Thursday, March 11, 2010

The Death of the Press Release

The concept of the disintegration of a fundamental element of the Public Relations industry has been discussed for eons, but never as succinctly as by the creators of the Social Media Press Release – Real Wire.


In there environmental parody, Real Wire adopt an Al Gorean tone to deliver an amusing analysis of the daily ecological vandalism of Journo’s inboxes.


The lack of research and thought that goes into the colossal volume of press releases sent by PRs leads inevitably to thousands landing in the recycling bin without even being opened.


Being an intern and having only just begun my PR masters, clips like this really convey the future of PR and the changes occuring (or hopefully occuring) in the industry. I'm learning about these transformations everyday.


Thankfully, modern PR agencies are moving ahead of the game, thinking laterally to entice readership and demand attention!




An Inconvenient PR Truth from RealWire on Vimeo.








Wednesday, March 3, 2010

What makes you influential on twitter?



One of Australia's most popular marketing blogs JeffBullas.com - designed to help business with web marketing utilising Internet mediums in social media such as Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin as well as Search Engine Optimisation, Lead Generation and Blogs - recently conducted a survey to gauge ”How Do You Measure Twitter Influence?”

Jeff Bullas comments “Twitter Influence” could become a powerful and significant part of your brand whether it's a ”personal brand” or a ”corporate brand”. So measurement is open to interpretation and different views of Twitters importance also needs to be factored into the discussion.

He then goes on to outline eight possible criteria to measure twitter influence against and conducts a reader survey.

Theresults of which are in fact in line with my own beliefs - please see below:

* The number of followers 8%
* The quality of their followers 16%
* The number of followers re tweeting their tweets or updates 16%
* The quality and value of the links that they tweet 22%
* How often they tweet or update 6%
* The ability to make other people take actions on Twitter 18%
* The quality and popularity of the website or blog that is on their Twitter site 7%
* They are already well known or famous 5%
* Other 2%

A great reminder that content is still king...