Google has unveiled one of its most incredible technologies yet – augmented reality glasses.
Code-named ‘Project Glass’, the specs allow the wearer to get directions, take photographs, check in at places and message friends, with all the information appearing on the lenses of the glasses, and the technology staying out of the way when it’s not needed.
Is this the next technological leap or a wacky fad? We’ll let you be the judge!
From the current edition of IMJ.
The social media revolution has had a huge influence on the PR business in Ireland and internationally. 10 years ago, when we set up Elevate PR, we were standing over fax machines sending hundreds of individual press releases and couriering out photography. In those days, coverage targets consisted of landing in a daily or Sunday newspaper, glossy magazine or on TV or radio. Since then there has been an explosion of radio stations and new domestic TV channels, as well as the birth of user generated content (USG), blogging and social media. Online is just a new channel, but it has turned traditional PR and media on its head, leaving lots of media owners, journalists and PR people somewhat bamboozled.
Twitter regularly breaks news stories and consumers can now live tweet and Facebook directly from events and help brands/events to trend on Twitter. This revolution has led to a whole new world of crisis management, as people can upload videos of celebrity indiscretion in nightclubs or on the street to a captive audience of millions.
Within the PR industry alone, there is now a whole range of new job titles including, roles such as Community Manager, Head of Digital, Digital Producer, etc. I’ve no doubt that there will be more to follow in the coming years.
PR agencies have a strong role to play in providing compelling content for social media platforms. This makes the PR industry a key player in the new digital world. Of course, there are new competitors with the rise of digital agencies, but the question remains; can they deliver on service?
Services like PitchEngine, PressLift, PRX Builder and MindTouch are bringing the press release into the new millennium with embedded multimedia and easy distribution through various channels, including social media and e-mail.
Clients are asking for online promotions and online reputation management, they need PR agencies to run Twitter feeds, Facebook pages and to work in community management. Recent Facebook changes mean that brands have to put more effort into custom builds for apps. Having a digital aspect to campaigns is now a must. The first things successful brands do online is listen, so we often kick off with an online audit of sentiment.
PR agencies help to devise a strong content strategy and have invested in listening software. Measurement is still very challenging. KPIs can include traffic to website, referrals from social media, tracking growth of share of voice, number of retweets etc. As Advertising Value Equivalent (AVE) is still the main measure for PR success, it is very disappointing that media monitoring agencies will not value online mentions/blog posts etc. So you are not comparing like with like.
According to a recent article in Business Week entitled “Driving Business Results with Social Media – how do you get a proven return on investment from your company’s blogosphere activity?”, most midsized companies in the USA doubled their investment in social media in the last two years – the majority of which experienced no return on investment, (survey of 100 US companies). Only 8% of respondents said that social media efforts actually drove business results (“social media exemplars”). Twitter topped the list of social media outlets with 74% of respondents active, with Facebook at 71%, Youtube at 53% and company blogs at 36%. The piece advises that it is important to approach social media measurement with the goal of reducing ambiguity.
Social media is more than just a marketing or public relations channel – it’s a way to enhance competitive position. It is more than just another communications’ channel, it’s a new vehicle to collaborate with customers.
We recently attended the Social Media Academy’s conference in Clontarf Castle, where the theme of the day was ‘Discover the Future Social Media Holds for PR and Marketing in Ireland’. With 13 speakers from Dell and Tourism Ireland to O2 and O’Leary Analytics, each speaker covered a different social media topic from their brand’s perspective. Emma Kelly, our MD, talked about driving business results with social media and many of the questions, as you would expect, focused on how to best measure social media coverage and mentions online.
Chair, Martin Thomas, opened the event by discussing how brands need to ‘let go’ before social media can truly become part of their marketing mix. Response times for large corporations, especially on Twitter, are often too long, (up to a number of days on some occasions), as a result of the management escalation they require. In Martin’s experience, the best response times are 60 minutes for a blog comment and 10 minutes to respond to a tweet. Cathy Orr from Pop Cap spoke of the opportunities available offline, as so many brands are fighting to find space online and how customer recommendations are more powerful than celebrity endorsement. Paul Dervan from O2, also reiterated this point, as well as the value of listening to customers online, which may eventually lead to collaborating with them on product innovation and development.
Georgina Bowes from Eircom presented some interesting statistics about older generations and their online presence. As so many young people are immigrating, more and more of our parents are joining, (if they have not already), social media sites just to stay in touch. Georgina also discussed the importance of YouTube as the second largest search engine and the power of Boards.ie with its 1.1 million views and 350,000 users. Silviu Preoteasa from Dell addressed the ‘white elephant’ in the room on the day – selling through social media – as did Jon Mell from IBM. They also spoke about using staff to act as their brand’s social media ambassador online, which threw up a lot of questions. In response, both speakers made similar recommendations: set up an internal blog / social media site as a training tool, trust staff and ensure clear and exact social media guidelines are in place.
Larry Taylor from BT focused on the B2B area of social media, speed of reaction time and CEO blogs, while Ciaran Doherty from Tourism Ireland presented on the ‘brand as a publisher’ now that brand’s are creating content especially for online. As the third largest Facebook presence of any tourism body in the world, Tourism Ireland was also the first to create a social media game. Supt. John Gilligan from An Garda Siochána gave a very interesting insight into the power of social media for communities, using the @gardatraffic Twitter account as an example. Set up to help with traffic information for visits by the Queen and Barack Obama, this proved an invaluable tool for the general public, as does the Garda Flickr site in returning lost property.
David Scanlon from Enterprise Ireland spoke of SME’s poor knowledge of the online sphere and their lack of tracking what works and what doesn’t. Niall Harbison from Simply Zesty and Stephen O’Leary from O’Leary Analytics finished up the day by talking about the importance of video, as 95% of all web traffic is video based, and measuring social media online through sentiment, share of voice, demographics, key influencers and competitor comparison.
The conference gave some very useful insight into social media, especially the importance of listening, choosing the best platform for your brand, reaction times and measurement. ‘Measurement’, always the hot topic at social media events, was still up in the air. While Stephen O’Leary from O’Leary Analytics analysed some brands in attendance successfully, it still throws up questions for the PR industry in terms of presenting ‘Return on Investment’ to clients at the end of campaigns. If you have thoughts about how best to measure social media as part of a PR campaign, we would love to hear from you.
We attended Lessons in Social Media – An Irish Perspective in the Royal College of Surgeons this week, courtesy of The Marketing Society. Guest speakers at the event included Damien Mulley, Tom Farrell from Paddy Power, Darren Grant from The Organic Supermarket and Eoin O’Suilleabhain from Bord Gais.
Damien Mulley kicked off the seminar with a number of interesting Irish social media stats. 200,000 Irish people use YouTube daily, with over 2 billon videos watched worldwide per day, 100 million of which are mobile video views. In terms of Facebook, there are over 1.83 million people using Facebook in Ireland currently and this figure is expected to rise to 2 million by the end of this year. 58% of Irish people on Facebook log on daily, with 400,000 logging on via their handset. Twitter is a growing social media outlet in Ireland with 200,000 users and interestingly, it has become the second most used search engine after Google, with 800 million searches daily.
Tom Farrell from Paddy Power presented on what the brand saw as the main rules of social media – content is king, choose the right channel, engage and close the loop with consumers, i.e. enable them to transact with the brand in a way that suits them. The Organic Supermarket, which launched in 2008, changed their strategy in 2009 focusing on online. Set up by Darren Grant, The Organic Supermarket’s mission is to become the leading organic retailer in Ireland and with engaging content on Twitter, Facebook and their blog this new company is on the right track. Eoin O’Suilleabhain from Bord Gais presented on how the brand maintained a strong online presence and kept up momentum during the second year of The Big Switch campaign by using videos of the Last Family to target those who still hadn’t made the switch to Bord Gais. Eoin also discussed Bord Gais’s sponsorship of the GAA under 21 hurling championships, called the Breaking Through campaign, which focused strongly on video.
Each presentation on the day reaffirmed the importance of social media as a marketing and PR tool, both for big brands and owner entrepreneurs.
We attended Damien Mulley’s Measure it! seminar yesterday in the Centre for Research and Innovation in Learning and Teaching in National College of Ireland. The session kicked off with a very useful presentation from Rowan Manahan on key things to note when presenting data. He stressed the importance of recognising that information which is very familiar to you is not always familiar to your audience, so it’s important to set the context, present slowly, find the story and make it as visual as possible. Other practical advice for using Powerpoint included a tip he learned from Guy Kawasaki – take the oldest age of the person you are presenting to and divide it in two: that should be the size of the font you use.
This was followed by Stephen O’Leary of O’Leary Analytics, who discussed measurement of social media campaigns. He presented a case study on ‘Juan Sheet’ the brand icon for kitchen roll product, Plenty. Stephen cited this as a great example of how an advertising campaign can grow to generate its own positive momentum online.
Our task for the morning involved discussing the best process for updating blogs, Facebook and Twitter. The main findings from this exercise were: know your audience and don’t bombard them, content is king, and while it’s important to have a structure in place for updates, flexibility and an ability to be proactive and respond quickly to relevant events in the news is also key. Using tools like Google Reader, Google Analytics and PollDaddy can also help you further understand your audience and the best way to effectively communicate with them.
It seems to be the season for trade and business publications to publish surveys and overviews of the PR industry at the moment. We have participated in three surveys which you will see in the current editions of Marketing Age, IMJ and Business Plus.
Summarising all of the pieces we see the following trends: » continue reading
This is Emma’s contribution to an article in the January/February issue of Digital Times Magazine - you will find the full article here
Digital PR
As we enter the second decade of the 21st Century, it is a very exciting time to work in PR. Pre-Web 2.0, PR practitioners were constrained to traditional PR tools such as the press release, the photocall and the follow up call to a harried journalist. » continue reading
We attended the Simply Zesty Winter Camp on Wednesday. It kicked off with a presentation by Damian Ryan. He talked about social media campaigns like the very successful Art of the Trench for Burberry, it has over 700,000 fans on Facebook greatly helped by a collaboration with The Sartorialist. The BBC has recently appointed a social media editor driven by the trend towards online engagement while watching TV with laptop on your knees. Games are now bigger than movies. Branded content or advertiser funded programming is growing – Bank of Ireland and RTE’s Dragon’s Den. » continue reading
