Facebook Broke the Internet

Did you know that for an hour yesterday Facebook broke the internet? Visitors to websites like Mashable, the Huffington Post, Pinterest were presented with a Facebook error page when they tried to visit their favourite sites. How annoying? Did you experience the intense rage of being denied your online fix?

The glitch was caused by a bug in Facebook Connect API, affecting any user logged into Facebook and redirecting them to a Facebook error page.

Social Media Fatigue

Staying with Facebook, a study revealed that 61% of people admit to taking a holiday from Facebook. Reasons for “social media fatigue” include lack of time and users becoming bored of the drama, gossip and negativity filling their feeds. Good news for Facebook is that these holidays are only temporary and most users return to the social network after their respite.

FOMO

Like “Social media fatigue”, “Fear of Missing Out” (FOMO) is a recent phenomena linked to our internet obsession. FOMO is the natural reaction to being constantly bombarded from updates from people who are obviously a lot cooler than you are and are having a lot more fun.

CouchCachet is a brand new app that helps you fabricate an exciting social life to alleviate those feelings of FOMO. Don’ t worry if you want to stay in on a Saturday night, watching re-runs of Friends. With CouchCachet you can pretend that you too have an exciting social life.

Couchcachet will check you into the coolest parties on Foursquare, tweet lyrics from the right indie band and upload photos of fashionable looking 20 year-olds to your Instagram. And you won’t even need to leave the sofa.

Diagnose yourself

What social media disorders do you suffer from? Are you a chronic oversharer? Are you obsessed with taking Instagram snaps of your food. Do you live vicariously through your Facebook feed. Please share with the group.

• Communication controlling
• Risk management
• Storytelling

Back when I started my career in PR, the earth was flat and PRs focused mainly on handling the media. PR life was easy, predictable and the only change we faced was the varying menu in our favorite restaurant!

However, the development of the internet and social web changed our roles fundamentally. It has put PR and communications at the center of an organization. To handle this change PR experts must use both cerebral hemispheres to manage the communication tasks and challenges: the left for rational thinking and the right for creative thinking. A modern PR needs to be a prudent risk manager, a rational controller and a creative storyteller.

Rational left-brain
A key task for PR managers is to align all communication activities with the overall business targets and strategy. Instead of solely evaluating the success of PR (media / social media coverage, share of voice, key message penetration etc.), communication controlling links the PR activities with the strategic goals of an organization.

Most Fortune 500 companies are influenced by Kaplan/Norton’s balanced scorecard approach. The central element of Kaplan/Norton’s theory is to define the vision and strategy of a company and break these down to operational targets. These business targets are not just commercial or financial. Kaplan/Norton added “Customer”, “Internal Business Processes” and “Learning and Growth” as important non-financial elements to measure the business success of an organization. With this in mind, communication departments need to correlate activity with the four perspectives of a balanced scorecard to demonstrate vvalue. Instead of evaluating only the output, PR needs to measure and analyze the outcome and outflow (see figure 1).

Managing Risk
Another left-brain discipline is to act and think as Risk Manager. In traditional crisis PR, focus was only on manufacturing industries as any crises were commonly due to industrial accidents, product failures or environmental disasters. In today’s fast-moving world, a crisis can happen to any company – regardless of industry, size or quality, due to two main factors. Journalists are increasingly under pressure to be the first with a breaking story. Speed means facts are not checked. Negative stories lead to online clicks and higher circulation. A second ‘fire accelerant’ for crisis is social media. Customer, former staff and an increasingly skeptical audience now use social media as a platform to self-publish and distribute views and frustrations with a brand. No business is immune from social media criticism. Examples such as Dolce & Gabbana, Dominos Pizza, Qantas, Nestlé, Pril or ING DIBA in Europe show how vulnerable companies have become. This means the new type of PR manager needs to act as risk manager. In the pre-crisis phase. we need to analyze potential crisis scenarios, develop structures and processes, monitor closely relevant debates and invest time and money for authentic, transparent stakeholder relations. If a crisis occurs, the media and consumer don’t judge the fact that there is a crisis. They judge how an organization handles the crisis and risk management goes far beyond the crisis management at the time.

Right-brain storytelling
And the job description of the next generation of communication experts goes further than controller and troubleshooter.
Creativity is the key to success whichever sector you work in. A modern communicator needs to be a digital storyteller. There will no longer be a successful product launch, a sustainable thought-leadership initiative or an employer branding campaign without a compelling story. B2b companies need to move from a rational fact, figures and features-driven campaign to storytelling. What do we need for a great story? A hero, a plot and, in some cases, a place. That’s all. Instead of boring the audience with left-brain facts and information, PR experts need to entertain and emotionalize audiences. Information is just bones. Stories are the flesh and blood. We need to show a movie or pictures at the audience’s inner-cinema. And with digital PR, we have a complete and endless selection of tools such as infographics, virals, videos as well as text. One of the greatest examples of this for for me, is the Lenovo ThinkPad T420s campaign. The key message is simple – the boot-up time is just 10 seconds. The hero: a laptop. The action: Free fall. The place: 6,000 meters above the earth. That simple. That powerful. Watch and enjoy.

How to Inject your Ideas into a Breaking News Story and Generate Tons of Media Coverage. It’s about making the second paragraph of a news story, by quickly responding to emerging news stories, developing a response, in order to generate media coverage.

However true, the concept of newsjacking is not all that new. Any PR today should recognise it as a common tactic. In fact it has been good practice in the PR industry for decades. So why is newsjacking suddenly so popular?

One explanation is the emergence of real-time reporting. Imagine a breaking news story is published – let’s say on a new computer worm that infects military computers. An expert from a security company, like Symantec, is available to give some insights on the topic. A PR team drafts a statement and contacts journalists. This works particularly well for newspaper journalists: they want to cover the item in tomorrow’s paper as comprehensively as possible.

Little pig, little pig…

Many online media, including newspapers, are increasingly engaging in real-time reporting. To be able to compete with other media, a breaking news story will be covered when it breaks. Want to see how this works? Check out this compelling video by The Guardian, which takes the fairytale of the wolf and the three pigs as a starting point to discuss how real-time journalism works.

Click here to view the embedded video.

In case of the computer worm: real-time reporting makes it possible for a journalist to start an article by just mentioning the news facts (New worm infects military computers). Meanwhile, the journalist will start looking for additional information to add to the story. The article will be updated several times, adding more background information and expert opinions.

Make it to the second paragraph

PR professionals that want to make the second paragraph of real-time media, have to make sure they get to the journalist first. Search plays a big part here, with a lot of research taking place online. The more a company expert has already written about a subject, the bigger the chance they will be approached by a journalist with an enquiry on the matter simply due to SEO rankings.

In short, real-time journalism has changed the way the PR industry can (or should) hijack a news story. First, speed is more important than ever, since news stories develop real-time. Second, it is critical that company experts can build their online reputation on a corporate blog, so a journalist will find them expert once looking for additional information.

Although newsjacking may have a negative ring to it – somehow it seems to imply all the benefit is on the brand’s side – if you tackle it the right way, it’s a win-win situation. Reporters are constantly looking for context and insights for their stories – newsjacking allows PR to become a source, not just for the benefit of being quoted. This is profoundly changing the world of PR: we are there much more to help clients become sources than to just communicate news or a message – brands are increasingly using their own channels for that.

Are you a PR or a journalist that regularly participates in newsjacking? What are your views on newsjacking? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.

A severe case of going back to basics seems to be in order, although it isn’t all bad. Those wonderful surveys that tend to get wheeled out if the old corporate news is a bit thin on the ground? You know the ones, nine respondents, predicting that the sun will come up in the morning and go down in the evening? Well, apparently they aren’t that interesting and don’t actually qualify as news…

Why is it that some still can’t even get the ‘bleeding obvious’ right? It is giving the rest of us a bad name!

Well, we’re not sure yet, but we will find out on Thursday afternoon when the BBC, ITN and the FT all tell us what they think of PR at our ‘What makes national news?’ industry forum. The event follows hot on the heels of our green dragons’ extravaganza last week, and we are delighted to have a variety of media names in attendance.

It should prove to be a lively debate and there is still some space left if you fancy coming along (RSVP only to tanyah@lewispr.com) If not, look out for the debrief here on Friday!