PR’s crisis of confidence as it looks to define itself (again)

This was originally published over at Econsultancy where there is a good discussion in the comments and a response from the PRSA.

There’s nothing more predictable than the PR industry’s constant urge to ‘define itself’. So today, true to form, the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) has announced that it is to develop a new ‘modern definition’ of PR (again). Following attempts in 2003 and 2007, this time, there’s a microsite, a piece in the New York Times and even a crowd-sourcing initiative.

Why do we need to define PR? It’s a great question; the last time the PRSA tried to find a new definition was four years ago. PRSA CEO Rosanna Fiske laments that it is hard for her to explain to her mum what she does. Will a definition really help here? This is the current one:

“Public relations helps an organization and its publics adapt mutually to each other.”

However, if you can’t explain to your mum what a PR does, then the issue seems to me to be wider than merely an industry definition.

The fundamentals of this run far deeper. Our constant need to redefine what it is we do could be seen as an indication of the fast-moving digital world we find ourselves in. And it would be hard to argue against this. But is it really necessary? Does it happen in other industries? In other marketing sectors?

I think there is something else at work here: fear. There is immense fear in the PR industry about what it actually means to do PR these days. The reason I was drawn to PR in the first place was because of the interesting position the industry finds itself in. There are so many drivers that make this an incredibly rich sector to be working in, from the democratisation of media to the socalisation of the web. But fear still pervades. And I am constantly frustrated by how slow sections of the industry are to reinvent themselves.

Maybe that is the problem with trying to find a definition because, apart from a few good agencies and practitioners doing great, pioneering work, there is too much burying of heads in the sand and hoping that the ‘same old’ will continue to be enough.

It won’t be.

The ironic thing is that the fundamentals of PR haven’t really changed – building relationships with publics is as relevant now as it has always been. Yes, some of the tactics may have changed and strategies may have shifted, but the fundamentals are the same. So changing the definition just feels like papering over the cracks.

In light of the recent furore about the role of professional bodies in the industry, then maybe we should welcome this development as a chance to raise the debate around what it is that PR is all about.

I’m just not sure whether sitting around debating high level definitions is the thing that is going to transform the industry and its reputation.

Occupy: a triumph for a belief in a cause

I walked past the Occupy camp at St Paul’s Cathedral last Monday for the first time. It’s probably just as well I did as the camp has been served eviction notices and soon will likely suffer the same terminal conclusion as its sister protest in New York.

But despite the bumbling right wing propaganda spouted by Boris Johnson last week, the abiding thing that struck me as I walked past the tents was respect for those that believe in a cause so much that they will resort to taking action. Because the fact remains that, despite your politics and whether you agree or disagree with the arguments, the protest has raised a global debate. The largely peaceful demonstrations have brought to the fore an argument that, since the global economic crisis started, has been largely ignored by our politicians and the mainstream media.

Boris’s rhetoric and Bloomberg’s violence has so far been able to quel the column inches this debate has generated. The challenge for the protesters now will be two-fold. Firstly, to continue the debate now that the camps have gone and, secondly, to try and bring about long-term change.

What Occupy challenges us to do is reassess the flavour of capitalism that we think is right and proper. I don’t see this as an anti-capitalist argument, but a question about how we should operate as a capitalist society. That means deciding whether we should take action to ensure fat bankers and immoral rulers are unable to get fatter and more immoral anytime soon.

And, talking of immoral rulers, it is not just capitalism that is under the spotlight but democracy itself, with technocrats talking over across Europe as Peter Beaumont highlights today.

2011 could be a defining year. The year when large swathes of public backlash took rulers and politicians by surprise both in the spring and the autumn.

For us in the western world, it is a time to celebrate our right to freedom of speech and our ability to start a debate that flies in the face of what those in power want us to think.

Power of One Live Blog – #P1event

I’m at the Battersea Power Station today for the Power of One event.

It’s a conference focused on how the individual can achieve in the technology industry.

There is a whoppingly impressive lineup of speakers from Jason Calacanis to Charles Arthur discussing everything related to technology and start up companies. If I miss quote you, please let me know!

The event was sponsored by Telefonica, so credit to them.

I’ll be updating this page throughout the day with the best bits. Hit F5!

Morten Lund - How I survived the European tech start up world, lessons learned

Disclosure: Morten is chairman of Tradeshift (an EML Wildfire client)

  • Be very careful about seeking capital. You can only really understand it if you do it yourself and there is no formula.
  • I love sales and people with stamina!
  • Made 50m EUROS so was loaded but bored. And then I fucked up and went bankrupt! It was scary. I saw how amazingly nice people can be.
  • Now I just focus. Focus on two companies.
  • Love marketing – I made this - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TP_vLqc9fnU
  • It’s simple, not easy.
  • Everyone should have done Dropbox, but no one did. If you don’t spend your investment on your prototype, you’re stupid.
  • Networking – people need to know you are in the game.
  • What is the next big thing? We don’t have a fucking clue.
  • You have to have no fear of losing. Starbucks lost $60m on Living.com.
  • Money matters less. People is everything.
  • There is a fine line between vision and hallucination.
  • All the odds are against you. Be speedy, be fast and be original.
  • Good people can succeed with a bad idea, bad people can’t succeed with a good idea.
  • If you pay in bananas, you get monkeys.

VC Panel chaired by Elizabeth Varley

Investing in companies that embody the Power of One – Jason Calacanis, Gonzalo Martin-Villa, Carlos Eduardo, Tyler Crowley

Here are the Twitter links for the panel – @evarley @Jason @steepdecline @delossantos_h @ceduardo

  • Do you need a lot of money or people to create something game-changing?
  • JC – depends on the product. For bio-tech you do. For internet startups it is possible for a few people to create something great with no funding.
  • TC – This question wouldn’t have been asked 10 years ago. In 10 years the question might be should you take VC money.
  • JC – when intelligent people invest in a company, you also get their attention. You get their input. It’s not the money, it is the attention on your business. These people are playing for pride, they are playing for the win.
  • TC – the question in music 10 years ago was can you make an album without a record label and, today, that is reality.
  • What is the optimal number of founders? Some VCs won’t invest in one-founder startups
  • CE – often we’ve seen the quicker a startup has a bigger team, the quicker they can kick off. They stop drinking the cool aid.
  • Do you invest in a person as much as you invest in a product?
  • CE – yes, often. It’s often a combination of the two though.
  • JC – typically with an entrepreneur either a light will shine on them or it won’t. It’s hard to say it is any one thing. If I had to pick a relentless entrepreneur with a glow in a tough, unattractive market than the other way round. As an investor if you know ‘that person is going to be successful with or without me’ then that is very attractive. When someone says ‘seven year projection’ I walk out the room. Why would I read your business plan? Show me your product.
  • JC – there are two buckets – people that create and people that talk about creating

Richard Kramer - When Finance Meets Tech: Not a Pretty Picture!

  • Former analyst and investment banker
  • See 200 tech companies a month – try and help investors see through the crap
  • Tech IPOs from the first half of 2010 really haven’t done very well. IPOs are not all they are shaped up to be.
  • The device market is the only growth area in the tech industry at the moment
  • The amount of money we spend on phones is rising quickly
  • There is way to much focus in this industry on the US and Europe – check out Asia
  • “Apple is God but we need a Chinese God” - quote from Chinese manufacturer
  • App stores are content stores
  • [These 70s slides need to be seen to be believed!]
  • Big opportunity in emerging markets for tablets to really be successful
  • A tablet is a big phone, a TV is a big tablet – apps need to be cross platform
  • Apple makes all its money by marking up flash – the higher spec iPhones/iPads are a cash cow. The same with iPad ‘smart covers’. Apple have a retail channel that makes it millions.
  • Samsung has the industry’s biggest advertising budget. Samsung makes money in a different way to Apple. Samsung Telecom is a distribution model for its memory and display products.
  • HTC have made $1/2bn of acquisitions in the last year. They are the only ones that have innovated on top of Android.
  • Nokia and RIM: the difficulty in this industry is execution and that is the problem these face. But they are still profitable so can get back in the game. But they need to change their lack of internet innovation.
  • Google has had colossal failures but it is big enough that it can just wipe them off. They should use Motorola to prototype new features.
  • Mobile payment – going to be very difficult to make money on it
  • Mobile advertising – even Google isn’t sure how much they are actually going to make on mobile advertising
  • Telco marketing is stale – based on device and price – nothing else. No innovation.
  • What’s unique about the customer experience with operators? Nothing. What about letting people change phone every 6 months?
  • Start with a community and the needs of that community.
  • A billion smartphones in 2013 and all will be co-branded with an internet company with deep integration [I guess Twitter is doing this with Apple now]

Stuart Arnott – The Power of One Pitch

  • The problem – I’m better connected to people I lost touch with over the years than the people I really care about
  • Started using digital photo frames to send photos in real-time. Connected to picture feeds with captions and linked to a calendar. You can include apps including weather and Facebook etc.
  • A way of staying in touch with people that live on their own or who are ill or infirm
  • www.mindings.com

Yosi Taguri - Launching a Mad idea – lessons from the Pah! iPhone app

  • “When I started my first company I fucked up!”
  • [This guy has plenty of energy!]
  • Talking about he was messed around by WPP and Google from an investment standpoint
  • Hard to live blog this, but he’s sharing lots of videos of people playing the Pah game
  • 1.5m YouTube views led to 2.5m game plays
  • Their measure of success? The number of shouts of Pah! 63m shouts! (they also made $60,000). Now they have made $250,000 developing similar apps for others
  • What did I learn from all this? If you make cool things, people will buy it. China has the biggest piracy but they also generate the most money from downloads. get the pricing structure right.
  • “If you have an idea and you are not doing it, you are stupid and ugly!”

Media panel with Charles Arthur - The shift to the Power of One – Stuart Dredge, Ewan McLoed, Tim Green

  • CA – everything these days is the media’s fault! Why does the media write about things? Why does it write about things?
  • How do you decide what to write about?
  • SD – I spend a long time trying to find the interesting stuff from all the other stuff out there
  • What makes something interesting?
  • SD – often it is a gut feel – it just stands out. It seems new, interesting, entertaining
  • TG – it is impossible to write about everything. So we have to focus on things that do things differently
  • EM – use my first name, read my site, check what I’m writing about
  • CA – It’s not about are you a big company, it’s more about if what you trying to do is different or interesting
  • SD – There is a lot of bullshit at the moment. Often it is the low key pitches that are the best – don’t over PR it
  • CA – first it was “we’ve got a website” that was news, then it was “we’ve got VC funding” that was news but then it stops being new
  • CA – often more sceptical if a company is making lots of noise, professional PR
  • CA – how important actually is journalism? Angry Birds wasn’t successful because it got lots of good press
  • What do you write about?
  • SD – it’s got to be about the readers. At the moment more readers have iPhones than Android but that will change in the next year
  • TG – it’s a self selecting audience as well as selective journalists
  • Is the future HTML5?
  • TG – a lot of this is about distribution. Better to go straight to the source, so web apps are clearly going to be important. The other angle to look at is perception and reality but how many apps do we all actually use on a regular basis?
  • EM – if you require high performance – games etc. – then clearly you need native apps but for everything else, HTML5 is the future. I think we’ll see 95-99% web app.
  • SD – as a consumer I don’t really care – I’ll go for what I want/need where I can get it and if it works then that’s all that matters. How you pay for stuff is interesting too with Facebook Credits now coming to the web.

David McCandless - Trends in tech start ups, the data you need to see

  • Title of presentation is ‘information is beautiful‘
  • Billions and trillions – it is impossible to get your head around them – made a visualisation
  • Do horoscopes all just say the same thing?
  • The story is often the journey through the data – this is data journalism
  • Never been to design school and have never been trained – only been designing very recently – had an innate design sense which was absorbed by working through media
  • We are all visualisers – we all expect data to be visual these days. Our eyes are always looking for patterns – it is the language of the eye combined with the language of the mind.
  • Who is suing whom in telecoms
  • Visualisations and infographics are a new kind of camera – Racist Profiling
  • David has a book of his infographics - http://www.davidmccandless.com/books/
  • Snake Oil visualisation app
  • Spend time curating your data and it becomes an asset

Sam Ramji - API’s are The Power of One companies secret weapon – @sramji

UPDATE – slides are here

  • Think about Darwin’s Finches and evolution
  • In the past business went from direct to indirect and the web is going through the same, that is why APIs are important
  • For successful companies 80% of traffic will come from beyond the browser, in a few years it will be 100%
  • Everyone has to play in the world the winners make – the 80:20 rule
  • In the world of APIs, the 80:20 rules often becomes to 99:1
  • Current environmental pressures – social, mobile and cloud – they can all come together
  • You can’t build new Facebooks or Twitters but you need to access them through APIs
  • Change agency – what is so damn wrong with the current model? I like it and I understand it – people fear the unknown
  • You need to be as close as possible to the problem you are trying to solve
  • Software is eating the world – Marc Andreessen
  • Bake your business model into your API

Jason Calacanis - Start your own tech business, you need attitude

This should be interesting. I’ve always had a bit love/hate with him but, whatever he is, he’s always engaging!

  • We live in fascinating times
  • He is a technological optimist – everything can be solved by technology
  • e.g. turning roads into solar panels to solve energy problems
  • The feature film Forks Over Knives examines the profound claim that most, if not all, of the degenerative diseases that afflict us can be controlled
  • The China Study details the connection between nutrition and heart disease, diabetes and cancer
  • There are more prescriptions for depression in the US as there are people
  • [He insists all this is coming back to tech and startups!]
  • Being an entrepreneur is painful and it is going to be depressing. You get through that depression by focusing on the end goal and getting excited [a good angel investor is really a therapist!]
  • Jason’s new book is called “A broken clock is right twice a day”
  • If your chance of winning is one in ten, have ten startups!
  • Key rule = create, don’t wait
  • Don’t worry if its not perfect, iterate
  • Ten years ago the cost of setting up a web startup was huge, now it isn’t – think what existed ten years ago
  • What do winners do? Stick with it and survive
  • We are the last generation that will remember when the internet didn’t exist
  • The problem with startups is too many people aren’t sticking with it - Steve Jobs quote to end the session

If you’re going to use social media, make sure you use it to be social!

As you may have picked up already today, we have released our second report investigating how some of the UK’s leading technology companies are using social media. You can download it here.

For the second year in a row, we found that UK technology companies are missing out on the potential of social media by not being social and failing to use these new channels to engage with their audiences.

Only 31% of brands with a Facebook account used it to engage with users and, of those that used Twitter, only 14% of tweets were replies and retweets. When it came to the companies that had a blog, only 20% received comments and only one company took the trouble to reply to comments received.

In the study, we took the 2010 Deloitte Fast Tech 50 – a list of the UK’s 50 fastest growing technology companies and benchmarked their social media activity.

Facebook for B2B is on the rise

One of the most interesting findings this year was that the use of Facebook amongst B2B companies has skyrocketed in the last 12 months with 70% of B2B companies on the platform compared to just 40% previously. Linkedin was still the most popular network used overall (92%), followed by Twitter (80%). YouTube remained the least popular for the second year running (44%). Despite the increase in adoption, most companies were still only using these channels for ‘push’ marketing techniques with 65% of companies with a Facebook page using it for one way communications and 96% of blogs simply broadcasting article and news content without inviting responses.

B2B v B2C

As might be expected, B2C brands in the study were far more likely to engage with users than B2B companies. Of the B2C companies with a Facebook page, 63% used it to engage with consumers compared to just 22% of B2B companies. And, while the percentage of B2B tweets that were replies was only 7%, B2C rated much higher (35%).

Tech companies were also still failing to effectively integrate social media channels with their website. Only 58% of companies in the study had social media links on their homepage despite over 90% of companies having at least one social media site. Half of companies linked Twitter from their homepage, but only 14% linked to a YouTube page or blog.

It’s no longer whether you use it, it’s how you use it

This matches what we’ve found in the last year when speaking to tech companies about social media PR. Whereas a few years ago much of the conversation was about whether tech brands should be using social media. These days, most companies know that they have to get in on the social media act, but are still unsure how to go about it. I predict we’ll see further maturing over the next year, so when version three of the report comes along, maybe we’ll finally see companies using social to be social.

Download ‘How social are you?‘

Originally posted here.

Facebook’s risky new approach to (forced) sharing

True to form, yesterday Facebook rolled out a whole host of new features at its F8 developer conference. The pick of the bunch was a new timeline (see what mine looks like on the right) and closer integration with music and media services. The latter will now be integrated into the platform through social apps.

A central part of this last development is that anything you do on these services – I’ve installed Spotify and the Guardian so far – will be automatically shared on your Facebook profile and through the new Facebook Ticker. This means every track you listen to, every article you read will be shared. The service is opt-out, so most of what you do will be shared automatically.

Selective v. forced sharing

Selective sharing – where you decide what you want to share with others – is how it has always been on the web and there is a lot to commend about this approach. But for Zuckerberg, it is clearly not enough. And, while social media cheerleaders will happily be pumping every Spotify track and Yahoo News article they read in front of their poor friends/subscribers/fans, I suspect the vast majority of Facebook users will be less enthusiastic.

Forced – or what Zuckerberg calls ‘frictionless’ – sharing will bring about a stream of consciousness, pulling in everything you do on the web.

I think there are a number of key problems with this approach that might come back to bite Zuckerberg in the arse:

  • Information overload – an obvious one here, but the increase in the amount of content will merely add to the sense of information overload. Will Facebook’s algorithms be able to effectively pick out the gems (in your eyes) from the tosh?
  • Privacy – Privacy has often been an issue for Facebook and the reason for this seems to lie in the fact that Zuckerberg’s vision – where everything should be seen by everyone – is at odds with what most users want and also how the site was initially constructed. It’s not hard to see how these latest feature changes make privacy harder and harder to control…
  • Lack of curation – but perhaps the most important issue I have with all this is the lack of curation, the lack of quality control. Some of the stuff I listen to on Spotify is awful. After a few seconds I regret listening to it and move onto something else. But my fans on Facebook won’t necessarily know that. Sharing works best for me when people I am linked up with identify something they think is great and actively make a decision to share it with others. This new forced sharing approach seems to overlook this fundamental process. And that is something that, for me, makes sharing less useful.

This is why Google+ could rule the world

Yesterday Google officially rolled Google+ out to the public at large.

And then today, anyone that visits the Google homepage will see a little blue arrow animation pointing them to the Google+ tab on the navigation bar. There is also a link under the search box encouraging searchers to join the network.

Ever since Google+ launched I’ve felt that, if the company put its full weight behind it, then social domination could be theirs.

Google is used for over 400 billion searches a day. Go figure.

This is the first step, I expect more to come….

Is Facebook losing focus?

I’m almost bored of Facebook announcements. There have been so many over the last few weeks it is easy to lose count.

And, if you believe the reports out today, at the company’s F8 Developer conference on Thursday, we are set to see a barrage of new features and tweaks that will move the goalposts yet again.

On the one hand, it is great to see a company like Facebook innovating. I’ve often thought Facebook was slower than some of its competitors to roll out new features. But, much like London buses, this is clearly not the case anymore!

Facebook seriously risks confusing its users. Constant changes to the user interface will be met with mixed reactions (humans just don’t like change, fact), but changes to the fabric of the social network (e.g. subscribe buttons) could be far more serious.

Some of the most effective online businesses out there are the ones that are so simple to use that everything just seems to ‘make sense’. Facebook doesn’t fall into this camp and by adding complexity to complexity, it stands to alienate even its most loyal user base.

Forced to innovate?

Some will claim that Facebook’s ramped up efforts in recent weeks have been a direct response to the beta launch of Google+ (and future-proofing ahead of the Google’s public launch of the service, expected shortly) and a response to continued growth and development over at Twitter.

The changes at Facebook have been so wide ranging that I don’t think they can all be put down to a competitor response, but some developments have possibly been rolled out sooner than initially intended to start the fight back.

Users, users, users

With nearly a billion users, there is clearly no need to start sounding the warning bells yet. Facebook’s key strength still lies in the fact that it has by far the most users and the most active users of any social network out there.

The danger is that by constantly fiddling with the platform, users become confused about what the platform is for and how they should use it.

Too big to fail? Possibly. Too complicated to be useful? We’ll see…

picture credit

Facebook launches a subscribe button & changes the social game again

I do wonder if the guys at Facebook, Twitter and Google have slept at all in the last few months. Only hours ago, in a blog about Twitter’s new analytics product, I mentioned that we are living through an intriguing battle as the three pretenders to the throne compete for supremacy. And for those of us working in the social media PR space, it is truly fascinating.

So I guess it should come as no surprise to find that, today, Facebook has unveiled another landmark change that could alter the way we all use the social network.

Introducing the subscribe button

At a basic level, Facebook’s new ‘subscribe’ button let’s users follow the public updates of anyone on the network without actually being friends with them. As Facebook states in the blog post announcing the service, in the past, users “couldn’t hear directly from people [they're] interested in but don’t know personally—like journalists, artists and political figures.”

Sound familiar? Yes, that’s right, the subscribe button is essentially the equivalent of the follow button on Twitter; Facebook is moving to a more asynchronous model. And, as with Twitter, the number of people ‘subscribing’ to your feed will be displayed on your profile.

There is additional functionality too. When viewing a friend’s profile, the subscribe button will allow you to set certain preferences which will control the updates you get from that person in your news feed. Settings include ‘all updates’, ‘most updates’ and ‘important updates’.

You can enable the subscribe option here.

Public v. private

When Facebook announced the changes to posting updates last month (the addition of privacy settings and location features), it was clear that it was encouraging users to make more of their posts public. This latest move seems to confirm that.

So on the one hand, this could encourage more people to make more of their posts public, but it could also encourage users to think more carefully about their privacy on the network; an issue that Facebook has struggled with in the past.

What does this mean for brands?

Another important question is whether this will have any effect on the ‘Pages’ feature that Facebook has created for companies or businesses.

The simple answer is no, it won’t.

The subscribe feature won’t be available on Pages and is really designed for individuals such as celebrities, journalists or politicians – individuals that have driven a lot of the success Twitter has achieved in recent years.

Facebook has created a handy little table – see right – that lets you see which feature is most appropriate for what you need.

Overly complex?

However, handy tables aside, I can’t help but think we are being bombarded by new Facebook features at the moment. Only yesterday, Facebook rolled out smart lists (incidentally a really nice feature) and it seems that every time I log onto the service, something has changed.

Of course, the subscribe button is totally optional. Facebook will function in exactly the same way that it always has. And one of my concerns with subscribe and with some of the other features that Facebook has introduced recently is that they risk over complicating the network. One of the reasons I believe Twitter has been so successful is that it is so simple to use. Facebook could potentially do with bearing this in mind.

But if Facebook gets it right and if users start embracing these new features, then it could be a good strategic move for the network. Whatever happens, those of us involved in social media PR will be watching how these changes are used very closely. I wonder what tomorrow will bring…

Finally! Twitter unveils analytics tool

Could this be the moment socially-enabled companies and agencies of all types have been waiting for? Very possibly.

Twitter has finally unveiled an official analytics tool – Twitter Web Analytics.

As I have blogged about on many occasions, an official analytics product from Twitter makes so much sense and surely could/will be a key part of the long-promised corporate or paid for accounts the social network has hinted at on many occasions.

So what has Twitter actually revealed? According to the official blog post:

Today we’re announcing Twitter Web Analytics, a tool that helps website owners understand how much traffic they receive from Twitter and the effectiveness of Twitter integrations on their sites. Twitter Web Analytics was driven by the acquisition of BackType, which we announced in July.

Twitter reveals that the product – which will be rolled out to a select few this week – will incorporate the following features:

  • See how Twitter content is being shared around the web
  • Track the amount of traffic from Twitter to a company’s website – including clicks per tweets
  • Measure the effectiveness of ‘official’ Twitter buttons
  • An API allowing third party analytics tools to incorporate this data

Interestingly, the focus here isn’t on content you share through a Twitter account, it’s on how content on your website has been shared, whether or not you share it through your account. It also provides you with a stream of tweets that reference your content, allowing you to easily reply to or take action based on activity.

The blog post reveals that the rest of us should have access to this feature in the “next few weeks”.

Generally, this is a move that should be welcomed. As a tech PR, I have been hoping for some sort of analytics product for ages. Sure, there have been third party tools that claim to do this to differing levels or success and/or accuracy and there are also various different Google analytics hacks that can help provide certain insights. But an official product that can make the most of the entire Twitter firehose is very exciting.

The product was announced at Techcrunch’s Disrupt conference and the publisher has some interesting detail to add on how Twitter analytics will actually work:

When you log in to your designated account, you’ll see a number of metrics including how many Tweets (this includes Tweets of all kinds), across the network include links to your publisher site as well as the number of clicks. You’ll also be able to see the weekly, daily and monthly number of clicks from any Tweet sent from the site via a Tweet button.

…Twitter will also show you all the Tweets that were sent from the Tweet button on your site, as well as any Tweet that was sent with an inbound link to your site. From the analytics platform you can retweet these Tweets as well as respond to these users.Another extremely useful feature is the ability to see the top links by day, week and month by Tweets and clicks. Users can also add more than one website to a dashboard, and sub-domains as well. Additionally, Twitter will show users what the average number of clicks Tweets received within given time periods and well as the percent of Tweets that were generated using the Tweet button.

You can see the full video of the announcement below.

The social media battle is on?

We’re going through an interesting phase in the whole social media sphere at the moment. The launch of Google+ has put the cat amongst the pigeons with Facebook rolling out a series of ‘anything you can do, I can do better’ features over the last few weeks. And Twitter itself announced some impressive user figures this week too.

We are reaching a point at which these social media giants realise now is the time for them to push for supremacy and, while I believe there is plenty of space for co-habitation, that doesn’t stop these networks from competing for users and column inches.

The fact that Facebook has provided an insight/analytics product for some time is a case in point here. Again, as I have blogged about on several occasions, businesses remain the golden bullet for many social networks when it comes to monetisation. The rumours that Twitter was languishing in no-mans’s land for a time seems to hold some sway. But since Dick Costolo took over late last year, the company seems to have assumed greater commercial, marketing and product savvy.

So is this the start of a greater focus on providing the millions of businesses that use Twitter on a daily basis with greater tools to help them succeed on social media? As a tech PR, I hope so.

 

Originally posted at EML Wildfire Tech PR

FT ditches iOS apps – more publishers to follow?

The news last week that the FT is to remove its apps from the Apple app store is the latest episode in the ongoing saga surrounding media publishers and their digital content strategies.

If you’ve missed the story so far, then what you need to know is that Apple, in February, changed the rules and forced publishers to run subscription services for any apps on the platform through its in-app purchasing function.

The catch here is that Apple takes 30% of all monies received through in-app purchases. And, as you can imagine, publishers like the FT aren’t very happy about this.

First of many?

The FT has taken matters into its own hands and has pulled its apps from the store and has created a new web-based app for the iPhone and iPad instead. A version for Android will be available soon.

And others will possibly follow suit. Amazon launched a web version of its Kindle iOS app in the summer and it looks as though the WSJ will soon remove all in-app purchasing options to ensure compliance with Apple’s new rules.

Of course Apple is hoping that the sheer number of users on its devices will persuade publishers that the 30% levy is a necessary evil. However, these moves suggest publishers might not have the same mindset.

The data game

Another key part of this that is often overlooked is the data angle. Another part of Apple’s rule change is that no publisher or app developer can retain information about customers that make in-app purchases. For a company like the FT, this is a massive issue. Acquiring data on subscribers and using this for marketing opportunities is absolutely vital to its entire business model.

The irony here is that Apple could be doing itself out of long term app revenues. There has always been an argument over whether platform specific apps or HTML5 cross-platform apps (like the new FT web-app) will be the future with many, myself included, believing the former is unsustainable and the latter will provide much more flexibility for publishers and users alike. This move by the FT seems to confirm that view, albeit the motives are for slightly different reasons.

Going against the app model

It seems that, if anything, Apple is forcing publishers to look at alternatives that might, ironically, do them out of some of the big revenues they currently enjoy from the app store.

The main arguments against web-based apps are they are often slower, less feature-rich and don’t have offline-reading modes. But with HTML5 technology developing quickly, these could soon be irrelevant.

Of course Apple is unlikely to go down without a fight, especially if more high profile publishers move away from the app store. The FT and Apple have apparently held talks over this issue already with neither seemingly willing to budge at this stage.

This is a fight that has many rounds to come. The eventual winners might be uncertain at this stage, but it is another blow for publishers tirelessly searching for answers to the digital conundrum.

First published on the EML Wildfire tech PR blog

About

This is my story. I've always been fascinated by the internet. My first passion was music and I studied a music degree at Birmingham University. But once graduated I quickly went back to the web working as a digital marketer. I also ran a web startup for a few years. In the need of a new challenge, I turned to the world of PR and now work as an Account Director at EML Wildfire. My interest is primarily looking at how PR professionals can make the most of the web and digital marketing. This blog contains my thoughts and things I find inspirational.

© 2012 Danny Whatmough - Made by me