Whatever...

How Black Friday could become Bieber Friday (or something thereabouts)

By Richard Scarlett

So as America’s Christmas warm up event has come to an end, the last of the pumpkin pie has been eaten and another year’s Black Friday has been dubbed success for retailers across the country.  Let the analysis begin – with a full on media round robin of sales figures and footfall metrics aplenty. 

However, an interesting trend is starting to emerge. Black Friday – once reserved for those of a US persuasion – is becoming more of a global affair, with international retailers trying to cash in on the Black Friday phenomenon in other countries. For instance, this weekend saw UK retailers including John Lewis and Currys open their virtual doors to customers with ‘amazing’, ‘price crash’, ‘astronomical’ November sales, even including some goodwill reductions from the usually aloof Apple.

Cyber Monday has long been the Black Friday of the internet world, but with this fast developing global movement (yes, global movement), it seems that a long-standing tradition could be changing.  Will Cyber Monday become the new Black Friday, or vice versa, will we need to find a new name for this digital merger – Cyber Weekend, Black Cyber Friday, perhaps Blyber Friday (which could, by some ungodly force, end up becoming Bieber Friday)? The possibilities are endless.

The point is, with so much available online – at the same reduced prices as in-store – do people really need to queue from the moment they finish the turkey to the break of dawn on Black Friday to score a shiny new waffle iron that is ‘half off’?  I mean, one minute you are sitting with the family to give thanks, and the next minute you could find yourself here. Unfortunately, flash sales all too often prove to be an underwhelming anticlimax – just ask anyone who ventured to Comet for the highly publicised ‘massive stock liquidation, everything must go’ debacle.  Throw in the fact that we now have aggregator sites offering comprehensive directions to the best online sales, which often start earlier than Friday, and this could really be the beginning of the end of Black Friday. 

For some, it is a tradition that will refuse to die, much like the Boxing Day sales elsewhere.  However, I predict that in a few years, the high street chaos will slowly tail off and move online – most likely resulting in post-Thanksgiving retail coverage being more about the security risks to online shoppers than backslapping over staggering in-store sales figures. 

Did I really say that?

By Oliver Fischer

You learn a lot of interesting stuff when you are working for an international PR company.

Obviously, the day-to-day work handled by our French, Germany and UK offices, such as drafting press releases and articles, varies greatly in style. Even some typing conventions aren’t the same – at first I thought that double spacing between sentences was a mistake…

But perhaps one of the biggest differences between media relations here in Germany and in the English-speaking world is around quote approval. Indeed, I was quite surprised when I first learnt that this practice isn’t very common outside of Germany.

The fact that German newspapers and magazines ask for authorisation of quotes before publishing them doesn’t mean that entrepreneurs and politicians get to censor their texts. Here are some interesting examples from Handelsblatt and taz of how journalists treated over-enthusiastic/self-appointed ‘editors’. Cases like these make quote approval a regular topic of discussion in the German media and when the New York Times announced it had had enough of US politicians insisting they should sign off their quotes, several journalists once again expressed their views on the topic.

These opinions are quite diverse, with those on both sides of the argument making good points. But there are two things I found especially interesting about the debate: firstly, only journalists have expressed their opinions and, secondly, there seems to be more or less no middle ground between those who are for and those who are against the practice.

So I wanted to use this opportunity to express my point of view.  Quote approval is both a tough and delicate job for PR professionals. We obviously have to do the basics, like check our own notes from the interview to see if the content matches, as well as do the fact checking – which is especially crucial in the field of tech. We also have to liaise with every relevant person and department at our client to ensure they’re all happy with the content. This can be a lot of people, especially if it’s a public enterprise: management, marketing, tech specialists and, in some cases, the legal department.

During this process we sometimes have to justify every quote. Everyone likes to tinker, but if too many people want to make edits during this approval process, the quote can soon become completely unrecognisable, with new phrases inserted and sentences that were said struck out. But just as unforgivable as rewriting a journalist’s work is allowing them to publish an interview containing factual errors. This means there can be no shortcuts when it comes to the approval process.

Personally, I still think the practice of quote approval is a good thing but it will always mean us PRs have to tread a very fine line between making sure our clients aren’t misquoted or misunderstood, while at the same time not telling journalists how to do their jobs.

Is print media about to be thrown a lifeline?

By Aislinn Collins

In May of this year, the UK daily newspaper market was down 7.6 per cent from April 2011.  We’ve also seen a vast number of titles move to online only to cut costs and others put up online paywalls in an effort to boost falling profits.  Technology it's said is partly to blame, as people look online for the content they would traditionally have found in print.  However, in an unforeseen twist of circumstances, technology now has the potential to entirely change the fortunes of print media.

The technology is augmented reality.  Using a nifty phone app like a QR code scanner, an image can be scanned and brought to life, allowing added content to be built into printed pages.

One such app that is currently brewing up a storm is Blippar and in the last few weeks alone its technology has been used on the cover of Shortlist magazine, for the re-launch of New Look’s Marble Arch store and even in Obama’s presidential election campaign. 

It is said that AR could be the turnaround in fortunes that print needs.  In fact, Blippar brand ambassador Dan Sodergren made the bold statement to an Irish Times journalist that “it will revolutionise the print media.  Print advertising is going to be turned on its head.  Blippar is going to offer magazines and newspapers a lifeline.”  Strong words indeed.

The reason for this confidence is advertising revenue.  The income that print media outlets previously received has been lost as companies plough their funds into cheaper digital forms that have the potential reach a wider audience and are fully trackable.  But by adding AR to print, consumers are taken to a world half way between the two where print adverts become digital adverts at the click of a button.  It gives advertisers the ability to apply the click-to-buy concept to print and greater scope for impulse purchasing, while also making adverts ‘fun’ and interactive for the consumer.  On paper, it sounds like a great concept and one that could pull print media back up from its knees.

On the other hand, could this be just another passing fad?  To me the whole process of moving between print and digital in this way seems clunky, particularly from an advertising perspective.  In an age where if we can skip through adverts we do, will consumers actively go out of their way to view more advertising?  The novelty factor of AR is likely to see it have some success for a while, but I’m not sure it’s going to “revolutionise the print media”, as Sodergren so robustly put it.

What’s in an age?

By Amy Turner

A recent story in the Times has questioned whether seven is too young for a child to be writing a blog, which led me to think about how many children are now expressing their views online and the impact this is having.  Take, for example, nine year old blogger Martha Payne who’s daily school dinner updates achieved widespread coverage back in June, eventually gaining over five million viewers and raising over £100,000 for charity. 

Nowadays, it seems that young children are becoming so accustomed to social media and the internet that it’s now not uncommon to hear of these child literary sensations. As such, this is having a huge influence on what this generation considers to be personal or private information, and what is acceptable to share online.  Many children and teenagers are now comfortable sharing almost all aspects of their lives and their opinions on places such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. 

It’s now accepted and often celebrated that the internet has given a platform to many whose opinions would otherwise not have been heard, but does a child of seven understand the potential repercussions of their actions?  During Obama’s first Campaign for the presidential election a seven year old boy blogged his support for the now President, going  on to receive a letter from Obama himself. Huge amount of coverage has been dedicated to the influence that Twitter had in this year’s US presidential election. With this in mind, how will online actions of today’s children help to structure future political campaigns? 

Do these technologies encourage young people to share too much information about themselves or does it instead serve as an educational purpose, teaching young people about the power of voicing their opinions and the difference they can make, by using the internet?

Extra! Extra! Read less about it!

By Jonathan Mathias

Every so often there comes along an app or website that almost every publication dedicates loads of column inches to.  Obviously Twitter was a big deal when it launched (and still is).  Quora, on the other hand suddenly popped up as 'the new Wikipedia’, but failed to live up to the hype.  As did Draw Something/OMGPOP, remember that?  (Zynga probably wants to forget all about it). 

Now the new kid on the block is Summly.  Written by 17 year old Nick D'Aloisio, you’d be hard pressed to have missed all the acres of news coverage on it – which is hardly surprising given the backing it’s got.  It seems that the news aggregating and summarising app is a panacea for how we can possibly cope with information overload in our increasingly hectic and mobile lives. 

I’ve been trialling the app over the past week or so and, not wanting to get into a full on review, it’s alright.  It is hard to navigate, as pointed out in this BBC piece, the majority of the stories seem to just come from Reuters, Sky and the Guardian and my biggest peeve is that it doesn’t update very often for me, particularly my custom searches where most of the content is days old, so I’m worried about missing things, which kind of defeats any time-saving element. 

Indeed, from the same BBC piece I mention, this quote stands out for me: "We can really become the de-facto format for news on mobile. People are not scrolling through 1,000-word articles - they want snack-sized information."  That’s some claim.  Summly does seem to fall somewhere between Twitter and actually visiting individual news sources, but it gets me thinking about the whole cause and effect that leads to an app like Summly being created in the first place. 

People don’t seem to have time any more to read just about anything, certainly not long feature articles – and definitely not on a week day.  So, one would surmise, it would make sense that apps like Summly would find success in addressing this.  I’m really not sure they do, though.  I think it’s a case of ‘more speed less haste’.  You’re really going to be better off just making the time to read and understand things properly to begin with. 

A commonly used phrase on the internet, ‘too long; didn’t read’, shortened to tl;dr, is often used at the end of long posts for those who can’t be bothered to read the whole thing, so... 

tl;dr: Summly fills a gap in the market, but does it address the underlying issue?

Obama wins real-world and cyber election

Yesterday, the Oxford Internet Institute released a map of the US charting the visibility on Twitter of both the country’s presidential candidates, Mitt Romney and Barack Obama, prior to the polling results. The data predicted that Obama would be re-elected as, according to the Institute, he had been tweeted about more frequently than his Republican rival.

Well, the results are in and, as you know (unless you really have been living in a cave), Obama has indeed won a second term in the White House.

Does that mean Twitter can really be useful in predicting the outcome of events?  After all, this doesn’t take into account sentiment or indeed represent any real link between mentions and actual votes.  It will be interesting to see how Twitter trends continue to correlate with the real world and whether we see new technologies and services that can make tangible use from the findings.  What do you think we’ll see by the time the next US election comes around?   

The cost of information

By Ginnia Cheng

Last week, Hurricane Sandy swept through the U.S., forcing a nation already divided by a tense presidential race to come to a complete standstill. The worst storm to ever hit the east coast has caused damage estimated to be in “the tens of billions of dollars, making the storm one of the five most expensive disasters in U.S. history”.

Today, when significant events rapidly unfold, the very first place you’d turn to for information is the web. Maybe you’d log onto Twitter to see what the local reports on the ground are, or check Facebook to see if friends and family have been affected – but, for dependable reports, especially surrounding potentially life-saving information, you’d no doubt seek out the most credible news sources. 

Interestingly, as Hurricane Sandy hit the US, the New York Times and Wall Street Journal temporarily suspended their paywalls in order to give users full access to information they might need to deal with the affects of the storm.

Although some would consider this a noble gesture, questions have been asked regarding the motivation of such a move.  For example, this piece on GigaOM looks at the tension between news sources as a vehicle for public information and as commercial entities.

This isn’t the first time that the NYT has lifted its controversial paywall.  It was briefly removed when Hurricane Irene hit the U.S. last year. However, there was much debate over how it remained closed following the death of Bin Laden.

While it may be the case that a move to drop paywalls could be for commercial, rather than emotional reasons, as both an avid consumer of information online and a professional involved in the digital media world, it’s interesting to consider the conflict between the ‘vision and the reality of the newspaper business’ at a time when the internet has given us unlimited access to so much free information.