Wispa’s coming home…

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An online ‘independent’ campaign has persuaded Cadbury to bring back the Wispa. 80s icon and all round confectionary wonder, I can feel the change in my wallet getting itchy.

It’s a great demonstration of how social media engagement can result in a win win situation for brands - wether or not Cadbury engaged with the campaign, there was significant engagement with the product.

There is a brief piece about it in PR Week. Anyone else got that horn line from the Lightning Seeds’ football song going through their head?

How to do PR in 2008

Shel Holtz has a great story that illustrates how really savvy PRs should be operating in today’s always connected society. It’s about a US magazine (MAD) and a big electronics retail chain (Circuit City). The magazine ran a spoof Circuit City ad (sort of sub-Private Eye style) and an executive at Circuit City took umbrage and order the mag to be cleared from the shelves and destroyed.

As you’d expect in today’s citizen journalist world the offending email was leaked and published in the blogosphere (on Consumerist). The story then took off and received 114 comments, an amazing 1935 Diggs (with a further 165 comments) and was picked up by AP.

But, this is where it gets really good. Instead of acting like a big, old, dumb corporate Jim Babb, a savvy PR in Circuit City’s corporate communications department sent a witty email that: a) Admitted the mistake; b) Tried to put it right; and c) Apologised.

The result was acclaim from The Consumerist and the apology received 63 comments – almost universally positive.

Shel quite rightly points out that the mistake should never have been made in the first place. It’s essential that potential reputation issues are run past the experts (i.e. the public relations people) and that every manager and indeed employee has a basic grasp of when they might need to take counsel.

The story illustrates how word of mouth marketing can be negative as well as positive, so it pays to get expert advice to help you manage it.

The Fakeness of Reality

Consider this – just over one hundred years ago, the Industrial Revolution brought about technological advances that were considered major advancements. Yet, the technological advances of those times would make even the most restrained modernist today scream for progress.

Reflect to ten years ago – the mainstream internet and mobile phone markets were just beginning to take off. The world was on the cusp of using instantaneous communications to its advantage … well, as instant as your dial-up speed allowed you to be.

Think of now. Instantaneous communication is not expected – it is a given. Can you imagine a world where you can’t just log onto your laptop and hook up to a hotspot to look at your friend’s holiday pictures on one of their many social networking profiles? A world where you have to schedule in a face-to-face visit to ooh and aah over the actual prints? Or how about a world where you have to wait for the postman to deliver your party invite instead of being able to RSVP at the click of a button in your Facebook Events?

The internet has had the fastest penetration rate of any form of communication and has changed social interactions and how we communicate with one another, even more so since the launch of MySpace in 2003 and Facebook in 2004. Distance has become irrelevant. The internet’s promise of now has become our accepted reality; yet we once dismissed this as a ‘virtual reality’ as it didn’t take place in the flesh. But, in today’s world, the offline and online bounce back and forth between one another faster than a ball served by one of the Williams’ sisters at Wimbledon.

The great thing about the internet is, yes, you can use it to communicate about your hobbies with complete strangers across the other side of the world, but likewise, you can use it to contact your friend who lives down the street to arrange lunch. Its range and diversity is incredible, but what about the more sinister side of the ease of the internet?

Take Facebook. Facebook is described as “a social utility that enables people to understand the world around them, facilitating the spread of relevant information through social networks, allowing people to share information online the same way they do in the real world through the creation of individual profiles”. Sounds lovely in theory that Facebook is enhancing society offline, but in practice? The reality is somewhat more dubious because of the uncertainty about the value of the information we are presented with – it is often unreliable and unverifiable – even though as a communication tool, Facebook does work.

The trouble I found with my research into Facebook is that people ‘play up’ their profile information, so how can it be a reality? It’s all about self-promotion because you know other people can view your little piece of cyberspace, and worst still, they can, and will, use it to judge you. As one person said to me:

My Facebook profile is simply a virtual portrayal of a person called X, nothing else. I don’t believe an internet profile can express who I am.

It’s all a big act – the razzle dazzle of the digital age – but if your identity constructs your very source of meaning and experience, what does that say about us all when we’re carefully selecting and editing our identity online? What’s the downside to all this wonderful technological advancement?

Take a look at people’s profiles if you’re on Facebook – a good look – notice anything? Typically, there are no admissions of dodgy characteristics lurking around. Take these rather tame examples from the ‘About Me’ section:

I’m X and I’m ace. So there.

You can’t beat me, I’m a rockstar! 

And isn’t that a nice photo? Used Photoshop by any chance? Let’s have a look at some photo albums. Ah, yes. There’s a trip to the Maldives. Notice how no one seems to create albums entitled ‘Sunday trip to B&Q’? The biggest problem with Facebook is that you have to take it all with a pinch of salt, at face value – what you see is what you get – at least online anyway. It’s like the Hollywood of the digital world – all airbrushed images and carefully constructed releases – but real life isn’t like that. We are not advertisements of a version of ourselves, as much as we pretend and would like to be.

I could go on and on about the fakeness of our new reality, but I won’t. Being online is brilliant because effectively you have the whole world (wide web) available at your fingertips; you’re no longer restricted by time or spatial constraints; and it has allowed us all access to an audience – a chance to use our voice, whether we want to blog, share images or music – but on the downside … just like the dot-com bubble burst, what happens when the social networking bubble bursts and we have to face up to the reality of who we really are?

Claire joins Wolfstar for work experience

Hi. My name is Claire Field, and today is my first day of work experience at Wolfstar. I graduated last year with a MA (Hons) from the University of St Andrews, where I read International Relations – Social Anthropology, but also took additional modules in Economics, English and Italian in my pre-Hons years because of how the Scottish system works – and no, I can’t speak Italian – non mi piace l’italiano (I don’t like the Italian language) is the extent of my recollections. I’m also highly skilled in butchering other languages – they’re not my strong point!

Despite attending university in Scotland, I’m actually a Yorkshire girl hailing from the liquorice-famous town of Pontefract, about 10 miles from Leeds; pre-uni I made the most of the Leeds nightlife and shops, but also its creative offerings. I was lucky enough to snag the last place on the Galaxy Radio Academy from thousands of applicants, and spent four months learning all about commercial radio broadcasting, even gaining a NCFE diploma from it.

This sparked off my interest in radio; I was delighted in my second year at St Andrews when student radio station STAR was set up. I immediately signed up, and began presenting my own twice-weekly show – ‘The Schnitzel with Noodles Show’ – which was fabulous because I got to pollute the airwaves with my ramblings and eclectic music taste! I was also on the committee, holding the position of Head of Community Relations, where I set up work experience for local pupils and promoted the station as a community, not a university, project.

I’m happier when I get to be creative and I’m pleased to be given the opportunity to work with Wolfstar to learn more about the PR world – social media especially – as my dissertation explored the issues arising from the use of social media within modern society, using Facebook as my ethnographic site. I find the rise of the Network Society absolutely fascinating, and have always had an interest in the fast-pace and sheer magnitude of the Internet. I’ve even dabbled in website creation myself – my first site was the now defunct Claire’s Cabin, which had episode guides of popular TV shows of the late ‘90’s – this spun-off a second site dedicated to the Harry Potter books.

Wherever I end up in my career, I know my forthcoming time at Wolfstar is going to be both a fabulous, and beneficial, experience!

Twitter Tool - Updating Twitter from Microsoft Outlook

If you are a regular Twitter user, you may well be interested to hear that there is a new tool available which means you can check and update your Twitter status directly from Microsoft Outlook - so no more switching from one site to another.

I have just tested it and it appears to work just fine and it’s actually really useful. Interestingly, it singles out messages to just you too, which is a really useful function - I had spotted most of my personal messages but there were a few in there that I didn’t know about.

Thanks, to Tom Murphy for flagging this one up to me - very useful. To download this tool click here - it takes about 30 secs.

Below is a screen grab of my outlook page and how it now looks.

Cross posted on: Norton’s Notes

UK blog visitors reach an all time high

The latest research from Hitwise Intelligence reveals that UK Internet visits to blogs reached an all time high last week.

In fact if you look at the monthly data you can see that the market share of blogs has increased steadily over the last three years and has increased by 208% compared to ‘traditional’ news and media sites which have also increased significantly by 70%.

Another interesting statistic  is that the market share of blogs is greater in the UK than the USA: 1.09% and 0.73% respectively.

Hitwise’s Robin Goad cites yesterday’s launch of Apple’s 3G iPhone as an example of the influence of blogs. Gadget and Apple-related blogs sent more traffic to the iPhone site than the traditional IT media.

Another fascinating fact about blog traffic is the diversity of search terms that people use to find them. The highest ranked term was ‘club penguin cheats’ yet it accounted for just 0.39% of the 518,000 search terms.

The final interesting piece of data for me was the importance of Google image search, which was the second largest individual source of traffic after Google UK and even more tellingly 7.85% of all traffic from Google UK Image Search went to blogs, second only to social networks and forums.

The significance of image search for public relations people is that it highlights just one of the many business benefits of a social media news room and social media news releases. Content is no longer being created just for the privileged ranks of journalists, but for thousands of ‘citizen journalists’ who simply want to talk about what they like on whatever user-generated content site they happen to use. But this means we must be much more focused on customer engagement and what the people want rather than what the client or business wants to tell them.

Wolfstar to work for a superstar DJ

I thought we better announce our latest bit of new business on the blog formally as I know not everyone needs to read our newsroom. We (Wolfstar) have won the contract to run a social media campaign for Chris Lake a world renowned DJ and dance music producer.

Chris has received critical acclaim and even managed to get into the UK charts last year with his track changes, in fact it reached number one in the dance charts in the US.

You can view our news release on this story here. Needless to say I and my colleague Seb can’t wait to get cracking on this because we both live and breathe dance music.

In the meantime, I have added a video of Chris in action at Space in Ibiza.

Have a good weekend.

Wolfstar formally welcomes Beth Jones to its team

For those of you who regularly read the blog, you will know we have had a friendly final year journalism student called Beth Jones working with us on a part-time work experience basis.

We have been so impressed with Beth’s writing ability, friendly nature and interest levels in social media and public relations that we have offered her an account executive position here at Wolfstar until she goes on her travels across America.

Beth starts formally from today and will be helping with anything and everything - so expect quite a few more blog posts and comments in the near future.

This of course does mean we now have two Beths in the office which could become confusing but don’t worry I am sure the team here can handle it if you can.

All joking aside, congratulations Beth well done and welcome to our team.

Miro Magic

I first came across Miro when watching Channel 5’s ‘The Gadget Show’ a couple of weeks ago. It’s a free application for channels of internet video (podcasts and video rss). The website says, “Miro is designed to be easy to use and gives you an elegant full screen viewing experience.” Unlike YouTube the videos are usually very high quality and download completely before you start watching, lessening the chance of skipping and stuttering. (It works on the same principle as the BBC iplayer.)

The way Miro stores and manages videos is very neat, creating a library (similar to itunes) which holds your videos for five days unless you specify for it to be held for longer. The automatic deleting stops the library from clogging up with too many videos - this is particularly useful when using the automatic grab function which saves all of the videos from your favourite channels.

It was developed by the Participatory Culture Foundation, a non-profit organisation. Their mission is to "enable and support independent, non-corporate creativity and political engagement." The software was previously known as Democracy Player but as Steve O’Hear, editor of last100, explains “the feedback received was that the name evoked different, yet equally negative responses. For many Americans it conjured up an image of yet another left wing media project, and to the rest of the world it was, rather bizarrely, being associated with the policies of the Bush administration. In contrast, the new name is purposely abstract.” Take a look at Steve’s blog for some useful tips on using Miro.

With over 1,500 channels and a slick, easy to use layout, it’s hard to see why Miro won’t become the new choice for downloading videos. My favourite video so far is the world record for xylo throwing (a frisbee type toy designed by NASA).

For an easy step by step video guide on how to use Miro follow the link to watch it now.

Live blogging the Guide to Social Media Conference

If you visit A PR Guy’s Musings then I’m live blogging the Don’t Panic Guide to Social Media Conference using CoverItLive.

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