But will this always be the case?

Even if one network is theoretically easier, the challenge has always been how you prevent your not-so-employment-friendly Facebook persona from becoming a scary CV (even though bits of it could actually represent a decent example of where you sit within your working network).

A recent NY Times piece (http://nyti.ms/yv3aqx) brought a few new social media tools to my attention that I think solve that common question: How can you bring LinkedIn’s ethos of professionalism and career focus to Facebook? Can there be a common ground (as the article suggests) between the overused sentiments that Facebook is for fun and LinkedIn is for professional purposes?

BranchOut and Be Known essentially do what LinkedIn do, but display what you want perspective employers to see and filtering your profile from what you do not. So how do they shape up?

BranchOut (http://branchout.com/)

BranchOut is a professional network itself. When you visit a BranchOut profile page, it immediately doesn’t look anything like a Facebook profile. The clean display and simple layout make it easy to navigate, and it’s easy to find people who you have professional relationships with. By importing your details, it gives the impression of an independent outlet, without you having to worry about keeping different profiles updated.

However, networking is slightly stymied by having to ask to make a connection with someone in order to see their network, taking the discretion away from the viewer, and so in a way, defeating the purpose. None the less, it is still a useful tool, and since it is retained within the Facebook platform, makes it easy to maintain.

Be Known (https://apps.facebook.com/beknown/)

Sitting within the regular Facebook template, this app immediately feels like it’s just a tab on your profile. It is as much part of Facebook as your photos and notes. While you are expected to input a certain level of background information, it doesn’t feel that much different from adjusting the privacy setting on your profile page. (Which does in itself raise a question: Couldn’t this whole debate be settled by adjusting those privacy settings, and using some of your better judgment and remove those tags of those infamous photos from Ibiza?)

And just in case it’s not you looking to network on Facebook, there are a few useful Facebook recruitment apps for your friends.

Hire My Friend (https://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=328891100642)

Promote your Friends who are job searching to your other Facebook Friends with the Hire My Friend Facebook App. You can include a brief description of their skills and a link to their LinkedIn Profile.

CareerFriend (https://apps.facebook.com/insidecareerinfo/)

CareerFriend uses your Facebook friends’ employment information to find potential job opportunities within your network. After connecting with your Facebook login information, CareerFriend creates a report that includes your friends’ employers, occupations, and reviews of related careers.

Of course it does raise the question, is the whole exercise even necessary? Maybe it’s better to keep your personal and your professional profiles separate? While the line between the two can often be blurred, how often do opportunities come up through a friend of a friend?

David Macnamara

Anyone even vaguely familiar with blogging communities will know that there are vast numbers of talented, eloquent would-be journalists out there churning out content that rivals much contained within the mainstream press. And the papers do acknowledge this (to a degree), with opportunities for freelance comment through their own blogs. The Guardian is just one example of a paper utilising this talent pool to provide informative and entertaining blogs on a plethora of subjects. But editorial styles must still be conformed to, and one can assume that getting the opportunity to write for these papers isn’t available to most online writers, no matter how talented.

The Huffington Post, on the other hand, has over 9,000 bloggers to generate all of its news and opinion pieces (suitably, that stat was found using Wikipedia). With such a wide range of contributors, the content can’t fail to be stimulating and engaging, with readers actively encouraged to join the debate and air their views. Currently, the UK edition has contributors that number “well into three figures” and this is likely to increase. Plans for celebrity writers will almost certainly be in the pipeline, if the US version is anything to go by.

Those championing paid-for-news should be nervous. The Huffington Post gets more views in the US than The New York Times site, and this could well happen over here as well – it all comes down to content. The well worn adage ‘content is king’ still applies, and for The Huffington Post UK it is crucial – with good content comes readers. The Times has a pay-wall, The Telegraph is (reportedly) considering one, and a shift towards online content for The Guardian (a step in the pay-wall direction?) all points to online being the place for news in the future. And if the Huffington Post rivals these papers in terms of editorial and reporting quality, would you use an outlet that had a pay-wall or just get your news for free?

With plans for 11 other country specific editions, this may be the beginning of a different breed of news generation and consumption. How will the established order in the media industry – and PR industry – react to a brand new outlet? Will it be accepted? Criticised? Or just ignored? Watch this space.

This time however, direct marketers were ready. The industry comprising 280,000 jobs, the industry which contributes £27bn to the economy, the industry that created Tesco Clubcard joined together under the DMA and took a stand and let it’s voice be heard. And what a roar it made! Using social media and the hashtag #panoramamail debate whizzed round twitter; 574 tweets were logged reaching 48,000 people.  Eulogy! spent much of Monday seeding the hashtag and encouraging industry members, thought leaders and consumers to join the conversation whilst the programme aired. And judging by the buzz, the industry’s first foray into social media self defence was a resounding success. We felt proud to represent the industry.

This whole affair, to coin a phrase, has left football fans around the country chuckling away and the reputation of one of British football’s greats in tatters. But it shows that all the money in the world cannot buy you good public relations support.

Giggs has clearly been badly advised. His team of legal and public relations advisors have taken on too much and lost it all in the eyes of the public. And it could have been so different if he hadn’t been so desperate to cover this up. In the days of Twitter and social media, there was only going to be one winner. And that was the masses.

Of course hindsight is easy. But Giggs had the reputation among sports fans and the media alike that he was a saint. A respected winner. Let’s get away from the stupidity of his indiscretion; after all, he’s a footballer and they all do it. What should he have done? He should have taken the likely one hit – a front page of the News of the World – with people up and down the country thinking something along the lines of ‘what a load of rubbish, as if Giggsy would do that’. It would have been forgotten the next day, no-one would have taken it seriously and he’d be able to brush it off. Whether he should be able to or not is another matter, but that’s what likely would have happened.

This whole case sets a precedent. Can newspapers outside of UK jurisdiction now just out a case like this and then let the internet do the rest? After all, Twitter went after this like vultures, in a mob-like manner. But I am sure that the Sunday Herald doesn’t care too much – reports suggest that they had over 1 million views on Sunday to their website when they broke the story (even though it wasn’t even covered online) and almost 2 million views on Monday as the story started to really unfold. Apparently, their online readership grew 220%. With these kinds of figures, plus the rise in print circulation from the day itself, it is unlikely to deter other papers in the future.

And now? Well, he’s the man who tried to take on Twitter. He’s the man who tried desperately to block it. He’s the man who cannot deny it. And he’s the man who stands here today with a reputation in tatters, a laughing stock, and as he approaches the end of his career, something that he’s likely to be remembered for. It could have been so different.

I don’t really care about footballer’s private lives; it doesn’t really interest me and he’s a complete idiot for doing what he did. But I, like so many others, now find it pretty funny. I’m particularly enjoying ribbing our resident Man Utd fan here in the office who’s devastated that her hero has been revealed as a love cheat. He’ll probably score the winner on Saturday night at Wembley. It might be the last time he scores away from home though.

Much has been said about the inevitable impact that Twitter and Facebook have had on our social lives (including this interesting piece from Gord Hotchkiss), but it really is incredible how strong the urge is to reach for the nearest mobile device when consuming media which once upon a time, used to be enough all on its own.  Take Masterchef, for example. I love Masterchef, as my colleagues and family will tell you, proven by my bookshelves groaning with cookbooks and my constant droning about how much I love Dhruv Baker, last year’s winner. However, when the long-awaited new series started last week, I spent so much time tweeting about how much I disliked the new format and finding out through Twitter / Facebook what everyone else thought, that I actually missed over half the programme.  When I tuned in again the next night, I forced myself to put the Blackberry down (well, actually, I was forced to because the rollerball broke), I realised that I actually loved the new format and I’d missed some cracking dishes the night before.

It’s not just about television, either.  As Hotchkiss rightly points out, we’ve now got to a point where social networking is starting to overshadow social interaction.  And I mean basic conversations with our friends and families.  I heard a client talking the other day about her two teenage children, who will sit on the sofa chatting to their friends for hours.  ‘How perfectly normal’, I hear you cry.  But these teenagers were not chatting in the verbal sense.  They were writing on each other’s Facebook walls. How sad that something so full of potential and innovation has turned into something which actually starts to negate all that it stood for in the first place: the ability to communicate.

So the moral of the story is that although it’s fantastic that we now have a medium, literally at our fingertips, with which to share and express opinions and pure joy about the programmes we love and the world around us, maybe it’s time we all gave in to the broken rollerball once in a while?  As my husband loves to tell me, maybe we all need to “stop talking about it and flipping watch it!!” And maybe even talk to each other once in a while?  Verbally?  Now there’s a thought…

Features Editor Cathy Bussey’s well balanced piece attempts to bring to the surface tensions which have been bubbling away for the last few years between the creative communications sectors that have up until now had fairly clearly laid out stalls which defined their existence. The debate in PR Week puts the three would-be contenders into a boxing ring to see which one emerges the victor.

Whoever it is that surfaces from the final round still standing and with their bloody nose intact will undoubtedly believe that they rightfully deserve to wear the social media crown. The truth of the matter is that they will be wrong: there are no crowns to wear -only matching sets of badges to be worn by all.

Firstly, the idea of any agency owning a channel is laughable and dare I say a little bit arrogant. An agency’s role is not to ‘own’ but to support through expertise and consultancy. Chris Lake, Director of Innovation at Econsultancy echoes this very sentiment in a post he recently wrote on the Econsultancy blog:

“I firmly believe that a company’s social media strategy should be owned and managed by the company itself, rather than by external agencies.”

Those that submit to the notion that social media can readily be claimed in its totality as belonging to the domain of PR, advertising or the newly emerging digital sector clearly do not understand the scope, complexity or potential of social media channels.

Take the telephone, for example. It would be extremely bizarre to restrict its usage to just members the PR team, or have a ‘phone call strategy’ defined by an external marketing agency. It would be equally unlikely that a brand’s digital marketing agency would have the right to decide how the wider company uses email as a communications tool? Social media: Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr… they’re all just tools (with varying degrees of sophistication) that serve to meet multiple needs.

Only when marketers start viewing social media platforms in this way, as facilitators which address multiple needs across numerous departments (comms, marketing, branding, customer services, corporate reputation, stakeholder management, research and development) will the ownership debate be replaced by a discussion that focuses around an integrated approach to social media.

At Onlinefire, whilst we’re often seen as a ‘social media agency’, we actually prefer to work collaboratively with clients and their agencies to allocate defined roles for social media activation. In truth, we’re much more than a social media agency; we’re a creative online communications agency with PR at our heart. Social media is our channel of choice but much of what we do for our clients draws upon multiple marketing touch-points from experiential to events to traditional news generation – regularly drawing upon the skills of the wider Eulogy! Group. It’s no accident that this blog has ended up being posted on the Eulogy! site. It’s all about integration, don’t you know!?

• We don’t create flash iPad apps, but we work with digital agencies that do.
• We don’t do search engine pay-per-click campaigns, but we work with many great companies that can do these (and do them really well).
• Onlinefire isn’t a specialist in organising promoted tweets but we can get your brand trending on Twitter whilst a quality media buying specialist sorts out your specific Twitter ads.

I’m not suggesting that there isn’t a clear role for PR in social media. In fact, us PRs have traditionally been the gatekeepers of the brand conversation and as such are in a good place to see the potential opportunities that social media offers us. Admittedly the conversation has always been with identifiable mid-point influencers (media, stakeholders, analysts, etc.) but new online tools have allowed us to take this dialogue direct to consumers. Never before have communicators ever been able to have this level of proximity to our end users and this is a gift that the PR industry should embrace rather than shy away from.

Advertisers on the other hand have always been on the receiving end of huge budgets and as such have been able to create truly great pieces of branded content which inspire talkability. However even small advertising budgets on social media platforms can reap great rewards. Executed correctly, Facebook’s social ads can deliver amazing results for the right campaign due to its pinpoint targeting capabilities. This is probably still very much the domain of the media buying agency but the ease of which brands can manage these social ads makes it more difficult for some unscrupulous agencies to play the smoke and mirrors game with their clients. And Amen to that!

Agencies which have previously taken great pride in dining at the top-table with their clients have been forced to reassess their offering in light of direct to consumer alternatives that social media has provided the industry.

Self-defined digital agencies are currently the best equipped to advise and build social apps and widgets which add an extra layer of usability to social networks. This technical knowledge is something that most PR / social media agencies currently do not offer nor would they probably every want to.

So the content versus conversation divide still exists to some extent but for how long?

Huff and Puff…

Three Little Pigs

Remember the story of the three pigs? They all set about making separate houses for themselves. Imagine that instead of each having sticks, straw and bricks respectively, one had just cement, another had a spade to dig the foundations with and the third pig had just bricks.

Individually, neither would be able to build anything resembling a solid structure but collectively, they each bring a different and vital quality needed in the construction of a robust home. Replace ‘pigs’ with marketing agencies (perhaps this doesn’t require too much of a stretch of the imagination) and substitute the act of building a house with the objective of contributing to a successful social media campaign – and that’s where we find ourselves today; everyone working in collaboration to build something that ultimately benefits all parties to serve a larger purpose.

360-degree Implementation

A few years ago when Eurostar were being held up as an example of a brand being overly myopic in its approach to social media comms, few agencies acknowledged the lessons that clearly needed to be learnt from the fall-out. Having appointed a social media specialist agency to carry out a (pretty well-executed) sales campaign on Twitter, Eurostar hadn’t factored in the other internal departments that may need to use the platform in the future. So, when poor weather conditions meant that many passengers were left stranded at Christmas without any information advising them on their options, many turned to Twitter only to be met with a wall of deafening silence.

I remember being invited on to Channel 4 news to comment on how the brand misread its customer’s social media requirements. At the time, I seem to remember a lot of focus being placed on the channel and none on the message itself. Sure, there were some cultural learnings for Eurostar to be gained but any criticism of their trial Twitter campaign merely deflected attention from the real problem which was Eurostar’s inability to communicate with its customers in a time of need.

In this situation, it was clear that the in-house team were not equipped to deal with social media as a 360-degree comms channel and that a specialist social media agency were reluctantly handed ‘ownership’ of Twitter in its entirety wheras in reality they were only allowed responsibility for a small campaign area. The danger of ownership being taken outside of the in-house team becomes apparent when the platform overlaps with other departments’ remits as happened in the case of Eurostar.

Therefore, media ownership (social or traditional) should always remain with the brand gate-keeper (i.e. the in-house marketing team) and not on the agency side. Only by having centralised ownership, can social media be divided accordingly between various internal business groups with weighting distributed in an appropriate fashion that reflects needs and not historical budgets.

Aim for the stars…

The situation reminds me somewhat of the Space and Moon Races which took place between the USA and the then Soviet Union in the mid to late twentieth century where two politically opposed forces fought a very global battle to attain technological and ideological superiority within space exploration. A key marker within this political era was fixed on which would be the first nation to set foot on the moon. After billions of dollars, numerous fatalities and a plethora of disasters on both sides the USA emerged as being the first nation to have representatives step foot on the moon.

The flag was placed, the video images beamed back to the world below and now, over fifty years on, as the Star Spangled Banner continues to fly in solitude on a windless moon are we able to say that the USA managed to claim ‘ownership’ of the moon? The answer is almost certainly no.

One small step for social media

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But then the phenomenon of twitter quickly came into the consciousness of footballers, and suddenly put a little dent into this vast gulf. Players could no longer fall asleep on the coach to a game without the picture being posted up by a cheeky teammate. Pictures of players relaxing and chilling out together doing things that the regular football fan does, helped to show the human side of these highly paid celebrities for the first time in years.

We all envy their lifestyle; get up late, pop along for training in the morning, and then go home and play their team-mates online at FIFA11. But twitter has helped create a more attainable and attractive personality for certain Premiership footballers. They seem, on the whole, to be relatively normal people who just happen to be famous and well paid footballers at the same time. Of course there are some players who write a load of absolute codswallop, but many players, particularly some of your high profile candidates, seem to engage with their fans in a way that is not controlled by their agents. It has even become a medium for some to apologise to their fans for a poor performance, something unheard of over the last few years as egos and salaries grew out of control.

Finally, football fans who shell out vast amounts of money to follow their team have started to feel in touch with their heroes again. And that can’t be a bad thing, unless you’re the suits at the archaic Football Association who got a little uptight at a Liverpool player mocking a referee through a tweet.

So what’s the conclusion for us? It harks back to the old social media notion of tangibility. Twitter, in particular, is an ideal platform for brands to create a personality and identity for themselves, and truly engage with their customers. And footballers are doing just that; for so long untouchable and unreachable, fans can now see the human side of their heroes.

If brands use and manage Twitter in the right way, they can create a brand personality and connect with their target consumer audiences, just as footballers are. Some brands are doing this well – Gatwick Airport for example, during the snow. Regular updates, prompt and quick personal responses and a wealth of information helped travellers stay in touch with developments as the snow took over.  They bridged the gap by showing real personality.. , engaging with consumers in a human way. Do Goliath brands need to transform themselves into many different Davids?  We can’t all have the appeal of Beckham, but we can learn a few tricks from his fellow team-mates.

From what the Eulogites can gather, the founders of Quora looked at Twitter and realised a significant percentage of tweets were people asking questions. So they got to thinking about taking this away from the Twitter platform and providing a space where users can build up a network around various subjects and position the question to a more targeted audience. So far, so on-trend –marketing is heading towards an era of personalised messaging that is aimed at carefully segmented audiences.  So the general business proposition seems to be accurate.

Founded by two former Facebook employees (note the invite to link Quora with FB on the homepage) in California, Quora has been steadily feeding a growing obsession over the last few months. It is now in full access mode (after a stint as invite only). Simply put, it is a Q&A platform that is created, edited and organised by its users.

Sound familiar? Well it is different to Wikipedia, apparently. Namely its ability to follow topics and attract reputable users – they are confident that the questioners can trust the opinions of the answerers. Quora has coined the phrase ‘continually improving’, in that once one question has been answered, the page continues to be developed into a stronger and more useful resource – with a narrower focus we can assume. Interestingly, there is no requirement for a neutral point-of-view (like Wikipedia), but a desire for some consensus…between both masterminds and laymen. How refreshing. 

As far as we can tell, contributors aren’t paid for their knowledge. If you are a cynic, this might beg the question of their validity. That is, invariably, the better informed you are, the busier you are and the more likely you might demand payment. But if Quora fulfils its aims and is indeed shared and spread across other social networks, then the revenue potential for experts thus increases. There will be some aspect of editing – by trained individuals who can navigate their way through the quagmire that is libel law. But censorship will be kept at a minimum as much as possible. Busybodies can also amend and edit content as they see fit.

What does all this mean for PRs and marketers? Well the general sentiment is that it actually has mass appeal, by dovetailing with Twitter and Facebook – thus reducing social networkers own network management time. It also nicely hones in on target audiences who are interested in specialist subjects (linked to a relatively sophisticated search function) and offers geeks – and gleeks! – the chance to interact with likeminded users. The blog-like facility may end up in client’s coverage packs and could aid natural search, even complement news aggregation.

However, PRs will need to take an active involvement – we’ll need to be on there, monitoring, waiting patiently for updates. It will also be good for assessing our spokespeople’s competition and another way of seeing who is talking about what. Be aware that Quora users are expected to use their real identity when answering questions, so transparency remains key.

Overall, people seem unanimous in their intrigue with Quora, if not united in their praise. Seasoned social network observers are already asking about the iPhone app – apparently it’s on its way. The mobile site is already live. 

I found out that Quora is named Quora because a group of people coming together and reaching a consensus is a quorum. Apparently it’s got nothing to do with the new Tron character. But the highlight of my Quora-tive research was this Tweet:

http://twitter.com/rhodri
I joined Quora and now I’m a member and people are following me and I’m following them and I don’t know what’s going on and want my mummy.

I’m going to come right out and say it: I have always thought Foursquare as kind of creepy, and with the introduction of Facebook Places in the States last week, I’m a tad worried LBS (or, Location-based Shouting, as I’m going to start to call it) is going to get out of hand.  It’s not that I don’t care if you’re at Kew Gardens or Polpo or All Star Lanes, it’s just that I’m sure everyone in the world doesn’t have to be privy to that information as well. I consider myself to be trustworthy – others… I’m not so sure.

You may remember the Please Rob Me campaign started earlier this year by Netherlands-based creatives Frank Groeneveld, Barry Borsboom and Boy van Amstel. It brought to the attention the fact that if you are checking in and announcing publically all the places in the world you are, it leaves wide open, the one place you aren’t…home, which could potentially leave you vulnerable to burglaries. The campaign gained moderate success, but I think it didn’t touch enough on one point – even telling people where you are currently can be dangerous.

I would hope those with stalkers and evil exes wouldn’t use the location-based services, but you never know.  If you’re posting your current whereabouts, is that not an invitation itself to be mugged?

While brands are using LBS to an advantage, I worry about consumers’ eagerness to share, and for what purpose?  Someone tweeting that they’re working late from the Starbucks on Tottenham Court Road may get a free coffee every once in a while, but they could also be leaving themselves open to having their laptop, Blackberry and iPad pinched on the way out.

Or perhaps, I’m over reacting?  What are your thoughts on ‘checking in’?

Through its various departments online, the Coalition Government had issued a call to action to the general public, to give its policy suggestions on areas such as the NHS, pensions and capital gains tax.

Following 9,500 responses, the Government decided to act on none of them, and issued their policy unchanged. On paper it doesn’t look good and, if we’re honest, a bit pointless.

Simon Burall, director of Involve, a group advising bodies on consultation, told The Guardian: “You have to give the government some credit for trying to do this, but badly designed consultations like this are worse than no consultations at all.

“They diminish trust and reduce the prospect that people will engage again.”

In many respects, he’s got a point. It’s both exciting and commendable that the Government is even considering crowdsourcing as a form of policy formation and surely takes the forays into social media for politics in the UK a step further. In addition to the participation and conversation online around politics, this is a clear sign that the Government is considering the Internet as a legitimate avenue for ideas.

However, as Simon says, it also seems hollow that the Government has failed to act on even just one of the 9,500 suggestions. I know we’re not well versed in the bureaucratic notions of policy making in Westminster, but surely one of 9,500, clearly politically-interested people (hell, if they’re participating in policy crowdsourcing, they must be) suggested a goodun’?!

I don’t believe though, like Simon says, that this episode will diminish trust in the Government, nor that it will reduce the prospect that people will engage again. Not significantly, anyway. Let’s face it – as it stands, the Government and indeed politics in general isn’t held in the highest esteem and considering we have a say effectively one every five years and see little change off the back of it, we’ve become quite accustomed to not being heard.

So let’s see the positives in this. The Government has not just acknowledged the presence of, but indulged in (albeit half-heartedly) crowdsourcing. Who’da thunk it? And not just indulged in it, but indulged in it as a prospective avenue for policy creation.

That, my friends, is progress. Not quite change, but progress nonetheless.