So last week's Roundup featured some posts with good old fashioned moaning, and the email click through rate was amongst the best ever. Right then. So I'm going to pick a super moan to lead the Roundup today.
Thanks to Vero for a heartfelt post criticising a government social media sex education campaign that falls just a teeny weeny bit short in Vero's opionion of delivering value representative of the four million odd pounds it cost. How not to...
And whilst we remain steadfastly focused on matching last week's click throughs, how about this post by Trevor Young on how not to express yourself.
And just in case you're not going to be tempted by negative pieces this week, check out Graham Jones on how to get retweeted.
Best regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team.
Admob Mobile Banner Ads prices drop - a good time to trial?
by si crowhurst of We Love Mobile
Admob has just announced that it is cutting its minimum bid prices in a bid, it claims, to stimulate the market and encourage advertisers onto mobile. This follows price cuts on operator portal inventory, which has seen CPM rates in the UK almost halved from this time last year. While a perhaps inevitable result of the global economic situation and, one must assume, a general decline in demand, price drops do mean that running banner campaigns on mobile has become cheaper and therefore now potentially viable for a wider range of applications. More...
Socializing the Social Media Release with PitchEngine
by Brian Solis of PR 2.0
Over the past few years I have been a vocal and vigorous supporter of the Social Media Release (SMR) for one simple reason – it represented a new and promising opportunity to renew the dialog around improving the foundation for the communication of news, information, and events that left most immune to its overdue potential.
It wasn’t a new tool to package the useless and hollow marketing "speak" that is prevalent in so many releases today. It was and is a blank slate to reinvent how we, as human beings representing a company that helps other human beings, share our story with them in a way that means something. More...
THESE ARE NOT MY WORDS: "Greater business level empowerment and flexibility within a non-negotiable compliance framework will ensure more efficient and effective decision making."
by Trevor Young of One19
It hasn't been a good week for one of Australia's largest brand marketers, Pacific Brands.
Hot on the heels of giving themselves significant pay rises, the Pac Brands board retrenched 1850 staff. Naturally, the media was all over it.
(To be fair, Pac Brands is not the only company to axe large numbers of staff nor give its senior executives hefty increases in remuneration, but its actions have caused more public outrage than most). The rationale provided by the company certainly wouldn't have helped matters. More...
Media 2.0 Workgroup Announces Best Practices
by Brian Solis of PR 2.0
As one of the founding members of the Media 2.0 Workgroup, I contribute to the greater collective of intellectual activity dedicated to advancing media and communication.
Fellow members, Chris Saad and Stowe Boyd have been discussing the ethics and best practices around social media and social tools specifically with Eric Blantz and Khris Loux with specific regard to JS-Kit. Independently, I have also discussed and supported a more people-focused approach to connecting with courtesy of those companies that continually force the discussion by upsetting the balance between brand and community. More...
Mobile coupons could be just the ticket for frazzled consumers
by Andrew Grill of Gigafone
Recently while I was sitting in Madrid airport having just come from a very successful meeting about mobile advertising I saw an article in the Financial Times by Jonathan Birchall titled Advertisers switch focus to money-off coupons, so I thought it worth highlighting. America is well known for its coupon culture, but it seems the economic downturn has pushed consumers and advertisers to coupons in a big way.
Quoting from the article, Jonathan explains how brand giants such as Procter and Gamble (P&G) are More...
How to get more people to "retweet" you on Twitter
by Graham Jones of Internet Psychology
Pete Cashmore is one of those people who could make you feel rather envious. He is devilishly handsome with film star looks. He is hugely successful and much sought after for his advice. He was chosen as one of the Top 25 bloggers by Forbes Magazine. And he is the most "retweeted" person in the world.
So how come this young man garners such adulation? What makes people want to "retweet" him? How come your Twitter account doesn't get the degree of attention his does? If you are not aware, "retweeting" More...
Google's Matt Cutts Issues Pay-Per-Post Warning to Bloggers
by Mindy Gofton of I-COM International
Matt Cutts, Google's spam cop and chief PR blogger posted a response yesterday to an article about "sponsored" blog posts. According to Cutts, paid blog posts are fine - as long as they don't pass page rank. Simply put - if someone pays you to review their site/product/service you have to add a rel="nofollow" attribute to any links to their site or Google might penalise you - if they find out.
So, here's the scenario. WidgetWorld is a new e-commerce site in need of exposure and good press. More...
Reasons to be cheerful: PR Week’s Danny Rogers on signs of hope in the PR market
by Stephen Waddington of Rainier PR
PR Week editor Danny Rogers searches for good news this week in his leader column in the UK edition of PR Week (sub required) against a backdrop of weekly reports of redundancies across the industry as a result of the worsening recession. “PR revenues in the UK are likely to see a year-on-year drop during 2009, but this is far from Armageddon,” says Rogers.
PR is holding up as a result of three factors, he says:
Recessions create corporate work
PR is the most cost-effective element More...
Search behaviour is changing significantly
by Graham Jones of Internet Psychology
Search engine users are changing the way they look for things; and it's a significant jump. When the internet was a mere baby, you could easily find things. All it took was an army of editors at Yahoo! and they presented you with a list of all the good stuff. But that was only when the web was a few million pages. Nowadays, that's the number of pages added in an hour or two and only automated search engines like Google can even hope to keep up. Over the years, though, our usage of Google has changed substantially and new research published this week signals an even bigger change in search behaviour. More...
Thmbnls: The Government is Screwing with Your Money (Again)
by Vero Pepperrell of Vero Pepperrell
I had to resist the urge to use the first post name that came to mind for this one, or it simply would have been “What the fuck is the government thinking?” But then that would have been too vague, and probably applies to at least two baker’s dozens of its recent policies.
The reason for my gobsmackedness on this sunny Friday is the Department for Children, Schools and Families’ latest campaign to promote condom use amongst the youth.
I’ve seen my fair share of poor More...
The marketplace is the outside world, not your comfortable office
by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott
I've spent the past week delivering four keynote speeches in four countries to hundreds of people each. My friends at Best Marketing invited me to their Password 2009 events, and I felt like a rock star as the road show included:
Monday in Zagreb, Croatia
Tuesday in Riga, Latvia
Wednesday in Vilnius, Lithuania
Thursday in Tartu, Estonia
These countries are amazingly plugged in to the Web. For example, Estonia, with a population of just 1.3 million has 806,000 Internet users. My high-speed connections in this part of the world were much faster than in most parts of the USA. More...
Astroturfing & Disclosure: Where Do You Draw the Line?
by Vero Pepperrell of Vero Pepperrell
As more businesses start peppering their marketing plans with social media projects, activities that previously were reserved for the geeky early adopters are now coming under scrutiny when used for commercial endeavours.
With all this new media growth, there’s no clear rule book yet. We’re writing it as we go, and just like the Bible, there are an awful lot of different interpretations of the same guidelines.
Certain aspects of blogging and online brand identity are seeing their limits pushed by certain brands lately… More...
How to win business with your website
by Tim Callington of Edelman
Let’s say you’re a salesman, you’ve just closed a big deal and won a tidy commission. You want to celebrate, and rightly so, and you want to make a statement about your achievements and status. So you decide to buy a flash car.
The trouble is, all of a sudden your sales figures start to drop. The deals aren’t closing and the customers seem slightly cooler than they were a few months before. What’s happened?
When you pull into the customer’s car park in your Porsche or Ferrarri you want to say that you’ve arrived, that you’re to be taken seriously and that you’ve achieved the affluence that symbolises talent and success. More...
