Are we seeing the fall of advertising?

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For some time now I’ve firmly believed that word of mouth marketing and social media have been becoming much stronger as effective marketing tools for companies to use to promote their products. However, I have never really had any strong proof to back it up, other than the usual statistics from surveys and reading other people’s opinions.

I read an interesting article on CBC (Newspaper print ad revenue falls at record pace in 2007, online ads rise) that highlighted how, in New York, newspaper print advertising fell by a record percentage in 2007 whilst online newspaper advertisements increased but at a slower pace (the slowest pace from 2003), leaving quite a big gap in amounts spent.

Although the article does not mention word of mouth or any other forms of marketing it makes me think that surely these have been partly to blame.

I know there are threats of a global slowdown and a possible recession but I don’t believe that marketing teams will have just stopped spending money by reducing their advertising budgets. I think they will have just found much more tactical and effective ways of promoting their goods to their consumers.

Something must be filling the gap where advertisements used to be and in my opinion word of mouth marketing and social media will probably be somewhere in there eating up these big budgets.

Is Gordon Brown the first head of government to Twitter?

Yesterday, DowningStreet started to Twitter. The bio describes it as “The official twitter channel for the Prime Minister’s Office based at 10 Downing Street” and gives the web address of the official PM’s site at www.pm.gov.uk.

Of course it isn’t actually Gordon Brown sitting at the keyboard or tapping away on his mobile (in fact I seem to remember that when Gordon became PM he had to give up his personal mobile as all the PM’s calls need to be logged).

But that’s not what this should be about. The social media and social network purists will possibly criticise the move because the PM isn’t properly taking part in the community. But come on, get real people. He’s got a big enough job running the country.

If it is being done by someone close enough to Gordon in his office then that is good enough for me. However, at the moment you don’t get that impression. The eight posts to date are incredibly dull and uninformative - even for a political junkie like me.

If this is to work then it needs to give an insight into Gordon’s personality and what makes him tick. “The Prime Minister is greeting President Nicolas Sarkozy at the front door of 10 Downing Street” tells me absolutely nothing of interest.

What was Gordon thinking? What was he doing? That would make the Twitter channel work.

If it is to be a news channel then that’s fine as well. But at the moment it doesn’t do either very well. “No10 news: France and Britain pledge school places: The Prime Minister and French Preside… http://tinyurl.com/27sjzl” tells me nothing much.

That’s probably because it is created using Twitterfeed from the PM’s existing RSS feeds.

So far there are only 23 followers (it was single figures when I joined) and it is following nobody. It will be interesting to see if it does do any following. If it is a success and enough people start following then it would be unrealistic to expect real interaction and community. But, what you could do is monitor and mine the followers to glean insight into what they are talking about and therefore what matters to them. That would provide useful information as to what to Twitter about and also provides the potential for a quick, dirty and easy online focus group.

Edelman’s Marshall Manson also has a post, as does Simon Dickson who alerted me to the story with his Tweet (incidentally it’s hard to credit a Tweet and comment in 140 characters).

UPDATE: To be crystal clear, even though I’ve already said it above. I (245 followers) was NOT the first to Tweet or blog this story. That honour goes to Simon Dickson (39 followers) at 12:04 yesterday, mine was second at 13:18. It was just that mine got picked up by Marshall Manson (followers 150), which in turn was picked up by Steve Rubel (4627 followers). I think it’s down to the number of followers.

UPDATE 2: CNET is now covering it as well. Cross-posted from A PR Guy’s Musings.

Acer customer support 1, PC World 0

Yesterday I attended WOM UK’s first ‘How To’ workshop event. Very interesting day, with impressive presentations from Fiona at MESH, Andy from Ramp, Dave at Bzz Agent and Ivan at Wildfire. After even just a day out of the office it always seems to take a little longer than you’d like to get your inbox in shape, and your to-do list back on track.

For example - I’ve only just picked up on a post written this afternoon by a colleague that sits no more than 1.5m away from me. And… thinking back on the busy day, I do suddenly recollect a fair amount of agro coming out of his ‘moody’ corner. It seems the level of customer service he received from PC World regarding a fairly serious IT issue, was dealt with in a somewhat poor manner….

On the flip side of Wolfstar’s IT scenario, I myself sent my Acer Travel Mate off for repair (that only took two short conversations, one with Acer and one with DHL) last Friday - today it was sat back on my desk, fully fit and raring to go… so hat’s off to the Acer crew down in Plympton - thanks very much!

Get Paid for Social Networking?

When I got an email inviting me to sign up to Yuwie I couldn’t help but be curious, I usually screen out these invites but the possibility of getting paid for social networking really caught my attention. Yuwie is apparently like Myspace, You tube, Facebook, Bebo and Hi5 with one big difference- you get paid to do everything!

I was surprised when I read that Facebook makes over $8million a month from  advertising alone and Myspace makes almost $25million! It makes sense that the users- the people who are making the pages, writing the blogs and creating this advertising space should somehow benefit from this. That is Yuwie’s message.

I’ve been doing some research and am convinced it’s not a scam, it doesn’t promise to be a get rich quick scheme but just pays its users small amounts that build up over time. You get paid for uploading pictures, videos, blog posts, inviting friends, starting clubs and basically everything you normally would do whilst social networking. The minimum payout is £50 and payments are handled by Paypal, a trusted and well known site. Even though I still love Facebook and I’m not entirely sure how long it takes to earn the minimum payout, I’ve decided to give Yuwie the benefit of the doubt and sign up, after all even if it takes months its still £50 for spending time on the internet, which I would be doing anyway.

Save Scrabulous!

I have never been a big fan of board games, Scrabble in particular was definitely my least favourite, I could never understand how the slow pace and debates over if a word was real or not could be called fun.

After turning down numerous invites to an application called Scrabulous on Facebook I finally gave it a try the other week. This game looks almost like Scrabble, it has the same board, numbered letters and the same set of rules. I presumed that it had been made by the same people as an attempt to reach new markets. I ended up spending most of my evening on it and now can’t help playing every time I’m near my computer, its more addictive than Facebook.

Over the weekend I read an article in The New York Times about how this new phenomena was actually made by two brothers who had nothing to do with the creation of the original game. Hasbro and Mattel (the joint owners of the Scrabble trademark) have denounced Scrabulous as piracy and threatened legal action against its creators hoping to have it shut down.

I’m finding myself torn between who I agree more with. On one hand I can understand the anger and frustration of Hasbro and Mattel and why they want it to be shut down. But, at the same time, this new development has shown them a great market opportunity that they might not have realised. Scrabulous currently has 658,461 daily active users, that’s 22% of the total users of Facebook. Tens of thousands of users have joined ‘Save Scrabulous’ groups, threatening to boycott Hasbro and Mattel products if this application is removed. As an addict myself I am hoping that they will somehow find some common ground, realise that this is a fantastic piece of new software that has attracted a lot of users and try to use it to their advantage. perhaps using it to advertise their other products or learning from Scrabulous’ success, reinvent some more of their games? Social networking has made this game popular to thousands of new users that might have never found it entertaining before.

Blogging without due care and attention

Last week Stuart and I had a chuckle over an article in the Yorkshire Evening Post about how the conservative party have been warned about blogging whilst under the influence of alcohol. Apparently TORY candidates at local elections in Leeds have been warned not to post internet blogs when they are drunk. If they do find themselves writing while under the influence, they have been advised to save a draft and then wait until the morning before deciding whether to send it. I’ve always been told that a little drink can help get the creative juices flowing but I think the principle here is the same as text messaging whilst a little merry. We are all guilty of thinking that posting that blog or message was a good idea when the alcohol strips down our inhibitions and gives us the confidence to tell the world what we really believe but when the morning comes and the memory of the night before comes flooding back its all too late.

I think the whole thing was trying to be a bit tongue in cheek, but bloggers out there everywhere should heed this warning before they switch on their laptops after cracking open that second bottle of wine. In the mean time, I want to see where these drunken Tory blogs lie, as they sound like some interesting reading.

CIPR Yorkshire & Lincolnshire launch Facebook Group

In my new role as social media coordinator for CIPR Yorkshire and Lincolnshire, I have advised that initially it creates an open Facebook group to share more information with its members and non-members.

To be honest, it’s not the most exciting item of social media/group to look at just yet (we only have 12 members as I write) as we still need some good official CIPR content to be added but it’s a start and it’s an organic thing, which means we can all begin to post items and provide updates to each other.

The group is open to anyone interested in PR in the Yorkshire and Lincolnshire regions, they don’t need to be members of the CIPR, just interested in communications.

The group will enable the CIPR to share knowledge, news, events, media coverage, blog posts and interesting videos.

It also has a notice board so its members can use it as a forum and ask questions of other members.

I am hoping this will mean that more younger non-members get to hear about the many events the CIPR is organising across the region this year.

Other interesting CIPR and PR Facebook groups include:

1. Wolfstar’s
2. Leeds Met PR Graduates
3. Young PRpros
4. Green Communications
5. PR Networking Group London

Cross posted: Norton’s Notes

It’s official - a third of all blogs are actually Spam

I have just read an interesting article on WebProNews reporting that the blogging platform Wordpress has announced it has to get rid of 30% of its blogs because they are splogs.

A quick definition of a splog: "A splog (spam blog) is a fake blog created solely to promote affiliated websites, with the intent of skewing search results and artificially boosting traffic. Some splogs are written like long-winded ads for the websites they promote; others have no original content, featuring either nonsense or content stolen from authentic websites."

We have had our social media newsroom releases used on splogs before and unfortunately we immediately discount them. The splog which stole one of our stories recently didn’t even manage to link to the story very well, but to the un-trained eye they can look like genuine news blogs. I am sure there are companies out there who wouldn’t know any different and claim these posts as genuine online coverage but splogs are just a means of making money by stealing content and then using blatant advertising. 

Matt Mullenweg from Wordpress said that his company powers a whopping 2,523,000 blogs. WebProNews states that: "WordPress has had to delete more than 800,000 splogs" which equates to almost a third of all of its blogs.

I am not sure if this is representative across all of the blogging platforms as some have to be paid for and some don’t. I would hazard a guess that the paid for platforms have a lower percentage of splogs clogging up their systems - I can’t see these pirates wanting to actually pay for a splog.

Up and coming bands should benefit from social media

As part of my public relations degree, I have to put together a portfolio of work to be submitted in a couple of months. My sister’s boyfriend is in a band called ‘Billy the Kid’ and they are doing really well at the moment, they’ve just been signed by Oasis’ management ‘Ignition’. As they are just starting to get their feet in the door of success, they haven’t yet had any real public relations work done for the band. Therefore I got really excited at the thought of doing some work for them and started brainstorming some ideas. I really wanted to do a stunt of some sort; something different and exciting, but then I became stuck. What sort of stunt could I do that was unique and completely free? Celebrities such as Paris Hilton get caught drink driving (arguably a PR stunt) which excites the press, but surely it’s a bit too extreme to ask the lads in the band to risk their lives in order for some coverage. They might be eager to promote themselves but they’re not that desperate!

So this got me thinking, my target audience is people aged between 17-35, what sort of PR works best for them? I believe the answer lies mainly in social media.

They already have their own Myspace page where friends can listen to their songs and so on which is a start. Young people nowadays want to be able to talk to each other about their favourite bands, share in discussion and swap information about them which is why I think creating a blog would be really beneficial for them.

Technology such as ‘Technorati’ (a blog search engine) also makes it so much easier to find the blog you want to be part of. Other methods of social media I could use would be to create a bespoke YouTube channel for them and upload videos of the band and creating groups and profiles in the social networking sites such as Facebook and Bebo.

It will be interesting to see if the boys do gain anymore popularity (however small) after I take advantage of the huge audience these sites have to offer. This would again prove the potential the world of social media has to offer.

Some other cool up and coming bands from the North East are:

· The Cutters (indie)

· Twisted Wheel (indie)

· We Start Fires (punk/electro)