Online PR: News and Views from ://CORPORACT

Online PR: Woolworths' Relaunch

Good to see that Woolworths is now a fully fledged etailer.   Six months after it disappeared from the high street, it has been recreated online, by Littlewoods-owned Shop Direct and comes packed with all the product goodies you could expect – including its famous pick’n’mix, sweets selection.

20,000 people signed up to the new site within hours of its launch, so it has plenty of fans.

Can't imagine buying pic 'n' mix online. Perhaps it should be renamed 'click 'n' mix'?

Online PR Mess-Ups

Econsultancy have published some good examples of online PR catastrophes.

Good one from Ryanair.  After a blogger spotted an error in the airline's online booking process, staff from the airline left several insulting comments in response to the post. To make matters worse, the episode was publicised around the web.  Then to really rile the online community, the company issued a statement staying that its policy was "not to waste time and energy in corresponding with idiot bloggers"

Interesting that a company specialising in low cost, high volume business activity doesn't see the benefits of engaging with low cost, high volume methods of communication.

UK Newspaper Websites Continue To Increase Traffic

The Telegraph.co.uk was the most popular UK newspaper website in March 2009, according to the latest figures from the Audit Bureau of Circulations Electronic.

Its 27,708,274 unique users, and more than 1.5 million unique users from the short month of February to March this year, relates to the equivalent of an 8% month-on-month rise and 63% increase over March 2008.

At the same time, the previous month’s leader, the Sun Online, recorded a dramatic decline of 6 million unique users, falling 22% month on month to 21,248,552.  Its previously figures were helped by popular stories relating to Jade Goody and Alfie Patten.

The Guardian.co.uk continues to maintain a year on year traffic increase – up by 40% (including MediaGuardian.co.uk)

Up year on year was Mail Online by 32% from March last year and 9% from February.

The Times Online increased its unique users by 34% year on year.

The Independent.co.uk recorded 10,034,148 unique users, equivalent to a 90% rise from March last year and a 7% increase month on month.

Mirror Group Digital also claimed a record month, with 7,138,013 unique users during March, up 2% from February and a 62% increase on March 2008.

The challenge for all these groups will be securing the advertisers as well as building on SEO stories and users.

Social Media: Web 3.0

Tim Berners Lee the man who invented the (first) World Wide Web thinks that that the advent of Web 3.0 will introduce technologies capable of reinventing the internet as we know it, bringing with it many breathtaking propositions that effectively turn the online world into one big database.

Web 2.0 has had its good points.  It’s people friendly, social, interactive ...but... it's time consuming.  In essence it has created a world of time wasters and people blathering on about nothing in particular.

Then there’s also the problem that anyone thinks they can set up a business without having a business model. 

There is a danger that eventually Web 2.0 could end in a trickle with everyone with interesting applications running out of money and their social “audiences” running out of interesting things to say or simply talking to themselves? 

I for one am quite looking forward to seeing the development of Web 3.0.  Hopefully it will bring in some good technology and add “meaningful” to the conversation.

Law Intervenes to halt PR for Online Gaming Operators

I was interested to read that Washington-based news distribution company PRWeb has been prevented from issuing press releases concerning online gambling by the Washington State Online Gambling Commission, forcing them to stop distributing online gambling news as it is in conflict with the States’ gaming laws.  As the company is located in Washington State, it is required to comply with State laws.
The news effectively means a loss to PRWeb of nearly 5 per cent of their total business and leaves their gaming clients looking for another way to distribute their news across the net. 

The end of the online gaming boom has long been predicted, and the advisors and services supporting the sector are the very people who must have been worrying for sometime about their revenue streams drying up if the law intervenes.

However, this move is hardly going impinge on the gaming operators.  They won’t suffer in any way.  Criminalising online gaming is probably a practical impossibility too as operators are likely to be based offshore, beyond the reach of U.S. law. 

Online PR: Twitter Frenzy Grows

There is rather an interesting Twitter frenzy going on at the moment.

Last week, the Guardian's education editor reported that UK government planned to update the primary school curriculum.  New curriculum developments include introducing Twitter and Wikipedia into the classroom.

This week academics have been criticised for offering a masters degree covering Twitter and other social networking websites.  They are now defending themselves against the barrage of criticism –  on Twitter of course.

Twitter is such hot news that Sky News has now appointed a dedicated Twitter correspondent.  I understand that this is not someone who reports on Twitter but someone who spends the day searching Twitter for breaking news

Twitter received a further $35m funding round last month. 

It has now introduced a discreet ad box under the following/followers box at the top of the page which promotes one of a small number of recommended Twitter clients and a short description.  This is apparently currently a free trial to test the response to text ads.

With all this endorsement and attention, at some point Twitter has got to start making money and develop a real business model if only to ensure it lives to grow up with the children who are being educated to use it.

G20 Planning for April Fools

Businesses around the Bank of England in London have boarded their windows up in anticipation of the forthcoming G20 protests, with demonstrators expected to converge on the Bank tomorrow (April 1st).

President Obama is likely to receive a warm personal welcome in Europe but analysts say he will almost certainly meet resistance over his plans to revive the embattled world economy.

The G20 summit is being held at the Excel centre in London's Docklands on Thursday.  Watch out for those April Fools who will come out to disrupt everyone's day.

Social Media Gets Employees Talking

During a period of corporate upheaval, or when external news from the world of businesses creates anxieties leading to a crisis of confidence in businesses and low employee morale and productivity, the role of effective internal communications takes on greater significance.

However, although everybody understands and talks about the significance of internal communication, not many organisations manage it efficiently or have an information flow that runs in all directions throughout the organisation -  not just from the top down.

It’s no surprise then that the “communications” element of internal comms has been hooked into the world of social media and been recreated in the form of Yammer.com  - a tool designed “to get employees talking and boost their productivity”.

Yammer aims to encourage people employed within companies to interact with one another around the projects, tasks and issues they have.   It’s free to employees but the boss has to pay – employers can join a price of $12 per employee.

Interesting business model from Yammer.com.   As an employee, do you say what you think knowing that comments can be viewed by the boss and you could pay the price, and, if you are a the employer, will you pay the price to hear what your employees think?

://CORPORACT is an award winning online corporate communiciations company.

Long Life Comes at a Cost in Japan

The Japanese are living longer because of healthy diets, strong communities and easy access to medical care. In 1963 just 153 Japanese celebrated their 100th birthdays compared to 19,768 new centenarians in 2008.

But long life comes at a cost.  The Japanese Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare has decided to reduce the size of the congratulatory silver cup given to centenarians and inscribed with the Chinese kanji character ‘happiness to all’.  From now it will be 9cm in diameter rather than 10.5cm.

How would this apply in the UK? 

Like Japan, the adult population in the UK is living longer and the health of the population has improved steadily over the last century in spite of increasingly unhealthy diets and problems with access to national health care.  The population is also getting older.  By 2026, half of the adult population in the UK will be over 50.

Messages from the Queen are automatically sent on a person's 100th, 105th and subsequent birthdays.

With more and more people celebrating their 100th birthdays, I wonder whether the Queen will resort to technology or social media to process en masse her congratulatory message to centenarians in the future?

Online PR Blog: Social Websites Are Bad News for Children

Last week Lord Harris of Haringey (Labour) called attention to the growth in the use of social networking sites by children, and the adequacy or otherwise of safeguards to protect their privacy and interests.

There is a need to safeguard children when it comes to social sites.  It took MySpace (disgracefully) two years to delete the known names of 90,000 sex offenders listed in the public domain.   More worrying is the fact that social websites are unable to protect against the offenders trying to sexually solicit children online who haven’t been caught.  In addition, there is currently no age authentication system in place so a 40 year old can easily pose as a teenager.

Also this week during a House of Lords debate, leading Oxford University neuroscientist, Baroness Greenfield , warned that social websites harm children's brains.  She believes that repeated exposure to social networking sites, computer games, instant messaging and chat rooms could leave a generation with poor attention spans, effectively 'rewiring' the brain.

With so many children and adults using social networking websites (more than 150 million use Facebook alone to share information) the responsibility for safe social networking for children needs to lie with the provider of the service and should include validation of its users, identification and mediation.

Likewise, it has to be the responsibility of parents (many of whom complain that youngsters lack the ability to communicate or concentrate away from their screens) to “police” excessive usage.

Schools too can play a part by teaching safe internet behaviour.  There are some great online educational communities in which children can safely learn and communicate with other children.

With this in mind, let’s hope that politicians continue to debate (and legislate).