A post by Victor Godinez questions whether Apple is transforming into Microsoft considering all the recent problems customers of the technology company have had to face recently.
To counter the problems with their new MobileMe service, Apple has launched a Status Blog at the request of Steve Jobs.
The fact that Apple has finally discovered blogging is remarkable and long overdue but it does make sense that they’ve chosen to do it at a time of need, when they need to keep customers, who are relying on thie service for both personal and professional reasons, updated.
Reading about sex in the tabloids is, well, unavoidable. But in the Guardian, it makes me feel slightly soiled. Still, the story about the “outing” of a Brit blogger, ChinaBounder, in China is instructive about the blogosphere generally.
ChinaBounder’s, ahem, enthusiastic online entries about his liaisons with Chinese women caused a storm with an influential Chinese blogger, whose denunciation of the bounder caused a flurry of visits to the offending blog. Now the guy’s got a book deal!
If you are an empassioned expert in your field and are willing to share your passion with the world, you are likely to spark debate, attract an increasing audience and plain get noticed. Hopefully, unlike ChineseBounder, you won’t have to leave the country.
Later this year, we could see the introduction city specific domain names such as .london or . nyc. Following that we could see .movie, .food, .xxx, .kids or .justaboutanything!
For consumers, it offers clarity for services with each website having to establish exactly what it does and what service it provides. No doubt we’ll see industries crowding around particular domain names such as the entertainment industry around .film or newspapers around .news.
For years, .com has been the reigning champion of domain names with .co.uk and .net just feeling a bit cheap. However, now I forsee a time when .com is seen as ’soooo web 1.0′.
I’m off to register every .pr, .media, .blog and .marketing sites I can think of and finally make my fortune as a .com millionaire. I mean .pr millionaire. No, I mean .media or is that .blog? .cotton?? Oh forget it!
As candidate for the biggest job in the world (that’s President of the United States, by the way), which commentators would keep you awake at night? The big journalist guns of the New York Times or Washington Post, perhaps? Or might it be a 61-year-old Pennsyvanian housewife and part-time (wait for it…) BLOGGER? Keeping journalists out of a recent Barack Obama campaign event in Pennsylvania clearly lulled the presidential contender into - well - saying what he really thought. Unfortunately for him, the 37 cataclysmic words of his speech which included references to small town people being “bitter” and somewhat attached to “guns” and “religion” were reported on an influential liberal blog by Mayhill Fowler - an Obama supporter!
Within a day, the post had 100,000 hits and the Clinton PR machine was in full swing to capitalise on Obama’s comments.
Despite having zillions to spend on the best comms strategists in the business, Obama has learned the hard way about the new reality: in the world of citizen journalism, everything is fair game
Facebook has launched Lexicon, a new tool that allows members to see the buzz surrounding different words and phrases on Facebook Walls. For PRs, it’s another tool to monitor who’s talking about your brand, in a similar style to Google Trends or Technorati, but in the enclosed environment of Facebook.
After a few initial searches, I have some client names talked occassionally but nothing surprising. Of course, I’ll be monitoring it carefully when my next national news story breaks to see if the topic flows over into the Facebook conversation.
To be honest, it’s more fun to search for generic terms to see what unusual spikes and drops appear. Conversations about ‘Halloween’ predictably climb rapidly, peaking on 31st October. ‘Love’ is at an all time high on Valentine’s Day while there are fewer people wishing ‘Happy Birthday’ on leap day, 29th February.
Lexicon pulls from the wealth of data on Facebook without collecting any personal information in order to respect everyone’s privacy.
Well that’s good news considering all the recent media hype surrounding privacy of online information. But Lexicon is a far cry from companies who constantly monitor conversations across social media such as 1000 Heads.
As their homepage states:
Web forums and communities are where these decisions are being made. In these public spaces, users discuss their thoughts and experiences, recommending, or warning against using certain products and services. This peer to peer dialogue is guiding the purchasing decisions of a new generation of information rich consumers.
Clearly an area of growth for some brands to invest in but an area that could be perceived as a moral tightrope for others. The rise in concerns over online privacy are only going to tighten especially with the introduction of Big Brother-type programmes like Phorm.
I’ve spent the last few years envisaging an application that would allow me to know what my journalist contacts were up to, minute-by-minute. I’ve thought about a messenger-based system that would allow me to drop a quick note to them to see if it’s a convenient time to chat about a possible news angle on behalf of my client because there’s nothing worse than calling when they’re on deadline.
Well it’s arrived and it’s growing in popularity. If Facebook is the new Second Life, then Twitter is the new Facebook. It’s the tool us PRs have been waiting for.
For those of you who haven’t come across Twitter, I encourage you to watch this video courtesy of Commoncraft.
Exploring Twitter from a PR perspective has been interesting and has shown initial potential but it needs to be accepted by the masses to make it truely useful. Here are my thoughts on potential future uses of Twitter for PRs:
- Online Research: Drawing on a pool of social media enthusiasts (why else would they have Twitter accounts?) has turned Twitter into a great resource for research. Answers to questions are incredibly quick and offer great insight into areas you might not be familiar with. Working on adventure sports for one of my clients, I had to wade through media databases and avoid the much-hyped but low traffic websites. After requested help on Twitter, within minutes I had reached a community of adventure sports enthusiats who offered guidance on forums where extreme sports fans actually interact. Thanks everyone!
- Contacts: I wonder how many journalists out there would sign up for Twitter if they knew it would put an end to calls and emails from PRs at inappropriate times? Well only 27 so far following a search for “UK” and “journalist”. They’re obviously all too shy to put on their real profession. If newsdesks had Twitter at their disposal, the relationship between hacks and flacks could change dramatically. From instant updates like “Don’t bother me. I’m on deadline!” through to “Looking for urgent case study about….” journalists should be using Twitter as a tool to interact with PRs. If newsdesks are evolving into 24-hour bodies, maybe it’s time for their journalists to move away from resources like ResponseSource to a more immediate communication tool.
- Driver to website or blog: Driving interested audiences to a particular website is a regular occurance on the application. Most of the people I follow are comentators in the social media field and so links on Twitter to new posts on their blog make it easy for me to make a snap judgement on whether I’m interested in the topic or not. As previously noted, Gordon Brown, or rather Number 10, uses Twitter to publicise the PM’s current activities and highlights press releases from their press office. I have no doubt I’m one of the first to read these releases and I like to think journalists are using this as a resource to follow the PMs movements.
- Listen to the conversation: Using tools such as Tweetscan, PRs can search for who is talking about their brand and in what context. (Thanks for that one Jon!)
It wouldn’t surprise me if companies with busy press offices set up their own Twitter feeds to announce press releases, but don’t bank on having masses of followers. Brands with a strong online following and dedicated brand advocates, such as Apple, will benefit highly from this but it will be interesting to see which companies experiment with this tool as it gains popularity online and with mainstream media.
I agree with James Horton that the key to Twitter for PRs is to experiment - the same philosophy behind any new media tool - but don’t forget that this is a community. Don’t see this solely as a resource. Ultimately, the more you put in, the more you’ll get out.
