The Winter Olympics have quickly become the Social Media Games, with the media, sponsoring brands and even competitors themselves all sharing the experience online.

But athletes were warned by the IOC that their uploads must avoid damaging the privacy of others, carrying commercial messaging, publishing interviews with fellow athletes or Olympic staff or publishing any audio or video footage of Olympic events. 

Basically, athletes can only broadcast about their own personal (i.e. first person) Olympic experience and must not mention their sponsors unless they are also Olympic sponsors.

Of course, the principle income streams for the IOC are selling media rights and sponsorship, so it’s understandable that they would want to ensure exclusivity for their media and corporate partners.  But they appear to have been a bit heavy handed and have, in essence, throttled the athletes’ own buzz machines for the duration.

posted by gemmaT

In February’s Admap magazine, Molly Flatt writes about how social media is forcing marketers to change the way they work:

Businesses are used to time on their terms: time as a method of control – a clearly compartmentalised commodity measured out in the ping of Outlook meeting alerts.  They’re not used to other people’s timescales dictating their schedules, especially when these people refuse to confine their conversations to nine to five on weekdays.

For businesses, slowness means safety: time to plan; time to check legal red tape, facts and logistics; time to cover up the mistakes before they spread.  Social media demands qualities of flexibility, spontaneity and speed that are alien and risky to image-makers versed in composition, rather than conversation.

So slow equals safe, but social media insists on fast.  You can start to see why the traditional Monday-Friday for both clients and marketing agencies is fast becoming a thing of the past in a two-way society where dealing with the latest fallout on twitter just won’t wait ‘til Monday morning.  

The traditional crisis PR approach of taking home with you the ‘in the event of a client emergency dial…’ mobile phone isn’t really going to cut it anymore.  I can see a lot of shift working, two full time people covering one role and weekends in the office in the future for online PR professionals – and their clients.

posted by gemmaT

As reported in the Times Online, a Harvard law student is not only suing Google for breaching email privacy with its social network, Buzz, but is effectively damaging the online giant’s reputation in the process. Uh-oh Google!

Annoyed users of the email service have been posting (and ranting) on Google’s forum, so much so that Google employees are having to intervene, one of which stated ‘we welcome your feedback, but the tone of this thread has gotten completely out of line’ with angry threads popping up frequently, such as ‘Breach of trust and privacy. Get rid of it Google’.

I can imagine it’s been a tough call for Google on how to react to this – on one hand they can’t really boot people off for being annoyed about this issue when it was their fault in the first place. Looks like a bit of a catch 22 for them on how to respond and social media bloggers around the world (including me!) are keen to see how Google will bounce back from this.

However, it does seem that Google have moved quickly to rectify the problem with an apologetic blog post appearing by the product manager, Todd Jackson, for Gmail and Google Buzz, along with a promise to change one of the social network’s features. He said “We’re very sorry for the concern we’ve caused and have been working hard ever since to improve things based on your feedback.” Good approach in my opinion. But, is this enough to restore our faith in Google once more? Time will tell.

Posted by Charlotte Brophy

It’s going to be a very interesting few months.  A general election is galloping over the horizon in the UK and it looks like the fight for hearts and minds is going to take place online.

The 2008 US presidential election was probably the first high profile political event to really utilise online, with 1.5 million volunteers registered online and $600m raised from 3 million people.  Obama’s campaign utilised facebook, YouTube, myspace, flickr and twitter to mobilise supporters and communities.  By the time the campaign was over, volunteers had created more than 3.2 million Facebook profiles on the site, planned 200,000 offline events, formed 35,000 groups, posted 400,000 blogs and generated 14.5 million television viewing hours on YouTube.

Of course, in the UK we have 650 local candidates, rather than just a single figurehead that everyone can really rally behind and smaller digital budgets, making grassroots online campaigning more problematic.

However, online is undoubtedly going to play a role in driving the UK political news agenda for the next few months and is far less controllable than the traditional offline media tools that the parties are used to electioneering with.  The Conservatives seem to be ahead of Labour in the digital race at the moment with their collaborative myconservatives.com versus Labour’s more direct Labourspace, but the spoof Cameron posters popping up all over the internet aren’t exactly helping the Conservatives’ cause. 

That’s the problem with the online world.  It puts the people, not politicians, in the driving seat.  On the other hand, that’s why it’s so brilliant.

posted by gemmaT

Brands need to be monitored, protected and represented online.  Even if your business isn’t very good at the monitoring and representing bit yet, you at least need to get the protection right.

Would you allow a shop to open bearing your brand name and imagery, but selling p0rn?  Or tolerate someone ringing up your customers pretending to be from your brand, while criticising your products?  I thought not.

You need to protect your brand and your trademarks online.  And the best way to do this is to own the relevant online real estate.  Its not just about owning the domain name mybrand.com.  You also need to consider social media sites so you’ll need to own facebook.com/mybrand, twitter.com/mybrand, linkedin.com/companies/mybrand and so on.

The only cost involved is the time it takes to sign up for a free account.  But you’d better get a move on.  Social media sites allocate names on a first come, first served basis and cybersquatters are on the rise.  Someone even beat Heinz to their twitter handle (albeit as an exercise to see how long it took them to notice!).

posted by gemmaT

It seems an accidental tweet from Vodafone on Friday has got the company in big Twitter trouble. The tweet has since been deleted by the company but was quickly put on Twitpic and has been picked-up across the web including on The Guardian Unlimited, Telegraph.co.uk, and econsultancy to name but a few.

Twitter can be a great way to engage with customers, but whether it’s one tweet or an ethical fauxpas, as with Habitat in 2009, blunders like this on the Twittersphere are not forgotten easily, not forgotten easily at all.

The importance of not giving all employees access to a corporate profile could reduce the risk of mistakes like this happening. And an innocent tweet on your personal profile may be one too far when you realise your logged in on the company profile.

At least with good old newspapers today’s headlines could be tomorrow’s fish and chip wrappers - not the same for online, especially with Vodafone’s 8,800 followers. Oh, no sorry it’s now 9,277 followers – the pesky employee may have even done some good, no?

Posted by Sally Barr

It might only be December 7th, but its not too early to start thinking about New Year’s Resolutions from an Online PR point of view.  May OnVisible suggest a few for you?

1) Ensure that how your brand presents itself, reacts and behaves online is in line with it’s offline persona – which means that you need a joined up strategy which embraces your brand’s blog, twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and so on to deliver consistent messaging and tone of voice.

2) Because engagement in the online environment is about having conversations, not making speeches, make sure that you are listening as much (if not more) than you are talking online.

3) Embrace and celebrate your colleague’s take-up of social media – but implement and communicate clear guidelines about personal use of blogs, social networking and other third party websites where they identify the author as an employee of your organisation (the BBC’s guidelines are a great example).

4) Allocate online responsibilities (and preferably targets) within your organisation – whether this is liaising with your online PR agency or twittering and blogging directly, someone needs to have the-buck-stops-here responsibility for how your brand behaves online or its easy to push it to the bottom of the ‘to do’ list.

5) Think quality not quantity – better to have 50 engaged enthusiast followers on twitter than 500 eccentrics, better to produce two insightful, content rich, well linked to blog posts a week than five half hearted attempts.

posted by gemmaT

Econsultancy’s Social Media and Online PR report is out now and makes interesting reading.

It suggests that in-house PR teams in particular are guilty of ignoring the importance of online reputation monitoring.  Nearly half of respondents to the survey (of 1,100 client-side marketers, PR professionals and digital agencies) said they did not use reputation or buzz monitoring tools to understand what was being said about their brand on the web – and only 17 per cent were using technology to analyse sentiment.

At OnVisible we are big fans of reputation monitoring, utilising a mix of free tools, bought in technology and bespoke solutions.  After all, online reputation building and engagement is all about conversations – and it gets a bit one sided if you aren’t listening to what everyone else is saying.

posted by gemmaT

Well, you do.  It’s a fact that people are already talking about your brand online.  Whether you’re a shopper who has had a bad experience, an ex-employee or satisfied customer, its easy to share your experiences and opinions online.  And equally easy to comment and start a discussion.

Committing time and resources to monitoring what people are saying about your brand or business is the first step towards managing your online reputation (and OnVisible has tools that can help you do this).  But to start contributing to the discussion and even influencing it too, you need to clearly define how your brand should behave online.  Is it a problem solver like ComCast, warm and friendly like Innocent, or slightly eccentric like Pimms?

Attempting engagement and influence in the online world can only be successful when the true voice of your brand shines through in everything you do.  To make sure that how your brand presents itself, reacts and behaves online is in line with it’s offline persona, you need a social media strategy.

posted by gemmaT

From one central web(site) presence, brands are increasingly moving towards a ‘hub and spoke’ approach, utilising social media tools to engage with their stakeholders, wherever they may be hanging out.

The spokes might include twitter, facebook, LinkedIn and some kind of blog, with directions back to the main ‘hub’ which provides more detailed information and access to the other ‘spokes’.  In a perfect world, each spoke would have a real, live person from that brand visibly responsible for the two way communication it engenders (like Frank Eliason at Comcast).

For individuals, lifestreaming solutions like posterous, tumblr and friendfeed (that aggregate content from blogs, social networking sites, bookmarking sites and uploaded material like youtube videos) are increasingly taking over from copy heavy blogs.  We are overwhelmed with content and don’t have time to read or view as much as we used to even 18 months ago. 

Microblogging seems to be a solution, with auto posting to a lifestream allowing content from all the spokes to be viewed in one place on the main hub. For brands and organisations, the problem comes when perhaps you don’t want a customer complaint or a campaign aimed at a specific niche audience reposted and plastered all over the home page of your website.

Which means that the central hub has (at least!) four jobs:

- demonstrating what the is organisation doing and thinking right now…
- …while being relevant to and appropriate for the person visiting and anticipating what their needs might be
- communicating appropriate and positive brand values
- providing company information and points of contact

With communication between brands and their users becoming ever more transparent, the role of PR in the online environment as omnipresent defender of corporate reputation is going to get ever more important.

posted by gemmaT