CBS goes inside the Barack Obama campaign

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

I’ve just found this fascinating video on the Total Politics site where CBS takes a camera crew inside the Barack Obama campaign to interview some of the backroom staffers.

Most telling for me was chief strategist, David Axelrod, talking about the difficulties of campaigning against friends in Primaries or internal party elections. Axelrod had worked for Hilary Clinton in her first Senate campaign and now found himself working on the other side.

I had exactly that experience when I worked as Director of Communications for Alan Johnson in the Labour deputy leadership elections. Hilary Benn, another of the six candidates, is an old friend of mine and as a Labour Party staff member I worked as his campaign manger in the Leeds Central by-election where he first won his seat.

XP: A PR Guy’s Musings

Is investigative journalism dead?

As a broadcast journalism student, journalism is a topic close to my heart; however I feel the need to ask myself why I am looking to a career in PR instead. First and foremost, is the move away from muckraking journalism which brought governments to right; here I am obviously thinking of the infamous Watergate Scandal. I’m sure Woodward and Bernstein started a revolution among young journalists in the hope that they too would have the chance to change the world using a secret source named ‘Deep Throat’.

It was in this Golden Age that the media really lived up to its name as the fourth estate. But in the modern age investigative journalism can simply not survive within the press. Commercial pressures are forcing resources and cash to be stretched to the point that no, or at least very few, editors are willing to take a risk on expensive investigations. Phillip Knightley explains that it all began with the death of the print unions, and was subsequently made worse by the arrival of media law firms. I particularly like Knightley’s quote from Rupert Murdoch just after he ended the editorial budgets on the Times Newspapers, “Never give journalists a budget. The b******s will spend every penny of it." Just give them a news agenda instead, yeah?

Today, investigative journalism has moved over to television, with the technological age paving the way for the ‘undercover documentary’. Prime time spots are filled with reporters donning hidden cameras and mini-mics, in their quest for justice. I am not objecting to this kin d of journalism, don’t get me wrong I enjoy this type of programming as much as any other, yet I can’t help feeling like saying “Is this the best we can do?”

This is not the only problem. It is clear journalism is in decline across the spectrum – for one, Politics has been made into a melodramatic soap opera and ultimately caused the public to become more concerned with trivial rubbish. It was not long ago that Blair’s new haircut made the front pages and Cameron’s dabble with cannabis in his teens caused national uproar.

So with the Internet taking the world by storm and the emergence of social networking taking over could UGC (User Generated Content) become the new method of journalism? (In 2006 Ofcom’s communications market report revealed that 41 per cent of all UK Internet users aged 25 and over have a social website homepage. This is in addition to the 70 per cent of all 16-24 year olds signed-up to social networking sites.)

To this I would answer no, despite the lack of faith I have expressed in modern journalism, I still believe it plays a vital role in our democracy. There might be less catastrophic wrongdoings uncovered and more conformist reports in today’s news output, but there are still a lot of journalists risking their lives and fulfilling their role whole-heartedly to bring all of us, the news.

Are we seeing the fall of advertising?

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.

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.

Google announced as world’s number one brand

Yesterday Google was announced by ‘Superbrands‘, as the UK’s number one  business brand beating off giants such as the BBC. This has made me appreciate just how big this company really is. I myself use the search engine ‘Yahoo’, simply because that was the first engine my Dad introduced me to years ago. Interestingly, all my friends find it bizarre that I don’t use Google, as if the organisation owns a monopoly over searching on the internet. But of course they don’t and there are probably thousands of other search engines on the net, so why has Google gone on to rule the net, winning the crown for the brand with the best reputation?

Speaking of Yahoo, the business recently rejected a bid made by Microsoft for a ‘friendly takeover’. According to The Lang Report, Yahoo has just announced 1000 job cuts, its largest ever amount since the dot-com crash. Perhaps this due to the effects of Google’s growth in this sector. I believe in forthcoming years, the fate of companies such as Yahoo will be unsure, as Google continues to reign.

My university tutor suggested that the popularity of Google could be thanks to the idea of WOMM (word of mouth marketing). This is an interesting thought and I think he is right, especially when you think of the phrase ‘Google-it’.  It has become synonymous with internet searching and it is very common to hear people in work, the press and even teachers at school using the phrase to their pupils. I am told it actually makes an appearance in the dictionary now too!

Next Page »