A year in PR

Wadds has started the 2007 'A year in PR' reviewing session, he was followed swiftly by Ged. As a newbie to PR and only touching one specific part of the genre (online) I will do a micro version!

(1) Most important development in social media
webitpr's Social Media News Release?...it has got to be the development of Facebook.

(2) Biggest disappointment
MySpace's response to FaceBook - Maybe that will change soon!

(3) High
Cadbury's Gorilla and the Wonderbra follow up!

(4) Low
Limited in depth responses at the NMK Beers and Innovation event (Great event otherwise)

(5) Biggest cock up (in 2007 in general)
Steve McClaren - Joke list here...

(6) Predictions for 2008
Social networks being banned at work and home for steeling peoples lives...and some faddy sites/tools that will simply bob above the water and then sink without a trace. Plus more personalised and targeted advertising in 2.0 ways.

(7) Next big thing?
More and more specific social networks such as vbmaNETWORK and meandmybicycle.

(8) Most important tech development
'Mobility' the ease of going online wherever/whenever - nicely advertised here by Vodafone.

Some great Advertising methods from the year to date:
Handvertising, Shadow(vertising), On Police Cars, In 'the can', On Toast and Using Hills.

Over to Daljit and Dom for their thoughts.

Happy Christmas: A great Christmasy advert to end the year:

A social media social network

If you are "...involved in bottom up approaches to marketing (viral, buzz, word of mouth, social media, etc), business (co-creation, open innovation, etc) and social policy (participation, collaborative governance, etc)" then this social network is for you, pop along to vbmaNETWORK and sign up.

2007 the year of Facebook

How much media coverage has FACEBOOK got the last few weeks, let alone this year! Following the Facebook Beacon PR disaster, are they loosing out with selling ad space?

I have only seen blank adverts:

Wadds feels that the advertisers are trying to get him to have a hair transplant, maybe they will make me get a new shirt?

Apparently with Facebook ads you can:

"Advanced Targeting -Target by age, gender, location, interests, and more.

Content Integration -Get noticed, not skipped.

Flexible Pricing -Buy clicks (CPC) or impressions (CPM).

Trusted Referrals - Attach friend-to-friend interactions about your business to your ads."

Looking at another part of the Facebook promotion machine - The Stereophonics have managed to miss a trick and not link their application with there band profile page!

Quiz; how many Celebrities can you get in one advert:

Can Facebook work for PR? – Part 2 – Guest Post

As I previously mentioned I would be keeping an eye on uses of PR within Facebook.

I got in contact with Lee Henshaw, founder of 'Silence' a London based online advertising agency that were hired by Alicia Keys to boost her online profile. Silence created the “As I Am” application for Facebook as part of the brief.

Lee recently commented on Brandrepublic:
'Social media are a challenge for publicists,'...'There are no editors, so to reach this community you have to act like a friend, rather than as an advertiser.'

Lee had this to say:

'Of all the social networks, Facebook represents the biggest challenge for publicists.

You Tube, for example, has Featured Videos, and My Space has Featured Artists. These are editorial slots that a publicist can negotiate.

Facebook doesn't offer similar opportunities. You can set up a Facebook group, of course, but doing that well requires a flare for a rarer PR skill, the publicity stunt. Looking at groups my friends are joining and leaving today, I see that the group for the Manchester band Red Vinyl Fur has less than 200 members, while the “I Secretly Want To Punch Slow Walking People In The Back Of The Head” group has nearly 750,000 members.

The people behind the “I Secretly Want To Punch Slow Walking People In The Back Of The Head” group are publicising a Facebook app called Sekret Gifts. A good PR stunt? Yes and no. If they'd chosen to advertise their app and paid an £8 CPM, for example, it would have cost £6,000 to generate 750,000 page impressions. How much did it cost them to conceive this group? A few rounds in the pub, you'd guess. Their Sekret Gifts app though has only been added 4,000 times (representing a modest 0.005% click through rate), and wherever this wonderfully titled group is written about online, the app is never mentioned. There's no connection between the group and the product in the same way that Cadbury, for example, had one for its Bring Back Wispa groups.

As for Red Vinyl Fur, maybe their Facebook group would be more popular if its title reflected something they stood for - Girls With Guitars Rock Harder Than Boys, say. London's Heaven nightclub, for example, has a group that will donate 1p to a cancer charity for every member it attracts. They currently have 25,000 members, leaving them with a £250 donation to make. Their £10 CPM is arguably more cost-effective than paying for a website to serve 1,000 page impressions because they're paying for 1,000 people to respond to a call-to-action, and, of course, they're supporting a good cause rather than lining an online publisher's pocket.

The Facebook group, therefore, should be the publicist's responsibility. The right stunt can reach 1000's and if you make it newsworthy, maybe millions. The Facebook app, however, can't be the publicist's alone, because, as with most products, you can't make a Facebook app popular without advertising it.

There are 10,000 Facebook apps but only 4 of them - Super Wall, Funwall, Top Friends and Video - have over 1m active users. Publicists can conceive apps, manage their build, and contributing to their popularity by ensuring they're written about, but that approach alone will never bother the most popular apps. Parlaphone, for example, got plenty of publicity for Kylie's Kylierobotics app, but it only has 169 active users (Which Spice Girl are You? has 10,000). To break through the clutter you need a budget to advertise the app on Facebook, and Facebook will only start talking to you when you have a minimum of $50,000 to spend, which, while PR remains the thin end of the wedge, eclipses most publicity budgets.'

Instead of a advert, this week I am going for a video of my guest blogger: