PR and the Social Web

Here’s the final session from Social PR 2011, attended by 160 plus the many followers on Twitter and on the live stream. I was there for the latter part but from what I saw it was a great conference with plenty of insight and useful information.

Video streaming by Ustream

Here are a few things that I learned.

1. There are a lot of tools out there for measuring individual influence.  The much maligned Klout has competition now from mpact, ecairns and peekyou.
2. Evaluation and measurement is ‘the’ hot topic.
3. The most popular device of choice for the Social PR practitioner is a MacBook.  There was a sea of them out there.
4. There was a pretty even split between Blackberries,  iPhones and HTC Desires.
5. If you don’t want to share your slides don’t present at a conference.  People aren’t waiting for Slideshare they’re taking pictures of the slides.
6. A conference of 160 Social PR devotees is still not enough to get a ‘Swarm’ badge on Foursquare.

Social PR 2011 is a one day conference taking place at the Cavendish Conference Centre in London this coming Monday 28th February and there’s a great line-up of speakers.

The conference will include presentations, panel discussions and Q&A sessions with some of the world’s leading social PR experts.

It will tackle some of the most pressing questions for PR and Communications professionals working with social media such as the convergence of Social PR and Marketing, how to identify influencers and how to measure and evaluate PR on the web.

Measurement and evaluation is perhaps the hottest topic in PR at the moment with the industry finally taking a stand on Advertising Value Equivalents and promoting the seven ‘ Barcelona Principles’:

1. Goal setting and measurement are fundamental aspects of any PR programmes.
2. Media measurement requires quantity and quality – cuttings in themselves are not enough.
3. Advertising Value Equivalents (AVEs) do not measure the value of PR and do not inform future activity.
4. Social media can and should be measured.
5. Measuring outcomes is preferred to measuring media results.
6. Business results can and should be measured where possible.
7. Transparency and Replicability are paramount to sound measurement.

The line-up for Social PR 2011 includes three of the world’s leading experts in PR measurement online.  New York based Marshall Sponder is the founder of webmetricsguru.com, an industry blog about Web analytics, social media and search marketing.  He will be joined at the conference by Philip Sheldrake who co-founded Fuse PR (which was acquired by W2 Group in 2006) and is now a Partner of Meanwhile, the venture marketers and author of the soon to be published ‘The Business of Influence: Reframing Marketing and PR for the Digital Age’.   Joining by live video link will be Katie Delahaye Paine who heads up KDPaine & Partners, a leading communications research consultancy, and is the author of ‘Measuring Public Relationships, the data-driven communicators guide to measuring success’.

There will also be an Exhibition Area and the ticket price includes lunch, refreshments and a handbook for the day.  The conference will be streamed online, so if you can’t make it buy an online ticket and sit back.

News has arrived of the reinstatement of UberTwitter following the Twitter ban imposed on Friday.

“We’ve given the developers of twidroyd and UberSocial for Blackberry (formerly UberTwitter) access to the Twitter API again.  Our initial review indicates that steps have been taken to remedy the violations for these applications” said  the statement on Twitter Support.  In a statement they also said “We will review these applications on an ongoing basis for compliance”.

There has been speculation on this blog and elsewhere that the Twitter organisation sees UberMedia, the owner of both these applications as a commercial threat.  If so the suspension has done little to enhance the reputation of the official ‘Twitter for Blackberry’ app.   Thousands of users condemned the application over the weekend

On hearing the news about UberSocial, @ericvice tweeted; “Ahhh the sound of 2.5 million copies of Twitter for Blackberry being simultaneously deleted. The bird can sing!http://bit.ly/UberDL“.  It has been retweeted over 300 times in six hours.

Today sees the UK launch of an incentive package for Facebook Places that will be a blow to Foursquare and Gowalla and pits Facebook against the growing might of Groupon in the consumer offer sector.    Facebook Deals rewards users who check-in to participating shops, restaurants, coffee bars and visitor attraction using the recently launched Facebook Places, location-based application.

Launch partners include Starbucks, Yo! Sushi, Argos, Debenhams, and Mazda.  Alton Towers is rumoured to be offering free tickets to users checking in via Facebook places on February 18th.  Facebook will use a golden ticket icon to identify locations where there are deals in place.  Joanna Shields from Facebook said: “Facebook Deals represents the power of word of mouth marketing …over 200 million people use Facebook on their mobile phone. We are now offering businesses the opportunity to connect with people in an entirely new way.”

It’s one of the joys of the Social Web that people now and then, through social networks, are able to overcome the ambitions of media barons.  It sickened me when Simon Cowell and his acolytes for years dominated the nation’s Christmas music fayre.

I was  foursquare behind the struggle to have Jeff Buckley’s cover of Leonard Cohen’s climactic masterpiece Hallelujah on the top spot ahead of the X-Factor version, but the public was split and that allowed the Burke cover to prevail.  Last year it was different we were united in our Rage Against the Machine.

This year the crowd may face another split.  The obvious choice is the original Biffy Clyro version of Matt Cardle’s anodyne exhortation of the sanitized and renamed ‘Many of Horror’.  I’m fan of Biffy Clyro (really, I’ve seen them four times including once in Pontypridd), although I’d take ‘Blackened Sky’ or ‘The Vertigo of Bliss’ over ‘Only Revolutions’ every time.

There has also been a groundswell behind Surfin’ Bird by The Trashmen, a slightly grating ditty popularised by Family Guy.   However if we are going to do it again there is a clear front-runner,  John Cage’s 4’33.  Composed in 1952 the musical score instructs the performer(s) not to play the instrument during the entire duration of the piece.

A Facebook page is in place to promote a new recording of 4’33 by Cage Against the Machine which includes Suggs and Imogen Heap amongst others.  Let’s make December 25 a silent night.  Join the group and more importantly, buy the single.

If you’ve had to sit through the X Factor this year I’m sure that you’ll agree; silence is golden.

On Twitter this morning, the ennobled Lord Sugar took the Daily Telegraph’s consumer affairs editor to task in an extraordinary on-line exchange.

Harry Wallop had been bemoaning Sugar’s endless plugs for his autobiography ‘What You See is What You Get’ when @Lord_Sugar did what it says on the tin. Seven minutes after Wallop called him a “shameless self publicist”, Sugar posted “@hwallop p*** off and follow others then”.  The asterisks, in an uncharacteristic show of restraint, are Sugar’s not mine.  Harry, who seemed a little taken aback, tried to engage in some peer to peer discussion but Sugar wasn’t playing.

Perhaps The Apprentice boss was feeling a little raw as David Cameron has just announced Lord Young as Sugar’s successor in the post of ‘Enterprise Tsar‘.   The Tories certainly got it with both barrels a few minutes later when Sugar posted “New figures today reveal gvt cuts & VAT hike will actually cost 1.6 million jobs! No wonder Tories behind in polls, 1st time since 2007″.  Not strictly true as the Tories fell behind Labour in September and were briefly behind the LibDems pre-election.

I’ll be taking part in a debate on CIPR TV next week as part of the Chartered Institute of Public Relations presidential election.

CIPR TV is regular show hosted on the CIPR’s website and by Marketiers4DC.  It’s live but also available to watch again.  Sally Sykes is the other candidate and we’ll both be taking questions live on Tuesday.

Hosting the half hour show will be presenter Philip Sheldrake and the CIPR’s new CEO, Jane Wilson will also be on hand.  Jane will introduce the proceedings and ask the first question.

You can take part in the debate by submitting a question in one of the following ways:

• Using the form on the dedicated CIPR TV web page
• Using Twitter with the hashtag #ciprtv
• Or by emailing ciprtv@cipr.co.uk.

As well as the CIPR President-Elect position for 2011, in the biggest slate for several years, there are eleven candidates contesting seven CIPR Council seats being contested.  You can see the full list and the candidates statements at the CIPR website.

CIPR members have until noon, 19 November to cast their votes.

For the last two years twitter has been the poster child of the social web.  The growth has been both phenomenal and relentless as this chart taken from the twitter blog graphically shows.

By the end of June this year the 20 billionth tweet had been posted and the number of tweets had grown from 45 million a day in January to 80 million a day.  Twitter had become an unstoppable juggernaut, changing the way that news is delivered, socialising prime time television and altering the way that organisations and people engage with each other.

But the unstoppable appears to have stopped, or at least dramatically slowed.  Over the last two months the number of tweets posted per day has barely increased and is still hovering around the 80 million per day mark as this graph from Gigatweet shows.  There has been a modest increase but nothing compared to the growth of the past.  Efforts to reduce twitter spam may have had some impact but the spike in usage during the world cup may have masked the fact that underlying usage has peaked.

We’ve been here before, but previous claims that twitter was flat-lining were based on visits to twitter.com and that was due to the adoption of other Twitter apps and clients like Tweetdeck or Hootsuite and the move from pc to mobile.  This time we are talking about the volume of tweets so the data is platform neutral.

If we look at the time that it took to reach major volume milestones it bears out the observation that the period of rapid growth has either stalled or come to an end.

Milestones in 5 billion increments (time taken to reach):

5 billion tweets                                   3 years, 4 months

10 billion tweets                                 136 days

15 billion tweets                                  87 days

20 billion tweets                                  62 days

25 billion tweets (forecast)                   50 days

30 billion tweets (forecast)                   54 days

If Twitter has reached its zenith it suggests that despite the media hype it may not achieve true mainstream penetration. Currently there are 44.4 million users in the US and whilst that’s a big number it only represents 14% of the population.

Eighteen months after publication my book ‘Public Relations and the Social Web’ has become the best-selling PR book on Amazon UK.

The chart gets quite volatile near the top and after a spell at number 2 this morning it dropped to number 4 before hitting the top spot at about 6.30pm.  I expect the reign to be brief so I’ve posted a screen shot here.  I genuinely didn’t expect it to happen and thought the opportunity had passed after the first few months in print.  I’m thrilled that people are finding it useful and if you’ve bought it then thank you.

This blog was always intended as a companion to the book, but although I should probably quit whilst I’m ahead, I think I’ll keep it going.