Archive for January, 2012

Our colleagues over at RFI Studios in New York have put together a useful little tutorial on the latest social network to be stirring up (p)interest.

So I nicked shared it.

I hope it is useful.

Amid all the discussion over the past few days about search and social referral traffic, I also spotted an interesting piece from Econsultancy showing the site’s growing role as a referral source (client Experian hat tip here) for retailers.

Monetate has also put together an infographic pulling together the latest stats on Pinterest’s journey to become a “social commerce game changer” (see below).

I am playing around with it myself at the moment and from a PR/brand perspective it seems to be more about creating interest through the mindset of a brand persona and then curating content that supports that persona, rather than engaging around product or comms content. But like all social networks, it needs to be brought back into context - what are you trying to achieve, who’s your audience and what do they want?

Get an account and start exploring.

Over the past week or so we’ve seen a lot of change at Ruder Finn. We moved office across Covent Garden from New Oxford Street; to the corner of Bedford Street and the Strand. To match our new real-world presence we worked with our colleagues at RFI Studios in New York to revamp our online presence.

From

To

If you would like to see our offices, we have an exceptionally talented table football team looking for challenges. For more details contact Hugh.

In no particular order of importance, ten things that would make your PR agency panic:

1. Having the campaign objectives changed after most of the activity has been completed. Whilst PR as an industry is steeped in ambiguity because of its focus around language, a campaign needs a clear vision of what success means in terms of objectives. Moving the goal posts will understandably induce agency panic, if it doesn’t you probably don’t have an agency that understands strategy
2. Payment-by-results - a number of reasons for this; it encourages PR to be much more tactical. Often the measures are not mapped to what the communications objectives are. It provides the insecurity of not being able to predict cash-flow like you would have in a retainer with an implied restricted upside as clients use it to try to restrict fees - so presents a no-win situation for the PR team
3. Reverse auction - the economic theory of reverse auctions are sound, but like economics what is good in theory often falls apart in practice. It assumes that PR as a service is a commodity: teams are the same, agencies are just as efficient as each other and all campaigns are uniform in terms of resource allocation - it is likely to find the PR agency that is most desperate for cash-flow rather than the right agency
4. A meeting with procurement - buying PR isn’t like purchasing stationery, most procurement professionals realise this, but this doesn’t stop many PR agencies getting palpitations
5. Senior executive suddenly available for press tour tomorrow - an old favourite of American tech-sector companies who find out at the last minute that they have senior executives flying into the UK at the last moment and want to impress head office
6. Our CEO wants to do a blog / twitter feed - because when this is brought up there isn’t a lot of thought about how this fits into the client company’s social media strategy (if they have one in the first place). One also has to wonder if all the profile building is about encouraging headhunters to line up their next career move
7. Meeting is at the ‘wrong’ office - I once sat petrified whilst my agency MD at the time drove at illegal speeds through Birmingham city centre to get to a meeting on time in the client’s second office out by Coventry Airport. Apparently she hadn’t read the diary invite that the client had sent, on realising the mistake blood pressure levels were raised and the accelerator pedal was depressed
8. Telling the client about key account person changes - agency life is all about change, but that doesn’t mean that it gets any easier when you have to tell the client that one of their key contacts is moving on. As much as we like to pretend that its about the agency brand, we sell people by the hour and great people can both win-and-lose accounts for an agency
9. Realising that you’ve left the annual plan on public transport - I once read a rivals client plan after they left it on the seat of a train. It was reassuringly staid in its thinking and scope; so I promptly deposited it in the nearest waste paper basket. I can only imagine the panic that ensued at the agency once they realised that it could have fallen into the wrong hands
10. They read about a company crisis in the media before they’ve heard about it from their client - think Bernie Madoff

Stumbled across this Ad Age infographic showing media consumption by generation,

type of media and by time of day today via @robbrown on Twitter. Missed it first time around - is broad in approach but useful topline trends data.

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