PR FROM THE BEACH

Seven handy hints for hashtag help

Hashtags are interesting things - one minute they look cute, cuddly and amusing and the next they roar into life, turn around and bite you. I thought this post would be helpful to those wrestling with the way in which they use hashtags, with public relations and communication professionals uppermost in my mind. So below you'll find seven handy hints to help avoid hashtag horror.

Has Linkedin blown it with its new 'social popularity' tool?

I have to confess that I have never been a big fan of Linkedin. Probably wrong of me, but from the start it nagged me too much with repetitive alerts and updates. Groups were gradually taken over by sellers rather than debaters - which is fair enough, just not my thing. The news then, that Linkedin has introduced a new 'ranking' tool made me cringe, reminiscent as it is of high school popularity contests and all the angst that goes with them.

Beware the creeping algorithms softly invading your privacy

Hot on the heels of the EU Court of Justice ruling around the 'right to be forgotten', I attended the Auckland Writers' Festival debate with Iraqi/English scientist Jim Al-Khalili, Dutch historian Frank Dikotter, New Zealand privacy expert Bob Stevens, and British broadcaster, writer and comedian Sandi Toksvig.  

Under scrutiny was the topic 'Is privacy an outdated concept' and, while Jim and Bob made some interesting points around the nature and history of privacy, Sandi and Frank won the night (for me at least) with their arguments in favour of retaining and strengthening rights to privacy both online and off.

Rising above the noise - is there anybody out there?

I've been up and down the country for the last few weeks talking with people about the coming changes online and the need for organisations to consolidate what they already do as they carve out their digital futures.

With device jumps galore just around the corner, the issues of user attention, engagement and real connections have been much under discussion.  We question if there is anybody out there listening to what we are sharing and rightly so. With so much noise coming from the machines we must be sure that we have identified our communities correctly and are actively serving their needs - not just broadcasting content ad nauseum.

I've embedded the deck from a recent session for you - enjoy.

 

Pay-per-gaze from Google?

The web's abuzz with the news of a possible 'pay-per-gaze' patent filed by Google to work with Google Glass.  Certainly would make things very distracting for us all and one more step closer to the 'personal' ads we saw imagined in Minority Report. 

 

For now, I had to laugh at the video below - which is another potential way we'll use this sort of device.

 

Air New Zealand talk social media on social media

Couple of good clips from Air New Zealand this week. Firs one below takes a quick  look at their use of social media. The second is Rob Fyfe talking about how the stories, the channels and the way they intersect change approaches and engagement.  It's long, but worth sticking with.

 

Making it personal: The Air New Zealand Brand - wierd wacky or inspired? by Rob Fyfe from Creative New Zealand on Vimeo.

Cri-du-coeur for real communication as Cloud outage crashes confidence

Last week - and this weekend - saw major outages at Amazon and Sony. Gamers hoping to get down to some serious wins over Easter were struck by the fail - highlighted here on the Playstation blog, while Amazon's super fail affected sites far and wide, most notably, Quora, Hootsuite and Reddit.

Amazon's latest health reports show that things have improved since the problem occurred and, realisitically, this kind of thing is bound to happen as increasing numbers take to the Cloud as a means to manage server demand. Mistakes happen, sites get attacked, someone unplugs the wrong connection. What counts is the ability to keep customers, users and other stakeholders informed, up-to-date and confident that you can fix the problem as quickly as possible.

If your web presence is your main communication channel and you are rendered invisible by someone else's crash, what can you do?  Hidden among the acres of copy written in the last few days, probably the most useful is over at ZDNet, where Phil Wainewright has some salutary lessons for the user.

But what of the providers themselves?  What lessons should they learn? The greatest cri-du-coeur has been that Amazon failed to communicate clearly and effectively with its customers during the crisis. Personally, I'm not surprised.  Without exception, today's web giants are, I believe, appallingly bad at communicating with their users. For many years they were able to shield themselves behind remote access walls, responding only to emails (eventually), with very little human contact (if at all) and, in latter years, using minimal statements on blogs and webwalls to update users in a crisis. But believe me boys, (as mostly boys you are)  a blog post does not mean you have 'communicated', created trust, understanding or cemented the necessary forgiveness to maintain your licence to operate.

Anyone who has ever tried to communicate directly with Facebook, Google, Amazon or other large web corporates will know exactly the level of frustration I am talking about. In a world where instant two-way communication is the lifeblood of a system that champions trust, engagement, transparency and the user as the vital ingredients of the service mix, our web giants are lacking in their ability to generate and maintain the kind of real relationships they tout so readily on the global stage but which they spectacularly fail to deliver at a user level. 

Their technology may be great but the business model - as far as their public relations and communications is concerned - is more akin to the impenetrable walls of corporate non-communication circa 1950. And we all know how that turned out.

Some day soon, the big guys are going to have to wake up to the fact that they can no longer hide behind nerdy geekdom when it comes to good communications practice. If they don't, then some day soon, they'll suddenly find their licence to operate withdrawn by the users, customers and stakeholders they fail.

Fabulous - if fixable - code is not enough. You have to talk, respond and act and engage - just like the rest of us.

Google Wave Wipes Out

The news from Google this week that the Wave has crashed and burned was a bit of a shame.  I had high hopes for this development, but sadly, the platform was just too hard for people to get the hang of.

One of the reasons that the social web - particularly social networking and blogging - has done so well and grown so dramatically in the last five years is because it is easy to do. You don't require a high degree of technical skill, you can point and press and it takes moments to share stuff with others.

Despite the anticipation, the huge build up, the long wait for a Wave invite, once faced with their Waves, most people tended to look at it blankly, realise they had no idea where to start and quietly put it back in the box - a bit like an IKEA cabinet where you can see the screws are there but they are taped so tightly to the packaging you never get round to putting it together.

There were some excellent bits to Wave and I suspect that they will be used elsewhere - the rumoured 'Google Me' might pick up a few or perhaps they will build in some additions to the rather lame Buzz.

I am a big fan of Google's development processes and think they are to be applauded for continually exploring what else we can do (even though I have serious and long-term misgivings about the potential for misuse of power and information that exists around an organisation so large having so much information in its control).  What these clever folk need to always keep in mind is that for the web to work it has to be easy. Geek it up for mass use and you are on a hiding to nothing.

Given we are talking Waves here, Google - and others - need to remember that many on the web are paddlepusses, delighted to play in the shallows but not yet ready, willing or able to take on the big surf.

So perhaps the big lesson for Wave is make sure the box contains clear and simple instructions next time around. The failure was perhaps not so much the product itself, but the communication that surrounded it. Building the anticipation is fine to a degree, but if the why, how and what for is not clearly communicated then expectations are dashed and reputation suffers. Which, if I recall correctly, sits somewhere in Lesson 101 Communications Management...

Hurrah - I'm a Newspaper Publisher

A longtime fan of NewsCred, their latest development is seriously cool - just think of the possibilities for this type of off the shelf publishing. Check out my new 'newspaper', PR Dimensions, and tell me what you think I should add - I am looking for global public relations feeds, public relations news, comments and blogs and would be delighted to check out your recommendations.

The Tweet Imperative: Practitioner Beware

Little story today about problems at a tween star's autograph signing, but one with major implications for communicators who regularly use Twitter to advise, inform and attract people to events.

There are different versions of the story around - one says the executive was arrested for not tweeting when told, while another says it was because he tweeted too much, drawing a large, over-stimulated, hormone-fuelled crowd of screaming teens.

Whatever the actual situation, practitioners and communicators everywhere should take careful note of this one. For example, how does 'being ordered to communicate' sit with free speech? What if, in your professional opinion, tweeting would make the situation worse? And what impact would that have on your organisation's reputation? 

Equally, in a 'non-democratic' environment, what if you are 'ordered' to tweet something that will put others in danger? And for the journalists who live tweet material - what if your story is the catalyst that causes chaos? What liability would mainstream media assume?

This is a small story about an action taken - or at very least suggested - by some US police officers. Its implications however, are enormous, not necessarily at this moment, but certainly as we rush towards the future. Bet there are a few people out there live tweeting events as I write. As the event manager are you at some point, going to be held responsible for what they say or the actions their tweets precipitate?

I know it's a consideration that I'll be building into programmes from here on in.