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

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…

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.

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.

Both Stephen and Fernando demonstrated the beauty of the results that these techniques provide. PR agencies can produce definitive statistics with SEO and PPC campaigns – unequivocal results. Fantastic!

Stephen and Fernando also discussed the complexity of ownership with the group. Eulogy!’s well versed in SEO having completed a number of projects for clients, but Stephen confirmed our fears that the PR industry (and the marketing community at large) is yet to understand the practice.

Five years ago, SEO firmly belonged in the hands of search agencies. Then ad and digital agencies took a bite. And now PR agencies, too? Well, yes of course! It’s editorial. Who else is better placed to write authoritative copy, rich with brand messaging and keywords? SEO sits firmly within the online PR gambit. It amplifies what other marketing channels churn out. It seeds your content all over the shop to encourage people to click, to engage and to talk!

I am committed to working with bodies like the PRCA to carve out a fair share of ownership of online and social media budgets. We’ve seen a big move towards this in the industry. Sure it’s a struggle sometimes, like when clients refuse to acknowledge PR as anything but proof in a paper, but our digital revolution is increasingly inevitable.

We’re working hard to this speed along. As chief exec, it’s my job to drive the agency forward not only in terms of new business but also skills and professional development.We believe PR’s love affair with social media will be a hot and steamy one, and it’s only just begun.

Unless you were under a cloud of volcanic ash (oh, wait…), you’ll have known that last night saw the UK’s first ever leaders’ debate on ITV. The event, despite an Icelandic volcano’s best efforts, has dominated the news agenda across all media platforms for the last week.

Online opinion tracker Tweetminster provided consistently interesting facts throughout proceedings and in the aftermath with regards to interest in the debate on Twitter. Throughout the debate, a staggering 35,483 people tweeted 184,396 times, with an average frequency of 29.06 tweets per second.

To put that into some form of context, that’s fifteen times more tweets than were seen for #askthechancellors and almost triple the volume of tweets posted during BNP leader Nick Griffin’s infamous appearance on Question Time – both of which saw significant surges in interest themselves.

Admittedly, in the context of the entire UK population those figures seem less impressive. However, they still do add to the belief that – in social media circles – the appetite for political consumption is there.

What these debates and the interest around them have demonstrated, is that while social media isn’t a direct replacement for other media, it’s a hugely engaging complement to other platforms.

The observations provided on Twitter, even though much of it was superficially commenting on the state of the leaders’ make up or what they were scribbling on their notes, made the leaders’ debates incredibly exciting.

The TV debate on its own may have made for relentlessly dull viewing (BBC Parliament, anyone?), but Twitter added a whole new dimension, providing an outlet for discussion and amusing insight not just from your average Joe, but from people in power, too. Throughout the debate I was enlightened of the real-time thoughts of Alistair Campbell, the Evening Standard’s deputy political editor Paul Waugh and MPs John Prescott and William Hague.

What other aspect of the media could offer such close insight?

The leaders’ debate was part of a continuing acceptance that engagement in politics means more than simply voting at a ballot box. People are interested and engaged, but just in increasingly complex ways, including social media.

This interest in the leaders’ debates, be it superficial or not, can only be seen as a positive. Millions of people tuned in to the debate on TV and thousands of those cared enough to express some form of opinion. In the world of low voter-turnouts and sentiment for politicians being at its lowest ebb, that can only be a good thing.

Since Barack Obama embraced social networking as one of the core foundations of his 2008 Presidential campaign, the medium has been championed as the great new form of political engagement. It’s not difficult to see why.

Social networks such as Twitter offer politicians a unique opportunity to interact with their electorate on a mutually fair platform on a regular basis. For example, UK politicians like Kerry McCarthy MP, Dan Hannan MEP and even John Prescott MP have seen the virtues of social media in creating a dialogue with their constituents.

Blogging, too, has become a growing political force. A brief look at services such as Social Media Affairs, which catalogues political blogs, demonstrates the growing list of increasingly influential voices online, such as Iain Dale and Guido Fawkes.

Social media has also emphatically demonstrated how it can bring cohesion to a social movement. Whether it has been to tell a company that what it’s doing is wrong, to protest against someone’s actions, or even to protest against Governments, platforms such as Twitter have provided ‘average Joe’ with a phenomenal vehicle for uniting behind a common cause.

Obama has more than 2.7 million followers on Twitter, while the use of his website, MyBarackObama.com, to organise support is well documented. It helped to cement his placement as a grassroots candidate during his 2008 election, as well as encouraging individuals to become directly involved in Obama’s campaign.

It’s a point that brands should take note of. The level of engagement that enveloped Obama’s supporters provided them with an investment in the campaign and as such they went that extra mile, providing millions of fundraising dollars and eventually elevating Obama to the White House.

By engaging with their customers, brands could build a similarly loyal group of advocates who they can rely upon to champion their brand which, in the current competitive economic climate, could be vital to a company’s survival.

There are immediate digital opportunities which mirror those in print (especially when we consider most print titles have either an online version, or that so many have migrated online completely), but it would be underselling the potential to simply suggest that everything we do offline simply translates online.  Instead the scope of opportunity presents us with a much more dynamic and exciting B2B digital toolkit, offering not only specific digital techniques, but a new level of immediacy and interactivity which B2B PR may have lacked in the past.

At Eulogy! we’re marching forward with the development of our B2B digital approach.  Since embarking on this process we’ve discovered some of what works, some of what doesn’t, but also realised that the journey is one of constant evolution.  Specific techniques may be as simple as embracing social media-based opportunities, in order to manage a client’s reputation online and ensure that they’re part of pertinent discussions.  Others are more advanced; from blogger relations, using platforms like Facebook and Twitter, and investigating multimedia PR delivery.  Above all we’re recognising how dialogue and response work together in this new digital landscape, enabling us to manage reputation, promote brands and their products, services and values, and ultimately create more dynamic and exciting PR strategies.

Of course, not everything will work for everyone, and there’s still much more to develop and explore.  For us, the challenge comes not in identifying these exciting opportunities, but in convincing clients and prospects of the value of making an ongoing investment in digital PR.  Measurement is crucial, but delivering the right kind of measurement, especially when the tactics are so new and varied, isn’t easy; but we’re working on it!

It’s a fair point. Being a blogger does take some effort, but the way that I look at it, the benefits far outweigh any negatives.  The way to do it is to find the right balance between your personal and professional life.

I currently have two blogs: one about social media and PR, and one about food and restaurants in London.  They’re opposite ends of the spectrum, but they have both helped me in ways I couldn’t have imagined back at the beginning.

My PR and social media site, Fake Plastic Noodles, is the first blog I started, and tends to lean more toward the professional side.  I did so because I wanted to find a job in London, wanted to make connections and really establish myself in the UK PR industry.  Incidentally, it worked. I firmly believe that a huge reason I’m here right now is because of my blog. This is because many agencies and clients understand that while everyone in PR is talking the social media talk, not all of them can walk the walk.  If you interview for a PR position or pitch to prospective clients who you know understand the online space, you need to prove it. Twitter is fabulous for establishing an online presence too, but blogging really helps you expound on your ideas.

My food blog on the other hand is something I do simply for intrinsic value. I finally started om nom London this past summer after months of questioning whether or not I’d have time to start a whole new site.

It’s proved to be the right decision.  It keeps me sane to just write about things that *I* like to do. I was a keen food photographer already, so food blogging just seemed a perfect fit.  Plus, it’s nice to write about something that’s not my job. Shocking, I know.

I won’t lie, sometimes it’s tough to devote enough time to both, but having a system in place of what I want to post about and when is how I’ve been able to juggle it all.  Being a blogger is something that is part of my life that I’m not sure I’d ever want to give up. No matter what, I’ll make time.

The new rules say that anyone endorsing a product must give full disclosure about what he or she received – if anything – in compensation for the endorsement or else face fines up to $11,000 (£6,910).

Oddly enough, an attorney for several advertising groups in the States said this ruling is the ‘worst fears of businesses come true’.  That seems a bit of an overreaction to me.  It won’t be a surprise to people that celebs are paid to endorse products (or even lie about them), and most bloggers I know already do disclose the terms in which they’re either endorsing or reviewing a product, i.e. So-and-so asked me to review, I wasn’t paid for this post, etc.

I’m curious to hear what other bloggers think, but my hunch is that we spend so much time trying to prove that we haven’t sold out that this ruling (should it ever make its way across the pond) won’t change very much at all.