Splendid Friday News Roundup
The US Mom blogger network, Mom Dot has called for a PR blackout for a week in August. Trisha, one of the founders of the community, has said that mom bloggers are simply doing too much in terms of giveaways, reviews, and blog trips and that “Mom Bloggers have turned from what they love the most, their family, into working directly as public relations for their captive audience.”
She goes on: “MomDot is challenging bloggers to participate for one week in August in a PR BLACKOUT challenge where you do not blog ANY giveaways, ANY reviews, and Zero press releases. In fact, we don’t want you to talk to PR at ALL that whole week. We want to see your blog naked, raw, and back to basics. Talk about your kids, your marriage, your college, your hopes, your dreams, your house and whatever you can come up with for one week.”
It seems that as PR professionals in an industry where our relationships with bloggers and online writers are ever more important, basic lessons circa 2003 are being ignored. Before you ever contact a blogger, make sure you:
• Read their articles/blog posts
• Try and nderstand their audience
• Offer an interesting and/or newsworthy piece of content
• Truly build a genuine relationship with them
• Understand their content needs and their deadlines (or time constraints)
• Become a helpful resource for them
How iSpyLevis tapped into Twitter
This is an awesome use of Twitter from Levi’s in Australasia.
“We’ve released hundreds of pairs of Levi’s on the streets of key cities across Australia and New Zealand. If you think you see someone wearing a pair ask ‘are they Levi’s?’ If you get it right, they’ll drop their pants and give them to you on the spot.
Follow us [on Twitter] to see where they are.” (iSpyLevi’s twitter)
Here’s a post explaining the campaign by the PR agency responsible, One Green Bean.
P.S You have to watch the video!
Facebook’s New Dawn: The increasing growth of social media (report)
Here’s the best bits from the latest reports as broken down by Contagious:
• 80% of the UK’s online population visited a social network this May. Read more here: http://tinyurl.com/mpp5vd
• In terms of content-sharing, Facebook now dominates, being responsible for nearly a quarter (24%) which is over double the amount of content shared via email (11.1%) and Twitter (10.8%). Read more on Mashable: http://tinyurl.com/lv79xl
• Universal McCann’s global Power to the People study flags up the growth of mobile internet access: 17% of active internet users now go online on the move as well as at home, work or college, as well as the growth of online video which is now watched by 83%.
• Facebook is certainly upping the ante for advertisers. In the last few weeks, it’s launched Fanbox, which enables any profile with a fan page to embed their Facebook presence into their website, as well as unveiling a Twitter-like stream of status updates that can run on home-pages. The social network is also preparing to improve its search function. It looks like Facebook has taken a long hard look at what works on Twitter and repackaged it for its audience
• eMarketer projects that Facebook’s ad revenue will grow 9.5% this year to $230m, while MySpace’s will fall by 15% to $495m. The research company expects Facebook’s revenue to eclipse MySpace’s in 2011.
Twitter Launches a Twitter 101 Guide for Business
Twitter has put together a guide for businesses covering how to get started, the basics of Twitter, Twitter lingo (RT, hashtags etc) and includes case studies. Mashable has put together a pretty comprehensive guide too.
If you haven’t heard about the latest Smirnoff Original Night (quite frankly, where have you been?!) here’s some background on the plans for 6th August.
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