Like blogs, Twitter has almost become a staple comms. tool for brands. But before jumping into the world of micro-blogging make sure your company can answer the following questions:

1. What will your Twitter username be? Make sure it’s short, snappy and relevant. Use the company name if possible so fellow tweeters can find your easily
2. Who will be responsible for updating the feed? Will it be a single person, a team of people – how much time will you allocate to Twitter each week? If it’s not enough you won’t get out of the starting block.
3. What is the purpose of your Twitter account? Is it a news feed, customer support channel, lead generator, personality-builder, media engagement tool, event promotion, competition promotion, internal communications or simply amplifying another Twitter feed? Make sure your tweets serve a purpose.
4. What is your follower strategy?  How will you decide who to follow and who does the following?
5. Who are you targeting with Twitter? Journalists, industry influencers, customers, competitors, celebrities, staff? There are numerous audiences on Twitter but make sure your tweets aren’t being lost in space – make them targeting and attract the people you want to speak to.
6. What is your response strategy? What do you do if someone sends a reply or DM to you? Is it an instant response, do you have a 24 response time? Who manages the replies?
7. What is the expected life-span of your Twitter feed? Is this something that will live for 6 months or indefinitely. Ask the question, if the answer is less than 3 months then Twitter probably isn’t the way forward for your brand.
8. How will you integrate your Twitter feed across your other social platforms? LinkedIn, Facebook, Foursquare – they all allow you to further spread your tweets amongst your target audience.
9. How will you measure the success of your Twitter feed? Be accountable, will you measure the number of followers you have, the number of leads you have generated or the amount of conversation created. Have a goal and you’ll find it easier to find success on Twitter.

Creating a Twitter account isn’t rocket-science but having an effective and useful Twitter feed isn’t easy. Only by questioning the role that micro-blogging will have for your brand and dedicating focused resource towards the platform will you ensure Twitter becomes an invaluable tool for your company, your employees and your customers.

Yesterday I had the pleasure of attending the second Media140 event in London. This event was focused on brands and their use of social media platforms (particular focus on Twitter) and whilst it was a good event overall, like many events of this nature, it often drifted from insightful to insufferable (and back again).

The most notable thing missing from the conference was the number of brands in attendance – both in speaker slots and the audience. Whilst the likes of BA, Virgin Trains and Red Bull made a valued and insightful contribution, the event would have benefited from more case studies and brand perspective rather than theoretical hyperbole which was, at times, all that was coming from the stage.

That said, I would still recommend attending Media140 to colleagues and fellow social media enthusiasts as between the sales pitches and agency showcasing it did spark some lively debate and offered valuable face time with an inner circle of marketing bods who are influencing the way brands use the social media space.

The highlights for me included the excellent David McCandless who received the biggest cheer of the day simply by demonstrating the power that creative imagery can have on data. An example of his work is below but I urge you to read more via his Flickr channel (and buy his book in February 2010).

Also Ciaran Norris provided some excellent case studies of brands harnessing the 2.0 world, some more successfully than others. Richard Baker, General Manager at Virgin Train made us all reflect a little and appreciate that brands can be great at Twitter if they take a down to earth attitude towards it and simply try to help people.  And finally, Ted Hunt from Innocent Drinks who not only found a suitor within the audience but managed to keep his composure throughout a particularly raucous TwitterFall to demonstrate how personality is key to social media success.

Ande, who organises the events (whilst juggling a full time job I should add), kept his cool between major wi-fi outages which frustrated those in attendance and is looking to host further Media 140 events across the globe over the coming months. I would encourage everyone, if they get the chance, to attend and find out more about how brands, marketers and the media are harnessing the connected web.

As one panel member put it quite brilliantly (and honestly) yesterday, “…at the end of the day we’re all just making it up as we go along”. We are, but with events like Media140 we can at least pretend we know what we’re doing

Last week there were two incredible lapses in judgement from brands that saw people up in arms.

Firstly, Habitat. This has been well documented and covered but to recap – Habitat’s first foray into the Twittersphere ended disastrously after some bright spark decided that leveraging key trends or hashtags on Twitter would be a great way of getting more eyeballs on their tweets.

This resulted in the likes of “#MOUSAVI Join the database for free to win a £1,000 gift card” being posted on their account.

The second, Perez Hilton (yes, he counts as a brand). Upon learning about the tragic death of Michael Jackson, Perez posted this on his popular gossip blog.

This resulted in uproar on social media channels and the #unfollowperez hashtag started doing the rounds.

Both Habitat and Perez received negative comment and coverage as a result of their exploits and both were swift to apologise and correct their errors – Habitat deleted the offending (and offensive) tweets, Perez removing the image.

What is interesting is not the consumer backlash – this is to be expected given the errors in judgement, at least by anyone with half a mind – but the immediate forgiveness shown to both parties by consumers.

Yes they are continuing to receive a small amount criticism and yes both cases may have causes irreparable damage to each brand but largely the apologies were met with general acceptance.

The point is, and this is something I reiterate whenever asked to give a client a social media workshop, brands in general are still learning how best to leverage social media channels and mistakes will be made (even really stupid ones). But, as long as you learn from those mistakes, make adjustments and improve then social media can continue to be an incredibly fun and powerful channel which should be leveraged.

Using your audience as your marketing moral compass is not a bad thing as long as you do listen and change direction when told to.

I doubt Habitat will make the same mistake again – although judging by their Twitter account they may have just given up altogether. And, whilst Perez probably lapped up the controversy it could have been much worse than it was and he’ll be sure to double check his sources before opening MS Paint again.

Anyone that follows me on Twitter will know that I have just returned from the Cannes Lions Festival where Hill & Knowlton was playing host to its own seminar (the first time PR has been included in 56 years).

We decided to show off a bit so recruited Twitter co-founder Biz Stone to speak and held the festival’s first ever live tweet-up.

You can check out videos from the seminar here.

I was lucky enough to hang out with Biz who turned out to be a class act and uncovered a few interesting facts about the man that you might not know:

• He’s a strict vegan and even wears “vegetarian” shoes
• He loves portmanteaus and can come up with them in seconds
• He likes tequila…but in a connoisseur kind of way not in a “slammer” kind of way

Check out the videos above as they offer some real insight into how Twitter came about, Biz’s thoughts on why it has become such a phenomenon and what the future holds.

Enjoy!

I was catching up with some friends earlier this week, most of which work in some sort of marketing / digital / interactive capacity. During the course of dinner we noticed the array of mobile phones on the table and in particular the fact that 5 out of the 6 phones were iPhones.

The conversation moved onto how to engage consumers on the mobile platform (seriously, we have some crazy rock ‘n’ roll dinners) with half arguing that brands need to engage users through iPhone apps and others arguing that the market share of the iPhone was still too small for it to warrant such a large focus. My view, for what it was worth, was that the focus should be on non-iPhone but there is no reason why this can’t be supported through the iPhone.

Anyway, it struck me, looking at the array of iPhones on display, how important it is for us to remember that as marketers we aren’t our client’s target audience – and we shouldn’t lose sight of what is the norm for us and what is the norm for the general population. I’ve see it so often, and I do it myself, when marketers presume audiences behave in a certain way based on their own experiences.

It’s vital when preparing comms. plans whether it’s PR, advertising or marketing that throughout the planning stage we engage and understand the audience we are trying to reach. We’ve (H&K) recently hired a planner and she’s already had us monitoring tourists at the British Museum or shadowing grocery shoppers in supermarkets!

Understanding our clients’ audience’s mindsets and behaviours more deeply allows us to better engage with them and ultimately achieve cut through with our messages.

PR Lesson #63: Treat your customers like thieves and you will get, in most cases, a negative reaction

Poor EA Games, not content with creating the biggest games franchise of all time with The Sims and making millions in the process they decide that their bulging wallets just weren’t bulging enough. They have recently released their latest “must-have” game, Spore, with a new DRM system that means people that buy the game can only install it three times before the game locks and it can’t be used. Wait it gets better…

…now, this could be a brilliant ploy to sell more games but then a glitch with EA’s registration system means gamers were struggling to authorise their copy of Spore and ended up using up their three installations and locking the game.

The decision by EA games to treat all their (loyal) fans as software pirates has resulted in a flurry of negative reviews and uproar amongst the gaming community.

In one fell swoop, EA has turned the most eagerly anticipated game of 2008 into one of the worst.

Can I suggest next time EA skip the formalities of online registration and simply take fingerprints and DNA swabs at point-of-sale.

Found a great new website over the weekend that could prove to be an incredibly useful tool for some raw measurement of campaigns, events and activity.

It’s called Twist and allows you to plot the frequency of keywords found on Twitter. It’s quick and dirty as far as measurement goes but clients love the odd chart and this is an effective way of demonstrating the amount of online buzz being generating at any one time.

As a side experiment I created a graph based on mentions of “Gordon Brown” and “David Cameron”. There is a lot of talk of David Cameron being the new-age digital political compared favourably to Mr. Analogue Gordon Brown. But on this evidence, GB is much more prominent amongst the Twitter chatter!

I get a little bit of stick in the office for being a self-confessed techy but more and more I am finding an array of software, websites, gadgets and tools that allow me to stay one step ahead in the fast-paced world of PR

I thought I would compile a selection of things I kit myself out with to make me a little more PR 2.0:

1. Firefox & add-ons: I took the plunge with Firefox earlier this year and have never looked back. Aside from the speed, stability and usability it provides it also allows you to install add-ons and plug-ins to tailor the software. Pertinent to this post include:

• LinkedIn Companion: Allows me to keep access and my business network at the click of a button (Disclaimer: LinkedIn is an H&K client)
• Foxmarks: Invaluable for working between the office and home. Synchronises your bookmarks across computers so you never have to find that obscure news article you saved during some late night surfing
• Googlepedia: Displays a Wikipedia article next to your Google searches. Excellent resource and time-saver when doing desk research
• Cooliris: Fantastic tool for some one-man creative thinking. Turn your PC into a mood-board in seconds
• TwitterFox: I can’t remember the last time I visited Twitter.com. Tweet and access your feeds from the comfort of your toolbar
• Brief RSS Reader: I know a lot of people like Google Reader but I actually prefer this reader. It’s quick, intuitive and allows me track my 70+ feeds easily

2. Google Alerts: An absolute must for any PR worth their salt. Say goodbye to emails from clients that start, “Did you not see this article?”

3. Factiva Alerts: If you do have access to Factiva you’ll know it provides a useful if not limited service. People tend to overlook its alert service though, which I have found very good. I have it setup to send me an overview email of relevant news articles every morning at 8am. A good indication of what’s on your clients’ agendas that day

4. Mobile Internet / TV: I check the news on a regular basis either through Orange’s WAP site or via Sky News through Orange’s 3G mobile TV service (£5 per month). Increasingly useful as the meetings tot up in my calendar.

5. SpinVox: We all know what it’s like. Leave a 2 hour meeting, turn your phone on…”you have 15 new voicemail messages”. Streamline your voicemail by using SpinVox, a service that turns your voicemails into SMS texts. You’ll no longer be fumbling around for a pen on the 12:05 from Weybridge

6. The Web: Couldn’t really leave it out. But, whilst 99% of it is useless there are some gems in there that every (tech/consumer) PR should have in his or hers bookmarks:

• BBC News Online
• Digg.com
• Mashable!
• Techmeme
• Getty Images
• Wikipedia
• TheWebList.net
• PR Week UK

Follow me, be a geek and amaze your colleagues and clients with your knowledge, speed and creativeness. Just don’t tell anyone that without the web we’d be nothing!

Have I missed any? Let me know!

We all hear of horror stories of journalists being incredibly rude to PRs and many of us have experienced, first hand, exasperation turn to frustration turn to rage after unwittingly selling-in the tenth survey of the afternoon.

But recently I’m beginning to understand how they feel and to be honest wonder how they manage not to slam the phone down after two minutes of stumbling over the first sentence of a pitch.

As we near the end of the year many industry bodies and magazines start planning their awards ceremonies and with that comes the invitation to “take a table” at the event to PRs and the clients they represent.

I have had two already today and the pitching has been so woeful it’s a wonder how they manage to fill the smallest of venues.

The first one:

Sales: “Hi is this Dan”
Me: “Yes”
S: “Yes…er…hi….um…I’m not sure what clients you look after but we’re holding the xxxx 2008 awards in December. Have you heard of them?”
M: “Yes”
S: “Would you like to book a table?”

Second one:

Sales: “Hi I’m xxxxx and I’m calling about the xxxx Awards 2008″
Me: “Hi”
S: “Yes, we would like to invite you to the awards ceremony as I understand you represent xxxx”
Me: “Oh okay, sounds interesting. Could you send me an email with some more details?”
S: “Sure. How do you spell your company name?”

Neither is good but the second is better than the first purely because the sales rep decided to invite me rather than expect me to open up my cheque book within 30 seconds of picking up the handset.

The first rule of selling whether it’s a product or a story is knowing and understanding the audience you are selling to. And I don’t mean knowing what journalists or PRs like, I mean actually knowing who the person on the end of the phone is, who they are, where they work, what they work on and any other insights that are readily available through the magic of Google!

Not knowing who my clients are is annoying but forgivable. There is not central database for PRs however if you don’t know then why not ask. In fact that would be a good way of opening up some kind of dialogue. Not knowing how to spell the name of the company I work for is inexcusable. I know I’m one on a list of hundreds to receive a phone call that day but it doesn’t mean I want to feel like one.

When you’re asking for £3k+ to attend an event, a little bit of desk research is the absolute minimum I expect.

It’s the same for journalists – by doing some simple searches and gathering a little background knowledge I have found the levels of receptiveness and conversion increase vastly. It’s all to easy, when faced with a media list of hundreds, to try and rattle through as many as possible as quickly as possible (gotta get in before they go to conference) but a client would be much happier you called 10 and secured five pieces of coverage than called 100 and got nothing.

Note: I have not included the names of people or specifics about the events as I have used the experiences to make a point and don’t think it is necessary to publicly bash them.

A good friend of mine who follows this blog yesterday gave me a call asking me why the blog went a bit downhill yesterday. He called it “constructive criticism” and at first I was a little taken aback. Plenty of posts, some useful content, what was the problem?

Well apparently, two things lack of comment and lack of humour.

Fair enough I thought. I was busy, didn’t have a chance to construct Shakespearean prose, but he did raise an interesting point.

The advice did make me take a look back on my recent blog posts and he was right, not my best work. But it took him to say it for me to realise that I was substituting quantity for quality.

Self-critique is something we rarely do in PR. Key learnings are one thing but often these are watered down points intended to shift the blame rather than expose our own failings.

We need more people, on the inside, to question the way we do business for our clients. It’s all very well having clients question our approach but we too often dismiss that as in-house paranoia, they don’t have the wisdom to see what we are trying to achieve. Every now and again we should take a step back and look at what we are doing from the perspective of our harshest critic – what could we have done better, what didn’t we achieve, why didn’t we achieve it?

Fortunately, in my friend I have my harshest critic but we should make an effort to be our own on a more regular basis.