Encouraging parallel conversations during live events has been gathering pace recently. The Guardian have long had much success with their interactive minute-by-minute coverage of sport, and more recently live rolling news.
Even sweet old Radio 4 is getting in on the act; last night I heard them encouraging people to use the hashtag #r4riot and join in with one of their live shows.
But my favourite example recently is Riz Ahmed, an actor in Four Lions, tweeting live (simultweeting?) along with a screening of the film on TV. What a great way to spread the word and encouraging re-watching. It’s a bit like the audio commentaries you get as extras on DVD, but much more vital.
Like everyone else, I’ve been beguiled by the unfolding hacking drama at News International.
It’s been well discussed that it took the confluence of tenacious, brilliant reporting from the Guardian with the amplifying power of social media to really land the killer blows.
One thing that’s really struck me, though, is the impact of social media on crisis management PR.
NI took the understandable step (eventually) of publishing an apology last weekend in all the nationals, followed by “and now let’s put it right” the day after. These are classic steps in the crisis management playbook.
However, are they relevant any more? Within moments of the apology being published, it’d been dissected, remixed, lampooned and re-broadcast by the Twittersphere – undermining its power markedly.
Traditional crisis management has relied on a scarcity of the ability to broadcast. I.e. get your message on tv/in the papers and that’ll drown out dissenters.
Not any more.
Fun and very well-made Greenpeace video attacking VW, but the comments are mixed at best, with many commenters suggesting they picked the wrong target.
[edit] looks like George Lucas didn’t appreciate the copyright infringement!
Amazing story of how someone tracked down the thief of his laptop and posted its webcam pictures for everyone to see.
It’s fantastic publicity for the tracking software used, Hidden. Had this been a deliberate PR stunt, it would have been genius.
I’ve been clearing out some boxes from the spare room and found this cutting from Campaign magazine, July 28 1995. It features a profile of the 27 year old me looking quite marvellously serious.
It’s certainly of its time. Some of my statements still hold up, and some are more dubious. I love the no-irony reference to Information Superhighway and check that URL – www.itl.net/guinness! Someone in the US had grabbed guinness.com, and we eventually got it back by offering him a weekend in Dublin and a trip to the brewery.
[click to enlarge]
I’ve mentioned before a couple of examples where big companies have failed to understand internet culture and ended up paying the price.
Usually in these cases, there is a web-savvy way to deal with the wild west of social media, but in the case of the viciously satirical fake BP PR twitter account, I confess I’m at a loss what I’d do. Sample tweet:
We honestly didn’t think this was going to be a huge deal. No one cares when this happens in Nigeria
Not that I have any sympathy with BP over this, but if you were given the brief of responding to this (and assuming you’d accept the gig), what would you do??
Reported on Gadling, this is the very essence of talkable, likeable. Beds in economy. Oh yes.
As Kathryn Gregory, director of marketing for the Americas region recently said, “We like to look at what the other airlines are doing in their marketing and then… don’t do that.”
Awesome.
Thanks to @jackschofield for the heads up
Rumours abound that Murdoch and Microsoft might team up to make Bing the only place where News International content can be found in search.
As a stick to wield at Google, it’s pretty much the only one Rupert has. And as they trail by miles in search share, Microsoft won’t miss an opportunity to team up and gain an edge either.
It must be tempting for Google in turn to consider exclusive deals with Murdoch’s competitors.
But what do consumers want? Imagine a world where you have to know “I can find this kind of content on Google but that on Bing, or that on Google but not on Bing”. It’d be awful. Like having to dial 118 118 for these phone numbers, but 118 247 for those phone numbers.
We want everything in one place.
I wonder whether Google would open up a PR front championing “search neutrality“? i.e. position themselves as wanting to bring you the whole web and de-position others as wanting to fence it off.
