Posts Tagged ‘liberate media’
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.
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!
Nurturing client/PR agency relationships
April 16th, 2010
Yesterday I worked from the office of my client Collective - a digital creative agency based in Farringdon. It was a highly productive and rewarding day, and I walked away feeling inspired and full of ideas for the campaign. We plan to make it a regular thing - a decision that both parties are really excited about.
This is not a new approach for Liberate Media - in the past we have worked regular days in the offices of some of our larger clients. However from experience, it’s an approach that PR agencies often shy away from for obvious logistical and budgetary reasons, but I thought it might be worth spelling out the reasons why it can be worth considering.
- Re-energising a campaign - no matter how good a PR you are, campaigns always need fresh thinking and new leases of energy. Spending time in a client office can be an effective way of gaining new insight into what they are working on, and hearing what they think about issues affecting them.
- Gathering campaign assets - for a client like Collective, where visual assets are the name of the game, spending time with their design team is invaluable to understanding the campaign assets that we have access too.
- Meeting with their clients - in a B2B context, working internally can provide unique opportunity to meet with your client’s clients, and discuss opportunities for joint PR. If they are big brands, the opportunities can be endless.
- Gathering material for thought leadership - the best ideas always come out over a beer in the pub, but it’s not always possible to get that sort of time with a client…unless you’re spending regular time in their office. Having regular conversation with them will make sure that you’re inside their head when it comes to thought leadership.
- Building client confidence in social media - for many, engaging in social media is still very daunting. Being there physically to delegate responsibily and provide advice on how to use specific social media tools can be a highly useful exercise.
- Streamlining processes and procedures - the nitty gritty stuff can sometimes more easily be resolved once you are able to see how processes are working for your client, making it easier for you the PR to implement changes.
- Getting to know new senior people - when senior contacts change client-side, it can sometimes have an impact on the PR campaign, and lead to a time of adjustment. Have regular visibility internally is useful for staying on-top of key relationships.
This is not an exhaustive list, but hopefully paints of picture of why working regularly within client offices can be extremely effective. Please feel free to share any similar experiences that you may have had.
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.
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/
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.
Introducing Pressitt, social media news release (SMNR) creation service
March 2nd, 2009
At Liberate Media we always try to stand out from the crowd and push the boundaries of communications, and today marks a special day for us, as we introduce Pressitt, a social media news release service based on the social media news release template by Todd Defren.
The Pressitt project has been in development for the last year, and during that time we’ve used our own research to develop the service while trying to accommodate feedback from the social media news release community.
This is the first public stage of the project, but we won’t stop here. We intend to continue developing and adding more functionality and more social media elements, so please tell us what you think and be part of the Pressitt smnr evolution.
Pressitt is currently in private beta and is a collaboration between Liberate Media and Best Served Cold. Please register your interest and we will try our very best to accommodate you.
More about Pressitt:
This is how it breaks down:
Title: Title of your SMNR
Overview: Brief overview of the release
Core facts: Nuggets of information, expanding on the overview with facts and figures
Contact information: Names, email, and tel of the contacts, we have also included links to social profiles
Relevant links: Links with thumbs shots to relevant sites
Videos: Ability to easily add YouTube videos, more sites to follow.
Image: Add up to 8 images
Files: Add up to 4 files to support your release, including ppt, pptx, pdf, doc, dox, and excel
Quotes: Ability to add quotes from company spokespeople that add value to the release
Boilerplate: All essential trading information
Social bookmarking: All the usual bookmarking sites available
Comments: Register to add quotes
I hope that gives you a flavour of Pressitt.
The current version offers us a platform that we will build on, first with new levels of functionality and secondly with a new premium version.
Here are some other Pressitt SMNR examples currently on the site:
Kerb develops game campaign with user-generated content for online creative publisher Zoo Qoo
iBAHN Posts Record Sales in January
Liberate Media make it on to the SEO BIGLIST
August 26th, 2008
The guys at Liberate Media always strive to give are community of readers something back in the form of honest and thought provoking commentary, the latest social media news and lots of others features from our writers Wendy McAuliffe, Lloyd Gofton, Tim Greenhalgh and Andy Merchant.
So it was nice to see somebody had recognised are hard work, in the form of the - BIGLIST SEO Blog Reviews 082508
This is what Lee Odden from the online marketing blog had to say:
Liberate Media Blog - This UK based agency blog with Andy Merchant, Tim Greenhalgh and founders Lloyd Gofton and Wendy McAuliffe covers emerging trends, industry observations, social media and digital PR topics.
As part of the list we get a big shiny badge to add to our site:
Thanks for reading the blog so far, we hope you enjoy it.
Watch this space for more exiting posts.
Introducing a new(ish) member of the team
August 8th, 2008
At Liberate Media we’re always on the look out for consultants that can add a new dimension to our team, and Tim Greenhalgh has been a breath of fresh air since he joined last year. It may seem like an odd time to introduce him, but as we’ve taken the decision to divide our blogging power into separate focuses, now seemed like the right time to put Tim firmly in the spotlight.
Personally, I’ve known Tim for many years, having first introduced him to my clients when he was working for The Times. Tim has gathered a vast amount of experience in various roles, including 20 years as a national journalist, specialising in technology and education for The Times and Observer, and also launching several technology start-ups, including a VC-backed virtual world company.
As you can imagine, Tim’s experience has been invaluable to us not only in terms of his journalist instinct and contacts, but with the real world business knowledge that comes from running your own company. Something that our clients appreciate.
We hope you’ll enjoy Tim’s blog, which is focused on virtual worlds, mobile’s move into social media and digital education as well. You may have already seen a few of Tim’s posts on the central blog, and I’m sure he will build up a following of his own pretty quickly.
Best of luck Tim.
Follow the new Liberate Media Twitter account
August 7th, 2008
As you are all well aware Liberate is very much up to speed with all the latest happenings in the jolly old world of social media. The Liberate team have decided it’s about time to create a Liberate Media Twitter account.
You can follow Liberate Media updates here.
The Liberate Twitter account is kind of like Top Gear’s Stig your never quite sure who’s behind the mask or Twitter account in this case! - Look out for the latest company news, ideas and views from the Liberate Media updates.
Other people to follow within team Liberate already on Twitter are:
Directors, Wendy Mcauliffe, Lloyd Gofton
Social Media consultant, Andy Merchant
and Tim has a go sometimes too! (if you read this Tim only joking…lol)