Archive for the ‘Blogging’ Category

Is it time to kill your company’s blog?

Wednesday, March 10th, 2010

The other day I spent an hour or so checking out a lot of corporate blogs. I looked at blogs from brands in both the US and the UK and a whole host of blogs from agencies. As you’d expect there are many examples of excellent corporate blogs that act as a mouthpiece for the company – Mariott Hotels and ASOS are among my favourites. These often act a content hub with the posts then seeded through social media channels like Twitter, Facebook and (increasingly) LinkedIn.

However I would say that just under half of the blogs I visited hadn’t been updated this year. In many instances there were interesting posts, but they refereed to news stories that had moved on, or surveys that were out of date. Surprisingly some of the worst offenders are in the social media space with several agencies boasting websites that talk of community engagement and thought leadership, yet have blogs that are little more than online tumbleweed.

One of the golden rules of blogging is that you have to keep at it. If you have personal blog that you don’t update well that’s fine, but you will see readership begin to fall away, For a corporate blog not posting looks much worse. It says that the company has nothing to say or worse that it can’t actually get itself together to organise a proper posting schedule which makes it look incompetent. Either way it says that the company doesn’t especially care about its customers or suppliers (if the blog is focused on the business space).

It gets worse too. Corporate blogs especially are becoming a prime way in which brands break news to journalists and bloggers. With very tight deadlines and schedules those in the media can only spend a certain amount of time checking RSS feeds. If your blog goes quiet for a while you might find yourself culled from their RSS lists.

Then of course the issue of search engines. It is amazing how carefully curated blogging programming can organically propel a brand to the top of Google, Bing etc.

Blogging isn’t mandatory for all brands. There are many social media channels and they all have their uses. However I guess for most brands the prime use of say Twitter, should be engaging directly with customers while simultaneously promoting thought leaderships content. Surely most brands have messages and concepts that they want to communicate that need more than 140 charactars to convey them. So if your blog is unloved and poorly fed it might be time to put it out of its misery. You will be forgoing some excelent opportunities to promote your brand to customers and the media but at least you won’t have a part of your website that reflects very badly on your business.

Tags: blog tumbleweed, blogs, brands and blogging, corporate blogging, killy company blog
Posted in Blogging | No Comments »

Alice Chan guest blogs for PR Week US

Tuesday, January 19th, 2010

Last week the GM of Red San Francisco, Alice Chan, guest blogged for US PR Week’s Insider blog

She discussed a number of topics including how creativity matters more than ever before the changing role of PR and the joys of working globally.

We thought would be useful to share her thoughts from across the pond. Tale a read and let us know what you think!

Tags: Alice Chan, changing role of PR, PR Week, The Red Consultancy
Posted in Blogging, PR and Marcomms | No Comments »

2009: how it was for us

Friday, December 18th, 2009

The office has been full to bursting this week with mince pies (thanks Lewis), birthday cakes (courtesy of Tara and Gill) and home made Christmas cake (from my Geordie gran). Amidst the crumbs and tinsel, we’ve been reflecting on what’s been a busy and incredibly productive year, so I thought I’d share my take on Shiny Red in 2009.

Without doubt there’s been a real growth in demand for digital innovation, driven by consumer brands and public sector clients who now expect to choose from a portfolio of online comms services. We’ve constantly evolved our offer to meet this demand, and looking back, it seems as if the year unfolded as distinct social media seasons.

So spring saw us creating social sites for two quite different clients. Yell.com wanted to encourage people to and around the site so we developed Sort Your Life where each month an expert guest blogger would write on a theme like fitness or fashion. For Reckitt Benckiser, the brief was to inspire graduates about available career opportunities, so our approach was to develop a site where new joiners from around the world could talk about their front-line experiences.

By the summer, web video had really come into focus, and we worked with fashion stylist Louise Roe on a series of films to help launch social shopping site very.co.uk. We also got to meet Peter Crouch at an East London soccer skills academy and filmed him in action for the National Lottery Promotions Unit (an edited version is on our homepage video). Video was also a powerful way for us to showcase a new interactive Piccadilly Circus sign for McDonald’s to bloggers and photography communities (thanks, Leo Burnett!).

Autumn was the season of microblogging: we helped Habitat relaunch the brand’s Twitter feed, which now provides offers, updates, and store news. We also issued a major report into online buying behaviour for eBay Advertising, and asked the great British public for messages to put on advertising billboards around the UK for Cadbury Wispa Gold.

Everyone needs warming up in the winter, so our Twindaloo app for Cobra that analyses your Twitter profile to find out what type of curry you are provided a welcome touch of spice to our lives, as did managing the brand’s 60,000-strong Welovecurry Facebook group. We went live with Pfizer’s Man MoT to give men health advice from doctors via an online surgery, and partnered with MySpace for the NHS Teen LifeCheck campaign that asked teens to take a quiz and find out how healthy they are in return for the chance to win a gig by R+B artist Chipmunk at their school.

Of course talking to bloggers and web communities was – and is – still very much on the agenda for clients including Molson Coors’ Bittersweet Partnership which looks at women’s attitudes towards beer, and Odeon which saw us we targeting film bloggers and heavy metal fans to promote Iron Maiden’s Flight 666. And in one of PR Week’s digital campaigns of the year, we unveiled the wedding of Bertie and Betty Bassett for Red Allsorts via Facebook and YouTube.

I could go on because there’s so much more great work that the team has done this year, but the end of the year is time to look forward as well as back. Ash has been gazing into his crystal ball and will share his some thoughts about what 2010 will hold next week.

Meanwhile (and apologies for a slight touch of the Oscars …) huge thank yous go out to all the lovely Shiny Redders for making 2009 a vintage year, to our colleagues at Red for all their amazing support over the last 12 months, and to you the reader for being part of it with us.

Merry Christmas, and have a happy, healthy and social New Year!

Posted in Blogging, Client News, PR and Marcomms, Video, facebook | No Comments »

The future for commercial blogging – a case study

Thursday, November 26th, 2009

So which is the most powerful and influential blog network in the world? Well there are two contenders, the brit owned New York based Gawker media and Weblogs Inc, which for all intents and purposes these days is AOL. And when either of the networks tweak their designs the rest of the blogging world watches very closely. So last week’s revamp of AOL’s flagship blog, Engadget, has already become a big talking point among commercial bloggers.

Since purchasing Engadget and the rest of Weblogs Inc in 2006 AOL has established the gadget site as the number one consumer electronics portal in the world. It has moved a long way from being a typical blog both in terms of the content on the site and its design. Last week’s tweak takes it even further away from what we used to understand as blogging. It underlines how now blogging is as much about long tail content designed to appeal to readers (and whisper it, search engines) over a longer period of time. Highlighting long tail content has become hugely important now for commercial blogs. Sure most still receive a large chunk of their traffic via quick news stories and are fed by RSS, Google News and organic Google search. However long tail content has enabled some websites/online companies to grow massively (Demand Media springs to mind) and it is content that inevitably has longer shelf life and more intrinsic value than most news content.

Let’s see how the new Engadget reflects this

Firstly at the top of the site there is now a floating bar that Engadget calls its hero module – this can be used by the editors to focus on any type of content they feel has a long shelf life. At the moment the bar is full of Christmas buying guides, next month it will be CES etc. This is where Engadget’s premier long tail content will fit.

Underneath the hero module there is now a pictorial section which highlights top stories. This is where the medium tail content sits – stories that are the most important for that week which will have a longer shelf life than most standard news stories. These are housed in five large-ish images and are designed to pick on the day’s premier news. Since Gawker added top story thumbnails to its pages many months ago this has become a standard feature on many blogs. It is highly effective in keeping casual readers on a site. In some ways it is surprising that Engadget has left it so long to add this.

Finally there is what are arguably the redesign’s coolest feature – the hubs. These are like mini categories which focus on key individual products or events. Take a peek at the one for the recently announced Motorola Cliq phone, you get to access to all the stories that mention the phone along with videos, galleries and a timeline that shows which it was announced and when it was most written about. Once again this is all about re-organising content to give it a longer life. It takes the concept of categories and tabs to its logical conclusion.

Strangely Engadget hasn’t followed Gawker, and its gadget blog Gizmodo, to a home page that features just snippets of story and thumbnails Instead Engadget keeps the long established blog format which allows readers to access a lot of stories without ever having to click on. This flies in the face of most current commercial web design which attempts to get readers to continue to click through – the more page impressions the site gets the higher its ad revenue.

Anyhow, the team at Engadget has come up with was really innovative, dynamic and user friendly redesign and it will be interesting to see if other AOL sites gets a similar treatment soon.

Tags: AOL, Demand Media, Engadget, future of blogging, Gawker media
Posted in Blogging | 1 Comment »

Twitter list of top UK fashion bloggers

Thursday, November 5th, 2009

If you are a regular Twitter user you’ll know that the last couple of weeks has been all about lists. Thanks to a tweak to the Twitter website users can now make lists of users and shares them with others. There’s a good post on how this works here.

So will lists transform the way that people use Twitter? It is too early to say at the moment. So many people now user third party software to access their Twitter account and only a handful of these apps have added list functionality to their offering. For the record lists are available now on Seesmic, but not on my favourite Twitter system Tweetdeck or the many mobile versions of Twitter.

One of the most interesting things about the lists is that its shows how people perceive/categorise you. One Shiny Redder is in ‘awesome music related list.’ ‘top London folk’ as well as other social media types. I am waiting to be included in a Scott Walker obsessives list

Anyhow in a spirit of generosity and sharing I worked with the editor of Shiny Style, Andrea Petrou, to produce a list of UK fashion bloggers on Twitter. It is by no means comprehensive, but includes most of the main bloggers who update their websites more than once a day.

While doing the research I was struck by how vibrant the UK fashion blog scene is. There are lots of very professional looking sites that have great content that are constantly updated. Along with the equally vibrant mummy blogging sectors the fashion bloggers put two metaphorical fingers up to the notion that blogging in the UK is on the wane.

It is also interesting to note that most of the successful bloggers have hooked up with one of the major blog networks. So in fashion the key players are Handpicked Media (which has a huge selection of titles including the excellent Queens of Vintage), Aigua Media (which has several ex Shiny titles like Catwalk Queen) and Shiny Media itself which boasts Shiny Style and Brandish.

The list is here

Tags: Fashion bloggers, seesmic, Shiny Style, tweetdeck, twitter, Twitter Lists
Posted in Blogging, Microblogging | No Comments »

Shiny Red’s research into the UK Mummy Blogging community

Tuesday, October 27th, 2009

Conversations With Mummy Bloggers

View more documents from Ashleynorris.

One of the biggest growth areas in social media in the UK is the so called Mummy Blogging sector. This is where bloggers share their experiences of parenting (among other things) with a growing and vibrant community.

Mummy Blogging’s roots are in the US with writers like Dooce who now attract hundreds of thousands of readers. It has however grown significantly this side of the pond, and we think that there could now be as many 1000 parenting blogs in the UK.

Mummy Bloggers are also becoming increasingly influential with core writers attracting thousands of readers each month and creating posts that generate large numbers of comments. There is also a very powerful social media footprint emerging around the Mummy Bloggers powered not just by Twitter and Facebook but also by the Ning community site of The British Mummy Blogger network.

As an agency Shiny Red has already worked on several campaigns that have involved talking with mummy bloggers. This autumn though we decided that the time was right to take the temperature of the UK scene by surveying 20 of the key bloggers and engaging in conversations with several others. We also gleaned a lot of information about the scene by simply reading their blogs.

Among the questions we asked them were

Why they blog?

How they feel about brands approaching them?

How they use social media?

Where they go for advice and support?

This presentation was developed a for a Mummy Blogging event that we hosted along with our sister agency The Red Consultancy on October 20^th. Here we gave representatives from brands and government agencies the chance to not just hear our views, but more importantly to meet and have a conversation with two of the UK’s leading mummy bloggers.

It is hard to sum up our findings in a couple of sentences. However we feel that the Mummy Bloggers are powerful and vociferous community, but one that is ready and willing to engage with brands, but only on their own terms. They are also well educated, influential women who between them wield an awful lot of economic power.

We also noted there is also a splintering of the Mummy Blogging community with a new breed of writers emerging who are much more focussed on monetising their words than some of their contemporaries.

Feel free to read through the deck and tell us what you think in the comments.

Tags: mummy blogging, Mumsnet, research, shiny red
Posted in Blogging, New Media | 2 Comments »

US Blogs to disclose all “cash or in-kind payments” under new laws

Tuesday, October 6th, 2009

This week the Federal Trade Commission announced that beginning December 1, bloggers in the US will have to disclose whether or not they received payments or free goods in exchange for reviewing products—if they don’t, they could be fined up to $11,000.

The new FTC Guide Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising makes the argument that any post by a blogger who receives “cash or in-kind payment to review a product” should be considered as a product endorsement. With posts now being considered official endorsements, under advertising and marketing laws, they will have to disclose all relationships with brands and any freebies they have received on their sites.

Although currently there are only plans for this to take place in the US, it is very interesting as it represents the first time since 1980 that the FTC has changed its rules for advertising endorsements and testimonials, and could possibly signal further change worldwide, regarding the way in which online content is regulated.

The announcement has created a great deal of debate amongst bloggers and has been a trending topic on twitter for most of the day, as bloggers begin to look at the impact these new regulations will have on the way they operate their blogs.

Having firsthand experience as a music blogger, I can say from personal experience that receiving freebies are a vital part of maintaining a blog. Without being sent free albums and concert tickets, I would have little content to fuel my blog, and as most bloggers would probably agree, paying for all the products that they review out of pocket, would quickly push many of them out of the blogging business.

That said, the FTC is not saying that bloggers cannot still accept freebies from PR’s. However, it may affect the way readers perceive the credibility of both bloggers and brands, despite the fact that most bloggers will write honest and accurate reviews of a product regardless of if it was free or not.

It will be interesting to see how this policy will affect bloggers in the US and if any plans to implement a similar policy in the EU emerge.

Tags: blogger endorsements, FTC blogger regulations, product review regulations
Posted in Blogging | No Comments »

Why Posterous just might be the future of blogging

Tuesday, August 4th, 2009

Over the last few months there have been many stories in both mainstream and social media chronicling the decline of blogging. Fewer people are apparently starting blogs, many blogs are not being updated and less people are reading them.

There is a fairly contentious debate as to why blogging has become less popular, but many commentators cite the growth of micro blogging or Twitter, as the most significant reason for its downturn.

I think they are right too. Twitter is a fast and instantaneous way of sharing information with a large group of people, it makes blogging look slow, cumbersome and rather one dimensional.

There are however still many good reasons why savvy individuals and brands will continue to use blogging software to deliver content.

1 I think that only very shallow minds can express everything they feel about an issue in 140 charactars.
2 Blogging should still be a major plank in website owners SEO strategy. For search engines original content on websites is still a massive draw and if a blog is updated regularly it will not only attract regular readers via RSS, Twitter or others sources but will pick up readers through Google, Bing etc

Why Posterous might be a game-changer

I think that blogging will still be a major part of the social media world if blogging software can evolve to make things easy for people to express their opinions. This is where Posterous comes in.

Posterous, along with its rivals Tumblr and Twitblogs, is the fourth wave of blogging software. It all began with basic systems like Blogger at the turn of the decade. Then more sophisticated systems like Wordpress and Movable Type enabled bloggers to produce more website-like feature-rich blogs. The third wave married blogging with social networking like the blogs on sites like MySpace as well as blogging software with social networking elements like Vox.

With Posterous and its rivals, we have blogging software that is optimised to not only ape the simplicity of micro blogging, but also to harness its reach, to syndicate content.

So is Posterous the future of blogging? At this point is hard to say. However given the way the Posterous has reignited many bloggers love of the format (I’d include myself here – nearly 100 posts in a month) I’d argue that it at the very least it will play an important role in shaping the future of blogging.

Posterous is not entirely new. It has been around for a year now, but it is now only really starting to gain traction with bloggers on both sides of the Atlantic.

Ease of use

What makes it so attract to bloggers is that it is so simple to use. With traditional blogging software users had to log into a site, input their text, upload images, size them and carry out other tweaks too. With Posterous there are two very simple ways of posting. Firstly users can email content. The subject matter of the email becomes the head, the body text the content and any attached images the pictures. It is incredibly simple to use and very effective when used with smartphones like the Nokia N97 and the iPhone.

Secondly Posterous users can download a bookmarklet which sits in the bar at the top of the browser. When they find a page they want to link to or write about, they click on the bookmarklet and it appears on top of the page. It grabs any images on the page – the user just chooses the one they want – and they add any text or links in the text box. They then press save and within seconds their post is published. Even complicated things are made simple. Producing image galleries can be done in seconds rather than minutes by attaching a lot of images to an email – the software automatically presents them as a gallery. The software is also smart enough to recognise video content and presents it in the correct way on the page without the user having to make any amendments.

Once the post has been published Posterous does several other clever things. The user can set their account up so that each time they post, details of the post are automatically sent to Twitter, Facebook and other social networking sites. They can even use it to feed another blog.

So for example I very rarely post direct to Twitter now, but rather post a mini blog story on Posterous which automatically pings my Twitter account. The system’s excellent tracking ability means that I can see exactly how many people have clicked on my post. Some bloggers use Posterous as an alternative to Twitpic in that they can share many images quickly and easily with the Twitter community.

Oddly this makes Posterous a real contender for brands who want to start a blog. Many early corporate blogs attracted very little traffic. By integrating Posterous with Twitter, providing their Twitter feed has a few followers, a brand can be sure that their blog posts are being read from day one.

It’ll be interesting to see where Posterous goes in the next few months. An obvious move would be a deal with Google to allow users to monetise their blogs. Adding more advanced features so users can tweak their posts after posting would also be useful.

It will also be interesting to see if Posterous type features are incorporated into traditional blogging software like Wordpress and Typepad.

From this bloggers perspective though Posterous is the most exciting thing to happen to blogging software in several years. It might not slow the decline of the format but it will certainly attract hard core, time-poor bloggers and it could have some very interesting uses for both commercial and corporate bloggers.

Here are a few Shiny Red Posterous blogs

This is Tomorrrow , Laura’s Posterous, Gill’s Posterous , A whole world of Crap, Curiosty And the good news is and the legendary Dark Place

Tags: Blogging, future of blogging, Posterous, Tumblr, Twitblogs, twitter
Posted in Blogging | No Comments »

Shiny Red’s new signing

Wednesday, February 11th, 2009

We’re thrilled to have a new team member join us this week, the lovely Laurence Borel who’s been writing Blogtillyoudrop for several years.

Lolly’s a well-known blogger around town and has worked as a social media strategist too. As a self-confessed lover of cocktails she’ll fit right into the Shiny Red setup – welcome, Lolly!

Other new team members include Gill Edwards and Laura Scott who both joined full-time in January and have already made their debuts on this blog.

It’s been a good time to expand the team as we’ve seen a real surge of interest in social media over the last few months. New clients are coming from across a range of sectors, despite – or because of – the wider economic gloom. With marketing budgets under pressure, brands still want to run innovative marketing campaigns…and long may that continue!

Posted in Blogging, PR and Marcomms | 1 Comment »