Wednesday 17 April 2013

Knowing when to stop


In the wake of the Boston tragedy, scrutiny has inevitably turned to coverage of the situation, and who was or wasn’t respectful.

It has become an almost ubiquitous feature of any crisis that at least one company will not know when to stop self-publicizing. For example, when Hurricane Sandy hit the U.S, somebody at American Apparel made the mistake of thinking they could use human tragedy to sell clothes, and the reaction of disgust dealt a damaging blow to the brand.

Yet people are slow to learn, and with each new disaster we see another damaged public image. In this case, it was Guy Kawasaki. Self-proclaimed social media ‘guru’ Kawasaki schedules constant tweets for each day (or rather, his interns do) and whilst the rest of the Twittersphere paid tribute to the victims of the Boston bombings, Guy continued his stream of self-promotion.

Unsurprisingly, the collective mind of Twitter turned angrily upon Kawasaki, who responded with ‘Loving how people with less than 1,500 followers are telling me how to tweet…’ further angering his audience and prompting a mass un-following.

Although Kawasaki has since scrambled to post ‘How to help Boston Victims’ tweets, the damage has been done, and the moment of social media hubris has dented Kawasaki’s reputation
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The lesson Kawasaki and everyone else needs to take from this is that ‘No publicity is bad publicity’ isn’t all that applicable anymore (if it ever was). If you upset the social media universe, people un-follow you, un-like you and all of a sudden your audience is that much smaller.

Thursday 11 April 2013

THE NEW KIDS ON THE BLOCK

In the PR game, it’s crucial to keep up with emerging trends - especially in the digital sector. Identifying which new platforms will take off and which will fold is now a key part of digital strategy. Our latest favourite, Storify, seems like a pretty good bet.
 
Storify describes itself as a way of making sure you’re heard above the noise of social media, but as the name suggests, it’s actually a way of combining your platforms to tell a story.
A multi-media application, Storify allows you to collect and collate posts from across the Internet, not just within social media but also the wider web. For example, a story might include Tweets, Google images, Tumblr - any news around the subject, all of which you can surround with your own text to form a cohesive narrative. The best part? Every source you use is tagged and notified, creating an immediate viewer base for your story.

In terms of our industry, it’s a bit of a game changer. A platform that allows you to put all publicity and positive feedback in one place, Storify can almost act like yours and your client’s trophy cabinet, except it can be embedded anywhere, and you can tag people.
Already major companies are incorporating it into their strategy, with Levi choosing the best responses to its #shapewhatstocome Twitter campaign, and publishing them on Storify, and Coca-Cola storifying their ‘Hug me’ vending machine campaign.
DDPR are just about to publish our first story, stay tuned to our Twitter for news of our upcoming launch, who knows, if you Tweet us we might just add you to our narrative.