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Sky Sports have been hyping The Ashes for months in their own inimitable way and who can blame them with the money they have spent to secure sole television rights.

It is one of their older commentators, the former England player and coach David ‘Bumble’ Lloyd, who has taken on their coverage to another level with his tweets from the commentary box.

Reading his tweets reminds me of listening to the grandfather of cricket coverage Test Match Special (TMS).

Over the first two days we have learnt from Lloyd his views on the food being delivered, suggested player look-a-likes and that he even listened to the Inspiral Carpets and Mark E Smith on the way to the ground this morning.

It is not just the occasional tweet either from Lloyd there is regular comment and views through each session. While the BBC’s Jonathan Agnew is sending regular tweets, it seems as if Lloyd has edge. Perhaps Agnew, sitting in the TMS commentary box can add little to what is being said.

Both set up their accounts within days of each other last week and Lloyd has taken a first innings lead with Lloyd having 8885 followers compared with 6820 following Aggers. Interestingly, old stalwart Henry Blofeld has started up his own Twitter account - only yesterday - most of tweets seem to be just retweets.

Sky, along with Bumble, seems to have grasped the extra dimension that Twitter can bring to fans – some of whom are sitting in the office and can’t watch the TV or listen to the radio.

Last year MI6 was using Facebook to recruit the next generation of spies. This year it appears, indirectly, to be using the social networking site as a family photo album. As the wife of Sir John Sawers, the next head of MI6, put family details on Facebook, diplomats and civil servants are being warned of the danger of putting family and career information on social networking websites.

Lady Sawers disclosed the location of their London flat, the whereabouts of their children and the couple’s friendship with senior diplomats and actors without putting any privacy protection on her account. She also uploaded over 40 photographs from beach holidays to family parties and publicly congratulated her husband on his new and very secret job. Facebook has more than 200 million active users, 100 million of which log on to Facebook at least once a day. With this in mind, one could assume that Lady Sawers has made one huge security blunder.

That said, could this “blunder” in fact be a sign of the times? According to IT security firm, NCC Group, UK intelligence agencies are concerned that social networking sites are ruining the spy industry. Finding recruits who have no online presence will become nearly impossible, and with the ability to take photos on a mobile phone and upload to the internet, the days of locking away incriminating photos and files are long gone.

The brutal fact is however that Lady Sawers and her “Facebook frivolity” has left the Ministry of Defence with a security headache which will cost the tax payer. Relocation costs and extra security don’t come cheap and in today’s economy, it doesn’t bode well.

What Are the Business Benefits?

…asks Phil Jones, Sales and Marketing Director of technology brand Brother, in the second of two guest posts on PR Media Blog.

Here’s the $100 million question.  I’ve put the key stuff down as bullet-points so you can work through it quickly:

For your business

1. Transparency. It’s a great way to build authenticity for your brand. Do you have brand values that you want to shine through? Then build a personality on Twitter. But don’t do it if you’ve nothing interesting to say. If you’re a small business, build trust with potential purchasers of your product and look for people in your locality using the search tool.

2. Traffic with no jams. It’s a great way to build traffic to your official website or blog. A well worded Tweet can entice people to click through to your website as part of your overall traffic-building strategy. But don’t cheat people or bend the truth or they won’t click on your link again; make it interesting. My blog traffic increased threefold after I started Twittering and readership has expanded to more than 20 countries, so it works.

3. Treasure and measure. Give something unique to your followers. Many of the well known global brands are already offering unique offers or pre-launches to their Twitter followers. This gives incredible ROI measurement when using unique codes.

4. Join the conversation. It’s a great way to understand what others are saying about your product or brand, and for people to share positive experiences with others. Buyer remorse is rife; the more support and reinforcement available, the better.

5. Shareware. I’m making this point twice (see below). The whole point of these platforms is to acquire and spread knowledge; if you build your brand/company reputation through a loyal following of people, they will help you spread your word.

For you in business

1. Grow up. You can increase your own personal learning and growth. There are some awesome and really clever people on Twitter who share their daily insights. Some of their Tweets are really thought-provoking. It’s free mind food.

2. Stay in touch.You can keep up with your key customers and contacts. A great reason to interrupt someone with something totally personalised: “I saw that you were… how interesting. Did you know?” You can see where people are and what they’re up to. Could you both be in the same place at the same time for an impromptu get together (called a Tweetup)?

3. I’m free. I’ve seen some really good consultants offer “free consulting” in their downtime between meetings. You can take advantage of this or give tasters of your goods or services to others. This is brilliant for smaller businesses - free advice.

4. Feed me. Ask questions of your followers to get instant feedback. Got a problem? You only need ask; people will give advice. Want to see some early feedback on a new product or service? Ask and people will reply. The community is building.

5. Shareware. The more you give, the more you will receive and the more your personal reputation will grow.

Phil Jones is Vice-President of Greater Manchester Chamber of Commerce and Sales & Marketing Director of technology brand Brother.  He writes a daily blog at http://thecorporatebubble.blogspot.com/ and can be found on Twitter @Philjones40. 

Whilst the train operators web sites were creaking and collapsing under the weight of web traffic dumped upon them by the snow falls of the last 24 hours, the social web was generating new ways to share knowledge and information.

For those planning to travel across the country it is useful to see exactly how much snow is really falling and where.  Step forward then Ben March with the latest application to use the wealth of data emerging in real time from the Twitter universe.  Twitter users may be perplexed by the number of messages containing the words ’#uk snow’ followed by a series of digits.  Those digits provide a postcode and a ’severity level’ for the snowfall.  Ben Marsh’s site has been collecting the data giving a live snow fall picture of the UK.

Yes there are flaws, (population density for one) but it shows how Twitter can be harnassed to provide information in new and exciting ways.  Check out the latest at Ben’s site and don’t delay as the thaw is surely on the way.

Every now and then we should remind ourselves that traditional media brands have a strong part to play in social media.

Newspapers are a big part of our society and we turn to them for help in interpreting the events of the day. The problem lies in trying to adapt to modern expectations of how and when we get that information and how involved we want to be in it.

10/10 to the Birmingham Post for the way they covered a key event affecting their community i.e. the long-awaited announcement from the governement on the help it will give the automotive industry, upon which so many livelihoods in the Midlands depend.

They live-blogged Lord Mandelson’s statement, led by social media guru/journalist, Joanna Geary but drawing in comments from experts on the Post staff such as the business corr, motoring and politics staffers.

And guess what? Readers were allowed in too. Anyone can jump in and add to the conversation with the journalists, rather than them having a dialogue between themselves that the rest of us watch down below.

This is embryonic so I guess if the Post had data on viewership of the event, they wouldn’t release it. But they’ve proved it works as very simple content and it didn’t exactly take a lot of resource. It was largely a conversation that the journalists would have been having in the office anyway.

Take a look at an archive version here 

This is a guest post from Thomas Gensemer, Managing Partner of Blue State Digital, the strategy and software company that spearheaded the Obama campaign’s web operation.

He has chosen PRMediaBlog to exclusively reveal his thoughts on how the PR industry can learn the lessons of Barack’s online success.

What can communication professionals learn from the Obama campaign?

The network is better than you are. 

Obama for America changed the economics of campaigns. Instead of seeing supporters as passive recipients of message, they were seen as an integral part of the team that would propel Obama to the Whitehouse. 

And it had a simple strategy behind it all - find your support, recruit them, give them something to do and then say thank you. And by repeating these steps, changing the calls to action, and monitoring how each user responds, the campaign quickly built an organization of unpredicted scale and commitment to Barack Obama. 

While much of Obama’s success came from his capacity to promote a message that authentically resonated with the American people, this connection was dramatically amplified by supporters willing to adopt his messages and then share this endorsement within their own peer groups.   

By focusing the campaign on this process, Obama’s message was strengthened through independent third party support - and then shared with an audience that Obama could never have reached without his networks support.  

They embraced the idea that in a world of communication divergence you can’t afford to be a single message campaign in a multi-message world - and accordingly provided groups and networks for traditional and non-traditional support alike. So what happens when other groups - firms, charities, unions – start talking directly to communities? 

Imagine neighbours, friends, and family members, colleagues uniting for a shared love or cause. And then imagine what’d happen if you asked for their help.   

The key concept of Obama’s campaign still applies; whose advocacy are you most likely to respond to - your best friend or a monolithic organisation’s centralized message? Digital strategists often become blinded by technology.  But the Obama campaign wasn’t about cheap gimmicks, short term tactical wins.

It was about people - and the awe-inspiring capacity of a huge number of individuals to take small actions which in turn generate a huge communal effect. $500 million dollars, 1.2 billion emails, 10 million phone calls, and 300,000 grassroots events later, Barack Obama won the Presidency. And it all started with a “do this now” call to action. 

The Internet did not win the election - it simply provided the capacity to release and develop the communities potential, and in a far more efficient and analytical manner then ever before. 

I’m just working on a Twitter strategy for a client. Their rationale is to humanise the brand and get early warning on any product issues. This is an extension of stuff we’ve done for clients in other social networking environments but I wanted to speak to a couple of the more prolific corporate Twitterati to see how things were going.

Quite a few are still experimenting. The Labour Party for instance is still establishing who their audience should be and how to make it easier to gather information from around the organisation and get it out in the right format. One thing we’ll see soon is MPs and cabinet ministers being able to easily blog, Tweet and post on facebook via one platform.  

Honda’s is one that I’ve followed for a while. Alicia Jones is a senior exec in Honda’s corporate comms division in California. She runs the Honda Twitter feed, the famous (ok, famous among Twitter folk!) Alicia-AT-Honda! Obviously Tweeting is only part of her job so time management can be an issue and ROI is important….

“I’m evaluating the value every day in a variety of ways … when it comes down to it I’d say that the jury is still out on the ROI. Its easy to count “followers”, link click-thrus and use tools like TwitterGrader but I think most of the value for me is coming from other more nebulous things.

“American Honda doesn’t currently have a corporate blog so as a corporate communicator it allows for a direct connection to engage and respond in a way that I cannot otherwise. And on occasion it gives me a forum to share things that wouldn’t be worth, say, a news release but that may be cool or interesting… so I tweet.”

The key is humanising your brand and no better example than the feed that comes from the ChannelFour Newsroom. It provides an insight into the decisions made in the course of the day that give a picture as to why what ends up on screen ends up on screen, an insight into the thought process and the people involved. I’m thinking of stuff like this….

This fosters a ‘club’ feel amongst an audience that is tech-savvy, metropolitain and demands a bit more from a brand than just being broadcasted at. A lot of other media outlets haven’t quite grasped this and tend to just attach an RSS feed of latest stories to their Twitter accounts.

PS One of the best things about Twitter is when you follow a celeb and they respond by following you - I’ve saved my email with the header ”Britney Spears is now following you on Twitter”!!! Imagine my excitement when I saw this. I’ll do an update post if I get an interview….

The world is going twitter mad.   Newspapers like The Sun, The Star and The Times have cottoned on to the fact that celebrities (or the Twitterati as we like to refer them at PR Media Blog towers) are micro-blogging to their fans and people are clamouring to sign up for some tabloid tit bits in 140 characters or less.  It’s not just the world going twitter mad, the twitter world is going mad …the latest fad is silent radio, yes you heard me, silent radio.

I can get my head around silent films but music radio without the audio track?  ’Twadio’, for that is its name, is a radio station you can’t hear. Through the magic of Twitter, and with Derren Brown like powers of suggestion, it plants a new song in your brain every few minutes.  According to the website you just follow the Tweejay and it’ll play you the tunes right inside your head.   Every song is a hit… but there’s a get out if you can’t quite remember how the hit goes or you want to hear it again - just click the link in the tweet to play for real.  It will even take you to the brand new Amazon MP3 store.

This might just be a stroke of genius.  Silent radio is perfect for listening to in the office, plus what better way to use the limit of 140 characters than to name a great song and a great artist.  When we have an anthem driving us insane in the membrane which of us will hold back and resist all temptations to part with 89 pence.  Bitter Sweet Symphony by The Verve, “Monkey Gone to Heaven” by Pixies oh and there goes “Dancing Queen” by Abba. Bring it on. This is a new media marketing idea like no other.  

Google’s relentless march to world domination has taken another step with the realisation that the Google Trends search may play a powerful role in the prevention of the spread of viruses and infectious disease.

‘Google Flu trends’ uses a selection of search terms to predict how many people in a particular area are searching for relevant information about flu.   Not only have they found that there is an incredible correlation between these searches and numbers of actual cases of flu but they can show incidence of flu far faster than the current official channels in the United States. 

Google compared its data with that from a surveillance system managed by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).   Because of the time lag in collating and checking data Google believes it can accurately estimate flu levels one to two weeks faster than published CDC reports.  On January 28th 2008 Google flu trends showed a marked increase in ‘flu related searches in the Mid-Atlantic region of the US, the available published CDC data showed no detectable increase for another week. 

Google has compared their search data with that of ‘influenza like illnesses’ tracked by the CDC over four years and there is a very close match between the two data sets.   The speed at which the Google data is available could prove to be of major importance in the case of a pandemic.  It would allow epidemiologists crucial extra time to respond to an outbreak, perhaps saving tens or even hundreds of thousands of lives. 

With the sheer volume of searches conducted on Google this real time trend tracking could be used to spot outbreaks of a range of illnesses or identify hot spots for disease giving public health services more time and more information, vital commodities in the battle against ill health.    

Stay with me on this!

I’ve spent the last two years advising brands, public sector, NGOs and individual politicians about social media strategy, web 2.0, e-pr, whatever you want to call it. Everybody has heard how powerful it is but there’s sometimes confusion about how and why to do it. ROI is an issue. How many people will see it? Should we be sending our press releases to these people?

The only way to make the case is to try a bit and get comfortable or to see case studies that you can relate to. The benefit of the Obama coverage-fest that we’ve had for the last few months, which is still at fever pitch, (PS how many people have the beeb had out there?!) is that there’s such detailed analysis of how he used new media to connect people, talk to them in their language and motivate them. There’s endless media case studies and experts stepping forward on mainstream media to talk about it.

Social media helped win the biggest competition in the World. Social media has grown up.

And the best bit is that this story keeps going. I posted last week about how Obama could take this into a whole new way of running the country. Within hours of his victory he’d launched this site. A clear indicator that social media will play some part in running the most powerful country on the globe.