Tag: friday roundup (page 1 of 1)

What is social business?

[Originally written for the CIPR Friday Roundup.]

I've been writing Friday Roundups for five and a half years and this is my last one. The circulation has grown from eleven to nearly eleven thousand, we merged it into the CIPR three years ago, and I'm delighted it's carrying on in their safe hands.

We have covered the full gamut of PR topics in this time, but a tag cloud of the 275 roundups would probably need to render "social media" in font size 100!

Increasingly however accomplished social media practitioners are asking a most pertinent question – now what? Well, it appears the answer to that is acquiring the name "social business", and it's increasingly been my focus of recent times. You might say social media are the eggs in the social business cake.

I've tried to design one question to both convey what social business might be exactly and to give the person attempting an answer real pause for thought in relation to their own organisation. I think I'm making progress with the following question, what do you think?... Read more

The CIPR Friday Roundup +/- 5 years

[Originally written, obviously, for the CIPR Friday Roundup.]

The Kardashians first appeared in October 2007 just as it was becoming difficult to get a mortgage. I don't believe the two were related. I also sent out the first Friday Roundup... to eleven recipients.

Five years and 250 editions later (missing out the festive seasons), it's gone out to 9345 of you, which is fantastic. But let's look at some more interesting October 2007 facts, spanning the full gamut of topics we've covered here for PR professionals.

Facebook had just passed the thirty million user mark, approaching half that reported by MySpace. There were 350,000 of us on Twitter and ten million odd on LinkedIn – now half a billion and 175 million respectively.

There was no Kindle, no Android, no tablets, and no Justin Bieber. Nokia was number one in mobile phones, bigger than numbers 2, 3 and 4 combined. The Blackberry 8800 and the very first iPhone were the executive must-haves.

There was no FourSquare, Groupon, Pinterest, Instagram, Angry Birds, Prezi, Quora, Spotify, Mendeley, Blippar, Dropbox, Tweetdeck or Google+. And these were pre-Chatroulette days too, and pre-Barcelona principles come to that.

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It’s all about curation

If one word has dominated social media in the second half of 2010, for me it's "curation". We have reached a certain maturity in our interaction with media to question our traditional abdication of curation to others.

Until recently, people we don't know decided what we might like to read, listen to and watch. Our only choice, should we disagree with theirs, was to switch channel; change newspaper; retune the radio. And employ technology like personal video recorders to collect what we might want to watch later.

Now a new breed of services is emerging, sometimes referred to as social news aggregators. Read more