Social Media, Digital Marketing & PR Agency

Telling the whole world your news

So you have a story and you want everyone to read it. So you write it (or pay for it to be written) and put it up online where there is a good flow of ‘eyeballs’ or you call attention to it via social media, knowing that search loves nothing better than regularly updated content and that the more people who like the content, share the content and link back to the content, the better search likes it.

And then you put a paywall around it.

And wonder why, when no one can read it or link to it, your traffic suddenly falls away dramatically… enter The Times Newspaper Group, who must be getting seriously worried about the situation that they have created over at Murdoch Towers, although to listen to the spin emanating you’d think that it was the stats and the people who are wrong, not the paywall.

And interestingly for us – The Times fans to a girl – we thought it would be an issue and said so because we’ve seen something similar before, albeit on a much smaller scale. Here’s how it goes.

Business has a story to tell – maybe it’s won a big contract, an award or appointed the dream girl as CEO. It approaches The PR Co to help them tell the world, hoping that by doing so it would raise Business’s profile and sell more Stuff.

However, most traditional PR companies don’t understand how to pitch at bloggers (PR pros tend to send blanket emails because they are ‘too busy’ and anyway bloggers don’t really count… bloggers – and journos come to that – don’t like blanket emails, strange that, so they don’t use the release) and instead pitch publications and newspapers in the traditional manner, and say The Times uses the story.. nice. But it’s behind a paywall… not nice.

Because that means The PR Co has ‘told the world’, yes, but isn’t it a small world when it’s a world behind a paywall? A world without the help of the power of sharing or liking or retweeting or bookmarking? So in this instance no one much hears the story and so Business loses money because it didn’t achieve its objective to tell ‘the whole world’ and so it didn’t sell more Stuff.

So The Times appear to be paying its wonderful staff to write wonderful articles (stand up Caitlin Moran and wave your bra) that are not just not being read, but are not being seen, not being linked to, shared, liked, retweeted… which so MUST be dramatically affecting their advertising rates because, er, no one is reading… and advertising revenue is dependent on those all-important eyeballs.

In fact, I think we have just solved the conundrum of whether a tree falling in a forest without anyone seeing it fall has actually fallen. It actually DIDN’T because actually, however large that tree is, if it isn’t seen it doesn’t register in human consciousness.

And the same applies to your news, whether you are Murdoch at The Times or a solo biz peep – tell your story and SHARE it with as many people as possible, else it doesn’t count, and neither do you.

Want to share your business news and story effectively with the whole world? Call us now on 0845 862 0017 for a no obligation chat, or email us at hello@themediamarketingco.com.

Image of the week - Northern Lights, Norway

It’s that time of the week again, and here is our quick skip round the news and gossip that has been circulating in the digital and social media world.

It’s been another technology-tastic week with lots of launches and pre-launches and rumours of launches.

Blackberry are revving up the anticipation around next week’s BlackPad launch, which is stepping up to rival the iPad. And if you’ve already got an iPad, here’s a lovely little accessory which has hit the streets this week – something else to go on Santa’s list.

Talking of Apple, apparently they are some of the happiest users around, that’s assuming of course that you can actually buy one – apparently ‘brokers’ from all over the world are besieging Apple shops to buy unlocked iPhone 4 handsets which they sell on at a vast profit… I guess you could always consider buying an Anroid phone instead, as the analysts Inforna predict they they will overtake both Nokia and Apple by 2014… hmmm… well, we’ll be watching that one with interest.

This week there’s been increasing speculation that Facebook are going to launch some kind of mobile device, which they keep denying… which is strange because a quarter of Britons have said that they would buy one. Maybe it’s a clever marketing ploy?

Less clever is the most serious outage that Facebook have had in four years, which happened yesterday evening and affected the entire system for between two and four hours… while over in Twitter-land, they also had their fair share of technical woes this week with a nasty ‘mouseover’ virus on Tuesday, which was cooked up depending on which report you believe by a 17 year old Aussie boy and/or a Japanese developer intent on causing chaos.

Although it’s not clear what the intention was or what the consequences will be, the immediate effect was that rather a lot of people ending up looking at a porn site unexpectedly… no doubt giving a boost to the traffic stats of said porn sites – wonder if the hacker was on a kick back?!

Hot on the heels of the news that the B2Bs are finally cottoning onto the fact that Social Media is where it’s at comes a new survey from one of our favourite clients, Cision, on social journalism, which found that the vast majority (88 per cent) of UK journalists use social media more now as part of their work than they did three years ago, while over 80 per cent access blogs as part of the story research and 20 per cent of UK journalists use Twitter daily as part of their story sourcing… we hate to tell you “We told you so” but I’m afraid we’re going to anyway! WE TOLD YOU SO!

And finally, talking of Cision, their UK Corporate Blog, which we set up for them earlier this year, is up for an award at the Corp Comms Magazine’s Digital Awards.

The Monster Digerati Party is being held at The View at Battersea Power Station next week. Hosted by award-winning drag artiste Sabrina Duncan International, it’s rumoured it’ll be THE digital party of the year, with street dancers, cocktails and not a black tie in sight…  So we’ve dusted off our sparkly frocks in anticipation and will be keeping fingers and toes crossed that Cision beat the competition and carry home that award!

Report and pictures to follow…and if you are attending, do come up and say hello

NYC fashion week gets social makeover

Was this week Technology Week and someone forgot to say so? Seems like it with a slew of new launches coming at us from all angles…

Starting off the [Christmas present] party, so to speak, was Samsung with their iPad competitor, Samsung Tab…which probably should have a notice on it saying ‘No Marketing Required’ because it’s so darn sexy it’s already on our wish list, while Blackberry have bounced back strongly after a dip earlier in the year and despite problems with the Middle East banning their use.

On the other side of the North Sea, Nokia are playing ‘One Upmanship’ to the hilt, launching four new devices this week and claiming they have better technology now than the competition. Hmmm… well we shall see…no firm launch date for MeeGo as yet we note…

‘Beam me up Scotty’ – looks like Microsoft may finally have brought Internet Explorer up to date, this week launching a technological rival to Firefox and Chrome in the shape of the beta version of Internet Explorer 9.

And could Diaspora be the first real threat to Facebook’s world domination? They have just released their initial source code, which means the social site, which operates very much like Facebook, can become exactly what the users want, which is very unlike Facebook… so is it a potential threat? Certainly not yet, if only on the grounds that no one can remember how to spell it’s name, but in the future, who knows? Maybe it’ll be like the Twitter party and start with an exclusive group that then becomes the ‘happening’ thing as you ‘scatter’ your updates across your network. Going to have to be a very influential group to trigger it to beat Facebook though, where the average age is now 38 and rising.

Seems social media has worked it’s magic in yet another industry, transforming Fashion Week from an exclusive lovie event to a digital free for all with individual bloggers providing a real person’s perspective and giving a ‘niche’ viewpoint, thus adding rich and quirky detail to proceedings. If you follow all the fashion bloggers and magazines on Twitter already, you’ll exactly what we mean, with this year’s fashion week now even further enhanced by the new Twitter experience.

Finally, Jamie Oliver is the latest celebrity to choose to use his Twitter account to break important news – this time it’s the birth of his fourth child and first son, Buddy, complete with pictures… aawww…

Welcome to ‘Something for the Weekend‘, our Friday mashup of what we have found interesting/fun/inspiring/moorish over the last week.

This week we are kicking off with our findings that B2Bs are finally waking up to the considerable benefits of social media, including using some very exciting ways of promoting themselves. Interestingly, new research has also found that while UK tech brands are indeed using social media, many still aren’t actually behaving very ‘socially’ yet…come on, guys, it’s social, which means it’s all about relationships…!

On a slightly different note it seems Google has decided it’s psychic, and much like predictive text, will second guess what you are asking before you’ve actually finished typing it. And much like predictive text we anticipate that frustrated users may well start ranting at the screen, thus losing the apparent 2-5 seconds time saving, which in fact may well turn out to be as much as a 10 minute delay depending on whether you and Google really do ‘think as one’, hmmm …

The New York Times’ publisher stated in a recent conference that he expects the ‘Grey Lady’ to cease being a physical newspaper ‘sometime in the future, date TBD’, going completely online instead, while Mashable have confessed that readers will be subject to a metered pay wall in 2011. Looks like another one we’ll have to fork out for at TMMC towers then…

Twitter has been much in the news this week, mostly showing on how careers can be so easily broken by treating the micro blogging site as if it is a private phone line, what with Stephanie Rice losing her lucrative contract with luxury car maker, Jaguar, while cricketers have found themselves at the eye of the storm after tweeting rants and abusive language and promptly being fined for the pleasure – corp comms and CEOs take heed!

On a possibly sweeter note, or maybe not if you aren’t one of his 27,500+ fans, Lord Sugar has joined Twitter. He promises not to tweet as much as Ballantyne, although at an approximate rate of one every 15-30 minutes to date, we wonder whether he is telling porkie pies about that…

Over on Facebook things have turned a little more serious with Who killed Deon?, which the Met police have put together. It’s another of their excellent videos aimed at reducing youth crime, this time a Facebook murder mystery that carries a serious message endorsed by Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London.

And finally, it was truly love at first sight for us here at TMMC towers when we saw the press release about the iLoveHandles strap that turns your iPod nano into a wristwatch… Yum.

B2B giant CA creates 'cloud' chalk art and uploads it to Twitpic

We can’t tell how excited we were to read a whole batch of news over the summer telling us that B2Bs are finally waking up to the considerable benefits of social media.

Very significantly we feel, CA Technologies (you may know them better as Computer Associates) have appointed an agency to build its social media campaigns in Europe as it ‘wants to stimulate direct conversations to build relationships.’

What’s exciting about this is that CA Technologies are a very large IT management software company and are about as B2B as B2B gets. And they are using exciting techniques like getting chalk art drawings done on pavements with company messaging and using the photos on Twitter et al – all exciting and innovative stuff.

And those peeps at Cisco, another B2B giant, are embracing social media wholeheartedly too, not to mention Forrester who are constantly bringing out reports that are telling B2Bs to, well, get on with it!

So will those nay sayers at the B2Bs – you know those ‘social media is for B2Cs selling to kids’ types – have to change their plans? We think so. And fast. Not only will they be embracing social media as a means of communicating their corporate messages to their clients and prospects, but they will be incorporating social media into the solutions that they offer their clients.

A little bird tells us that social media is forming an important role in some ‘mega deals’ that are already on the table and that ultimately it will revolutionise how companies communicate.

In fact we think that within the next year we will be seeing an avalanche of B2Bs in the arena all reaping the tangible benefit of integrating a serious social media campaign into their marketing and PR strategies. Watch this space.