Whatever...

FA against footballers on Twitter

by Mike King

Now that the London riots have died down, Twitter has thankfully returned to normal and football is once again the number one trending topic. 

Given we’re still in the transfer window, social media is alive with rumours and gossip about player transfers and there’s information and misinformation everywhere.  Where Twitter has really come into its own isn’t in providing fast news updates but in giving us an entertaining insight into footballers’ thoughts and opinions on a whole range of subjects. 

The really interesting stuff often comes from spats between players, pundits and supporters.  This week we had a great Twitter row between Piers Morgan (an Arsenal fan) and Arsenal player Emmanuel Frimpong with the two trading insults. 

However, the king of footballers on Twitter is still Rio Ferdinand who has a long and, ahem, illustrious track record (including, of course, his own row with Piers Morgan).  Only last month, Ferdinand reportedly Tweeted a picture that caused a security alert at the White House involving the CIA. 

The pretender to Ferdinand’s crown is Joey Barton, a man who seems to spend his life doing all he can to upset as many people as possible.  His recent Twitter outbursts include this gem: "Bad shirt, shoes and views from Shearer again. Sort it out slaphead..." 

With Barton as the catalyst, the Football Association is apparently trying to curb footballers’ activities on Twitter.  Let’s hope they don’t succeed.  A Guardian poll earlier this month asked readers whether footballers should be barred from Tweeting and 81% of respondents thought they should not.  Hopefully, the FA will take note and let the fun continue.

#Londonriots social media timeline

Using information from Topsy, Time Out London has created an interactive timeline looking at what people were discussing on social media sites during the London riots.

The timeline takes a look at the key subjects that dominated Twitter conversations and links directly to lists of tweets on those hot topics, including #Cameron, #RiotCleanup and #Tottenham.

Click on the image below to see the full interactive timeline at Time Out.

 

Global Reach website relaunches

We’re very excited to announce that Global Reach*, the world-wide network of technology-focused public relations consultancies founded by Johnson King, has now gone live with a new website.

We’re pleased to have added high technology and life sciences specialist ‘Carabiner Communications’ as a partner agency to Global Reach, providing additional North American coverage from Georgia US. Moreover, Global Reach partner agencies have expanded the range of digital coordination they can support – including social media engagement and blogger and key influencer relations, further enabling clients to specify PR campaigns that will make an impact where it counts.

You can check out the revamped site at www.globalreachpr.com

Look forward to hearing your thoughts on it!

*The Global Reach community is designed to offer fast-growing technology companies much finer control over local aspects of international PR campaigns. Partner offices span the globe and specialise in different areas of technology, from mobile, to storage, to consumer, enabling clients to work with a best-fit agency in a geographically targeted way.

Au revoir Minitel

By Valérie Sontot

The Minitel – the precursor to the PC – is one of the most famous French inventions, installed in up to nine million households around the country. 

But according to an article in French newspaper, Le Monde, this charming little homegrown machine will soon disappear.  France Telecom recently announced that all networks will be disconnected from Minitel terminals on June 30^th 2012 – a casualty of the internet’s success.  

Believe it or not, even with nine million users, this machine was never exported beyond French borders – yet in 2011, it is still generating revenues with 1880 terminals actively in use across France. 

For France Telecom, the Minitel paved the way for the internet among both consumers and publishers. Many CEOs at French internet/web 2.0 firms started their careers with the Minitel, such as Xavier Niel, who today is the head of French ISP Iliad, trading under the Free brand.

Although I can’t remember the last time I saw a Minitel in action – perhaps at my parents’ place when I was a teenager – this historic piece of technology is a big part of French heritage.

The Minitel will certainly be missed here France – what other extinct (or soon-to-be) technology faves do you have fond memories of?  Let us know on Twitter at @JohnsonKingPR.

Work + holiday = ‘worliday’ ?

By Ben Roberts

I don’t know about you, but I miss the days of school summer holidays, when the only things that might worry you were your exam results coming out in August (good luck to everyone!).  Back then, holidays meant a time of complete removal from schoolwork, where your brain switched off completely. 

While these lengthy holidays were truly amazing – even though we didn’t know how good we had it – is such removal from our work these days really what we want?

The FT’s Lucy Kellaway wrote an interesting piece looking at what she calls the ‘worliday’.  Essentially, she suggests that a worliday is what most of us now experience when trying to go on holiday – we use all of our clever gadgets to keep in touch with our colleagues and clients, and even do some work.  She believes that this is no bad thing.

Personally, I can’t say I disagree.  We are no longer at school and can find the actual process of trying to switch off from work to be difficult.  On top of that, the mad rush to hand things over to colleagues and finish up all the necessary tasks before going on holiday can be stressful, leaving your mind clouded with work-related items as your holiday begins.  As Kellaway suggests, taking advantage of technology and being a little more flexible with your holiday and work time can actually be far more relaxing.

Although I agree with much of the article, the point that Kellaway makes about having no fixed holiday time, I’m not so keen on.  In an ideal world it might just work, but I think that, allowing employees to take holiday time as and when they please with none of it being recorded, would be very risky and open to exploitation.  Would you allow your employees this extreme flexibility?

While the carefree holidays of our youth are surely gone, we should embrace technology and the worliday!

 

Restructure all you like – we still need multi-talented PR pros

By Flora Haslam

The news of a radical restructure for a global PR firm is continuing to get attention months after it was announced, so I thought I’d take another look.

While I’m all for change, I’m just not convinced this is a good idea.  Yes, as an industry we need to evolve – we still hear stories about PRs building campaigns that consist of writing press releases and calling journalists afterwards to ‘follow up’.  Clearly this is a woefully outdated practice and anyone still doing this should, frankly, be ashamed of themselves.  But generally speaking, the agency world has moved on – our key influencers have changed, and we’ve changed how we communicate with them. 

For most agencies, Facebook strategies, Twitter and Google Plus are an integral part of the day-to-day work we do, and I’ve personally always been a big proponent of incorporating social media campaigns into the work the PR team is doing.  Not just because it means PR agencies retain more of the budget(!), but because the team that is ingrained in what a client does, is going to be able to do a much better job.

Yes, it’s going to be increasingly difficult to find people who are sufficiently multi-skilled that they can come up with ideas, pitch them effectively and keep clients happy, but that doesn’t mean we should give up.  More importantly, I can’t see this as a positive for career-focused PRs.  Do people really want to spend their days as ‘connectors’?  Isn’t one of the attractions of agency work the variety?  And how does this affect future career progression?

Indeed, the top five skills identified by recruitment consultants as crucial for a successful future PR career include social media skills, experience of integrated campaigns and commercial acumen.  Simply put, the need for multi-talented PR professionals is not going to go away anytime soon.

Let Flora know what you think a PR pro's skillset should be @florahaslam.

 

Is Twitter a #Londonriots catalyst? What can we learn from mis-information?

by Jonathan Mathias

The past few days have been equally frightening and fascinating, watching the London riots unfold.  As has become common practice with breaking news events such as this, I’ve been primarily glued to Twitter for a lot of information, but have been careful in trying to verify anything with established media outlets.  The BBC, Sky, Telegraph and Guardian all have excellent live coverage.  

There have been a few news pieces citing the use of Twitter as a tool for helping the rioters organise themselves.  This PR Week piece refers, perhaps unsurprisingly, to Daily Mail stories.  I’m struggling to find many more, but have easily found stories like this covering the good uses for Twitter, to aid the clear up and help to identify the criminals, as well as the situation being used as an excuse to simply evangelise Twitter in general.

From my perspective I’m more interested in trying to make sense of conflicting reports and rumours flying around Twitter, making it very difficult to decide what to believe from what I’m reading.  Is my route home safe, for example? 

It will be interesting to see if what we learn from the use of social media during these kinds of events can be used to improve the system.  Could there be a way to rank tweets based on their likely accuracy?  Perhaps by taking into account the tweeter’s profile, whether they have included an image, verified their location etc.  Perhaps users could even be up/down voted in terms or reliability?

Let us know what you think...

https://twitter.com/jonathanmathias

The unrelenting rise of smartphones and tablets

By Ben Roberts

Ofcom’s annual Communications Market Report has revealed that one in three adults in the UK now uses a smartphone.  That is a lot of people and a lot of fancy phones. 

Unsurprisingly, the report associates a significant increase in the use of mobile internet with the growth of the smartphone.  No prizes for guessing which website was visited most!  In December 2010, 43 million hours were clocked on Facebook – perhaps an indication that people should get a life, IRL?

For businesses this increasing use of smartphones means that many more connected devices are hitting their networks, and employees will expect to use them at work.  Of course it’s not just smartphones, but tablets too.  Undoubtedly, there are a huge number of issues, such as security and bandwidth, but I definitely believe that businesses should be doing their upmost to facilitate the use of personal mobile devices at work.

With stunning devices like the iPad 2 and the innovative applications they run, I think there are great advantages to be gained from enabling their use – such as enhanced collaboration opportunities and increased flexibility.  Sadly, with exclusively wireless devices set to continue to their meteoric rise, I think that some companies will be left behind as they dismiss the use of, or are slow to adopt, such technology.

As a tech-loving gadget-embracing geek, I suppose I would have these views.  Let me know what you think @bnrbrts.

 

The real cost of social media

Here’s a great infographic courtesy of The Wall showing what it really costs to run a social media campaign.  While it may be free to join Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and the like, you certainly need to thrown real money at campaigns if they’re going to be successful.

The good news is this investment reaps rewards, with plenty of evidence here about the benefits of using social media.

Weird workplace web habits

by Mike King

There was a great story recently about how civil servants employed at the Department for Transport spend their time on the internet when at work.  It comes in response to a freedom of information request that has resulted in the DfT publishing a list of the 1000 most popular websites visited by its staff. 

Apart from the list disclosing the number of visits to each site, no other information about the time of day when the sites were visited or how much time was spent on each has been released.  So there’s not really much of a wasted resources angle to the story, though that, predictably, hasn’t stopped the Sun drawing its own conclusions. 

The story’s also been picked up by the BBC and The Drum among others.

In addition to the obvious (BBC, Google, The Telegraph etc) there are some interesting sites listed, including a site where visitors can rank MPs based on their sex appeal www.Sexymp.co.uk – seems odd to me, maybe it’s a public sector thing.  I can’t say I’ve visited the site myself (apart from for, ahem, research purposes) but it did get me thinking.

All those workplace internet monitoring tools that I’ve always dismissed as the preserve of old-school, untrusting management styles may have something to offer after all.  Then again, who’d want to know that their office is full of role playing freaks with an unhealthy sexual fascination with MPs?  Or worse still, Tottenham supporters.  Frankly, I’d rather not know.