Online PR is all about Community

Radio silence broken, we have been busy at RealWire of late!

Online PR is all about Community from RealWire on Vimeo.

Floody hell

The news is dominated by the flood warnings today, most stations pointing people to - www.environment-agency.gov.uk/subjects/flood/floodwarning/.

Google is pointing people the same way - Searching: Flood warning, Flood, Floods - the environment agency and BBC weather come out top! Regional and national news pages have followed suit - Google News.

Good reaction making online resources available, plus a floodline phone number (0845 988 1188)...I am glad I live up a hill now and on the 3rd floor!

Lets hope that the floods in January are only this type:

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:

Viral works!

I am trying hard to get people to talk to me about PR within Facebook, no success yet. But viral marketing got a big thumbs up today!

"McCain Foods' first viral ad has been viewed by more than 100,000 people in 124 countries in its first week"

The McCain Potato parade is the viral ad to reach this impressive number, add another 1 to that I think it's great.

Happy birthday Stephen for tomorrow!

See for yourself:

Can Facebook work for PR?

One of the main questions asked at last nights NMK event was:



"Can you show me an example of where a planned Facebook campaign has worked for an online PR ?"

Yesterday NMA announce that Kylie's new album 'X' will be available to download first (today) on Nokia's music store before the general release. This ties in nicely with the Facebook application kylierobotics.

Application description:

Send your Friends your favourite Kylie Robotic or even create your own! You can either look through the archives of Kylie robotics based on her different outfits over the years or send the new album 'X' Kylie to your friends.

The campaign is being handled by Parlophone, and follows Kylie's launch of her own social network http://www.blogger.com/www.KylieKonnect.com. Kylie is busy online!

The application currently only has 883 daily active users (1 is now me)! Some way behind Wispa, HSBC and Cadburys Gorilla groups. But maybe an application is the way to go? - More interactive?

Definitely one to keep an eye on!

Better finish with a Kylie advert:

Hammer of the gods

Saw this on the old Viralmonitor, to promote Led Zeppelin's new album the "The Mothership" NetDisaster.com are helping Led fans to take over the net and do what they call "Zeppelise the net".

Check out PRvert.blogspot.com under attack to the sound of the immigrant song!


You can visit the campaign blog here, cool little application and online PR stunt...what site do you want to Zeppelise?

After Pudsey's version of this last night, here is a better spoof:

Work, work and more work

...only kidding boss! For those of you who don't know, here is a bit about what we have been up to at work.

At webitpr we have been very busy, you might already know from Stephens blog that we have developed and launched a new part to our service - our Social Media News Release (SMNR). Obviously I am biased, but the SMNR is damn cool. The functionality of the concept is perfect for a variety of online press releases and benefits enormously from our monitoring prowess. Take a look at our latest news if you haven't seen Todd Defrens original template in action. (I told you we have been busy!).

In a few months we have hired Stephen, partnered with a translation service, commissioned an online PR survey and who could forget our 'kickit' table football event (Videos here)! Busy bees.


Personal Favourite: "Hello to you"