strategy?
One search expert in attendance suggested online has outpaced the traditional PR agencies, with some trying to re-position themselves to grab this online concept, and make sure they portray that they know it. “When actually the digital agencies know the online mediums and don’t know PR, while the PR agencies know PR but don’t necessarily know the online mediums,” he argued.
At Liberate Media we’re taking a collaborative approach, forging partnerships with experts who offer complimentary services, e.g. SEO, but respect our strategic communications skills. By bringing essential new skills in-house, e.g. social media/technology expertise, we have also been able to evolve more quickly into a consultancy set-up to take ownership of online PR.
May 21st, 2008
At Liberate Media we’ve been tackling one of the biggest issues facing the PR industry today, the skills crisis.
We thought it might be helpful to overview our thoughts on the subject in a podcast, which we’ve used to identify a few of the problems and share some insight into how we’re dealing with the matter.
Let us know your thoughts on the subject.
To Listen or to down load the podcast click here
Business Podcasting Basics And Tools
May 14th, 2008
Today’s post is a little pre-empt for the forthcoming Liberate Media podcast.
A good few businesses use podcasting as part of there intergreated social media campaigns, below is a list of just a few available at the iTunes store:
Business Link (government body supporting SMEs)
Which? Podcast - Consumer Association
One heavy business podcast user is IBM, who use podcasting to brief distributed staff. Read more here
The great thing about podcasts is that they can be completed to a good standard on any size budget. If you don’t have much cash, but do have a little imagination and time, you can still achieve some great results.
The tools you need:
Audacity, is a free all singing, all dancing recording, editing and post-production solution for your audio podcast, this open-source programme has many helpful tutorials that can be found on the site.
TIP: If you want to save to the MP3 format you need the LAME MP3 encoder for Audacity, which i strongly recommend.
A paid-for alternative is RecordForAll which at $40.00 or around £20.00 provides great value for money, there’s also a nice and easy screencast to follow as soon as you open the site. Here’s what they say about it “RecordForAll makes it simple to record audio files, layer audio files and edit audio files for podcasting. Podcasters can record voices, or music files or other sounds”.
For more information and a beginners guide to podcasting, view this post, for more information on podcasting in general go to the Liberate Media resource/research page - podcasting section.
Liberate Media social media resource/research map
April 16th, 2008
The Liberate Media social media research/resources page is where we archive all our social media and web 2.0 resources/findings. There is a huge amount of resource to be looked at, so please feel free to dig around at your leisure.
Liberate Media is always keen to add to the social media resource with new posts, so please get in touch if you have something of value to add. - The resource map will be ever growing with new headings and links being added all the time.
The social media resource/research is very heavy due to large amount of archived resource, it takes a little while to appear, but please be patient, it’s well worth the wait!
To use the resource map simply hold the left mouse button down and scroll around until you see the section you want to look at. Click the bars next to the paper-clip to get a description of the archive, then click the paper-clip to get a list of posts in that resource.
To add the resource/research map copy and paste the code blow into your blog:
<iframe id=”mapframe_id226″ name=”mapframe_id226″ frameborder=”0″ style=”border:1px #B9B9B9 solid;” scrolling=”no” src=”http://www.glinkr.net/site_media/DebateMapClient/html/map_content.html?graphId=226″ height=”500px” width=”95%” ></iframe>