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Blogging, improving breaking news at Twitter and this week’s bits and bytes

@SainsburysPR

Starting off with exciting news from the Sainsbury’s digital corporate affairs world, I am super excited to say that we have finally been granted official ‘blue tick of awesomeness’ status by Twitter for our @SainsburysPR account (thank you @simonlp). Equally exciting is the launch of the lifestyle PR team’s blog, where Kathryn and her team will be bringing you all the news from the world of fashion, home and entertainment. The first post provides a sneak peek at the Spring/Summer 2013 home & lifestyle show.

While we’re on the topic, here’s an excellent 8 point guide to blogging that not only sums it up perfectly, but also shows how it’s different from writing a press release or an article. From the importance of tweetable and descriptive headlines, writing upside down to inviting comments with questions and opinion – if you blog for work or privately, this is a must read, print, laminate and stick to the wall kind of document.

Twelve Thirty Eight have produced their annual review of PR jargon and practices that piss off journalists. Not too many surprises there I don’t think, but a good read with quite a few car-crash examples of what not to do in PR. Condensed here in The Guardian’s Greenslade Blog if you don’t want to go through the whole PDF.

Ideas of Year are looking for just that – creative ideas from the Great British PR industry – to showcase some of the best stunts, social campaigns, quick and simple media stories. At the end of the process, around 100 of the finest examples will be compiled in a coffee table book that’ll be published with PR Moment in March 2013. So if you have a campaign to enter, complete this form and submit it by January 20.

Hasbro came out with a clever PR campaign this week, asking fans of Monopoly to vote on which of the classic tokens will never pass go again. The Guardian and The Mirror have covered the story and Paddy Power made the wheelbarrow odds on to be axed, with the cat tipped to replace it. Head over to the official Monopoly Facebook page to save your favourite token!

Lego have been on a roll in regards to customer service recently and this week has been no exception: A boy lost his new Lego toys in Sainsbury’s. He wrote a letter to Lego asking them if they’d replace the toys. Lego’s response is pure customer service gold. The original Tweet has been shared thousands of times, ITV and other media outlets have picked it up, and I don’t have to tell you the importance of quick, empathetic, helpful, human customer service in a viral world.

Must watch video of the week: The totally epic, OTT, 3 minute clip for The Guardian and Observer Weekend™ featuring none other than Hugh Grant (really). Turn up the volume, sit back and enjoy (HT @TomParker81 and @tarasthompson).

Check out this excellent print campaign from Expedia using airport codes and luggage tags. Makes me want to book my next flight and check in – although LHR PHL LHR doesn’t really spell anything.

The guys at Oddbins are back and running yet another marvellous promotional campaign. After their cheeky anti-Olympics campaign in the summer, they’ve now turned their attention to four groups of people who, in 2012, did not always receive the love that they probably deserved. Throughout the four January weekends mothers, bankers & journalists, Germans (YES!) and gingers will take turns to receive 10% discount. I am getting ready for the German weekend.

We all know that the place for breaking news is Twitter. Something happens and people instantly come to Twitter to search for a keyword – often without getting much context. Looks like Twitter are looking to wrest that role of context provider from media outlets using a combination of clever algorithms and dedicated people: they are working to improve the search function with a real-time human computation engine that helps identify search queries as soon as they’re trending, sends these queries to real humans to be judged, and then incorporates the human annotations back into Twitter search results.

Still on Twitter, those crazy cats at @SolihullPolice are at it again, providing their followers with the best comedy crime fighting you could possibly squeeze into 140 characters.

No surprise given murky privacy settings, tax affairs, Instafail, and the new Poke App, but Ad Age doesn’t like Facebook very much: Think of Facebook as a self-absorbed, petulant brat, one that doesn’t understand how to play well with others — users, investors, partners, competitors. Perhaps they should send that to Mark directly – it’ll only cost them a $100. That’s one way to monetise your social network… (HT @stangreenan)

And finally: a ridiculously well done Brad Pitt Chanel N°5 commercial parody featuring Johnny Depp (again, HT @stangreenan).

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The increasing power of PR and this week’s bits and bytes

A round-up of my favourite tweets mentioning Sainsbury’s in December kicks of this week’s update. You can check out November andOctober if you missed them.

The must read article of the week comes from Management Today and their look at the increasing power and influence of PRs. There’s a perception in some quarters that PR is just about transmitting a message. It’s not. It’s first and foremost about interpreting reality, reading the Zeitgeist. […] That requires some distance from the status quo. A good PR has to be a bit of an outsider and be prepared to tell people hard truths. I could just quote the whole thing. Trust me. You need to read this.

Last week I mentioned that I was looking for the top PR stunts of 2012 – well, here are some that caught my eye:

  • The BBC put together a look back at the top memes and viral videos of 2012, and of course we were chuffed to see that Giraffe Bread made it onto the list. Interesting to see the imbalance of planned vs. reactive – clear indication that you don’t make something go viral, it just happens.
  • One of France’s leading marketing bloggers Gregory Pouy pulled together a great slideshare deck of the best digital campaigns of 2012. It’s 82 slides long and includes videos as well as a key take away for each campaign so make sure you have a cup of tea ready before you tackle this bad boy.
  • Rich Leigh over at @GoodandBadPR did a brilliant job at pulling together his top 20 PR stunts and campaigns of 2012

What’s going to happen in 2013?

  • @AndrewGirdwood  pulls together 9 observations of where digital is headed in 2013. Point 9 sums it up nicely for me: In this increasingly complex digital landscape – a landscape that is evermore intertwined with offline – people, especially the crowds, are inherently unpredictable. Good marketers will recognise and adapt.
  • Meanwhile, The HuffPo looks at predictions for retail and mobile – note the schizophrenic nature of our relationship to our smartphone. It allows loyalty programmes access to people’s pockets but at the same time gives customers the ability to ‘showroom’.
  • 7 social media trends from Luke Abbot’s excellent blog
  • Vice magazine looks at the age-old journalistic practice of using event anniversaries as story hooks. Prepare to read the 2013 headlines today.

And as ever, for every positive summary, there seems to be twice as many ‘top fails’ compilation. Adweek put together the 20 biggest brand fails of 2012 and you have to admit – from Amazon spoiling a key plot point in a book, the Bic ladypen to Nestlé using a bear that looked suspiciously like ‘paedobear’ – there are some crackers. I wouldn’t have put the AMC theatres/Oreos cookies in myself though, that was just a bit of a banter between two branded Twitter accounts. Still, this is very much a top 20 things not to do in communications.

Through sheer luck, I came across a video by Minute MBA about the top three HR mistakes companies make (no handbook, withholding criticism or praise from employees and ignoring the competition) which led me on to another of their videos about what you can learn from Valve’s Employee Handbook. If you don’t know, Valve are the people that developed probably one of the greatest and genre defining games of all time: ‘Half-Life’. They went on to develop the gaming platform Steam and another mindbendingly brilliant game ‘Portal’. In 2012, Valve’s employee handbook was leaked and caused quite a stir in the gaming and HR world. So I found myself sitting at home, on a Saturday morning, totally enthralled by a employee handbook for a company that I wasn’t working for. Not only does the handbook do a great job at outlining what their company culture is like, it is really very funny! They promote a total lack of structure to promote creativity and to empower their employees to follow and create what they believe has value. A brilliant bit of work, well worth the read and I’m sure that handbook and company ethos is a big reason why they attract some of the best game designers and engineers in the world (the handbook has a prominent place on their homepage, in high and low res pdf).

Always a relief to see when your principles of dealing with negative customer comments online is mirrored by third parties. Social Media Today provide this great 12 point checklist on how it’s done.

Do you know what the world’s most active Twitter city is? Nope. Not that one. It’s Jakarta.

And finally: feeling the January blues? Then head over to the nicest place on the Internet and get a hug: http://thenicestplaceontheinter.net/

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Digital Corporate Affairs – weekly bits and bytes

We start with what for me was the biggest story of the week: Instagram’s terms of service über-fail. Hipsters, cappucino and selfie photographers the world over freaked out on Tuesday, when Instagram allegedly announced it was planning to sell the crappy, filtered, rectangular photos of people’s lunches to faceless corporations the world over.

I admit, I too had one foot on the InstaBashing bandwagon. But I wasn’t the only one. Users deleted their accounts, articles about how to remove all your photos from Instagram were popping up everywhere (mainly linking to the rather useful http://instaport.me) and the Guardian made the point that: “Instagram makes you the product” – but failed to realise that this is true of most other social network/platform/app out there).

So why the InstaRage?

The BBC’s technology correspondent, Rory Cellan-Jones, put his finger on the main issue: “Real story on Instagram is incompetence (again) of Facebook in framing its privacy policies. Don’t think they’ve any plans to sell photos but they should have made that clear in the t&cs.”

But I think that the second element is one that Paul Ford started writing about waaay back in 2007, when he talked about the web being a powerful platform for people to voice their discontent for then they had not been informed of changes relating to their lives. “Why Wasn’t I Consulted, is the fundamental question of the web. It is the rule from which other rules are derived. Humans have a fundamental need to be consulted, engaged, to exercise their knowledge (and thus power), and no other medium that came before has been able to tap into that as effectively.”

Facebook changes settings, removes features, even redesigns their website without consulting their users. And you can understand them – they simply wouldn’t get anything done. Instagram though are a lot smaller than Facebook. They haven’t reached that point of total domination where – if you’re not on Facebook you basically do not have a social life.

So I think the combination of incomprehensible and confusing legalese and not even making it seem like they care about their users privacy led to Instagram losing even more of that loveable upstart karma they started to lose when they were acquired by Facebook.

In other news this week, The Mail Online cracked the 7 million daily unique browsers mark. Guardian.co.uk comes in at just under 4 million and Telegraph.co.uk at just under 3 million. Meanwhile, CIPR looked at the top newspaper Twitter accounts and found that the FT had the most followers, The Telegraph tweeted the most, The Sun received by far the most retweets and The Guardian receives the most replies.

In what Marketing Week called “a shift in social strategy”, Tesco this week launched their first Twitter campaign that encouraged users to pull virtual crackers by tweeting the hashtag #pullacracker. Followers who reply using the hashtag will be sent a unique link to an animation showing a cracker being pulled and revealing their prize. http://www.tescopullacracker.com

Jamaican beer Red Stripe teamed up with director Greg Brunkalla and Hirsch & Mann) to transform Best Supermarket on Kingsland High Street into an interactive music box, where products were rigged to create a plethora of instruments – a food can xylophone, jumping box drums and clinking bottle bells to name just a few. The finished clip has been viewed over 350,000 times (make sure you also check out the making of clip).

Buzzfeed have again done a great job of pulling together 5 of the best PR/advertising stunts of the year. The entirely epic Red Bull Stratos features, of course, but the other 4 aren’t to be sniffed at.

In a series of short webisodes (Fresh Meat fans will be amused) the cheeky buggers at Google look at what what bad web practices look like in real life – using the example of supermarkets. The point being: if it is annoying in real life, you can be sure that it is also annoying when shopping online.

The London Fire Brigade might actually want you to tweet about a fire before leaving the building, after it announced that it is looking to set up the world’s first 999 emergency Twitter feed. Given the amount false positives I see every week about fires at Sainsbury’s, I suspect (hope!) that it’ll be a while before this is implemented.

Starbucks are still having a rubbish time: not only was their #SpreadtheCheer Twitter campaign hijacked, the tweets were displayed on a big screen at the Natural History Museum. Ouch.

A different look back at the year: Spotifiy’s Review of the Year, with the top 100 tracks by country. Gotye’s Somebody that I used to know at no.1 in the UK. For shame.

And finally: the entirely NSFW ‘Epic Chef’, a new online cooking show from the deranged geniuses behind Epic Meal Time. This is totally and utterly mental. One of the secret challenge ingredients is a “mother-expletive-deleted case of bacon”. One of the contestants opens a jar of mayo with a chainsaw. Just watch it.

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Digital Corporate Affairs – weekly bits and bytes

Poynter has pulled together the best and worst media errors, corrections and apologies of 2013. From CNN’s and Fox News’ epic failure to correctly interpret the US Supreme Court’s Affordable Care Act decision (guess who actually corrected the mistake and who just went with it) to some cracking examples from closer to home, including the apology of the year from The Sun and their coverage of the Hillsborough disaster – this is an absolute must read.

Ever since Google published their first Zeitgeist summary, there is no better way to have a quick look back at the year and see how we searched in 2012 (especially as this year’s clip is put to the wonderful track “All I Want” by Kodaline).

Not to be outdone, Twitter have pulled together their own little look back at the year 2012 in Tweets. They’ve even partnered with Vizify to allow you to create your own personalised look back at your year on Twitter. Turns out I swear about Arsenal. A lot.

Twitter however did not include my favourite tweet of 2012 (and quite possibly of all time). Robbed.

The guys at Buzzfeed have done a great job of pulling together the best print ads of 2012 and the best commercials of 2012.

A quick pitstop in the present with an entirely marvellous clip featuring a somewhat angry German dude (Martin Oetting, MD of Word of Mouth agency trnd) in conversation with a rude French Fox. Bear with me on this one: the point that word-of-mouth marketing is all about putting the customer on stage, rather than your brand of product is an interesting one and worth thinking about. Tune in from around the 9 minute mark if you want to skip the build up.

But what about next year?

David Armano, Managing Director at Edelman Digital, has again compiled his traditional look into the future at the top 6 social/digital trends for 2013. Most interesting personally, I find the co-dependency of social and mobile (Armano calls it ‘Smobile’): A smobile Web means your customers, co-workers and colleagues expect their digital experiences will be optimized for mobile/social sharing and as a result spend less time tethered to a PC or television.

And finally: it’s time to break up with the native iOS6 maps app (you won’t able to delete it, but you can now install the free Google Maps app).

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PR in 140 characters

This week, I had the pleasure of speaking at the Social Media Results Conference in London about how to incorporate Twitter into your digital communication plan. Below you’ll see the presentation (and as you can see, its built with Prezi, which is just much more fun that Powerpoint and also went down well with the audience on the day), but I also wanted to share a bit more of my thinking with you regarding PR in the social media space, specifically on Twitter.

Listen, measure & engage

Communicating on Twitter is based on listening and engaging. This holds true if you communicate via the phone, email, Facebook, SMS, or Twitter. You listen and you respond. Now, I use the word “engage” because it has two meanings: it means that you respond to a question, to a trend or issue that you have identified by listening. It also means that what you say on a proactive level needs to be engaging – you want it to inspire the other person to act. On Twitter, than can be a retweet, a fave or a reply. If you’re Twitter stream is full of @ responses and mentions then you know you are listening to and engaging with your audience in a way that they find interesting.

Measurement is the third important element of communicating via Twitter: Tools such as Twitalyzer, Tweetreach, Klout and Bit.ly will produce a number of different reports and key performance indicators that will help you track your own Twitter performance, how far you message has travelled, how much influence you really have – right down to how many people have actually clicked on the link you’ve just shared (the trick is to add a + to the end of bit.ly links and you’ll see what I mean).

So why should PRs be on Twitter?

Because your target audience – journalists and bloggers – are already there and using it to connect to other hacks. They ask questions about products and companies, announce they are writing an article about an issue that you might have some information on and some even prefer to be contacted exclusively through Twitter. 

Another important audience is also on Twitter: customers. They will be talking about your brand, commenting on things you have done, sharing news about your company and often times provide the first source of information in times of crisis.

And finally, the value of Twitter as a constant stream of “what’s happening in the world right now” – is a huge asset if you use Hootsuite, Tweetdeck and/or Twitter lists to keep an eye on tweeps relevant to your industry.

Twitter is a PRs best friend in times of crisis

By monitoring customer sentiment and trends on Twitter as well as a few key words combined with your brand name(s) will provide you with an effective early warning system. Once Twitter alerts you to a possible situation, you’ll be ahead of the game because you’ll know what to look for and where to look for it. Depending on the nature of the issue you can then chose to update followers through Twitter about the situation or decide to respond on a reactive basis only. Either way, you’ll have a better chance to control the flow of news.

A simple and free way to set up Twitter monitoring for keywords is to set up a Google Alert for status updates on Twitter mentioning certain keywords. You can then set up a rule in your email program of choice to highlight the alert when it comes through so that you don’t overlook it. Simple, free and instantaneous – providing you are there to check your email!

Defining PR in 140 characters in 140 characters

PR on Twitter: live and instantaneous tool to listen for brand mentions, measure customer sentiment and trends; and engage target audiences

So my question to other flacks out there: how do you use Twitter in your everyday PR work?

PR in 140 characters on Prezi

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Trying something new today: Digital Media Manager at Sainsbury’s

Today was my second day at Sainsbury’s. After 2 1/2 exciting and incredibly rewarding years at AOL it was time for a new challenge and the Digital Media Manager position at Sainsbury’s perfectly combines two of my passions: all things digital and public relations. I will be supporting the Corporate Affairs team led by Mark Rigby to help communicate the Sainsbury’s story through digital media channels such as blogs, Twitter, Foursquare and many more.

It’s still early days but here are some amazing facts about Sainsbury’s to give you an idea about why I am so excited about starting this new job:

  • 18,000,000 weekly customers
  • 150,000+ employees 
  • 30,000+ products 
  • 2,000+ suppliers 
  • 792 (and counting!) supermarkets and stores

You can learn more about Sainsbury’s in the 2009 Corporate Responsibility Report.

So from having mail I’m now going to try something new – and if my first two days is anything to go by, I’m going to love it! 

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