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I was watching this video on PocketLint recently and the words ‘work is a thing we do, not a place we go’ really struck a chord.  It nicely sums up how we work in 2009. I can work anywhere and am lucky enough to be employed by a company that not only provides the technology I need but also trusts that I am not going to sat at home watching day time TV!

But it was interesting having a chat with my parents recently – while I worked from their house in Ireland – about the whole working from home concept.  Mum and dad both in their early 60s (sorry to give away your age, mum) agreed that ‘in their day’ no one would have been given permission to work anywhere else but the office.  It just wasn’t done the thing.  And my parents both maintain that if a colleague was at home during work hours they would presume that he or she were playing a round of golf, hitting the shops or having an afternoon nap i.e. doing anything else but work.

So what’s changed?  Why does our generation not bat an eyelid at the thought of our colleagues, friends and family working from home?  I put it down to the power of the Internet.  Being online gives us the freedom to access the information we need, the people we want to speak and the service we want anywhere, anytime night or day.  So, getting the ammunition we need for work should be no different.

But that does not quite answer the question of skiving. Do our bosses trust us more today?  I doubt it, but I do think that our employers’ mindsets have changed.  They realise that we may watch a bit of This Morning while we are working from home.  But they also understand that we will happily check and respond to email at 8pm.

Generation Y, or those who have been brought up with internet, will take it a step further and demand to work from anywhere; happily working as part of a globally dispersed team, content in the knowledge that they can work from Starbucks if they want. A recent article in the Sunday Times Style magazine even hinted that the office was dead and would be replaced by a series of community hubs which would house people who work rather than people you work with.  The workplace as we know it is changing and I for one like the changes and won’t be giving up my iPhone or remote access anytime soon.

Econsultancy has today released its latest Online PR and Social Media Report and it makes thoroughly interesting reading (download here – login/membership required).

The report, edited by Linus Gregoriadis and Michelle Goodall, is based on a survey of more than 1,100 companies and agencies.

I’ve been wading through some of the findings and have pulled out the following, that are particularly interesting:

Social media participation is growing, but heavy participation is still rare

It’s hard to miss coverage of social media in the media, but the report suggests that many brands and agencies are still just dipping their toes in the water with only 26% saying they are heavily involved in social media and 64% having experimented but not ‘done much’.

“Softer” brand-building factors are seen as “major benefits” as opposed to harder financial advantages such as increased profitability

No surprise here, but there are some interesting statistics when you dig a little deeper: 73% of respondents have seen greater brand awareness through using social media. 71% saw increased customer engagement, 66% better brand reputation and 62% increased communication / networking with key influencers. These are all benefits that you would also expect (or would have expected!) to achieve through traditional PR.

Overwhelming personal enthusiasm for social media, but many organisations do not share the same positive outlook

I wrote recently about the difficulties of getting internal buy-in for social media and the report seems to support this. When asked about the opportunities provided by social media, 61% of respondents said that as individuals they saw tremendous opportunities for their business, but only 31% said their organisations as a whole have this same positive outlook.

Twitter is increasingly popular

Interestingly a massive 78% said they are using Twitter, compared to only 47% using a corporate or brand blog. Perhaps the convenience of micro-blogging is just as appealing when it comes to brands as it is for many individuals.

Customer service teams yet to embrace social media

I also revealed recently that the growth in usage of social media by customer services teams is likely to increase in the near future, however the Econsultancy report shows that 35% of respondents said that social media activity was managed by digital marketing teams, 21% by PR teams, with only 2% saying it was managed by customer services.

Monitoring tools

Despite the array of tools out there, a surprising 46% said they didn’t use any form of online repuation or buzz monitoring technology. 39% used a free tool with only 8% paying.

Social media spend will grow, but you only get out what you put in

The majority of companies surveyed (86%) said they expect investment in social media to increase in 2010, but there is a health warning in the report - “You only get what you put in” – with only 1% of companies who are heavily involved in social media say that they have gained no real value from the channel. Education seems to be important here with 59% saying a lack of knowledge or understanding was a key barrier to adoption.

As with most emerging technologies, Twitter began life as the plaything of geeks and technophiles. But the last year has seen increasing mainstream adoption.

I’m always coming across interesting new tweeters and last week, found an account for the London Symphony Orchestra – one of the world’s leading musical ensembles.

As someone who was a pro musician in a former life, I was particularly intrigued, also because one of the account’s tweeters was advertised as one of the Orchestra’s flute players.

So I got in touch and spoke with the LSO’s Digital Marketing Manager to find out more. I also managed to speak with Principal Flautist and Tweeter, Gareth Davies – his thoughts are also below…

DW: Tell me about the LSO and your role?

Jo Johnson, Digital Marketing Manager, LSO: My job encompasses running the LSO website, email marketing, text messaging, social networks, film-making etc.

The LSO is a huge and very busy organisation and there’s always a lot of different things going on at once. My job is to make sure the right information about all these activities is in the right places online, where people might find them (and spend their cash on tickets – if you want to get down to the nitty-gritty of the purpose of my existence!).

DW: Why did you start tweeting at the LSO and what were the initial aims?

JJ: We [that's me and my colleague Gavin Bayliss, LSO Live Product Manager] started tweeting really as an experiment.We had been using Facebook since 2007 (and MySpace for a little while before that) and saw the rise in importance of the status update. Twitter started really as an extension of that.

We happened to join at the time when there was a big surge in people joining up, and it became clear that Twitter was really about conversations. We started out with the aim that we would NOT use Twitter for marketing, and that aim is still there.

DW: How do you use Twitter and what do you tweet about?

JJ: We try to use it to inform people about what the Orchestra is doing daily and respond to any replies . We put up photos, particularly when on tour, and share interesting links and thoughts. If we have a bit of new video, or a new CD release, we’ll announce itt.

Occasionally we run what we call Artist Conversations, which are basically interviews and Q&As with soloists and conductors, and we’ll tweet those as a complete event.

DW: Do you measure the effectiveness of Twitter and/or social media?

JJ: We try, although it can be difficult to see hard results in terms of visitor numbers to the main website or sales of tickets or CDs.

We can track visitors coming to http://lso.co.uk from Facebook etc. (Twitter is harder to track because of the wide variety of 3rd party apps that people use) and we can see ticket and CD sales as a result of those visits.

In terms of income, Facebook is our 5th biggest referring website – definitely not insignificant!

We also use the bit.ly service to shorten URLs that we post, which gives us stats like number and times of clicks, geographical location and type of application they have used.

But personally, I think that measuring like this is only half the story. Any organisations looking to justify their use of social networks this way are missing the point.

Surely the most effective way to measure its success is by the amount of user activity within the sites! The more interesting and relevant you are within them, the more people interact with you, and the more fans you gather.

If you’re doing it right, all these people are getting a taste of your brand, just within the environment that they choose and are comfortable with.

The things people say about you and to you in these networks are things they might not say to you anywhere else – for example we get loads of people tweeting mini-reviews after a concert, or telling us how much they enjoy Star Wars, or how they wish we could tour to their city. I suppose one could call it buzz-monitoring.

DW: Was it difficult getting buy-in internally?

JJ: Um… we didn’t ask! Sometimes you’ve just got to go for it and see what happens.

We had already managed to prove that Facebook was a success and worth doing – and that we could be trusted to communicate in these places without sign-off every time! Just as well, since Twitter et al are not the sorts of activities that thrive under those sorts of restrictions. And we are lucky to work in an organisation that encourages and trusts its employees to do something they believe in and to give things a go!

We’d be lying if we said it was all easy – we’ve had to fight our battles and convince people it’s the right thing to do, that we are doing the LSO’s reputation good and not wasting our time. But they are generally supportive right up to the top of the organisation.

DW: Do you have any future plans for using Twitter/social media at the LSO?

JJ: More, more, more! Conversations are really important to us – we want to encourage people to get to know us through social networks. I don’t think this phenomenon is going away. The names may change, but this way of conducting our lives online will stay.

DW: What would be your top tips for companies looking to start using Twitter?

JJ:

- Be original. Be funny. Allow your personality through, don’t just be corporate.

- Don’t just tweet mini-press releases, there’s nothing more boring. But on the other hand, don’t just tweet about what you had for lunch, how bad your commute was or how awful the weather is!

- Do respond to criticism in a positive way.

Gareth Davies is Princial Flute Player with the LSO. he has a blog and also contributes to the @londonsymphony Twitter account

DW: How and why did you start using Twitter?

Gareth Davies: I didn’t use Twitter before I started using it with the LSO.

I started writing a blog for the Orchestra nearly two years ago and it became apparent that a lot of people enjoyed finding out about what went on behind the scenes and also having a more personal relationship with the players.

DW: What do you tweet about?

GD: All sorts of things. Sometimes it’s just information like what we are doing, where we are, who we are working with.

Or it might be telling people about an upcoming concert or CD. But my favourite stuff is when things happen backstage that we tell people about, which they wouldn’t find out about otherwise!

DW: What’s the best thing about tweeting for the LSO?

GD: I hated it at first, and managed to get into a few arguments with some people on it, so I had a break.

It really got going when we went on a tour of the US. We got into tweeting all sorts of stuff.

My favourite one was when our principal cellist forgot his black socks for a concert and so was backstage with a pair of black and white striped socks, filling in the white lines with a black marker pen. I got a picture of that up in about 30 seconds!

People also seem to like pictures of the rehearsal from a different angle than they are used to seeing.

The thing I like best is that it really breaks down a few perceived barriers between the orchestra and the audience which can only be a good thing. Its also is really nice when I’m on the train home after a concert and people are already tweeting how much they loved it.

You can follow the LSO on Twitter at @londonsymphonyorchestra and find out more about forthcoming concerts at LSO.co.uk. Don’t forget to check out Gareth’s either! lsoontour.wordpress.com

Retweeting – the process by which you repeat (or retweet) a tweet written by someone else – is standard currency on Twitter. By retweeting someone else, you are assigning value to what they’ve said or shared. And by being retweeted, you are expanding the awareness of your brand and your reputation on Twitter and beyond.

It’s the way that messages spread, virally, around the Twittersphere and, for that reason, is the holy grail for brands.

Controversially, Twitter has recently revamped the way that retweets work, but despite this, the power of the RT still remains. So what makes a perfect retweetable tweet? Here are my top five tips:

1. Brevity – When you retweet and credit the original author, additional content can be added to the tweet. If the original message is 130 characters, there won’t be much space left, meaning you will have to edit the original message to get the character count down.

Try to keep your tweet short and snappy to make retweeting easier

2. Content – Be a bit of a tease by giving enough content to hook readers, but leave them wanting more. Controversial statements and questions all work well in enticing your followers to RT.

Content is king and brevity is important, so use your words wisely

3. Links – The link is usually the call to action of any tweet. Often, you will link to a page that provides more information about the tweet, for example a blog post or website page. Studies have shown tweets that contain a link are more likely to be retweeted, but use a URL shortener to make sure you don’t use up too many characters – bit.ly is the most common and most ‘trusted’.

Include a link and make sure it’s bit.ly

4. Timing – It goes without saying that if there are more people using Twitter when you send out your message, then there is a greater chance that someone will see and then retweet the message.

Tweet between 3pm and 4pm on a Thursday or a Friday as this is when Twitter is busiest

5. Relevance – There are two key points here. Firstly, know your audience: make sure your content is perfectly tuned to your particular set of followers as these are the people that will get the ball (or tweet) rolling. Secondly, be topical: if possible, try and tweet on issues that are in the news or ideally, that are just breaking.

Engage your followers by being relevant and topical

Following these five steps should help you maximise your retweet potential, but remember, this is not an exact science; sometimes it is the tweet you least expect that will be successful.

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It’s been quite a year for Twitter. Despite not yet making much money [the pic is a bit misleading, I know], popularity in the micro-blogging platform has soared in 2009. Outside the US, global figures in September reached 58.4 million – a 949% increase on this time last year.

With search engines falling over themselves to get tweets showing up in results and with other social networks clamouring to get Twitter integrated, the future certainly seems bright.

So why the success? What puts Twitter above the other micro-blogger pretenders-to-the-throne and why is it seen as posing such a threat to more established players?

Back to basics

Following feature-rich networks like Facebook, Myspace and Bebo, Twitter is bold in its simplicity. The focus is very much on user generated content, with supporting material such as background images or profile text kept low-key. It’ll be interesting to see whether Twitter is brave enough to stick to the ’simpler is better’ format, or whether recent tweaks (like Twitter Lists and the new retweet functionality) are precursors for future functionality additions.

The micro-blogging craze

Blogging has been popular for some time now, but it has a few downsides, primarily that it is time-consuming and labour-intensive. Micro-blogging solves these issues. It is easy to use and the 140 character limit makes writing even the most complex tweets a painless, quick and easy experience. Time-pressed, would-be bloggers have been flocking to Twitter to realise their aim of broadcasting to the world.

Opt-in

So many communication methods fall down because of one thing: spam. Twitter effortlessly gets around this problem by requiring users to opt-in to messages they want to receive. If a user is being too noisy, commercial or irrelevant, the solution is easy: simply unfollow.

The API

Coming back to the first point, Twitter’s simplicity means that it is very straightforward to take its core data and create other ways of presenting or interacting with it. Because of this and through its open API, all manner of desktop clients, analytics tools and gimmicks have sprung up around the service. This has fuelled the interest in the service, driven by an active and dedicated developer community.

All brands are welcome

From the beginning, Facebook has always been about ‘real’ people. Twitter is about real people too, but it’s also open to anyone or anything, from people, brands and characters to animals, ideas and bridges. This open-door policy has seen businesses flocking to the network to begin communicating more directly with their public. Facebook, possibly seeing the error of its ways, has been quick to  embrace business interaction further, but Twitter is unique in putting all users on an equal footing.

Media lovefest

If we look at the reason for Twitter’s growth in the UK in 2009, the media have played a huge role with daily mentions of the network almost guaranteed in at least one national newspaper. From Stephen Fry threatening to quit, to David Cameron’s glib remarks, Twitter has been at the centre of our news agenda.

So why the interest? Well, the openness of the service means that Twitter provides a constant stream of fodder for our celebrity-obsessed hacks. On top of this, Twitter is a great way for journalists to communicate with readers, source stories and build up their own fan bases.

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At the end of October, Twitter began rolling out its newest feature: Lists. Lists allows users to create groups of other Twitter accounts, which they can then share with their followers.

It is a good way of keeping track of tweets from a certain group or sub-section of tweeters, allowing you to track their updates and/or find new people to follow.

The introduction of Lists has seen people busily listing their interesting followers. There are good reasons why Lists have become so popular and why brands should consider using Lists as an integral part of their tweeting:

1. Demonstrate your knowledge and spread the love

It’s always a great compliment to be publicly recognised for something. Whether it is through being musically inclined or just as someone’s friend, Lists are a great way for recommending certain followers within a niche. You’ll also get credit from those you add to a list; they may even add you in return.

2. Organise your followers

For those who don’t already use a desktop client, like Tweetdeck, to organise their Twitter feed into groups, Lists can be helpful to keep up to date with a specific group of people you are interested in.

3. Rank popularity, or usefulness

It used to be that you could get a pretty good idea of a Twitter account’s ‘value’ or ‘influence’ by the number of followers it had, but now with the number of spammy accounts using automated software to find followers, it’s getting harder to tell who is popular and who is junk. With people organising their followers into Lists, the number of Lists an account is placed on becomes another good way of determining influence, especially within certain subject areas.

For brands, these are three very compelling reasons for using Lists. It is also a good way to bring together all the tweeters in your organisation under one banner.

With this in mind, we’ve been playing around with Lists ourselves. You can now easily check out what the Wildfire team are tweeting about here: http://twitter.com/wildfirepr/wildfire-pr

Last week, I attended a PRCA event on Linkedin where the speaker was Cristina Hoole – European PR and Marketing Director at the business social network.

For the regular users of Linkedin, there wasn’t really anything new to report, but it did get me thinking about ways in which Linkedin could be used to improve a company’s (or an individual’s) PR efforts. Here are my top ten tips:

1. Make sure your spokespeople has a unique URL – this is easy to configure in your Linkedin control panel and will give you a search-engine-friendly URL – e.g. http://uk.linkedin.com/in/dannywhatmough
2. SEO your spokesperson and company profiles – make sure that your spokespeople appear in internal and external searches by including lots of relevant keywords in their Linkedin titles, biogs and the rest of their profile
3. Set up your company profile – you can now have company profiles in Linkedin just as you can individual ones. Point 2 still applies here – make sure the page is properly optimised
4. Create a group for your company or industry group – Linkedin groups allow users to connect and chat with each other on a whole range of themes. This is a great way to start chatting to customers, prospects or partners
5. Make sure you list all your events – Linkedin events was a feature that I hadn’t come across before Cristina mentioned it. It is free to add events you might be running (or attending) and will even flag up events that other users in your network have found interesting or are going along to
6. Run a poll – Linkedin polls can be targeted to particular demographic splits or interest groups. The service does have a cost attached, but could be a great way to get relatively cheap industry insights or even get research for a PR campaign
7. Monitor questions and answer any that relate to your business – Linkedin Answers is a way for anyone on Linkedin to ask questions of the entire community. Monitoring these questions on a regular basis and answering any that apply to your business or sector will help you build up recognition and respect
8. Join groups in your industry or sector and give involved in the discussion – as well as setting up a group for your business or sector, you should also join and monitor other relevant groups that are in existance. Join in the conversation if and when it makes sense
9. Connect with journalists and influencers – If you’ve recently met a journalist, analyst or even a blogger, make sure you connect to them on Linkedin. This will keep you front of mind and might mean that they will come to you first the next time they need a comment or interview. Better still, they’ll have all your contact details!
10. Update your status – Having built up a following on Linkedin, make sure you keep your connections updated with your latest goings on by updating your status. You can now link status updates to Twitter (and vice versa), but bear in mind that Linkedin isn’t primarily a micro-blogging platform, so you’ll probably want to go easy and not overload your connection’s streams with continuous updates

Linkedin is often ignored by many in PR, but there are lots of really beneficial ways to use the service. Let me know if you can think of any I’ve missed and don’t forget to connect!

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I’m a bit late with this one, but it’s been a busy few weeks! On Tuesday 3rd November I attended Figaro’s Social Media Marketing Conference in London.

As with all these types of events, some of it was good, some was less good, but once you looked past the vanilla presentations/salespitches from the sponsors and a few large-ego-ed ’social media gurus’, there were some really interesting case studies and some concrete advice from the people that are actually out there doing this stuff we call social media marketing.

Rather than do a blow by blow account of the day, I thought I’d pull out some of the themes and key ideas I came away with.

Too many brands fail to see social media campaigns all the way through

This was covered by Andy O’brien from Amaze and Jonathan MacDonald. The problem is that although the interaction on social media or shareable content is often well-conceived and thought-through, when users try to go to the next stage, they are often let down. It’s like having a great conversation with a brand on Twitter only to click through to their site and find it impossible to navigate.

Customer service is the next big thing?

Andy from Amaze suggested that customer service will be the next big thing in social media. I’d suggest that it is already, but I know what he means! For me, the way we link customer service (or not) to social media marketing is an interesting challenge/question.

It’s all about innovation and content is still king

There were some great case studies throughout the day (kudos to Scott Burton and the T-Mobile dance flashmob, Stuart Parkinson from VCCP and Comparethemeerkat, Charles Williams from British Red Cross and Anna Rafferty from Penguin Digital).

What these examples all had in common was bundles of creativity, innovation and ‘wow-ness’. They also all found great ways to use all this ‘goodness’ to deliver content or allow their users to create content that stood out from the crowd.

Social media as a phrase is meaningless – social is everywhere

Euan Semple commented that “everything has become social and the word has lost all meaningless”. I agree that there is a danger that social media just becomes a catch-all term for everything and anything digital.

Stuart at VCCP revealed how he felt the Meerkat campaign was a ’social’ campaign not a ’social media’ campaign. Alan from SMLXL probably said it best: “human beings are a social species”.

Organisational challenges

Many of the speakers and audience members spoke about the organisational challenges of running social media campaigns. Some revealed that they just got on and did it without any formal, top-level approval. Others shared the ways in which they got buy-in from senior staff. It seems there is no easy answer to this one and that individual circumstances can radically change the goal-posts.

Distributed content

Most of the case studies explored the idea of ‘distributed content’ and for me this is a huge development area that we are finally seeing come to fruition as technology advances.

Social media in 2012

My vote for presentation of the day was Freddie Laker from Sapient. His look at the social media trends we will see by 2012 was great! Rather than try and mis-quote what he said, I’d urge you to visit his blog for more!

It’s been a dramatic week in the media world, with a number of key developments. Here’s a quick recap in case you missed any of it…

Guardian Technology supplement

As we reported last week, more than 100 editorial and commercial jobs are to be cut at Guardian News & Media and the Guardian’s Thursday Technology print section will cease publication at the end of the year.

More: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/nov/11/guardian-news-and-media

Revolution

From now on, Revolution Magazine, published by Haymarket, will now be distributed as a quarterly supplement with Marketing magazine. The online content will be incorporated into Brand Republic.

More: http://www.allmediascotland.com/press_news/23585/Media-Week-Closed-Down

Media Week

Lord Heseltine’s Haymarket Publishing is also to close Media Week after almost 25 years as part of a restructure of its marketing and advertising trade titles, including Campaign and Marketing, that will see the loss of 18 editorial jobs.

More: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/nov/17/media-week-to-close

Computer Weekly

Computing editor Bryan Glick has been poached by fierce IT rivals Computer Weekly. He began his new role as editor this week. Our inside sources have suggested that Computer Weekly is hoping Bryan will help revitalise the online side of the brand, akin to his achievements at Computing, as it has been losing ground to it’s main rival.

If you didn’t catch our interview last month with Bryan, you can find it here

More: http://www.computerweekly.com/blogs/editors-blog/2009/11/a-new-custodian-for-this-blog.html

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It’s no secret that the traditional media industry is in chaos at the moment. Today, the tech sector felt the force of this with the announcement that the Guardian’s Thursday print Technology supplement is to close at the end of the year.

This came alongside news of over 100 job cuts at the Guardian, following revenue losses of £33m.

As if this wasn’t enough doom and gloom for the Guardian Media Group, yesterday it was revealed that the Observer, whilst still suriving, will lose its monthly Music, Sport and Woman magazines.

Declining advertising revenues, combined with more news being available for free online, not to mention the rise of professional blogging, has really hit the media sector and the tech industry is no clearly no different.

So what’s the answer? Rupert Murdoch has made no secret of  plans for properties in his media portfolio, including The Times, which will move to a paywall charging structure online from next Spring.

The Guardian’s technology editor Charles Arthur was hinting at a similar outcome this afternoon on Twitter (see right).

Whilst Arthur was quick to point out that charging separately for online technology news wasn’t currently being considered, it does beg the question: would you pay for specialised content? And if so, how much would you pay? And what would you want to receive?

Only last week, we covered news about how NMA are to begin charging for subscriber-only content.

Dan also covered research recently, which suggests that if the publishers think we are all going to start paying for online content, then they should really think again…

What do you think? Would you pay for tech news from the Guardian? Or do we already have enough access to content online that the print supplement was a superfluous?