So what will 2012 bring?

A recent joint survey from Booz Allen and Buddy Media found that almost two thirds (57 per cent) of businesses surveyed will up their social media spend in 2012, while 38 percent of CEOs say they view social media as a high priority.

I’ll say a few obvious things up front: tumblr will continue to grow in numbers and bloggers will continue to become more important for brands, although they should always properly verify the authority of those bloggers to derive true value from building relations with them. Bloggers know what cards they hold.

I predict that in 2012 the smart PR firms will continue to encroach on the territory currently occupied mostly by search marketing firms and offer optimised content services to clients. This is something which I know search marketers fear – PR controlling SEO (search engine optimisation) – possibly because they could do it better.

Video will continue to be the key content pull. Text and photos are good, but online video improves sales. Fact. It’s not even expensive to create and seed video any more, plus video is great for SEO, so why aren’t more brands – particularly those whose products need more explanation – using video more?

Geotargeting will continue to slowly pick up but better offers are required if brands expect to get significant value from Foursquare and the like.

People will continue to disagree over how to measure ‘influence’. Klout serves a purpose but often surprises users on what subjects it claims they are influential on, plus some of us are too busy actually DOING strategic social media campaigns that we don’t have time to piss about on Twitter, thus not helping our own ‘influencer’ status, however much real change we’re affecting to our online communities and beyond. Rant over.

Q&A site Quora still fails to excite me and, judging by its traffic (see graph, source Alexa.com) this year it has stabilised and found its niche.

My big question for 2012 is whether Facebook finally reaches its tipping point. With all its changes and uncertainty over privacy, plus older adopters appearing to drift away or at least use it less, could there be a gradual migration towards the more segregated world of Google Plus? Time will tell.

What are your predictions for 2012?

PR Week Awards 2011

Last night was the PR Week Awards and there was a refreshing winner for straight talking in the form of Blackpool FC manager, Ian Holloway, as “Communicator of the Year”. I’ve always loved straight-talking managers, people like Brian Clough, for whom there was no fluff, no carefully-rehearsed clichés, no nonsense, just tell it how it is. As a Queens Park Rangers fan, I’ve always had respect for former manager Holloway. Below is classic Holloway in action. We need more of it in business and life in general.

Thanks again for a great night from PR Week. Tim Minchin was genius entertainment, although the choice of Alastair Campbell to hand out awards split opinions.

There are a million and one viewpoints about the media and the acquittal of Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito. I’m not blogging about the about the inevitable media cock ups or Twitter gun-jumping (why MUST people be first on Twitter?), most entertainingly the Daily Mail, but more about the emphasis throughout on Knox, not Sollecito, or even the guy who’s actually serving time. Do you even know his name?

Here’s the rub in this whole sorry Keystone Kops-like affair. Had Knox not been physically attractive, young and female, then this whole media circus would have been more of a one-man juggling act. Why wasn’t Sollecito more interesting? Nah, no media fodder there.

You get these cases every so often. Remember Joanna Lees of the Falconio case? Young woman accused of murder and her private life dragged out in public. Storytellers throughout history have loved the angle of the (apparently) fallen woman, right from Eve through Salome to, well, Knox. She’s the latest in this line.

Unlike many others though, Knox is now free to make a fortune. Opportunity Knox.

But it’s the British Airways versus Virgin Atlantic campaign that really interests me. No sooner does BA unveil its £20 million “Aviators” campaign than Virgin brings back its long-form “Your airline’s either got it or it hasn’t” to counter.

What I really find interesting is how both ads directly reflect both companies’ respective cultures. British Airways plays on its history, experience, the glamour of Heathrow Terminal 5 and drags up the ever-popular (but retired) Concorde. Virgin is edgy, Bond-like, modern, humorous and sexy. Both perfectly tee up what the customer can expect from the experience.

I like them both, I fly with both, and I think the competition is good for customers and TV viewers alike.

British Airways’ new “Aviators” ad:

Everyone in marketing’s watched Mad Men – sit in the fifties heyday of adverting, with all its associated excitement and decadence – but I think the social revolution is living up to something equally, if not more, exciting. “Mad” stood for Madison Avenue in New York, where the Mad Men worked, but if it were an indication of their mental state, then I’d venture that nowadays we’re altogether madder men and women.

Advertising in the fifties and sixties endured far less scrutiny and cynicism than marketing, advertising and PR do in the consumer-enlightened era of today. Things also didn’t move at the speed of light, like they do now. Mad Men had a couple of channels to play with: Print and television. Marketers today have those above-the-line channels plus the Web, with its ever changing social networks, platforms and algorithms to take into account and conquer.

That means we need to be ever more creative and innovative to remain engaged and relevant. I was a fledgling tech journalist during the dotcom boom with its parties, exotic press junkets and rapidly-evolving technologies. Now is reminiscent but so much more varied and fun. There are some cracking agencies, wonderfully-gifted individuals, an incredible creative pulse and some truly amazing work coming out. So, today I salute the madder men and women that make each day so damn awesome. Long may it continue.

The author marvelling at some lovely Kent hops

A certain leading supermarket change has annoyed me this week in what to most people would be an otherwise innocuous observation and got me thinking about how things are branded regionally and who decides these things.

My beef is the humble strawberry. And a geography lesson. There I am in this leading supermarket in the strawberry section and the choice I face is whether to pick the “British” strawberries from Kent, or the “Scottish” strawberries.

Firstly, the geography lesson – GET IT RIGHT: if you’re going to have “Scottish” strawberries complete with flag of St Andrew, at least have “English” strawberries with the flag of St George as an alternative and not “British” strawberries (with Union Flag) in the same batch as the Scots…who are also British.

Secondly, as someone from Royal Tunbridge Wells, I take great umbrage that the greatest brand in strawberries – nay, UK fruit in general – has been overlooked here. Kent strawberries are the best in the world, that’s why they’re served up at Wimbledon. That’s part of the reason we’re called “The Garden of England”, because the soil and the weather’s so damn good that fruit thrives here.

Dickens knew it: “Kent, sir – everybody knows Kent – apples, cherries, hops and women.” (The Pickwick Papers), as did the Sussex village of Lamberhurst, which jumped borders into Kent to sell its hops at a higher price by branding them as Kent hops.

Supermarkets: if you’re going to brand things regionally, do it right. Scotland’s rightly famous for many things, but its strawberries don’t trump those from the Garden. And while we’re at it, do they really grow tea in Yorkshire…?

Comedians – like journalists – are largely unaccountable, so can afford to bandy about statements like “if you work in marketing, kill yourselves”. This isn’t a blog about whether or not there are good and bad PRs out there because our eyes and ears alone testify to both on a daily basis, instead I’m more interested in whether marketers and PRs are made to suffer for their art. You know, are you denounced as a “typical PR girl”, or do you get accused of putting a spin on things just because you saw a positive that no one else did? I remember saying once that I worked in PR and being accused of serving corporate masters by a champagne socialist. The fact that I was PRing start-ups to help them, you know, grow and generate jobs, was neither here nor there.

I’m no longer technically a PR, although I do work at a PR firm as a vice president of digital, so out of work now I tend to get asked for free advice on SEO, blogging and building Facebook pages. If I said I worked in PR, I think I know what kind of response I’d get…

Please share your personal experiences in the comments section.

recently on how PRs are apparently neglecting bloggers as part of their media outreach and got thinking about some recent learnings of my own. Phil lead with the very positive headline “92% of PRs use Twitter to find bloggers for outreach”, while my cynical eye was drawn towards the evidence that suggested a third of PRs (33 per cent) said they “rarely” contact bloggers and 15 per cent said they are “never” in touch with the blogging community.

Firstly, I guess we need to establish WHY brands should engage with bloggers. Let’s face it, some are genuinely well-read in their field – Pete Brown in beer, or What I Wore Today in fashion, for example – but then again the great majority of blogs are barely read at all, so why bother engaging them? Well, you don’t. Simple answer. Identify those that matter and target them, but keep an eye on the others so see if they start evolving and building momentum. Those with real reach give you both an audience and the potential for a strong link back to your website.

As a blogger myself – I launched a beer blog and real ale reviews site this spring called The Guest Ale – I am seeing first hand which breweries and PR teams are targeting bloggers and responding/retweeting my reviews of their beer and those which aren’t. Naturally, I’m more inclined towards trying out the beers of those that DO assist over those that don’t.

Some bloggers, while enjoying a small but targeted audience, when put collectively can create a very vocal block, such as the mummy blogger community in the UK, something I posted about recently when I attended Cybermummy.

How to target bloggers

Bloggers are often amateurs, coming from the Latin verb amare – to love, so they have far more free reign to write about something that they’re passionate about and are potentially more trusted by the general public as a result. I was disturbed by Szomszor’s finding that 53 per cent of PRs send bloggers press releases – that kind of impersonal touch DOES NOT WORK.

Really target your pitch and then approach your blogger by email or Twitter. A blogger will typically not welcome a phone call. Prepare as you would for a journalist – is there anything they’ve written on recently that you could segue into your pitch? Why would that blogger’s audience be interested? What have you got to offer? Really personalise it – more than you would for a journalist.

You only have one chance to make a good first impression, so make the blogger feel special. So don’t spam them with press releases – you’re likely get blocked; be transparent; don’t try to bribe them; offer to guest blog – some bloggers love free content; if you’re focused on a particular geographical location, why not organise an event just for bloggers?

How to identify bloggers that matter

How do you identify those key bloggers in your sphere? Check out free blog listing sites such Wikio, Technorati or Google Blog Search, then double check their traffic rates on sites such as Compete or Alexa to see how many visitors they’re getting or how their site ranks globally. Paid-for services include CisionPoint or Gorkana and will come with most of the information you need already.

Check the site out, look at the about page, follow their Twitter feed, really clue yourself up on them, their likes and pet hates before you pitch to them.

Whatever you do, don’t get into a spat – especially a public one – with a blogger. They’re a tight-knit group so your brand or agency could suffer as a result. Bloggers can be great advocates for your brand, so have that in mind and at the core of everything you do with blogger relations. Play the long game. They might be a blogger today, they could be a journalist tomorrow.

What has your experience been when approaching bloggers? What’s worked – and failed – for you?

As a contributor to New Media Knowledge I get pitched to all the time, but – LO AND BEHOLD – the assumptions start. “Please find below my comment from [name] of [Company X] for your feature on [subject Y]”

Thank you for your client’s comments…but what exactly does Company X do? I have to google them to find out because  – another bad score – there’s no URL, embedded or otherwise. It’s annoying; time consuming and – frankly – clumsy PR.

It’s all too easy to get sucked into brands and assume (there we go, the ‘A’ word again) that everyone else knows what Company X does because we live and breathe it every day. Take a step away from the brand and realise that, actually, unless they’re a household name, nobody will know what they do. Fact.

Everyone needs someone to remind them once in a while that assume makes an ass out of you and me. Today, it’s my turn.

A look at my spam folder shows me that:

• The host of one of my websites has sent me two emails this week offering an “exclusive” promotional code for something I don’t want
• An online shoe retailer has emailed me EVERY DAY with reminders of their X%-off sale
• Numerous other monthly “newsletters” (often just sales spiel with little informative, engaging content) which I seem to have got myself signed up for

The worst offender is, of course, the daily email from the online shoe vendor. Seriously, guys, how many shoes do you expect the regular punter to buy? Try Imelda Marcos, folks, you might have more luck.

I recommend any would-be email marketer checks out the Target Internet podcast, as these guys impart some great common sense when it comes to email marketing. Email marketing conversion is hard enough as us consumers are pretty clued up and cynical nowadays. This means you need to offer more than a daily door thump of offers.