The likes of Klout and Peerindex have been around for a while now and are an OK way of measuring social media influence. Tools such as these are a good way of general benchmarking . However, the introduction of The Times Social list has got me thinking.
Much like the Time Rich List the Social List also examines wealth, but not wealth in the traditional monetary sense by how much money you make, but by how rich you are socially.
The format takes into account activity across four ‘social networking’ tools, Twitter, Foursquare, Facebook and Linkedin. Once a day the system counts up your social networking activity (as well as your friends and colleagues’ responses to it) and assigns points to each interaction. The more you do and the more interactions you have, the more socially wealthy you’ll become.
Being a bit of a nerd, and after a few pints out with the missus, I got thinking about the real time cost of gaining social media wealth, and if I attempted to up my social media wealth would it have a detrimental affect to my real wealth. For example, the majority of places I check in via Foursquare or Facebook (at present) tend to be social venues such as bars, restaurants, or venues, whereby in order to be their I have to part with some real time funds (or cold hard cash as I like to call it). Therefore this has a negative affect on my real world worth. The same apply to certain Twitter interactions.
On the flip side, the majority of my Linkedin and Twitter interactions tend to be in working hours or linked in some way to my professional life. Therefore I can attribute a positive financial value to them.
Taking this into account I’m planning to do a three to six month experiment, whereby I measure my real time worth against my social media worth, attributing a positive or negative value to my interactions. I’m still figuring out how to measure this, but I’m aiming to update every Friday on my progress.
I’ve harped on about this before, but I’m beginning to worry about the standards of CV coming through from PR graduates and experienced professionals looking for a job.
Its not the experience or necessarily the content that concerns me, it’s the severe lack of attention to detail and creative approach that worries me.
Don’t get me wrong, as is evident throughout this blog, my spelling and grammar is appalling at times. However, I’m not using this blog to apply for a job, nor am I writing it on behalf of a client.
All I want is a CV to stand out a little, and surely that’s what any aspiring graduate looking to break into a creative industry, such as PR, should be aiming to achieve.
There are numerous examples of some really great creative approaches to CV presentation, such as this, this, and of course this, Jed Hallam’s well documented pursuit of a job.
So the following message is for anyone looking at getting their CV noticed. Check out the links, give it your own slant and get it out there. I’m not asking for you to reinvent the wheel, just to show a little spark.
And for Christ sake, please spell it using an English dictionary, don’t rely on Word sticking an American ‘Z’ where there should be and ‘S’. We invented the language, lets stick with it for a while.
Really like these two campaigns. The Desperado one especially, I like how the creative team have tried to push the envelope a little, taking on the Tip-Ex campaign from last year and making it better. The second is a 3D mapping project from Carlsberg. I think we’ll start seeing a lot more of these over the coming months.
I went along to a pitch a few weeks back for a well-known gift brand who wanted to utilise social media as part of their communications campaign. Prior to the pitch they sent a nice detailed brief, asking the usual questions about experience, what we planned to do and how we could meet their objectives.
There weren’t many alarm bells ringing from the initial brief, one or two odd questions, more misguided than out of the ordinary. The only real thing that raised an eyebrow was the simple objective of ‘getting 40,000 Facebook followers in 6 months’ Willing to push back on this objective we sat down and came up with some really nice yet simple mechanics to help garner some third party endorsement and generate two way conversations.
However, upon arrival to the pitch it was clear that they were not after a PR/Word of mouth led agency, but instead they wanted an SEO/digital agency who were going to get them cold hard cash as fast as possible. There was very much a ‘Pile em high and sell em cheep’ attitude, asking questions such as “have you any figures on how many of our Facebook fans will buy our products?” and “how do we extract our Facebook ‘fans’ data so we can add them to our email database?”
Needless to say our approach of identifying the right consumers, generating conversation and undertaking a detailed blogger outreach campaign was not as well received as I would have liked.
The long car journey home, as always, turned into an assassination of the pitch and how we can improve our offering, eventually resulting in the importal ‘we don’t want to work with them anyway’ line. The one thing that stuck in my mind the whole journey was the title of the brief ‘An Online PR and social media brief for xxxxxxx’.
Clearly there are two massively differing views out there on what Online PR is. We are very much of the ilk that our offering is one of conversation, campaigns with two-way communication, blogger outreach, word of mouth and listening and learning.
Increasingly we are entering into conversations with clients, where we are having to educate to an even greater extent than we were 12 months ago on the benefits of Online PR, social media and how it should be managed.
It seems that the social media waters have become muddied further by agencies offing a quick fix, high number, untargeted user acquisition, push message campaigns that provide the client with numbers rather than targeted brand advocates who will offer a more long term benefit.
I have hit a bit of a wall, should I provide a similar service and scrape up clueless clients, or should I continue to be purist on the fact and hope to work with clients who see the benefits of our current offering?
Last week Facebook launched Places, their take on a location based check-in service. Although not yet working in the UK, I’ve seen the promotional video and I cant help but think that Foursquare and Gowalla, who were the forerunners in the location check-in services are doomed.
I have been using Foursquare for about a year, and although I probably don’t use it to its full potential, I have taken a real interest in the concept and how brands can maximise their social media and customer interaction through the service.
But with Facebook entering the market, the future for the likes of Foursquare looks bleak. I don’t think this is anything to do with the fact that Facebook will bring anything more technological to the party, nor will it be that brands will flock to use Places instead. Instead, I think that the shear weight and influence of Facebook will see millions adopting Places, making the service as irritating as the all to regular updates from abundance of clearly unemployed ‘friends’ I have on Facebook who seem to take great pleasure in letting me know that they have just received another fucking cow/barn/chicken/job seekers payment from Farmville.
I believe that users will become quickly disillusioned with Places, due to the all to regular updates and the appearance of at least one story in The Sun claiming the ‘Places got my house robbed’. This in turn will see users abandon Places before they have even had chance to see the service reach its full potential, and so forerunners such as Foursquare and Gowalla will only be used by a limited audience and have what could have been a massive audience achieved through organic growth turned off to their product by behemoth who has launched a product to a population of over 500 million in order to make quick buck.
I’ve have written numerous blogs and then caned them as I felt they were not constructive after they turned into a diatribe on one thing or another. But I have decided that now I’m going to, rather than can the blogs, can my better judgment and just rant. Don’t get me wrong, I will still be posting informative (touch wood) and interesting content, but I am going to allow a smattering of vitriol just to ease the pain of bottling it up.
I’ve decided to post a weekly list of things I like, offset with a list of things that have annoyed me.
In the absence of anything to post that I like, I’m just going to mention something I really don’t like.
We’re in the process of expanding our team at Hatch, and despite a slow start the CV’s came flying in. We have been fortunate enough to meet some amazing candidates and are hoping to appoint one or two more staff members in the very near future.
We didn’t set a remit for the type of candidate we were looking for, just so we could see who was out there. What surprised me the most was the amount of senior level practitioners we received enquires from. All of them had excellent CV’s and had worked on some of the world’s best-known brands. For those entering the industry working on these brands would, from the outside looking in, seem like a massive draw. But, from speaking with the senior candidates this is the thing they want to get away from the most.
We’re lucky at Hatch, we have a range of clients from big multinational brands, through to regional start ups, all of which are willing to experiment with their PR campaigns rather than go down the same old route. It’s the ‘same old route’ it would appear, that is the reason our batch of senior candidates opted to contact Hatch.
There seems to be a reticence with some well know brands to push the boundary PR-wise, opting instead to stay within the comfort zones and role out ‘safe’ campaigns. This has meant that after a few years of slogging away on a brand that is world renowned, has left some bored with not being given the opportunity to flex their creative muscle.
So, does this mean that agencies with a history of big brand action are getting a constant stream of Graduates through their doors and losing their experienced practitioners to smaller agencies able to get a little creative with their campaigns?
Love this clever little localised marketing campaign. Fantastic example of on and offline crossover. Campaign is made that little more special with some great graphics and editing. Love the follow up interviews.
