Category: PR

Media Culpa One Of 25 Essential PR Bloggers You Should Be Reading

I’m proud to read that Media Culpa has been named one of 25 Essential PR Bloggers You Should Be Reading by the online news distribution and online publicity service PRWeb, owned by NASDAQ-listed software company Vocus. PRWeb writes:

“Keeping up with what’s new and interesting in public relations news is important – vital strategies, tips and trends are shared each day that can impact your business.  Whether you’re looking for best practices on press release distribution or simply how to take advantage of social media, these blogs will prove invaluable. To keep up with the hottest and highest quality content, below are 25 essential public relations blogs you should be reading:”

It’s a great list of industry luminaries that you should start reading, if you’re not already doing so.

Media Culpa celebrates six years of blogging

six On Feb 4, 2004, Mark Zuckerberg launched his Harvard student social network Facebook. At about the same time, I was goofing around with this new thing web log, and on Feb 17, I published my first blog post. Six years later Zuckerberg is a billionare and, well, I’m not. Either way, I’m happy that I have managed to keep this blog running for six years today and during that time I have published in excess of 1,400 posts.

During the years, the number of visitors peaked during the tragic Asian tsunami, in late December 2004, much thanks to a number of links from some mainstream media sites. Another day with thousands of visits was on Nov 2, 2005 when Media Culpa was pick of the day by the Blogger team.

A quick look at Google Analytics from Jan 1, 2005 and onwards shows that Twitter.com has sent a lot of traffic my way, it is fifth in the list of top referring sources. On July 18, 2009 the blog received the highest amount of traffic from search engines and my guess is that is from the post about the fake Zlatan Ibrahimovic on Twitter who was quoted by the AP.

I may not be blogging as frequently now as I used to (the last year I have also been running a blog in Swedish about social media), but I promise to keep it going for a little longer. And please don’t be too hard on me if you read the first few blog posts. It was a period of testing and trying to understand the concept of blogging.

Footnote: Image by Marie-II.

Movie wins Swedish digital PR award

This year I have had the honor to be in the jury for the Swedish PR awards Spinn 2009. I’ve been impressed by the amount of creative work that Swedish PR and advertising agencies create for their clients, and even more of the business value these campaigns have delivered. Public relations once again demonstrates how valueable and cost efficient it can be in driving business goals. But even more apparent was that almost all successful activities this year had a digital element to it. It is no longer unique to be active in social media channels when launching PR initiatives.

kennybegins On Thursday night this week, the prizes were handed out at a gala dinner in Stockholm and the gold in the digital category went to the Swedish movie Kenny Begins. The campaign cleverly used social media channels such as Facebook groups (Kenny Begins – The Countdown) in combination with traditional marketing to engage with potential fans and create a buzz in the target audience early on. The character Kenny Starfighter currently has 1,740 fans on Facebook.

Client: Nordisk Film
Agency: Prime PR.

One of two silver prizes went to technical consulting firm ÅF, previously Ångpanneföreningen, for the digital rectruiting campaign Welcome to the List. An almost empty site was launched with the objective to recruit 100 programmers and developers. The get on the top ten list you had to program your way through the campaign site. The campaign brilliantly excluded non-programmers and instead focused on creating the right word-of-mouth in the main target group.

welcometothelist

Client: ÅF
Agencies: Jung, Peacock and Lonley Duck.

The second silver went to the Swedish Tourist Association for a blogging campagin called “The most Swedish job in Sweden“, in which a young man travelled through Sweden in 60 days and documented his experiences via social media.

Client: STF
Agency: Syrup

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Top PR and social media blogs

I love ranking lists, especially the ones that include me. So I have to write about these rankings from Invesp Consulting that list blogs in a variety of categories, based on factors like Google Page Rank and incoming links. I am happy to find Media Culpa currently listed as number 21 in public relations and 119 in social media. Not bad for a guy blogging in a second language (and I get 0 for subscribers since my FeedBurner stats are not in yet). Especially cool to see that among the biggest PR blogs in the world, this blog is ranked #8 on Google Page Rank, #12 on number of incoming links, #13 on most indexed pages in Google, #18 on StumbleUpon reviews, #19 on Delicious bookmarks and #23 on Alexa site rank (that was a real surprise).

The list of social media blogs include such well-known blogs as ProBlogger, Mashable, ReadWriteWeb and Scobleizer, so I’m quite happy to be included at all.

Hat tip to Chris Abraham (#18 in PR).

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You’re not a SlideShare Rockstar

Blogging or microblogging on April 1st is a risky business. Chances are that someone is trying to pull your leg. One of the more successful pranks today was done by the filesharing site SlideShare which sent an email to many users congratulating them on the sudden rise in traffic to the presentations they had uploaded to SlideShare.

“You’re a SlideShare Rockstar

We’venoticed that your slideshow on SlideShare has been getting
a LOT of views inthe last 24 hours.
Great job … you must be doing something right.;-)

Why don’t you tweet or blog this?
Use the hashtag #bestofslideshare so we can track the conversation.

Congratulations,
-SlideShare Team”

Bloggers and microbloggers were quick to communicate their sudden brush of fame to friends and followers, stating that one of their presentations had gotten thousands of views. Problem was that it was only an April fools joke. Below you can see the increase in mentions of SlideShare on blogs and on Twitter.

aprilfools

slidesharejoke

Another successful joke today was published by the Guardian which claimed that the 188 year old newspaper would quit the paper edition and turn to publishing only on Twitter. This joke fooled Anna Serner, the CEO and Managing Director of the Swedish Newspaper Publishers’ Association, who blogged about the bold move by the Guardian.

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Few use multimedia in online press releases

The Society for New Communications Research has published the results (see pdf) of a survey of the ROI of Online Press Releases. The survey is based on 423 responses from marketing professionals, PR professionals and small business owners.

Respondents said that both traditional media and new media/bloggers were the top two most important audiences they hoped to reach with their online press releases (given 4.16 and 3.88 on a 1-5 scale, respectively).

The survey also showed that very few respondents used social media release formats (26.3 percent) and even fewer reported adding video (12.8 percent) or audio (9 percent) enhancements. Of all multimedia elements, photos were the most popular, used in online press releases by 49.5 percent of respondents. However, as more and more social media release services are launched I am sure that more businesses and organizations will start adding multimedia content to their press releases when it adds value.

Via In Front Of Your Nose.

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