Welcome to the Escape Blog

I’ve written a lot recently about what I feel is a movement by Facebook to increase their hold on the social media world and become the hub for all that we do online.

So I was interested today to see a quote from CNN’s US president Jonathan Klein suggesting that although rival Fox is currently winning the ratings war in the US, their real threat comes from Facebook:

“I’m more worried about the 500m people on Facebook versus the 2m on Fox. The people you’re friends with on Facebook or the people you follow on Twitter are trusted sources of information. Well we want to be the most trusted name in news. That’s a challenge and we have to rise to that challenge.”

In many ways, CNN probably shouldn’t see Facebook as a threat, more an opportunity. But, with AP already making strides in the direction of the western world’s most popular social network, it’s now time to act.

And if this is an opportunity for traditional media, then it is most definitely an opportunity for PRs and brands too…

picture credit hat tip

Mobile World Congress kicked off in style on Monday with Microsoft unveiling their latest mobile operating system – Windows 7. The OS looks really slick with some really nice features including contact syncing with social networks and Xbox integration.

But is this all too little too late? The new iPhone (4.0) is set to hit in the summer and Microsoft don’t expect any Windows 7 phones to reach consumers until the end of the year.

It’s all about the apps

I’m a big iPhone fan, but I really like the Windows 7 UI – enough to make me consider moving, but there is one thing holding me back – the apps.

And this neatly brings me to one of the other big MWC announcements; a number of the leading mobile manufacturers have teamed together to try and bring about the standardisation of mobile applications.

This seems to be a movement that is gaining momentum. The BBC today announced that it is going to be launching mobile apps for parts of its website in the next few month, but launched an attack on mobile manufacturers who are making life too hard for publishers keen to get their content on mobile devices, by forcing them to create separate versions for different operating systems.

Are apps just a stop gap?

Apple leads the way at the moment with the sheer number of apps that are available for the iPhone. And for an iPhone user, this means the temptation to move to another handset manufacturer is fairly low. Sure UIs are great, but in a world where mobile handsets are now more like mini-computers, applications really do make the difference.

But the standardisation of apps could really shake things up. And it would make a lot of sense for the consumer, if not for Apple.

Of course, standalone applications themselves could soon be a thing of the past themselves – how will HTML5 change this space? I had a good tweet-chat with Matt Hopkins on Friday evening about how HTML5 web apps could in fact overtake – take the new mobile web app for Google Buzz as an example of HTML5 at work. This would render the whole compatibility issue a moot point.

So for now, I’ll be sticking with the iPhone, but I’ve still got my eye on Microsoft et al., as the mobile landscape could soon be very different…

A survey of US journalists published by Cision finds that 56% say social media is important for reporting and producing stories.

This comes just a week after Peter Horrocks, the new director of BBC Global News said that social media is now an essential tool for journalists and those that were ignoring it should look elsewhere for employment:

“This isn’t just a kind of fad from someone who’s an enthusiast of technology. I’m afraid you’re not doing your job if you can’t do those things. It’s not discretionary”

With Sky News recently installing Tweetdeck on all the PCs in their newsroom it seems that social media is now a must have for all journalists.

Among the journalists surveyed by Cision, 89% said they turn to blogs for story research, 65% to social media sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn, and 52% to microblogging services such as Twitter. The survey also found that 61% use Wikipedia, the popular online encyclopedia.

Despite these figures and the enthusiastic uptake, it seems that there is still some wariness of using social media as a source. The research shows that reporters and editors are acutely aware of the need to verify information they get from social media. Eighty-four percent said social media sources were “slightly less” or “much less” reliable than traditional media, with 49% saying social media suffers from “lack of fact checking, verification and reporting standards.”

And we were pleased to see that PRs are still playing a vital role, with editors and reporters saying they depend on PR professionals for “interviews and access to sources and experts” (44%), “answers to questions and targeted information” (23%), and “perspective, information in context, and background information” (17%).

The Cision research was based on 371 responses conducted in autumn 2009. More than 47% of the questioned journalists had more than 20 years’ experience.

While the old adage ‘size matters’ might apply to marketing budgets, when it comes to building a business profile, ‘bigger is better’ holds little truth. In this digital age, small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are better placed than ever to get maximum returns from their investment in communications campaigns.

It’s worth remembering that over 99% of UK companies employ less than 250 people and the SMB sector makes a powerful contribution to the economy. At Wildfire we work with many clients who fit the SMB bracket and are generating brand awareness that their bigger competitors cannot match. So we’re happy to share our experience (and even boast a little) together with some tips that can help smaller brands really punch above their weight:

1. Know Your Audience

Small businesses are often targeting a niche industry sector, with a very specific product or service offering. So know who your prospects are, find out how they consume media and spend your marketing budget wisely so you reach the people who are going to buy your product or service. For example, our YourTube video competition for Optoma generated over half a million views in just a few weeks.

2. Think big, act big

Who’s to know that behind your website, email campaign and Facebook page, just a handful of people are keeping the cogs turning?  Engaging in social media can help you build up a legion of enthusiastic and evangelistic supporters, through Twitter accounts or Facebook pages (see our interview with Guy Clapperton for more tips on how to do this).  Our e-waste campaign for charity Computer Aid International used social media to attract 700 signatories for a petition that captured the attention of Downing Street.

3. Be flexible and reactive

The window of opportunity to be included in a timely news piece is often very small.  Big brands are slowed down by cumbersome approval processes, so taking advantage of being first can give a smaller firm valuable coverage where they might otherwise have been overlooked.

Rocela, the world’s fastest growing independent Oracle consultancy, recently made the news in many of the top tier technology publications by commenting on the recent Sun Microsystems takeover by Oracle. Rocela’s CEO Martin Mutch, made himself available before and immediately after Oracle’s press conference with prepared comment on how the takeover will effect end users. This resulted in several interviews and coverage in The Register, Information Age, The New Statesmen, MicroScope and Computer Business Review.

4. Create compelling content and make it accessible

It’s almost becoming a PR cliché, but compelling content really can elevate your PR campaign and your brand.  The key rule here is to make sure that content has real value for your target audience – and that it is in a format that is readily accessible to them.  To support our PR campaign for Tealeaf’s Consumer Behaviour Study, we generated a campaign microsite, a downloadable white paper and a social media-friendly Slideshare presentation.

In addition to generating over 70 pieces of coverage across horizontal and vertical sectors, the Slideshare presentation generated 1,600 views in two weeks and was embedded in over 15 blog posts, the whitepaper was download over 150 times and the micro site recorded over 2,500 page views within a week.

5. Be controversial and make some noise

Finally, as every PR will tell you, the media loves a bit of controversy, so saying something juicy can be very beneficial.  With share prices to worry about, corporates often have to be very careful about what they say and when. Smaller companies rarely have this headache and should take advantage of the fact.

Our Hitting the Mark campaign for dotMailer highlighted the need for best practice in email marketing.  By ‘naming and shaming’ some of the UK’s leading retailers –  as well as giving away a major benchmark study on email marketing effectiveness – we generated strong news angles together with ammunition for sales and marketing efforts. PR coverage was widespread and hits on the website increased by 400% in a week.

picture credit

First, a bit of a disclosure: I’m a huge Apple fan. I love my Mac nearly as much as my iPhone and the latter, my friends and family will all tell you, is glued to my hand for most of the day.

So bearing this in mind, you can probably imagine my excitement on the 26^th January, frantically refreshing Engadget’s live blog, as I eagerly waited to see what new gift Apple would bring into the world.

The sheer volume of media coverage for the iPad was, even for Apple, quite amazing. It blew away the entire coverage of the CES trade show earlier in the month and had Nationals and tech mags alike straining for the first picture of the new tablet computer.

So why, with all this media attention and eager anticipation, was I left feeling a bit disappointed when the product launched?

The iPad is a great piece of technology and looks amazing. But there was also quite a bit missing – for example, no new OS, no flash support, no camera. Was I being too fussy? I was left feeling that the surprisingly low price point was the only silver lining.

And then I realised what the problem was: all the months of speculation and buzz had blown this device out of all proportion. I read spectators who were claiming this was the device that would ‘change computing for ever’ – quite a claim, and one that the iPad would never meet.

So was this something that Apple’s PR could have handled differently? Should the media storm before the launch have been handled more carefully to avoid this sense of disappointment?

Apple’s PR is different to many tech vendors and part of this is because of the evangelical nature of the support the company has both in the media and amongst its customer base. Using leaks and a ‘no-denial’ policy, the media storm before any announcement usually reaches fever pitch.

The day after the launch, I was asked to comment on the PR around the iPad for Utalkmarketing. I said that “in the long run this slight negativity is unlikely to have any effect on sales or their brand image.”

I still believe this to be true; the iPad will be very successful, despite its initial failings. Apple has form here. The first incarnation of the iPhone wasn’t exactly perfect. Sure, it was a great device and revolutionary in so many ways, but it didn’t have 3G support, video, or copy and paste – in fact the list of failings was quite long. But the device still sold and the later upgrades more than made up for its initial teething issues.

Therefore I have no doubt the iPad will sell, and sell well. I’m also sure that Apple will continue to encourage the hype and buzz that surrounds its future product launches. The truth is that we all love to speculate and today’s multi-channel, real-time media landscape means that canny PRs have a multitude of opportunities to build moment-by-moment suspense on behalf of clients when the right story presents itself.

picture credit

Over 350 million people have a Facebook account, 60 million people use Twitter and hundreds of millions of videos are watched on YouTube every single day.  Social media is mainstream , with even the BBC giving Stephen Fry’s threats to abandon Twitter headline news status..

But what is this social media thing all about? Is it just a way to link up with like-minded people, a load of old hype, or does it present real value for businesses, in particular small to medium-sized companies?

I caught up with freelance journalist Guy Clapperton who has just published a new book - “This is Social Media” – and asked him about  demystifying ‘social media’ and  why he thinks business managers and owners everywhere should be thinking about putting social media into their marketing mix.

Can any business get involved in social media, or is it just for the big brands?

Good grief I hope not, or I’ve been wasting my time! Seriously, if a sole trading freelance can get work out of social media then so can anyone. In fact it might be more difficult for a big brand to achieve a consistent voice, weigh up whether to sound personal or businesslike, how to get the right balance.

What are the top five things that any business should think about when it comes to social media?

1. Who your customers and prospects are and where they’re likely to be in terms of social media. Don’t guess at this, treat it as a piece of market research. If they’re not on Twitter then don’t market yourself through Twitter – otherwise you’ll be spending half your time selling the idea of Twitter to them.

2. Observe what’s going on in the networks your prospects are part of. Facebookers tend to think it’s a bit naff to publicise your own blog posts, for example, whereas Tweeters don’t mind it. Don’t think the rules are going to change around you.

3. Don’t go for the hard sell – in just about every part of life it’s really easy to ignore.

4. You might not have started using it yet but if you have any sort of branding the chances are there are people talking about you on Facebook etc. already. It’s important that even if you can’t control it absolutely you get your say.

5. Use it as part of a strategy. In the 1990s a lot of people had bad experiences with their use of the Internet because they thought of it as some sort of bolt-on to the business rather than part of the overall business plan. The same thing is happening again.

Are there any ‘rules of engagement’?

Engage, participate, be seen to be someone who’s contributing rather than just selling.

What are the benefits for smaller businesses?

Although I don’t accept the ‘It’s free!’ argument as your time and that of your colleagues certainly costs money, if well managed it’s inexpensive and easy to get into very quickly.

Can you name examples of who’s doing it well and who’s doing it badly?

I had a problem with my accounting system. I mentioned it on Twitter and they’d offered me a solution within two minutes – I’ve waited on help lines for longer. So 10/10 to MYOB. On the other hand there are the disasters like Habitat, which famously tried to associate all of its Tweets with Iran so that people searching for Iran would find an ad for a sofa or something. Lunacy, and they’d probably agree with me after thumping me for bringing it up yet again.

What’s the one piece of advice you’d give to a business looking to get into social media?

Plan it like any other promotion and don’t expect miracles – in fact, measure the time you’re putting into it against stated objectives. Like a load of trendy topics it’s been described as a panacea in too many quarters; in my book one of the first things I say is that it might not be right for everyone.

Who should manage social media accounts?

Whoever can make them work. A lone office junior who’s been tasked with running social media might be really into Facebook but won’t necessarily be able to answer all of the queries or action any requests. Think of your desired outcome from social media. Consider what the social media person needs to put into it and how they need to be supported throughout the organisation and see who matches that set of requirements the best.

The pay wall debate rumbles on, with Patrick Smith on Journalism.co.uk asking last week how much is an article worth?

Patrick observes that there are 100 articles on any given day in The Times and you get all of this for £1 – that’s 1p per article.

He states that this means Murdoch will need to drastically reassess per-content pricing structures if an online subscription model is to work:

“But to reach a competitive pricepoint, he and other publishers will have to massively realign the value of each piece of news and comment from its current-day, paper value of one or two pence to fractions of pence.”

Patrick’s conclusion is obvious and one that I totally subscribe to:

“In reality, the real market value of news is what people will pay and the danger is that for an entire generation of readers weaned on the free-to-air internet, that price is nothing at all…”

John Thompson at Journalism.co.uk follows up with an interesting blog post comparing the cost per article of his website with a national newspaper:

“Taking into account wages, expenses and a percentage of overall overheads (rent, bills etc), but discounting non-news-related administration, aggregation, tip of the days etc, we calculated the average cost of an article (feature, news story or blog post) to be around £37.00.

“We have no intention of erecting a paywall around our news content, but if we were to, just to recoup that expenditure we would need 370 people to pay 10p each to read each article, or 3,700 to pay 1p each. In 2009, the average number of page views per article on our blog and main site was 440 (this includes all our aggregation posts, which probably skew the figure downwards slightly) but that means at current traffic levels we would need a model of 10p per article to be paid for by 84 per cent of our current readers.

“Factoring in the much greater overheads of national newspaper publications, I would guess that the cost per article could be as much as 10 times the cost to us, perhaps around the £400 mark.”

There are many questions to be asked here: is this is an unworkable economy? Does national news justify this cost? Is this cost necessary? Is the cost/profit margin of print media just impossible?

picture credit

Online information overload is one of my favourite little themes that I keep returning to. As we consume more and more content on the web (social and otherwise), it becomes harder and harder to stay on top of all the updates, tweets, news articles, emails etc. that come our way every single day.

Efficient aggregation of all this content therefore becomes extremely important. And the company that can become the social media dashboard or destination – allowing us to integrate and aggregate everything in manageable place – will go some way to taking the online crown.

There have been some major developments this week that I feel firmly positions Google and Facebook at loggerheads in this social aggreation war.

Facebook threatens new email client – Facebook 1 v 0 Google

As the biggest social network, Facebook is ideally placed to win this battle. It’s 400m users are very loyal and use the service on a regular basis. But Facebook is keen to increase this loyalty and one of the key tasks that would likely take Facebookers to another website is email.

Facebook’s messaging service is frequently utilised by its users, but isn’t a fully blown email client. The rumours this week are that Facebook is working on an email client that would give it a key foothold in this area.

Google rolls out Google Buzz – Facebook 1 v 0.5 Google [jury's still out]

Then yesterday, Google rolled out Google Buzz – a new social network/updater/integrator service that sits within Gmail. I blogged a few thoughts about Google Buzz last night and I remain unconvinced – it’s great if Gmail is your thing, but that only really accounts for the 140m Gmail users.

It’s still a fascinating move though by Google. And for me, it shows that the fight is on.

Facebook hits back with IM integration – Facebook 2 v 0.5 Google

And then today, just as the excitement around Google Buzz was dying down in the cold light of another day, Facebook hits back with the news that it is going to open up its internal chat to external developers.

Things move very quickly in social media and this week has brought this home very clearly.  I don’t think this is a ‘winner takes all’ situation, but there will be winners and losers and, so far I give Facebook the upper hand.

I wonder what tomorrow will bring…

picture credit

“No, I really, honestly don’t want an iPhone!” I stressed to colleagues recently. To which they all looked at me as though I’d lost my mind and launched into a tirade about all the amazing apps I’m missing out on.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I don’t like technology and I’m pretty savvy about what it can do. It’s just that I won’t use or buy it for the sake of it. For me, technology needs to serve a practical purpose – and when it does, I’m hooked.

For instance, I shop online. For everything. I simply can’t face the battle for a parking space, navigating the hoards on the high street or dealing with the self service scanners at the supermarket.

And I don’t think I’ve watched live TV for years. Instead, my trusty digibox gets busy recording lots of lovely programmes while I’m at work so I can watch whatever I want when I get home  (ok, admittedly, there’s a lot of Come Dine With Me at the moment).

VPN and remote PC access means I can work from home a few afternoons a week so I can walk the dog before it gets dark (and it was a life saver when it snowed); Skype is perfect for keeping in touch with friends who live abroad, and Facebook seems to be the only way to get hold of my brother these days.

So it’s not that I’m resisting new technologies – it’s just that I can’t think of any way that the iPhone could make my life easier – or better – than using the laptop, digital camera and other devices that I already have. Cue much gasping from the team and exclamations over what I’m missing.

Checking emails on the go! (hmm,  I drive to and from work).  Catching up with the latest news online! (sigh, what happened to buying a newspaper?)  Having the tube map at your fingertips! (they are obviously not aware of my prowess at playing Mornington Crescent).

The list went on, but I am yet to discover that ‘killer app’ which means that I simply can’t do without an iPhone (or a Palm Pre, Blackberry or iPad). When I do, I can assure you I’ll go out and buy one. But until then, I’ll be spreading the Sunday papers out across the kitchen table, relying on my trusty (paper) diary and curling up on the sofa with a good book.

picture credit

Google has started to roll out its ’social search’ project to all searchers on Google.com in what is another move towards integrating social media into the search engine.

Social search allows you to search your social networks rather than the entire web. For example, if I wanted to look at the latest buzz around the iPad launch, I could restrict my search to what my friends on Twitter have been saying.

Social search results are also now appearing towards the bottom of general searches.

Following the integration of real-time results into search results last year, this development is further proof that Google sees social media as a new frontier in search and one that it is putting social media firmly front of mind.

For brands, this only increases the importance of building social media relationships with your customers and prospects.