On Tuesday, Claire and I went on a Wildfire field trip. With the wide-eyed wonder of the little PRs that we are, we spent the morning exploring the halls of a national newspaper. We took in the sites and sounds of the busy newsroom, and, overwhelmed with curiosity, we bombarded our journalist host with all the questions we had always wanted to ask about the inside workings of a national paper.
We talked about the best way to secure coverage in the national papers, ways PR can make it easier for journalists and the process an article goes through between the editor and journalist. One of the biggest reoccurring themes we discussed was the changes and effects the internet has had and will have on newspapers, specifically paid content.
In a recent blog, Danny wrote about the Harris Interactive survey for Paid:Content UK that found that “if their favourite news site begins charging for access to content, three quarters of people would simply switch to an alternative free news source”. And a new survey from Lightspeed Research and The Global Web Index found similar results, that nine in 10 UK consumers would never pay for news stories online, regardless of how cheap it was.
So, things are not looking good for the online newspaper sites that are considering charging for content. But what about the Sunday paper’s content?
Our journalist host’s opinion was that news is broken in the dailies and this is the type of news people could find free elsewhere online, from sites like the BBC, if a newspaper website started charging. But the Sundays offer something beyond just news, they have news analysis, opinion articles, in-depth reviews, thorough travel stories and the longer investigative articles. This is the type of content that people could not find anywhere else and if any content has a chance as pay-per-view online, it would be the Sundays.
What do you think? Would you pay online to view the unique content that the Sunday papers offer or is even that not enough to get you to open your wallet? Picture credit
On Tuesday, Claire and I went on a Wildfire field trip. With the wide-eyed wonder of the little PRs that we are, we spent the morning exploring the halls of a national newspaper. We took in the sites and sounds of the busy newsroom, and, overwhelmed with curiosity, we bombarded our journalist host with all the questions we had always wanted to ask about inside workings of a national paper.
We talked about the best way to secure coverage in the national papers, ways PR can make it easier for journalists and the process a story goes through between the editor and journalist. One of the biggest reoccurring themes we discussed was the changes and effects the internet has had and will have on newspapers, specifically paid content.
In a recent blog, Danny wrote about the Harris Interactive survey for Paid:Content UK that found that “if their favourite news site begins charging for access to content, three quarters of people would simply switch to an alternative free news source”. And a new survey from Lightspeed Research and The Global Web Index found similar results, that nine in 10 UK consumers would never pay for news stories online, regardless of how cheap it was.
So, things are not looking good for the online newspaper sites that are considering charging for content. But what about the Sunday paper’s content?
Our journalist host’s opinion was that news is broke in the dailies and that is the type of news that people could find free elsewhere online, like from the BBC, if a newspaper website started charging. But the Sundays offer something beyond just news, they have news analysis, opinion articles, in-depth reviews, thorough travel stories and the longer investigative articles. This is the type of content that people could not find anywhere else and if any content has a chance as pay-per-view online, it would be the Sundays.
What do you think? Would you pay online to view the unique content that the Sunday papers offer or is even that not enough to get you to open your wallet?
I’ve recently returned from a month’s sabbatical, touring the South Devon and Cornwall coastline. Although I must confess that amongst all the cliff walks and strolls on the beach I did indulge in more than a little ‘daytime TV’.
The counties of Devon and Cornwall embarked on their digital switchover earlier this year, so I had a multitude of Freeview channels at my fingertips in the places I stayed. But goodness, what is it with the ads they are running?
I promise, I really don’t have any old gold lying around in my home and I don’t need a lawyer as I’m not in the habit of tripping up or falling over at work. Sigh. All too often I found myself channel-hopping in the hope of finding something else to entertain me for a few minutes.
But perhaps I’m being unfair. It’s unlikely the ads are aimed at someone who normally works an office job from Monday to Friday. But it did make me think about the way I usually watch TV.
I was missing my digital TV recorder; that clever little box that captures all my favourite programmes so I can watch them whenever I want to – with my finger poised over the fast forward button waiting for the little fuzzy black and white box to appear that marks the looming ad break.
Digital TV recorders are already in more than a quarter of UK households and the switchover is only now really beginning to ramp up to its completion in 2012. Wow, I thought, we could be on track for an exciting revolution in the way we all watch TV!
But then I started to worry about what ditching live TV would actually mean.
You see, while I’m not really a fan of ad breaks, I am a fan of decent TV content. If we’re not watching the ads, then why will brands bother spending money on them? UK internet ad spend overtook TV for the first time this year and ITV’s falling advertising revenues have been reported widely this month. How, with falling revenues, will the stations be able to commission, or buy, lovely new dramas, documentaries and entertainment shows?
Could we be condemning ourselves to a multitude of commercial digital TV channels that show nothing more than repeats of Friends, Murder She Wrote and the like?
And here’s another thing. I have a nagging feeling that if we skip the ads too often we may well miss out on those gems of genius that show the creativity that our ad agencies are capable of.
Does anyone know if milk is still what Ian Rush drinks?
“The great benefit of digital is that it is measurable”.
This old adage (yes, time moves fast in the digital world!) is the reason online marketers will tell you their discipline is far superior to offline equivalents. And it’s true: online campaigns produce vast amounts of data. Whether we’re talking click-throughs, conversions, downloads, followers… the list goes on and the numbers keep soaring.
This road is fraught with danger however. With these data points we end up quoting obscure, meaningless digits that only serve to quantify, but not qualify, end results. We measure without a purpose, without an end goal.
Beware measurement without an aim
Measurement for measurement’s sake is a waste of everyone’s time. It has to be focused and tied to an overarching goal.
For example, it’s great we can measure Twitter followers, but a thousand followers is a pretty meaningless statistic by itself. What lies behind the figures? Who are these people? What actions have they taken? Have they visited our website? Are they increasing brand awareness? Does the effort justify the business impact?
These are the questions that, no matter how many measurement metrics we are blessed with, are still difficult to answer – offline and online.
Decide goals and then decide what metrics meet these goals
The easy mistake to run into is failing to set and agree campaign objectives from the start. This renders effective measurement impossible and the efforts to achieve the impossible are a waste of time for everyone involved.
Having a Twitter profile, for example, should not itself be the key objective, but part of the strategy to achieving an overarching business goal. To truly measure its effectiveness, it needs to be tied to a particular anticipated outcome: user engagement, customer service, prospect nurturing, direct sales etc.
Measurement is an absolutely fundamental part of marketing. The web arms us with the tools to finally be able to prove (in most cases) that marketing efforts are making a difference to a business. But numbers alone won’t hack it.
At a Marketing Week conference I attended recently, one of the speakers asked the assembled crowd (all senior marketing people from some of the UK’s top brands) if they were participating in social media. Amazingly, only three out of about a hundred put their hands up!
The vast majority of brands think they should be embracing social media, and most want to be there, so why this reluctance to take the bull by the horns?
Social media is still unexplored territory for many and marketers want to be sure it will actually make a difference. By putting in place a measurement strategy right from the outset, you are taking the first step to gaining a clear justification for your social media activity.
Here are our seven steps to getting social media measurement right:
1. Put in place an overall objective – if you don’t know what you are trying to achieve through social media, then any kind of measurement will be impossible. Keep it simple and top line, at least to start with.
2. Identify the specific measures that will demonstrate progress - these goals will likely change over time, but try and put in place some metrics that can be easily benchmarked.
3. Don’t tie metrics to specific platforms, but to conversations – it’s very tempting to chart success against metrics tied to a certain social network – e.g. Twitter followers, Facebook fans, Flickr group numbers. But what does this actually mean to your overall objective or business aim? Monitoring conversations across the whole social media space is a much better success metric as it charts engagement right through to conversion.
4. Be patient, don’t expect instant results – this is not an exact science and there is (quite rightly) still a certain amount of trial and error in social media campaigns – and it’s likely there always will be).
5. Choose your destinations carefully – nine times out of ten, the conversations you participate in during a campaign will usually focus on some sort of end destination – be it a microsite, webpage, Slideshare presentation etc. Choosing the right destination, with the right content, is crucial and make sure you also have the right tools to measure their effectiveness.
6. Review the campaign on a regular basis - a day is a long time in social media and campaigns need constant care and attention. Don’t forget that the real-time web doesn’t have nine to five hours. Measurement needs to be ongoing.
7. Always try to tie metrics to specific business goals - at the end of the day, if you are unsure whether social media is helping your business, then either the campaign is wrong, you’re not measuring the right things, or it’s time to call it a day!
Earlier this month, the Wildfire Byte Night team (Debby, Dan and Danny) packed sleeping bags and longjohns to spend the night sleeping beneath the lights of Tower Bridge on London’s Potter Field.
It is the second year in a row that Wildfire has sent a team to the IT industry’s annual sleep-out in support of Action for Children, so this year – a year wiser – we came fully prepared for London’s crisp, autumn air.
We tried some different fundraising tactics this time around, including children’s facepainting and cupcake decorating at the Surbiton Festival – a bit of an adventure!
But as all the money we raised went to support vulnerable children, it was definitely worth it.
Our clients, friends and family stepped up again this year with donations and help in abundance. Along with the other Byte Night teams we contributed to an incredible £440,000 (to date) for Action for Children.
For those of you that don’t know, AVE stands for Advertising Value Equivalent. Something that sends shivers down the spine of any PR who was an account executive in the days before the internet.
Rulers and scalpels at the ready for measuring column inches of all coverage, multiplying that by the cost for ad space in said publication and then multiplying that again by a number, of anything between 2 and 7, to show how much more important influential PR was than advertising.
I really thought that AVE was pretty much a Dodo these days, so was amazed to find it was the most common form of measuring of the value of PR, especially consumer campaigns, while presiding as a judge for the 2009 PRCA Awards over the last few weeks.
Shouldn’t the industry have moved on by now?
AVE is so outdated for a number of reasons:
1. It only works for print media – column inches do not work on the Web
2. Advertising space is becoming cheaper, so PRs using it are already devaluing their work
3. But most importantly, it totally ignores business impact. All it does it give the board a nice big figure of how much it would cost to buy the equivalent amount of space.
We all know that PR is notoriously difficult to measure, and it is clear that there will never be one killer method of measurement. But what we should be striving for is a blend of measures that are aligned to specific business and campaign objectives. Things that actually mean something to our clients, like sales, market share, web hits, trials, and referrals.
I’m not saying it’s easy. But falling back on AVE is no way to win over clients, let alone win awards!
If ever there was an argument for why SEO is important then this is possibly it: an Ofcom study into media literacy has revealed that some kids believe sites ranked higher in search engines are more ‘truthful’!
“Among children aged 12-15 who use the internet, almost all have experience of using search engine websites (94%).
“Those who use search engine sites were shown a list of options and were asked to say which, if any, apply in terms of the way results are shown on search engine sites.
“There is no clear consensus among search engine users, but 12-15s are more likely to respond that results are ranked on their usefulness or relevance (37%) or their truthfulness (32%) than they are to respond that websites pay money to be at the top of the list (14%).”
With the rise of importance of search engines and the power they now hold, this is perhaps hardly surprising. SEO is a complex art; I wonder how many adults would be able to explain exactly how sites are ranked.
But then again, as long as they find what they are looking for, does it really matter and does anyone really care?
Following the announcement last week that London’s Evening Standard is to become a free paper, the Guardian’s director of digital content, Emily Bell, has an interesting piece in today’s Media Guardian supplement.
In it, she asks some poignant questions about the reasons behind the move and the effect this will have on London’s newspaper scene and the wider media industry. The main questions posed are:
- Will this spell the end for the London Lite?
- Will the Standard draw enough offline advertising to support the move?
- What will be the impact on the national dailies?
This last question is particularly interesting. As Emily states:
“At the moment the afternoon distribution of the Evening Standard means it does not fully compete with the national morning papers which have heavily biased metropolitan readerships (such as the Guardian and the Independent), and whilst many purchasers don’t value the Evening Standard in the way they would their own paid-for paper, the presence of something more than London Lite but less than the Times will begin to test the boundaries of the “enough” economy. In other words, a free Standard might be less good than your daily paper but is it “enough” to stop the daily purchase?”
In my mind, the growth of online news distribution will certainly lead to a position where commuters might conceivably forgo buying their daily paper in the morning and instead make do with online news consumption during the day, ending with a (free) evening paper for the commute home.
Whether the Standard will be able to capitalise on this is another question that will need to be answered, but it is certainly an interesting possible outcome.
So Google Wave has launched in beta and the (tech) world has gone crazy.
I’m yet to receive an invite (hint hint), despite having signed up the day it was announced. Google suggests that more invites will be on their way soon however, so fingers crossed!
As I’ve written before, I think Google Wave will be a game changer, especially as widespread internet availability increases and smartphones become more and more prevalent.
There has been a lot of coverage about the launch and some interesting articles with differing opinions, so I thought I’d do a quick round-up of the best ones I’ve found so far.
For the last two months, while we’ve been testing the Google Wave developer preview, we have been talking amongst ourselves about how this thing could change (or add to) what we do. So, here’s a list of a few wild ideas we had for using Wave.
I just got my Google Wave invite. No, I’m already out, so I can’t send one to you, sorry. But this service is way overhyped and as people start to use it they will realize it brings the worst of email and IM together: unproductivity.
Robert Scoble, Steve Rubel and Louis Gray are three tech blogger geeks that love to use new tools and all got to test Google’s new real-time communication platform Wave today. It’s possible that when the rush is over the Wave experience will seem less overwhelming, but the kinds of initial reactions these three had aren’t good.
Analysts say that Google’s Wave collaboration and communication tool could find its initial success as an alternative to social networks like Facebook, Twitter and MySpace.
You might have read that Gordon Brown had a few problems with a television interview this week. So, always happy to help, we thought we’d show him how it should be done.
Cue a video from industry magazine PR Week featuring Wildfire’s very own MD, Debby Penton.
In a wide-ranging conversation, the debate covers how to market gadgets to women and the role of women in PR…
On Tuesday, Claire and I went on a Wildfire field trip. With the wide-eyed wonder of the little PRs that we are, we spent the morning exploring the halls of a national newspaper. We took in the sites and sounds of the busy newsroom, and, overwhelmed with curiosity, we bombarded our journalist host with all the questions we had always wanted to ask about the inside workings of a national paper.
Following the 
