Welcome to the Escape Blog

[If overt displays of self-promotion easily offend you then probably best to move on... but hey, we are PRs after all!]

Wildfire has been named as the 13th most active PR consultancy on social networking tool Twitter by top trade mag PR Week.

Whilst the numbers are actually not quite right (91 per cent of our team are actually regular Twitter users), and the authenticity of the study itself has been called into question, it is still nice to be named alongside (and above) some of the industry’s biggest names, including some of the so-called social media/digital ’specialists’.

Here at Wildfire we incorporate and weave ‘digital’ into everything we do for clients rather than operating in its own little world.

It’s important that all PRs are aware and knowledgable about new digital trends and Twitter certainly falls into this category.

We are excited about the potential Twitter offers for PR and marketing. So, if you aren’t following us already, please do:

@Wildfirepr, @Loullabelle @katiesol @GabiWarren @DannyWhatmough @clairebarb @DebbyPenton @sarahannebray @KMD05 @Lauriefg @nicohop

So, the Ryanair thang I blogged about the other day is really driving traffic to the site and is doing the rounds elsewhere too with the Times and the Telegraph covering it today. [is it surprising that these two articles don't really seem to 'get it'?]

I don’t really want to add much to the conversation, merely post a quick update to the situation.

The first thing to note is that Ryanair finally owned up to Travolution saying:

“Ryanair can confirm that a Ryanair staff member did engage in a blog discussion.

“It is Ryanair policy not to waste time and energy corresponding with idiot bloggers and Ryanair can confirm that it won’t be happening again.

“Lunatic bloggers can have the blog sphere all to themselves as our people are far too busy driving down the cost of air travel”.

I don’t think I need to highlight the PR 101 errors here!

Elsewhere there have been some interesting responses, firstly from noted travel-blogger Alex Bainbridge who gives a slightly different response that has provoked a fair amount of debate.

I’ve got nothing against Ryanair. In fact, two nights ago I actually booked a (very) cheap flight with them. The irony is that the site served me an error message on the final page! The booking went through ok, but it did make me chuckle…

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In these hard, harsh times we find ourselves in, any attempt to secure a basement bargain is fair gain. So imagine the glee when blogger Jason – Roe (dot) com came across a tiny little fault on Ryanair.com that allowed him (and many some other people) to grab a totally free flight (no taxes or anything…nada!).

So, of course, being the honest blogger he is, Jason – Roe decides to tell the world and promptly pens a post telling one and all the secret he has discovered.

Ryanair, being the conscientious company they are (with an undoubtedly big social media monitoring team), identified that something was amiss and came across the offending article.

Having taken everything into account, commenter #10 – Ryanair staff #1 – proclaims in their best blogger-outreach-facing voice:

jason!
you’re an idiot and a liar!! fact is!
you’ve opened one session then another and requested a page meant for a different session, you are so stupid you dont even know how you did it! you dont get a free flight, there is no dynamic data to render which is prob why you got 0.00. what self respecting developer uses a crappy CMS such as word press anyway AND puts they’re mobile ph number online, i suppose even a prank call is better than nothing on a lonely sat evening!!

Now, I hear what you’re saying: ’surely this isn’t really a Ryanair member of staff?’. Well, our friends over at Travolution (who alerted us to this escapade via their own blog post) have been undertaking some sleuth detective work and traced the offending IP address right back to Ryanair-towers…

Oops

The fiasco gets worse and worse (read in its full glory here) with a veritable war of words continuing down the comment page. At one point, Ryanair staff #3 defends their words stating:

Defensive aggression of Ryanair stuff is less than offensive aggression of customers and each stuff member gains this gradually.
Offensive aggression of customers depends on customer’s ignorance, Ryanair restrictions, Ryanair policy, strictness and low prices as lower the prices are more people are traveling with bigger intellectual diversity.

“bigger intellectual diversity” eh?

I can only assume/hope/pray that these comments weren’t made by the customer service/PR/new media/marketing team but by a disgruntled techy on his/her last day on the job. But, even if this is not legit, even if it is not a Ryanair employee, Ryanair has still not responded. And now other bloggers (like yours truly) are wading in and widening the echo chamber.

A few points to learn from this debacle:

1. This really isn’t the best way to talk to anyone publicly
2. Especially online
3. Especially a blogger
4. Blogger outreach takes thought, time and care as does damage control
5. By escalating the situation, you merely invite more people to jump on the bandwagon (see the other comments!)

Having published this post, I am looking forward to a visitation from Ryanair Staff #4 below…

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UPDATE: via Econsultancy, we discover that Matt Mullenweg from Wordpress has now blogged about the anti-WP comments Ryanair staff made: this one could run and run. As Chris Lake says, let’s hope this is a viral marketing idea….

Via Paidcontent:UK we learn that Centaur, the publisher of titles such as Marketing Week, NMA, Precision Marketing (RIP), Design Week and Mad.co.uk is facing an uncertain future with dire profit projections amidst falling recruitment sales:

“We have not experienced any material change in our market position during this period and these results therefore reflect the extreme challenges faced by our clients at this time … Due to the seasonal nature of our business, Centaur typically earns the majority of its profits in the four months from March to June each year and unless there is a reduction in the recent rate of revenue decline for the remainder of this financial year, we anticipate our performance for the year to June 2009 to be significantly below the board’s expectations.”

Following a number of previous hints at problems, it remains to be seen what long-term effect the economic downturn will have on the publisher.

Various internet-based pundits have been banging on about the death of the plasma screen TV for years now, but with the dreaded RECESSION (dum dum duuuuuuuuum) making its effects felt and Pioneer announcing its withdrawal from the flatscreen market could this really be it?

Faced with shrinking consumer demand and mounting panel production costs, Pioneer is bowing out to focus on car electronics and audio products. This is emblematic of the pickle the wider TV industry has got itself into. With low-end LCD screens pushing television prices ever downwards, the enticingly huge screen sizes and low price tags are too much to resist for a penny-pinching public.  Meanwhile manufacturers’ margins are slimmer than an OLED screen. And when cash is sparse, who is seriously going to consider spending literally thousands of pounds on a plasma screen TV and the subsequent electricity bills?

But technology journalists the web over are lamenting the fickle public’s purse strings for bringing about the demise of a TV manufacturer that is widely regarded as one of the best in the television making biz. It’s like Primark flourishing whilst French Connection goes under; we’re all opting for quantity over quality.

Never fear, picture quality fans, with HD broadcasting looking set to rise and OLED TVs glimmering tantalisingly on the consumer horizon, even if plasma screens do go the way of HD DVD, it could just be natural selection at work.

In the age of digital media, when brand reputations are made and broken so fast, it is always great to see that some brands truly do care and still try to reach out to their customers. Case in point: Overstock.com, an online retailer of brand-name merchandise, recently launched in the UK.

Not too long ago, a Guardian tech journalist has used Twitter to ask for recommendations on the best websites selling luxury goods. Using the same micro-blogging website, I replied to her that Overstock.com was one of my favourite websites for shopping.

A few days later, I receive the following message from the company:

overstockdotcom @GabiWarren Thanks for recommending us! We really appreciate it.

Very simple and not incredibly time consuming. However, such a message is incredibly powerful. So powerful that I felt compelled to blog about it.

This occurrence has a lesson within it, which is: It is becoming very easy for brands to find out exactly who their customers are, and what they are up to, and better yet to communicate directly with them. Brands that choose to ignore social media do so at their own peril, as people are increasingly looking for this direct, easy and informal communication from brands. They want to feel special, and know that they are valued as a customer.

All the talk of cut backs, redundancies, credit crunches and ‘the current economic climate’ provide such an obvious and easy PR hook that we sometimes forget the realities behind the tired clichés – especially as the PR industry remains largely buoyant (touch wood).

A rather average Friday afternoon was rocked by this Tweet and post – change is afoot at UK media company, Shiny Media. Some of their blogs are among my favourite work and non-work sites, so I was sad to hear that co-founder, editorial director and Twitter-pal Katie Lee will be departing along with a number of other staff members. These aren’t just statistics, they are friendly, enthusiastic (and frequently hilarious) journalist-bloggers I have either met or conversed with via the magic of Twitter.

Personal feelings aside, Shiny’s fortunes have been the subject of mass internet debate before. Second-of-three co-founders Ashely Norris’s blog post on the subject spawned a hailstorm of comments some months ago, and raises questions about online publishing in the UK. Such a great group of together, switched-on people run and maintain Shiny’s group of sites, but it seems to have been proven that behind that you need the hard-heart of a business man and a grey-suited number cruncher to keep an online publishing company going.

But if streamlining the operation (sorry, sometimes we just can’t help that PR-speak) means that the excellent sites with honest, approachable voices can continue slicing through the PR spiel and offering entertaining, impartial advice on gadgets, fashion, music, crafts, green living and so on then it’s a necessary evil.

But I do wish shinykatie, radioedit, MyChemToilet and Luciosos all the best for the future. Give them a job, yeah?

Facebook last week announced that it will be making easier for Facebook status updates to be accessed outside the platform. This has led some to suggest that it might be the first step in tackling the Twitter-boom.

Mike Butcher has a very strong counter-argument over on TechCrunch.

It is an interesting move. Facebook remains very much a walled garden, a network. And rightly so. There is so much information on a personal Facebook profile that you wouldn’t want to share with the whole world.

Twitter is very different. It is based on the fact that everything is open. As Mike says:

“Twitter totally changed the model in social networks. Previously the model had been “friend” someone. Facebook requires consent for ‘following’. Twitter totally switched it to ‘Follow’.”

Facebook opening up a little bit will help add some of the functionality of the Twitter model but, in many ways, the two are like chalk and cheese.

Facebook is great for sharing content and ideas with those you know well. Twitter is a great way of communicating with a wide range of people who you might or might not know in ‘real life’.

As Jemima Kiss suggests, the real battle for both networks won’t be trying to win one over on the other, rather find a way to truly monetise their success…

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‘Live blogging’ is growing in popularity, from inaugurations and TV/radio shows to updates on football matches and conferences.

The idea is simple. Instead of writing a blog post about an event after it has happened, you cover it live, bit-by-bit, as it is happening. Live!

The draw is obvious. Create a sense of real-time and get your thoughts and the thoughts of others across as political/sporting/tv history is made.

There are a wealth of possibilities and now, the whole process has been made easier following the launch of a new beta tool called ‘Coveritlive.com‘.  It is essentially a little AJAX plugin that sits inside your blog or webpage and allows you to update and others to contribute.

See it being used by the Birmingham Post.

So the next time you are at a conference, why not consider live-blogging your experiences?

Centaur Media has announced that the Precision Marketing title is to cease publication from the February issue, with most of publisher’s coverage of direct marketing moving into Marketing Week.

This is no surprise. Precision Marketing’s (new) editor Mark Choueke was named the new editor of Marketing Week last month. The title itself was moved from a weekly to a monthly title late last year. So things haven’t been looking good for a while.

Is this a problem?

In my mind, it just demonstrates the importance of online and the uphill battle that print titles now face.

It is a shame that there is not going to be a Centaur title dedicated to direct marketing (although it is still unclear whether the website will survive), though with Mark at the helm, we can but hope the editorial focus at MW might readjust itself. Marketing Week is a good publication, but its focus is still very much big brands, advertising/branding and big agency.

Moving all news online and leaving the magazine to handle comment and features is surely the way to go. The rumours are that the magazine and the website will get a major revamp soon. Watch this space!