From PR to Eternity » new media

BAD NEWS REALLY IS GOOD NEWS

Matthew Watson — Sun, 25 May 2008 11:47:00 +0000

There have been many negative news reports predicting a recession recently. There’s a reason for this: bad news is good news. The same applies to social media. People are more willing to pass on and take in bad news than good news. For example a tweet that says, “My car got me to work without any problems again today.” is a lot less interesting than “My car broke down on the motorway today. I’ll never buy a Ford again!”

This is why monitoring what people are saying about your brand or product is so imperative. This is particularly important in an age of social media where that negative message could quickly go global. Fortunately by reacting to negative messages and using blogger outreach you can use bad news like the recession to your advantage.

Reactions to negative messages:

If a blogger has been made redundant offer them a free trial of your recruitment service.
If a Facebook group has been started to complain that your product is now more expensive, apologise and explain why the price change has been made. Maybe even offer a one-off discount to members of the group.
If someone isn’t happy with their mobile phone. Offer them a free trial of your company’s phone. Chances are they will want to keep the phone at the end of the trial so offer them the option to buy it.
If a blogger can’t find any holidays in their price range, suggest some cheap options.
If someone tweets to say their taxi is late, offer your services instead. (See feverbee)

Managed correctly bad news can really be good news for your company.

UPDATE: Stephen Davies of Prblogger.com gives a good example of the Carphone Warehouse reacting to a negative blog post here.

AN UPDATE ON LOGOBAMA

Matthew Watson — Wed, 07 May 2008 15:40:00 +0000

Almost five weeks ago I posted about Barack Obama’s viral campaign, Logobama. This is an update on how that campaign is progressing as well as the presidential race.

Since then nearly 6700 have created logos using the website and a total of $651 has been donated by 24 people. That’s not a lot of money or donations really, but I’m sure the number of exposures will be much higher.

Barack now has 156 more pledged delegates than Hillary Clinton and needs just another 183 to become the Democrat candidate. Significantly less than the 339 that Hillary needs to beat him.

Perhaps this is down to Barack’s inventive use of new media to support his campaign. A strategy, which Hillary seems to be replicating. In April 2007, Barack started using Twitter to aid his campaign. In January 2008, Hillary followed suit and started microblogging too. Since then Hillary has posted 139 times, whereas Barack has posted a mere 115 times.

If frequency isn’t the key to using Twitter successfully then what is?

I think interaction. Although neither candidate has actually entered into a two-way conversation with their followers. I think following other users has been a crucial factor in Barack’s success. Barack follows almost 30,000 other users, whereas Hillary follows nobody. No one. Not a sausage. I think people like to have followers, it feels good, even if they know that their followers are not really reading what they have to say. So it’s not surprising that Barack has over 25,000 more followers than poor old Hillary, who has just 3,745 in total.

CAKE? YES, PLEASE!

Matthew Watson — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 10:31:00 +0000

I received an e-mail from Cake PR in London today, inviting me to an interview for the position of digital account executive. I applied for the job last week after seeing it posted on Stephen Davies’s site PrBlogger.com. The job sounds fantastic! Very innovative with plenty of scope to try new and exciting PR methods and mediums. Which is exactly what I want to do.

The picture shows one of Cake’s PR stunts were they turned Trafalgar Square into a village green to promote the London villages to tourists. Strangely enough I talked about this stunt in my dissertation. I discussed how they had evaluated the campaign in terms of how many bloggers wrote about it, but didn’t disclose the readership of those blogs in PR Week. Readership is important because some of those blogs may only have two readers, whereas other may have two million. Therefore coverage in one blog can be worth more or less than coverage in an another.

Curiously my parents have both been invited to interviews this week. Perhaps there is something in the water?