Whilst I appreciate that people share content in a variety of different ways, I have focused my efforts solely on Twitter. I thought the site would give a good indication of how much content people are sharing without requiring the immense amount of time that would be needed to analyse several social networks and bookmarking sites.

The results of my three month study are interesting. On average, each of the IT trades are tweeted about 2,868 times a month. The Register is the most tweeted about IT Trade, racking up 21,719 tweets by its readers per month – more than 7.5 times as much as the average. And almost 37 times as much as the least tweeted publication.

By comparing the average number of tweets with the number of unique users that Google’s DoubleClick Ad Planner says each each publication receives, I found that just 4.18 per cent of each publication’s readership is tweeting links to articles. Computer Weekly has the highest percentage, with a possible 9.06 per cent of users tweeting about articles on the site. However it’s likely that both figures are much lower in reality, as people may tweet more than one link each per month.

Interestingly, IT PRO has the most followers on Twitter, with 12,901 people following its account. The average IT trade has 3,748 followers. This suggests that the number of people following a publication’s Twitter account isn’t the only factor that impacts how much content people share on the social networking site.

A whole host of things can encourage people to share content – frequency of tweets, relevancy and newsworthiness of content on the site, whether or not social sharing buttons are available on the site, which buttons are on offer, where the buttons are positioned, the size and type of readership that each publications has, and of course, which social networks they use most.

What are your thoughts on this? What do you think makes people want to share content? And how can publications encourage more visitors to share links with their network.

For the past few months we have used Twitterfeed to herald new blog posts by Speed staff using the @speedcomms Twitter feed, but recently we have experienced problems with Twitterfeed’s service going down quite regularly. So we are now experimenting with Google’s service.

The ‘socialize’ feature uses Google’s new URL shortening service named goo.gl to push blog posts out on Twitter almost instantly. If also offers a couple of interesting options that are above and beyond what Twitterfeed currently offers. It allows users to turn the keywords that they have tagged their blog post with into hashtags, which can help more people to discover your tweets and blog posts by using Twitter Search. The service can also reduce the size of your tweet, making it small enough for other users to retweet and share with their followers.

But there do seem to be a few teething problems at the moment. As not all blog posts are tagged with keywords, some blogging platforms such as WordPress tag them with ‘uncategorized’. Currently Google classes this as a proper keyword and has been tagging tweets with the #uncategorized hashtag.

Will scores of users now migrate from Twitterfeed to Google? Only time will tell, but I suspect that many users will give the new service a try the next time that Twitterfeed goes down.

(Cross posted on the Speed Tech Blog)

The social network had made the decision to pair advertisements with relevant social actions from a user’s friends to create Facebook Ads. This is supposed to make advertisements more interesting and more tailored to you and your friends. But the service is opt-out, not opt-in, which some may see as an infringement on their privacy.

To stop your photos from being used in the way click here to update your privacy settings.

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(Cross posted on the Speed Tech Blog)

Twitter users are invited to add themselves to the map by tweeting the #ukhols hash tag followed by their age, gender, post code and their holiday destination.

Using social media like this can be a great way to build a brand’s profile online and generate lots of quality coverage in both the traditional media and the blogosphere. Vodafone’s map has already gained coverage in the Guardian, the Daily Mirror, and Brand Republic.

The mashup comes a month to the day since I launched my National Work From Home Day map, which was based on the #uksnow map developed by Ben Marsh, who is behind this map too!

And with that I’m off on my hols! See you in a week or two…

To support the day, I have developed a Google Maps mashup for Speed that uses Twitter to allow home workers to display their location. To take part you have to send a tweet containing #NWFHD and the first half of your postcode ie: “#NWFHD WC2H”. The site will then automatically update every 30 seconds throughout the day, displaying the location of Twitter users working from home.

One website that serves to draw attention to bad PR practices is PRfail.tumblr.com. The site was setup nearly a year ago by Jonathan Hopkins to aggregate examples of bad PR highlighted on websites such as Twitter, which sees many users attach the #PRfail hashtag to their tweets.

The site now features plenty of PROs who have pointed our mistakes made by their peers or by the companies they represent, but is this wise?

If I were to criticise a company’s mistake on my blog or on Twitter, Google would automatically connect my name and the name of the company I work for to the name of the company I badmouthed. So if I or the company I work for were to then pitch for a PR brief by that company it would only take a quick search of those names, for example Nike and Speed Communications, to bring up my blog post or my tweets in the first few results. I’m pretty sure that digging up old mistakes that a potential client would rather forget, is probably not the best way to make a good impression.

That said, identifying a ‘PR fail’ and offering a solution as to how the company might have dealt with that crisis more effectively could demonstrate expertise. Though I’m not sure how much expertise you can demonstrate when you’ve already used up 7 characters of your 140 character tweet with a #PRfail hashtag!

My mind’s not totally made up on this. Do you think we should be more careful about what we say online or use our freedom of speech to highlight bad PR in an effort to separate the wheat from the chaff?

Following on from Barack Obama’s successful use of Facebook as part of his Presidential campaign last year, and the National Union of Students’s victory over HSBC 18 months ago, John Prescott has launched a group on Facebook to call the British public to action to protest against the Royal Bank of Scotland’s planned bonuses.

On his blog Prescott recognises Obama’s use of Facebook. He said:

“He has also been very successful in creating an online army to support his fiscal stimulus package through Congress – and we should use that people power here.”

“We must utilise these same online grassroots tactics to force these greedy and indifferent banks that the taxpayer bailled out to give up their bonuses.”

But can Prescott replicate Obama’s success in the UK?

With just 4,991 people signed up to the Facebook group so far things don’t look too positive. Especially if you consider that the average tax payer in the UK has paid £1,000 to the banks in tax. Therefore the tax paid the by all of the users in Prescott’s facebook group equates to less than half a per cent of the £1bn that the Royal Bank of Scotland plans to give away to its employees as bonuses. That said there were only 4,955 people signed up when I started writing this blog post.

I shall watch how this campaign evolves with interest. (No pun intended)

1. PR 2.0 – @briansolis
2. What’s Next – @whatsnext
3. PR Squared – @TDefren
4. A shel of my former self – @shel
5. POP! PR Jots – @jspepper
6. Strategic PR – @prblog
7. Pro PR – @thornley
8. PR Blogger – @stedavies
9. Young PR – @paullyoung
10. Communication Overtones – @kamichat
11. PRNewser – @prnewser
12. A PR Guy’s Musings – @stuartbruce
13. KDPaine’s PR – @kdpaine
14. Dave Fleet – @davefleet
15. Flack – @PeterHimler
16. Wadds’ tech pr blog – @wadds
17. Faster Future – @davidcushman
18. Corporate PR – @ealbrycht
19. Canuck Flack – @Canuckflack
20. Simonsays – @simoncollister
21. Brendan Cooper – @BrendanCooper
22. PR Communications – @johncass
23. Drew B’s take on tech PR – @drewb
24. PR Works – DoctorJones
    
25. Catching Flack – @jongreer
26. Hispanic Marketing & PR
27. Online PR Thoughts
28. Fake Plastic Noodles – @mseasons
29. PR meets the WWW - @cbasturea
30. PRoactive – @sallyfalkow
31. Common Sense PR – @shannoncherry
32. This is herd – @thisiscow
33. Flack Life – @bobledrew
34. Beyond PR
35. A view on PR
36. Pudding Relations – @benrmatthews
37. Denver PR Blog – @denverprblog
38. Engage in PR – @KyleFlaherty
39. Observations of PR – @LukeArmour
40. Valley PR Blog – @danwool
41. PR Disasters
42. PR Meets Marketing – @csalomonlee
43. Potomac Flacks – @MattMackowiak
44. Into PR – @owen_lystrup
45. The New PR – @ryananderson
46. Wired PR Works – @wiredprworks
47. Publicity Hound’s – @PublicityHound
48. From PR to Eternity – @mpwatson
49. Middledigit – @middledigit
50. Profitable Business Edge 2 – @JosephRatliff
51. Scatterbox
52. Pierce Mattie PR – @piercemattiepr
53. Client Service Insights – @leobottary
    
54. Corporate Engagement
55. Shiny Red – @shiny_red
56. Mutually Inclusive PR
57. Media Relations Blog
58. PR Voice
59. Eyecube – @eyecube
60. PR Talk
61. Student PR Blog – @clarkey
    
62. PRos in Training – @kmatthews
63. Lubetkin’s Other Blog – @podcaststeve
64. 10 Yetis PR Blog – @10Yetis
65. Alan Weinkrantz PR – @alanweinkrantz
66. Norton’s Notes – @chris_norton
67. Strive Notes – @Sherrilynne
68. PR. Differently – @skydiver
69. Morgan McLintic on PR – @morganm
70. PR Thoughts From Ronn Torrossian – @Ronn_Torossian
71. All Things PR – @samoakley
72. Social Media for PR Class
73. Tech PR Gems – @timallik
74. IndiaPRBlog! – @IndiaPRblog
75. Youngblood PR & Marketing – @michaelallison
    
76. Launch PR – @LaunchPR
77. My PR Palette – @martinwaxman
78. EducationPR – @pabaker55
79. Tech for PR
80. Public Relations Matters – @barbaranixon
81. Mosnar Communications
82. Flacker – @evanspatrick
83. Minnesota PR blog – @mnpr
84. Blinn PR Report – @BlinnPR
85. Online Publicity Journal
86. First Person PR – @karihanson
87. HighVizPR – @abbebuck
88. PowerUp

If any usernames are missing or incorrect please let me know and I will make changes to this list. Have a Merry Christmas!

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If every night was like Saturday night I very much doubt the club would be shutting down. So why is it shutting down? I put that down to mediocre marketing. Although the club has built up an impressive level of brand loyalty with its customers, by providing a good quality service, it hasn’t taken advantage of this. The club could have easily and cheaply used social media to interact with its customer base.

Here are a few ways that the club owners could have engaged more with their customers.

• Invite clubbers to get involved by voting for what music should be played or what drinks should be sold
• Provide an online space for customers to share their photographs and videos
• Issue a regular newsletter informing customers about changes to the night club
• Write a blog to provide information about bands that will soon be performing, recommend new artists to listen to and songs to download, and talk about changes being made to the club
• Invite the public to review music

The Underground did run a Facebook group that regularly issued messages about what bands were playing each week. But this can quickly be seen as spam and the message is lost. Nobody wants to be told the same thing each week. It’s boring and it could actually harm your brand.

Setting up a poll on Facebook was incredibly simple, whereas coming up with the right question and answers was a little trickier.

Here are three ways to get the best out of facebook polls:

Pose an interesting question.
Facebook users don’t have to fill in your survey, so attracting their attention with an interesting question is a key factor in generating as many responses as possible.

Be concise.
Your question can be a maximum of 100 characters long, and your answers can only be half that length. So it’s crucial that you keep the word count down. Also, a lengthy question and answers could be offputting to some users.

Keep it simple.
Terms like Web 2.0 and mobile applications may make perfect sense to you but they could appear like gobbledygook to some users who might not know their RSS from their elbow.

Do you have any more tips for improving Facebook polls? Or have you conducted any interesting surveys recently? Please let me know!