A round-up of recent happenings in the world of PR, marketing, and other
things I find interesting.
Twitter and LinkedIn Split Up: Believe me, my friends, Twitter is doing you a favor by no longer letting your cross-post your tweets onto LinkedIn. Sure, some of what you post on Twitter is relevant to a professional networking site. But a lot of it isn't, and it annoys your LinkedIn connections.
GM and Facebook Might Get Back Together: Am I missing something here? Yes, I realize that GM's announcement that it was ditching Facebook ads was blamed in part for Facebook's lackluster IPO. But is GM really such a trendsetter that it alone can arrest Facebook's slide? The larger problem for Facebook is if companies like GM discover they can get just as much value by utilizing free content on Facebook. Then what does the social network do?
NBC Tells Its Friends It's Dumping Ann Curry: In a rather cynical take on PR, Adele Cehrs praises NBC for minimizing the damage of pushing Ann Curry off The Today Show by allowing rumors about her departure and stories blaming her for the show's ratings tumble to leak out.
NBC made the news regarding Curry’s removal work to its benefit by using the
trickle effect. The trickle effect is a strategy in which
information is released in small doses over time to reduce the overall backlash
of a negative announcement.
Certainly, the slow, steady divulgence of information, done deliberately, is a good strategy for preparing publics, internal and external, for bad news. But leaking information designed to portray a single, identifiable individual in a bad light is downright mean, not to mention unethical. I'm not naive in thinking it's not done a lot. But it isn't the kind of public relations I want to practice.
Showing posts with label GM. Show all posts
Showing posts with label GM. Show all posts
Monday, July 9, 2012
Monday, May 28, 2012
The Spin Cycle, 5/28
A round-up of recent happenings in the world of PR, marketing, and other
things I find interesting.
Is Facebook advertising overrated, or is GM dumb? People are still parsing GM's decision to drop advertising from Facebook, and it's an interesting story about the power of brands. Facebook may have a shaky reputation this week, but the fact that many people reflexively dismissed GM's decision demonstrates how strong Facebook's brand is, and how weak GM's continues to be.
Is GM dumb, part 2: I might have grouped this item into the same broad category as the item above, until this jumped out at me: Ford has more than 1.5 million “likes” on its Facebook page, vs. fewer than 400,000 for GM. The problem is that a lot of PR and advertising measurement experts regard a "like" as a poor measure of engagement, and even harder to quantify is how a "like" translates into sales. Everything we do as strategic communicators is supposed to help our organizations or clients meet their business objectives. That's the ultimate measure by which we should judge the efforts of GM, or Ford, or any other company on Facebook or in any other medium.
Google + is down, Pinterest is up: It seems almost too easy to beat up on Google +, but it's too much fun to resist. Google keeps trying to tell people that numbers lie and its dismal user stats don't show the private circle sharing going on beneath the surface. (That sounds dirty.) That's great, but it doesn't diminish my frustration when I go on the network and find the same two people always posting stuff. Pinterest is zooming ahead of it, and maybe it's time for Google, without abandoning Google + as an alternative to Facebook, emphasize its true niche, which is an intra-organizational networking and conferencing tool.
Never forget: What struck me about this collection of letters to and from brothers who fought on separate fronts in World War II was the letter from Bob Dininger's friend to Bob's parents, describing his death at Okinawa:
I won't attempt to say that he died for the American way of life, freedom, etc. and these things that are written about by people who don't do the fighting and thus don't know what they're talking about. What I will say is that he died bravely, and quickly, which is the best way for a soldier to die, if he has to die at all.
Enjoy your day off.
Is Facebook advertising overrated, or is GM dumb? People are still parsing GM's decision to drop advertising from Facebook, and it's an interesting story about the power of brands. Facebook may have a shaky reputation this week, but the fact that many people reflexively dismissed GM's decision demonstrates how strong Facebook's brand is, and how weak GM's continues to be.
Is GM dumb, part 2: I might have grouped this item into the same broad category as the item above, until this jumped out at me: Ford has more than 1.5 million “likes” on its Facebook page, vs. fewer than 400,000 for GM. The problem is that a lot of PR and advertising measurement experts regard a "like" as a poor measure of engagement, and even harder to quantify is how a "like" translates into sales. Everything we do as strategic communicators is supposed to help our organizations or clients meet their business objectives. That's the ultimate measure by which we should judge the efforts of GM, or Ford, or any other company on Facebook or in any other medium.
Google + is down, Pinterest is up: It seems almost too easy to beat up on Google +, but it's too much fun to resist. Google keeps trying to tell people that numbers lie and its dismal user stats don't show the private circle sharing going on beneath the surface. (That sounds dirty.) That's great, but it doesn't diminish my frustration when I go on the network and find the same two people always posting stuff. Pinterest is zooming ahead of it, and maybe it's time for Google, without abandoning Google + as an alternative to Facebook, emphasize its true niche, which is an intra-organizational networking and conferencing tool.
Never forget: What struck me about this collection of letters to and from brothers who fought on separate fronts in World War II was the letter from Bob Dininger's friend to Bob's parents, describing his death at Okinawa:
I won't attempt to say that he died for the American way of life, freedom, etc. and these things that are written about by people who don't do the fighting and thus don't know what they're talking about. What I will say is that he died bravely, and quickly, which is the best way for a soldier to die, if he has to die at all.
Enjoy your day off.
Thursday, May 17, 2012
Share this on Facebook
I was going to save this thoughtful critique in Forbes of Facebook's advertising model for The Spin Cycle, but given Facebook's massive IPO this afternoon, it seemed particularly pertinent.
Us PR/marketing types are still figuring out how to measure the impact of social media. Hell, some of us are still figuring out the best way to measure the impact of traditional media, so it's no surprise that there is fierce debate over the value of a "like" (which conventional wisdom now says is not terribly valuable) versus a "share" (which conventional wisdom now says is the coin of the realm):
Lazerow’s company helps “advertisers succeed on Facebook and other major social networks” and claims to have developed a way of measuring social KPIs, or key performance indicators. According to Lazerow, data from his clients show that “every share on Facebook generates an average of $2.10 in incremental sales.”
Really? It’s hard enough to get exact numbers on conventional key word campaigns that are aimed at driving the purchase of specific products, since other factors can contribute to a boost in sales. And Facebook shares aren’t necessarily product focused. Indeed, because content on a company’s Facebook page strives to be “engaging” it’s often not about products at all. At best, shares of these posts help create a warm and fuzzy feeling about a company that, at some point in the future, might turn into a sale. (There’s that word again.)
For the sake of argument, let's postulate that there is a causal relationship between shares on Facebook and sales. Whether or not the content is product-centric is irrelevant; if it has built trust in the brand that spurs a consumer to action, then Facebook has done its job for the seller. The problem for Facebook is if this sharing comes from content on a brand's free Facebook page, as opposed to one of its paid ads. This free content is where GM plans to focus its Facebook efforts, the company announced this week.
The writer of the Forbes article does not take for granted that sharing has concrete value, and questions why it is desirable given that people's Facebook friends may be very different from themselves -- and thus not part of the brand's target audience. Many of us have assumed that sharing is a 21st century equivalent of word-of-mouth advertising, but the people we actually interact with in the real world may have a lot more in common with us than the people we are friends with on Facebook. I'm not quite that skeptical -- after all, our Facebook friends likely share at least some demographic similarities to us -- but it is an argument worth pondering. There are people I'm friends with on Facebook whose taste in restaurants, or music, or baby strollers I could care not one whit about.
Us PR/marketing types are still figuring out how to measure the impact of social media. Hell, some of us are still figuring out the best way to measure the impact of traditional media, so it's no surprise that there is fierce debate over the value of a "like" (which conventional wisdom now says is not terribly valuable) versus a "share" (which conventional wisdom now says is the coin of the realm):
Lazerow’s company helps “advertisers succeed on Facebook and other major social networks” and claims to have developed a way of measuring social KPIs, or key performance indicators. According to Lazerow, data from his clients show that “every share on Facebook generates an average of $2.10 in incremental sales.”
Really? It’s hard enough to get exact numbers on conventional key word campaigns that are aimed at driving the purchase of specific products, since other factors can contribute to a boost in sales. And Facebook shares aren’t necessarily product focused. Indeed, because content on a company’s Facebook page strives to be “engaging” it’s often not about products at all. At best, shares of these posts help create a warm and fuzzy feeling about a company that, at some point in the future, might turn into a sale. (There’s that word again.)
For the sake of argument, let's postulate that there is a causal relationship between shares on Facebook and sales. Whether or not the content is product-centric is irrelevant; if it has built trust in the brand that spurs a consumer to action, then Facebook has done its job for the seller. The problem for Facebook is if this sharing comes from content on a brand's free Facebook page, as opposed to one of its paid ads. This free content is where GM plans to focus its Facebook efforts, the company announced this week.
The writer of the Forbes article does not take for granted that sharing has concrete value, and questions why it is desirable given that people's Facebook friends may be very different from themselves -- and thus not part of the brand's target audience. Many of us have assumed that sharing is a 21st century equivalent of word-of-mouth advertising, but the people we actually interact with in the real world may have a lot more in common with us than the people we are friends with on Facebook. I'm not quite that skeptical -- after all, our Facebook friends likely share at least some demographic similarities to us -- but it is an argument worth pondering. There are people I'm friends with on Facebook whose taste in restaurants, or music, or baby strollers I could care not one whit about.
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