PR and the Social Web

The longest gap between a tweet being tweeted and then retweeted will shortly pass the five year mark, when someone sometime after 9.50pm PST will RT the first ever tweet from Jack Dorsey, or @jack,  Twitter Chairman and author of “just setting up my twttr”.  You saw right; in its early iteration twitter lacked vowels, and also sported a very natty logo IMHO. Most of the first tweets all said the same thing as they were automated tweets issued as the launch team all got their accounts up and running.

The very observant will note that the URL for the tweet is http://twitter.com/#!/jack/status/20 suggesting that there were 19 earlier tweets but as it appear that the @jack account was the first it’s more likely the URLs were used in testing.  The first real human generated tweet also from @Jack was “inviting coworkers”.

The first person to swear on Twitter was Head of Operations Jeremy LaTrasse who about 15 minutes after the first tweet was posted added “Oh shit I just twittered a little”.

A few minutes ago the sky lit up around the office and there was a barrage of explosive sounds.  There were one or two worried faces,  maybe due to the fact that we were evacuated in a real fire a few weeks ago from our Whitfield Street offices.

The offices are in the shadow of the BT Tower the source of the pyrotechnics.  They went off to celebrate 500 days until the London Olympic games.  I didn’t get to the right window in time to see very much but others did and here’s a selection of pics.

The excellent some comms awards took place in Manchester last December and the great and the good in social media communications travelled across Britain to celebrate the very best work in the sector.

There is still time (just) to book your tickets for the follow-up conference where the winners will be discussing the work (you can also phone or email the organisers Don’t Panic on 01706 828 855 or email ANDREW@DONTPANICPROJECTS.COM.  It is probably the first time in the UK that so many first hand case studies will be delivered in the same place at the same time.  I was one of the judging panel and trust me, this work is excellent.

Winner of Best Social Media Campaign & the Grand Prix Awards – FreshNetworks will there to talk about their celebrated Jimmy Choo Trainer Hunt.  The British Library will talk about the UK SoundMap project,  Stephen Waddington, MD of Speed will discuss the value of his business blog and there will be award-winning case studies from Twitition and Coventry City Council.  Seventy Seven Social will talk Nintendo and We Are Social will discuss the Marmarati campaign for Marmite.

It’s an awesome line-up and if you work in communications and are anywhere near Manchester tomorrow you ought to get along.

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.