The Brinkwire blog

The Inconvenient PR Truth

Posted on 01. Feb, 2010 by Andrew.

The fine folks at Realwire (formally WebIT PR) have started a brave campaign called The Inconvenient PR Truth. I say “brave” because it clearly runs along in the wake of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth but the very fact no one (that I’ve noticed) thinks this is out of line is a very good indicator to just how positive and needed the message is.

The message is; too many press releases are spam.

Stephen Davies , who works for Realwire as a consultant, pulls out three strong facts;

1. 1.7 billion irrelevant press releases are emailed each year to US and UK based journalists.
2. 78% of press release emails received by people are irrelevant
3. 55% of people have taken action to stop getting press releases from these sources

An Inconvenient PR Truth from RealWire on Vimeo.

Realwire have an alternative press release host to Brinkwire but we still like them and this message. In fact, the concept of bugging people with a press release in the inbox is an old and dying one.

There are better, more modern, more relevant and more interactive ways to distribute a press release today. That’s our pitch here at Brinkwire. Here’s the elevator pitch reminder;

1. a) Press releases distributed via a network of content suggestion widgets
2. b) Press releases sped into Twitter and Google News
3. c) RSS feeds built by tags and free-hand search to allow journalists, bloggers and other social media influencers to subscribe to a stream that interests them.
4. Reblogging via Zemanta
5. d) No emails.

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LoveJingles does a social media jingle a day

Posted on 05. Jan, 2010 by Andrew.

A random email touting the blog LoveJingles.com hit my inbox after lunch. It’s from a guy called Love Harnell. What a good name.

What Harnell is doing is selling a jingle a day. The first jingle, January the 1st, went for $1. Looking at the calendar it looks like he’s booked up to 26th of March when a jingle will cost you a whopping $86.

Well. Kinda. You have two options for each jingle. The cheap option gives you a live video recording of a cover or a jingle. Slap a zero on the end and you get your own logo in the video and Love’s promotional calendar. Either way, I think, there’s some social media promotion of his work.

Reading the fine print I also spot that Lovejingles and Gulsparv Partners own the work and you don’t get any distribution rights of your own. That said you seem able to embed the YouTube uploads.

Here’s the jingle produced for the social media agency theSocialMedia. What do you make of it?

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RIP John Jay Daly

Posted on 01. Sep, 2009 by Andrew.

It was John Jay Daly who invented the opt-out. The system he came up with in 1970 was one which allowed households to send a postcard with the details on to a single central address and, as a result, opt-out of all direct mail.

It’s the same model that we recognise for do-not-call lists and the opt-out concept that twisted and expanded to produce the “unsubscribe” links that should be on the bottom of direct marketing emails.

Daly was deputy chairman at the US Direct Marketing Association at the time and the American Congress was debating legislation which would have made opt-in.

You might be thinking that life would be better without direct mail but at the time some members of the Direct Marketing Association thought Daly solution would kill the business. His famous compromise solution may not have pleased everyone but it seems to have helped solved the bulk of the problem.

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Bravo Facebook. Facebook bans sponsored status updates.

Posted on 11. Aug, 2009 by Andrew.

If you take money or product from an advertiser in exchange for putting a message out via your Facebook status then you’re breaking the new Terms and Conditions.

In Facebook speak you’re breaking their Statement of Rights and Responsibilities. The Statement of Rights and Responsibilities replaced Facebook’s more traditional Terms of Use in the beginning of the year.

The new rules can be found on Facebook itself and although they say the changes are just tweaks the wily eyes of Jason Kincaid noticed the ban on “commercial use”.

Here’s the relevant section in full.

4. Registration and Account Security

Facebook users provide their real names and information, and we need your help to keep it that way. Here are some commitments you make to us relating to registering and maintaining the security of your account:
1. You will not provide any false personal information on Facebook, or create an account for anyone other than yourself without permission.
2. You will not use your personal profile for your own commercial gain (such as selling your status update to an advertiser).
3. You will not use Facebook if you are under 13.
4. You will not use Facebook if you are a convicted sex offender.
5. You will keep your contact information accurate and up-to-date.
6. You will not share your password, let anyone else access your account, or do anything else that might jeopardize the security of your account.
7. You will not transfer your account to anyone without first getting our written permission.
8. If you select a username for your account we reserve the right to remove or reclaim it if we believe appropriate (such as when a trademark owner complains about a username that does not closely relate to a user’s actual name).

So, if you’re under 13 then please go away. If you’re a sex offender then you’re not welcome. Both these rules make sense.

The other identification rules around Facebook are partly there to ensure the integrity of the site’s data, stop impersonation (and the scares and bad PR that comes with that).

It’s section two that stands out. “You will not use your personal profile for your own commercial gain (such as selling your status update to an advertiser).”

This, I think, could teach Twitter a thing or two who have done little to discourage this form of advertising.

Just a few weeks back we blogged that Full Disclosure Is International and Not Fair and we’re pleased to see that Facebook offered these new rules out in more than just English. The other ‘tweak’ they did today was to remind people that if you’re from a country embargoed by the Americans then you shouldn’t be on Facebook.

Rather than worrying what would be “fair” to advertising platforms like Izea. Facebook has simply said it’s not allowed.

Facebook, unlike Twitter, has many choices for advertisers who wish to put their message out. The basic fan page is free. Social ads to support that fan page can be extremely well targeted and as cheap as chips (but may fail to drive any traffic). For example, you may just pay a few pence for a Facebook click to your fan page and that compares very well to the $12 CPM that Patricio Robles calculated Kmart would have paid for a tweet from @shoemoney.

Fun questions remain – how many online PR or social media companies in the UK do you think are currently paying for ‘status updates’? How many do you think will stop because of this?

What counts as “use your personal profile for your own commercial gain” anyway? Updating your status with new blog post URLs where your blog has ads? Plugging a conference or gig you’re running?

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Digg users twice as likely to bury CNN than BBC (via @adamsherk)

Posted on 24. Jul, 2009 by Andrew.

Adam Sherk works in the industry. He helps publishers and other content providers with SEO and social media. As a result he’s pretty interested in Digg and he’s done some clever research.

Adam used di66.net’s list of top sources in Digg for the last 30 days http://di66.net/top-sites-30d-by-posts.html and fished out the news sites. Next he used Digg’s own advanced search tool to check out many submissions from those sites had been buried.

Please go to Adam’s original blog post to check out the full lists. The top 5 of Adam’s two classifications are provided as a fair use summary below.

Most buried by volume

Most buried by percentage of content

You’ll notice how the BBC isn’t in the top 5 by percentage. You’ll find it in the 11th position with only 2.44% percent buried

As Adam points out an important element in a bury is exactly who submitted the story and how they presented it to Digg so there may be some wiggles in these stats. However, assuming that all sites are treated, on average, the same isn’t a terrible assumption given the volume of submissions here.

These news sites do very well. There are certainly many blogs out there who would be very pleased with only a 5.25% bury rate at Digg.

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MacGyver social media warnings from @armano (via @malbonster)

Posted on 22. Jul, 2009 by Andrew.

It is worth reading the entire “Yes, Your Social Media Strategy Needs Design” guest post on Harvard Business’ blog by David Armano but if you’re super busy then a brisk tour through Tim Malbon’s discovery and analysis “Moving beyond a shallow definition of social media” is must.

David argues that too many companies have ‘social media’ campaigns that look like bits and pieces held together by string and gum. They’re like a MacGyver invention.

He argues that businesses need to look at evolving how we work, communicate, interact and collaborate at a very basic level. It’s not just a step back. It’s not the oft-quoted ‘holistic view’ but the need to design elegant business systems that fit together as snugly as an iPhone into iTunes.

Tim, one of Made By Man’s stars, is keen to stress the importance of “visual design” – one of the social media agency’s own core business design concepts. He suggests that that by applying a visual strategy to a problem that you force yourself to commit. That, Tim argues, is good.

What do you think? Are too many social media campaigns nothing more than individual efforts crudely connected by whatever comes to hand? Should we force yourselves to plan our business in a more elegant, a more visual, way?

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Beaten up by the DiggBar

Posted on 20. Jul, 2009 by Andrew.

People said it could happen but it many of us are surprised it did happen. This includes Kevin Rose, Digg’s founder, who tweeted to say he wasn’t aware of the change.

So; what did happen?

Digg launched their URL shortener into a storm of controversy. Rather than simply redirecting users on to their final destination (like most URL shorteners) the digg version put a framed DiggBar at the top.

The goal of this DiggBar was simple; users could digg the submission while reading it or engage various other of Digg’s offerings.

The problem; people don’t like the fact that the URLs pointed to digg.com and not the intended site. In order to show the toolbar Digg had to keep users on the digg.com domain.

It took about a week for Digg to cave in. They didn’t cave all the way; they found a promise. Users who were logged into Digg and who clicked on the short URL would see the DiggBar whereas users who were not logged into Digg would redirect all the way through and land on the original article. It seemed to be working.

What happened late last week was a radical change in this behaviour. Rather than redirecting anyone through to the original article or even showing the original article wrapped up in a digg frame the short URLs started to redirect people to the digg.com page for the story. Just to be clear; the URL shortener no longer pointed to the URL that people intended the URL to point too.

Digg didn’t tell anyone about this change. They just did it.

This will be concerned a mighty own goal. People are already talking about how services like Bit.ly are acutely aware of which URLs are passing through the system and how many clicks those links are generating.

Bit.ly could quite easily become a very serious competitor to Digg by simply presenting this information to the public. Look at tweetmeme for an example. Looks like Digg? It’s powered by retweets.

Kristin Marshall has a transcript of Kevin Rose talking on twit.tv which is worth a read. She asks a good question;

My question is this: If they intended on doing this to Diggbar, why was there no post on it, no indication on their intentions to change Diggbar from a general URL shortening service to one that is exclusively for Digg articles? I’m not debating the usefulness of an exclusive Digg shortener, in fact, it can be very useful if that’s what you’re aiming for. On the contrary, I’m questioning how Digg went about all of this. It makes them look shady.

The Time Thief at One Cool Site also makes a good point

What’s more? The fact that I now have to click at least twice and in some cases three times, to get the real link is so annoying that I turn the dang things of. So unless or until someone penetrates my thick skull and convinces me that to having the urls to my blog posts redirected to social network landing pages benefits my blog and creates no security risks, I’m remain unimpressed.

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Swearing helps you cope with pain

Posted on 13. Jul, 2009 by Andrew.

It’s official. Swearing helps you cope with pain. Today Slashdot highlights this article from Scientific American that explains how certain words are better at coming from/getting to the deeper and more evolutionary parts of the brain like the amygdale.

A study had college students see how long they could keep their hands in cold water and either repeat a swear word or a neutral phrase. The 67 students who swore in the experiment experienced less pain and lasted an average of 40 seconds longer than those who did not.

Is the same to be said online? If someone is able to mouth off about poor customer service or a malfunctioning website are they likely to put up with the problem for longer? This author’s gut feeling is that the answer is: no. Someone having problems on line and being vocal about it may be given helpful suggestions and some of those may be of alternative solutions.

What do you think?

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Intense Debate makes progress in baby steps

Posted on 10. Jul, 2009 by Andrew.

Intense Debate is the Automattic www.automattic.com owned competitor to Disqus. The idea is a good one; rather than locking comments into a single blog and a single thread why not let the comments be part of a comment community and enhance the comment interface while you’re at it?

The best way to test this out is simply to leave a comment on this blog and you’ll see all the ways in which Disqus lets you interact.

Intense Debate attempts the same thing and as it’s owned by WordPress’ parent company you would be forgiven for thinking that they’re at the lead. They’re not.

What lets Intense Debate down is that it doesn’t integrate very well with WordPress! Not compared to Disqus. Reading between the lines we might suspect that Intense Debate have a scaling problem.

The good news is that ID are making progress. In the last month we’ve seen a progress of tweaks and enhancements. Today the team have announced two more;

1. Banning Users
2. Viewing Deleted Comments

Neither one of these two will set the world afire but they’ve both very useful addition to anyone trying to run a popular blog.

A word of caution about banning users; Intense Debate offer the IP address as a way to do this. Ouch. With a single stroke a blogger could ban all comments from a single ISP or company rather than a single user. Watch out.

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Dan Thornton (@badgergravling) on building online communities

Posted on 09. Jul, 2009 by Andrew.

Over at TheWayoftheWeb Dan Thornton has been kind enough to share the presentation he gave to the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers.

We was invited to talk about building online communities and he took a useful birds eye view to this. His presentation is available via Slideshare but here are a few of our takeaways from it.

1. Encourage popular people to contribute as this will encourage others to do the same.
2. Reward good contributors with public recognition.
3. Moderate lightly but firmly.

We agree with all those points. The reward aspect of social media is often neglected.

Brinkwire makes the point of listing the most popular press releases on any given week on the homepage and the most popular tags at the bottom of each page. Why? Not only does this showcase good material on our news site but it rewards those people who submitted it.

The Brinkwire site also links back to the five blogs who sent us the most traffic by citing our news releases in any given week too. This is a reward method that might encourage bloggers to cite our news but it also helps us build stronger bonds with the community.

It’s worth reading to the appendix as Dan kindly points out other bloggers; people like Neil Perkin, Martin Belam and Jeff Jarvis.

What would your top three tips for community building be?

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