WeetPR » Social media

When do we get downtime?

John Weet — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 13:38:59 +0000

People under the age of 30 or so may not remember a time when we were not permanently connected. Connected to friends and family, connected to the office, connected to clients and colleagues alike. I remember times when i could go on holiday and remain totally out of touch for a week or more.

These were the days before mobile phones, before mobile web surfing, before wifi zones, times were simpler then, but were they better.

I’m writing this blog post on my Nokia mobile phone from a beach in the South West of the UK.

The Red "crocs" are not mine!

I’m on holiday but i’ve been writing blog posts, checking emails, both work and personal, updating twitter, viewing my RSS feeds and generally just keeping up to date.

Do i feel put out about this? Am i upset that i’m doing this while on holiday when i’m supposed to be relaxing? No I don’t, it’s my choice, nobody’s making me do it, nobody’s going to complain if i don’t.

PR and social media are a major part of my life, it’s what makes me get up in the morning, it’s what i enjoy. Is that sad? Should i take the opportunity to totally switch off? I don,t think i could.

What about you? Do you ever shut off totally or do you stay connected wherever you are?

No related posts.

Walk the talk

John Weet — Tue, 25 May 2010 13:11:21 +0000

I would have thought that it was a pre-requisite for a company that positions themselves as social media experts that they should walk the talk. I received a “Hi, John Weet. xxxxx is now following your tweets on twitter” email this morning.

I clicked through to their twitter account and saw nothing to tell me who they were. It was a company account and there was no clue in the name. The profile wasn’t filled in and the last tweet was made via facebook 7 weeks previously. I also scanned down at the tweets they had made to see if they were saying anything that I wanted to listen to. There wasn’t much of value to me.

Normally I would have exited at this stag but I was intrigued. They have 4,839 followers so a lot of people are following them. They had no easy link on their profile so I had to type in the link that appeared on their background.

The link took me straight to their blog, the latest blog entry was dated 8months previously. None of the blog entries were categorised or tagged.

In the head of their home page they have a graphic that says.

“does your brand need a voice online? What is a social network? I want to start a blog? Are you looking for a way to connect with your consumers in this digitally connected world? We can help”

Looking at the “About” page you can see that they are positioning themselves as an online communications agency.

So let’s say that i stumble upon their web presence and decide that I want this company who have a relatively inactive twitter account, and who have a very inactive blog to help me out with social media. Ideally I would like to meet up with them for a chat so let’s go to their contact page and see where they are based. Oh… all I get is an email address. I have no clue where they are.

So what lessons can we learn from this. Some lessons will apply to all and others to those trying to set themselves up as social media experts.

1) Write a profile on your twitter page. If people don’t know who you are and where you are coming from why would they follow you (I could be wrong on this one as the company in question has almost ten times the followers I do)

2) If you want people to go to your space on the web once they have been to your twitter page, then make it easy for them. Put your blog URL in your profile and not just on your background.

3) If you have a blog and you are offering your services to others to help set theirs up then keep yours current

4) If you are offering your services to people then make sure they know where you are based. I know it’s not essential in our modern connected world but some people do like face-to-face meetings and they look for local companies.

Please comment if you think there are any more lessons to be learned.

LinkedIn Spam

John Weet — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 12:59:43 +0000

I am a PR professional and as such I like to keep any eye on what’s going on in my clients industries.

To do that I read magazines, subscribe to RSS feeds and email newsletters, set up google alerts and also become a member of relevant LinkedIn groups.

What I find with some groups is that the discussion pages get filled with spam. One group that I am a member of had more spam discussions on their first page than they did discussions that were relevant to the group.

To my mind the value of belonging to a group is to monitor and participate in discussion, having loads of spam on the page prevents you seeing the meaningful stuff and limits the value of belonging to the group.

Group owners could adopt a prevention policy by limiting who can join the group but then that could also limit membership and so limit the discussion.

A far better policy to my mind is for the owners to monitor the discussions and delete those that are not relevant. That is what I do with the groups that I manage.

I don’t know if there is a better way to prevent spam comments, does anybody know of one?

Gave my first “Prezi” presentation last night

John Weet — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 12:46:41 +0000

It seemed to go OK. If I was doing it again there were a couple of things I would have changed, on the whole though I was pleased with the outcome.

The subject matter was social media and crisis communications. I am no expert in the subject so the purpose of the presentation was just to get people up to speed on a couple of case studies so that everybody was starting off from a minimum level of knowledge.

I was a little nervous using Prezi for the first time so I created a duplicate presentation on PowerPoint too, just in case. I downloaded the Prezi files and then presented from the Flash file saved to the desktop. That seemed to work OK.

Social Media and crisis comm’s on Prezi

Twitter and why do people follow

John Weet — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 09:04:58 +0000

Whenever I get a twitter follow notification I always go and look at the persons profile to a) understand why they would want to follow me and b) to see if they are worth following. I got a notification telling me that Grant Shapps was following me.

“Grant who” I thought and clicked through to his profile

Grant Shapps is a politician and his constituency is round to the North of London whereas I am based right down on the South coast in Ringwood, 105 miles away. I cannot possibly believe that I have anything to say that Grant may find interesting and I do not think I have any interest in what he might want to say.

I do wonder whether he is just playing the numbers game rather than being really targeted and taking the time to look for people that it may be worthwhile connecting with.

del.icio.us Tags: ciprwsx,socialmedia,twitter

Is Twitter a numbers game?

When will PR professionals get up to speed on social media?

John Weet — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 13:21:48 +0000

I was on a domestic flight today and used the time to catch up on some reading. I was reading a CIPR profile magazine from earlier this year in which they were reporting on the CIPR marketing communications seminar. A show of hands revealed that less than 20 percent of the people there were up to speed digitally. I’m not surprised but I am also a little shocked.

I am shocked that more PR professionals are not getting up to speed. I admit that I am a little scared that I will get left behind in this revolution and that I won’t be able to offer a full range of services to my clients when they ask for it, or even worse that they won’t ask me they will just go somewhere else. If I am scared then why aren’t more people?

Here in the Wessex region of the UK the local CIPR group are trying to do our bit. We arranged a social media fast facts workshop this week. The event was based on Pecha Kucha where each presenter gets 20 slides to present his topic, but here was the challenge, each slide changed automatically after 20 seconds, whether you had finished or not. This really did make for a fast paced and fun event.

We had six speakers who were, in order of appearance:-

Tom Chapman of Headstream presenting a case study on Samsung football.

Heather Yaxley of Greenbanana presenting blogging.

Yours truly presenting twitter

Darren Lilleker of Bournemouth University presenting how politicians are using social media

Dan Kerins of the Southampton daily echo on how they are engaging with their publics through social media

and finally Luke Williams of social tech solutions on Evaluation, Metrics and ROI of social media.

The event was hosted by Five by Five digital in Southampton and was well attended by 33 people. But, with a total CIPR membership in our region of 300 this is still only 10 per cent. If the 20 percent figure from earlier on is correct and if we were to assume that all people who attended were new to the subject then that still leaves 70 percent of our membership who may not be engaged. I know the maths is simplistic and relies on assumptions but it is still a large number that are not engaged in social media. What are thy going to do if a client or boss asks them about it?

If they want to offer a full integrated campaign then they will soon have to show that they have at least considered social media. they may consider that some of this stuff is a flash in the pan and will have a limited life but what they do need to remember, as Luke Williams told our group on Wednesday is, that the tools may fade and die but the concept will remain. The public are used to instant communications and it is unlikely they will ever settle for anything less. PR professionals will need to get up to speed at some point or risk losing clients and / or a job. This may sound like scaremongering but I believe it to be a fact.

All slides from the event are available here

Just started getting spam comments on my blog…

John Weet — Sat, 30 May 2009 10:06:15 +0000

I’ve had a blog for a while now but have only just started getting spammed. Why is that? Does this mean that my blog is more visible now so should I be pleased? Or is there another reason for it? How do these people choose a blog to target? Is there any way I can block this from happening other than highlighting them as spam when I get them.

Social Media marketing can get you into a mess…..

John Weet — Wed, 27 May 2009 13:37:09 +0000

…. that PR has to dig you out of.

I was having a conversation with Heather Yaxley last night about companies using Social media. We were saying about how there are many companies out there who are purporting to be experts in Social media and who are offering to put together marketing plans that use these new tools for their clients. We were agreeing that for some companies this could prove to be very dangerous territory to enter.

Heather suggested that it is all too easy for marketeers to get their clients into a mess on social media and then they need PR professionals to dig themselves out of it.

Interesting then that I saw a tweet from Sam Shepherd at the Bournemouth daily Echo this morning pointing me to a URL on the Guardian web site about Neals Yard Remedies. Not strictly social media, but relevant to our discussions all the same. The whole point of the page was that people could ask questions of Neals Yard about their ethics and Neals Yard would then respond.

The result, hundreds of tricky questions and no response from Neals Yard, despite being chased by the page moderator who posted as follows:-

“have just had a chat with NYR.

Unfortunately, despite previous assurances that they would be participating in this blog post, I’ve now been told they ‘will not be taking part in the debate’.

So yes, as several people have pointed out, this has become something of ‘You Ask’, rather than a ‘You Ask, They Answer’. I’m still hoping NYR will reconsider.”

Some poor PR person has a lot of work on his hands to restore any sort of credibility to their name now. Neals Yard may just dismiss it and say “it’s only one web site it doesn’t matter” but the power of social media is that this story is now being tweeted and re tweeted and it will grow I am sure.

Easy Jet, Getting it right on Twitter

John Weet — Fri, 08 May 2009 15:16:00 +0000

I flew with Easy Jet for the first time a few weeks ago. I only had hand luggage so thought I would turn up and check in at one of those handy self check in machines that all the other airlines (the ones I tend to use anyway) have. I arrived about an hour before my flight to Basel only to find no self check in machines and a horrendous queue. Feeling quite grumpy I sent the following tweet while in the line.

When I next checked twitter I had the following message

We had a little bit of email correspondence and I felt that I had aired my grievances and that I had been listened to.

I travelled with Easy Jet again this week and on my return I had the following message waiting for me.

I’m not easily impressed but must admit that I am impressed with Easy Jet and with Paul. It’s not difficult for a company to monitor the twittersphere for their brands but it’s what you do with that information that matters. I admit that I did not have a big grievance and that part of it was of my own making but I felt the response I got was good.

I wouldn’t say I’m a convert to Easy Jet. I’m not a big fan of the scrum that takes place at boarding and also I am far closer to Southampton and Heathrow, so these are certainly my airports of choice. However what I will say is that I will not go to great lengths to avoid them as I have done before.

The Curse of the RSS feed

John Weet — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 10:27:00 +0000

RSS feeds are fantastic. There are so many people out there that have interesting things to say and who I can learn from. I have set up my reader (I use Google reader because I find it easy and I can access it from one of many PC’s that I use as well as from my phone) to bring in feeds from blogs, twitter searches, google searches and things that my “friends” have Dugg. I use the reader to gather information from my clients, from my clients markets, from the social media and PR world as well as for things that amuse and entertain me.

The problem is one of overload. I have been a little busy of late and have also been travelling on business. In all I have probably not made a conscious effort to read my feeds for a week or more. Now I have 357 items to look at. I need to make a choice now. Do I just go through and mark all as read or do I skim read them, star those that I want to go back to and mark the rest as read. This could take two or three hours.

Information, both a curse and a blessing.