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digital pr Featured General PR online pr tech pr Technology PR

Which journalists aren’t worth engaging with on Twitter?

Consider the following argument:

Most journalists are on Twitter.

PRs should therefore spend more time “engaging” with journalists on Twitter.

Seems to make logical sense (from a PR standpoint).

Except that just because a journalist has a Twitter account, loads of followers and Tweets for Britain, doesn’t mean that PRs should attempt to interact and engage with every relevant journalist on Twitter.  The reason being that some are far more likely to share your content and actually talk to you than others.

But how do work out which is which?

One way is to use a tool like Twitonomy.

For example, look at the following analysis of Charles Arthur, The Guardian’s Technology Editor.

charles1

Over the last two months, he has Tweeted (on average) nearly 55 times per day. From an engagement standpoint, he certainly seems to mention other people a lot – and 74pc of his Tweets are actually @ replies to other people. So as a PR, you might think this is a good way to have a dialogue with him (better still of course, would be to get him to follow you – then you can have private DM conversations).

However, Charles hasn’t shared that many links in the last two months – so the chances that he is going to share that press release of yours is going to be pretty low. He doesn’t ReTweet that much either – so don’t get your hopes up on that front.

Going back to Charles’ propensity to reply to people, Twitonomy also reveals who has had the most conversations with in the last two months:

charles2

Not may PR people in that group (Charles himself has already pointed out that he doesn’t think this tells us much – other than that the community of people he has talked to via Twitter over the last two months is pretty broad).

If you were determined to have a go at interacting with Charles, Twitonomy also reveals those times when he most likely to Tweet (and thus presumably be online and on Twitter):

charles3

Based on this analysis, 11pm on Friday night.

Clearly, you need to use these metrics with caution. These stats only relate to the last two months. Even if they did range over a wider time frame, how much you can actually infer from this is a moot point. And a cynic might argue that rather than poring over this kind of data, someone trying to get Charles’ attention would be better off investing their time in actually coming up with a decent story angle.

Having said that, I do think tools like Twitonomy – when used appropriately – can be a useful guide to PRs who want to work out the propensity of target journalists to share links, engage in dialogue and/or RT content.

And armed with this knowledge, PRs can allocate engagement resources appropriately. If the end result is better targetting and more effort in giving journalists more relevant and timely information, surely that can’t be a bad thing.

What do you think? Is there something in this? Or is it complete hokum? The comments box awaits your answer.

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Digital marketing digital pr Featured online pr

Using MajesticSEO TrustFlow for online press coverage targeting

Back in May 2012, SEO tools firm MajesticSEO announced a concept called FlowMetrics – this was broken down into two areas: Citation Flow and Trust Flow

Here’s how MajesticSEO describes them:

Citation Flow

Citation Flow predicts how influential a URL might be based on how many sites link to it. Because links are now not all created with equal weight – and because a strong link will have a relatively stronger influence on URLs further down the chain, you can see how much better Citation Flow is as a mathematical logic than the old metric of ACRank.

Trust Flow

We start with a large list off manually reviewed URLs. These have a crowd-sourced level of trust but by no means include all the trusted sites on the web. It turns out, though, that trustworthy sites tend to link to trustworthy neighbours. Those neighbours also tend to link to trustworthy neighbours themselves. In fact – after lots of iterations – those outside the circle of trust are put in the cold.  So Trust Flow, like Citation Flow passes THROUGH urls like sound passes through walls – with awesome effects.

 In short, for every domain or URL, you end up with a score from 0 – 100 for each metric. And that score is a measure of the possible relative value of that page or domain.

So what has this got to do with PR?

Here’s an example. Let’s compare two tech media sites – The Register and Computer Weekly.

MajesticSEO

 

As the table shows, The Register has a much higher Trust Flow score than Computer Weekly. Based on the definition above, this would suggest that pages on The Register site (on the whole) pass more SEO value from its links than those from Computer Weekly (and yes, there are all manner of other variables that need to be taken into account). But the purpose of the exercise here is to have a quick way of prioritising which media sites you might consider for targeting from a PR perspective (or specifically, sites that might deliver more value both in terms of the content being read as well as the SEO value that links from such content could provide).

Of course, FlowMetrics work at an individual page level. So each individual story will have its own associated Citation and Flow Metric score. It is perfectly possible that a particular Computer Weekly page may have higher Trust Flow score than another individual Reg page – but at the domain level, the Trust Flow score is designed to give an overall perspective on the general level of SEO value from that site.

So imagine this scenario.

As the PR, you are tasked with identifying the best places to get online media coverage. Or more specifically, links. And links contained in editorial.

  1. Select your top 10 media sites for your client
  2. Run them through MajesticSEO’s Site Explorer tool
  3. Rank these sites by Trust Flow
  4. Look at an individual site’s pages and see which have the highest citation and trust flow scores (this tells you something about the kinds of pages and content that people are more likely to discover – and may have implications for where you want to target your content placement. Or those stories that have the highest citation and trust flow scores – this may give you clues as to the kind of content that is most popular on that site – and thus influence your own content creation. Look at the Anchor Text breakdown for each site – this gives you an idea of the kind of text that people use when linking to that particular media site – generally, it will be fairly obvious or mundane (eg brand name, click here, etc)  But again, you might unearth some clues for your own content creation).
  5. Or what about picking stories from specific journalists and running them through Site Explorer to see what kind of Citation and TrustFlow profile those pages have.

As has been stated time and again in the last 12 months, Google has said it will give preference to links in editorial style content on high authority, high trust sites and pages.

We all know PRs should be the ones best placed to gain coverage and links from high authority, high trust sites. Using a tool like MajesticSEO should make the process of identifying where to target those placements even more effective.

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Digital marketing digital pr Featured online pr Social media

Crowdbooster: an inexpensive social media measurement tool for those new to social media

One of the most common questions asked on my CIPR Social Media workshops is: can I recommend an inexpensive social media measurement tool?

And by inexpensive, people usually mean either free or under £10 a month.

Which is why Crowdbooster might be worth considering for those who have little or no experience of social media monitoring in a professional context.

Crowdbooster has been around for some time. It has been free until now, but is introducing a tiered pricing policy from March 2013. At an entry price of $9 a month to measure one Twitter account plus one Facebook page, this for me fits the definition of inexpensive.

The reason for highlighting Crowdbooster is its recently updated user interface which makes it a good choice for the beginner who wants something simple and easy to work with.

The tool comprises three parts: Analyze, Publish, Engage

Analyze 

The analysis section allows you to get an understanding of how your Tweets have performed along four dimensions: impressions, retweets, @ mentions and time.

What’s nice about Crowdbooster is that it provides a single visual display that clearly shows all of these elements in one view.

Here’s a snapshot of my Twitter activity over the last 24 hours (the tool will also provide similar for Facebook pages too). But you can specify any timeframe you like.

crowdbooster

Clicking on a bubble will display the details of the relevant Tweet at the bottom of the screen.

Publish

The publish element allows you to Tweet or post to Facebook. It also allows you to schedule in advance when your posts go out.

Although not as flexible as Autoscheduling in Hootsuite or Sprout Social, for those just starting out, it will probably be more than enough to give them a taste of how to plan for message distribution.

Engage 

Finally, the Engage element provides a rudimentary list of the people who Retweet you the most as well as your followers who in turn have the highest follower counts.

As with most tools these days, you can export the data in CSV format so you can perform your own analysis in a spreadsheet.

Hootsuite and Sprout Social obviously provide a lot more – but for those just starting out and want to test the water for little outlay, Crowdbooster is certainly worth a look.

________________________________

Little or no experience of social media?

Click here for more details of my next CIPR Introduction to Social Media workshop which runs on 5th February 2013.

 

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Digital marketing digital pr Featured Social media

Social Media ROI: your questions for M&S, Nokia, Giff Gaff and Bazaarvoice – #SocialBrands

How do M&S, Nokia, Giff Gaff and Bazaarvoice measure social media ROI? What tools do they use to measure social media value?

I’ll be putting these questions and more to senior representatives of all of these businesses at the Social Brands conference being held in London on Thursday February 7th 2013.

I’m moderating a panel with Lou Jones, Head of Online and Digital Marketing at M&S, Craig Hepburn, Global Director, Digital & Social Media at Nokia, Vincent Boon, Chief of Community at Giff Gaff, and Richard Anderson, VP Client Services at Bazaarvoice.

It should prove to be a lively discussion.

Feel free to leave your questions in the comment section below or Tweet me: @andismit.

Social Brands 2013

 

The conference overall has a very meaty line up of big brands and senior digital figures.

According to the organisers: “Social Brands is the only social media event bringing together those across marketing, communications, PR, brand, customer service and beyond. Join 150+ of your peers and hear from brands who are leading in the social space, driving long-term engagement and tying buzz to business results. Promising insight, inspiration and new ideas, this year’s agenda is packed with thought provoking speakers, invigorating debate and invaluable networking opportunities.”

And there is more info on Lanyrd too. Look forward to your questions!

Categories
digital pr Featured online pr

PR analytics: Using analytics to show the value of PR. CIPR Scotland event. Jan 30th. Glasgow

CIPR Scotland I’ll be speaking at CIPR Scotland’s Four Steps To Unlocking Online Success conference being held in Glasgow on Wednesday, January 30th, 2012.

The event aims to help business leaders and communicators harness the power of communication and become truly successful online.

I’ll be showing how PR professionals can use website analytics to prove the value of what they do (a favourite theme of mine).

There will also be presentations from Dr Jim Hamill, Ian Dommett of the Corr Agency and James Askrigg of Microsoft covering a whole variety of related topics.

Promises to be a good one.

Tickets available here.

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Digital marketing digital pr Featured online pr Social media

Escherman becomes a HootSuite Pro Solution Partner in the UK

 

I’ve long extolled the virtues of Hootsuite as a social media management platform for PR and communications teams (*).

We’ve helped a number of individuals and teams get properly set up on Hootsuite.

As a result of getting more immersed in Hootsuite, I became a Hootsuite Certified Professional earlier this year. And I’ve continued to try and ensure we’ve kept fully up to speed with all the many capabilities of the platform.

It is therefore very gratifying to announce we have now been signed up as an official Hootsuite Solution Partner in the UK.

How nice you say. What’s the benefit of that?

In short, we now have access to a range of additional tools and resources so we can offer even more value to any team or organisation who wants to get the best out of Hootsuite.

Don’t forget, if you haven’t tried Hootsuite before, you can always sign up for a free 30 day trial – just click here.

And always happy to discuss how we can help people implement Hootsuite effectively.

(*) For those unfamiliar with it, HootSuite is a social media management system for businesses and organisations to collaboratively execute campaigns across multiple social networks from one secure, web-based dashboard. Key social network integrations include Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+, plus a suite of social content apps for YouTube, Flickr, Instagram, Yammer, Tumblr and more.

Earlier this year HootSuite hit 4 million users, including 79 of the Fortune 100 companies. Along with HootSuite’s web platform, 20% of users access the dashboard through their mobiles including iPhone, Android, Blackberry and iPad. HootSuite also offers localized versions of their dashboard in six languages – English, French, Italian, Japanese, Spanish and Portuguese.

There are many benefits to HootSuite Pro

Engage: Optimise your audience engagement by creating search streams, scheduling messages and monitoring all of your social network profiles from one customizable web and mobile dashboard.

Collaborate: Invite clients and colleagues to participate in your social media management. Assign messages for follow up and share streams, helping you increase efficiency.

Analyze: Measure your efforts using over 40 social analytics modules to build and share custom reports. Or select from one of our pre-made templates for quick and easy reporting.

Secure: Share access with team members without compromising security. The team permission levels and advanced sharing options ensure you remain in control of your valuable social profiles and accounts.

Sign up for a 30-day free trial of HootSuite Pro now.

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Digital marketing digital pr Featured General PR Media online pr

Lissted adds sentiment scoring, trends and data export. Creates integrated press monitoring and reporting platform for Twitter

LisstedRealwire’s Lissted platform has added yet more interesting functionality.

First up, sentiment analysis. Each journalist Tweet now gets an automatic sentiment rating (courtesy of the Lexalytics salience engine). This means that you can now filter your journalist monitoring in terms of sentiment as well as by time and/or Klout score – in real time.

In practical terms, this means that you can monitor, say, a particular group of journalists who are talking about your brand or relevant topic – and immediately understand where the most positive and/or negative comments are coming from – and take action accordingly.

Secondly, Lissted now provides automatic trend analysis. At a generic level, you can see at a glance the current most popular topics that the press are talking about in real time. Better still (if you are a Lissted Pro user), you can analyse trends within a defined subset of journalists. So you can monitor trends within a media group that is specifically relevant to you. Certainly takes the guesswork out of what the media really is talking about on Twitter.

Finally, you now have the ability to export data out of Lissted into a spreadsheet. From a reporting standpoint, this really is the jewel in the crown.  For example, you can define a specific group of journalists over a particular time period – and then export not only the Tweet content and associated data, but also Klout and sentiment scores for offline analysis. I can see this being an immensely powerful tool for determining which content has the most relevance, reach and impact. Smart PR pros are going to be able to use this to spend more time refining their content and engagement strategies rather than wasting countless hours just struggling to gather the requisite data.

Coupled with the recent announcement of dynamic Twitter lists, Lissted has evolved rapidly into a robust monitoring and reporting platform for looking specifically at the media on Twitter. Given media relations remains at the core of much PR activity, Lissted certainly seems to provide a powerful means of providing real time insight into the conversations that journalists really are having on Twitter (as well as the content they find most worthy of linking to).

Any PR who has an interest in remaining ahead of the game in media relations would do well to check it out.

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Digital marketing digital pr Featured online pr

What counts as a good ReTweet level? And what impact does RTing have on clickthrough rate?

Every social media guru will tell you why getting retweeted is a good thing.

RTs mean your message is being amplified.

Getting your message amplified means more people are exposed to your message and content.

And that surely is a good thing, yes?

However, I haven’t come across any stats on what constitutes a good, bad or indifferent level of retweeting.

How many RTs should you be aiming for? 5, 10, 100, 1000?

Clearly, who is doing the Retweeting has to be factored in.

Getting a single RT from someone like @stephenfry is going to gain you a lot more exposure than 1000 RTs from people who only have 1 follower each (assuming of course Stephen Fry’s follower base is a relevant audience for you).

Still – I thought it would be interesting to see what the average RT levels were for certain high profile Twitter accounts. And where possible, see if there is an impact on clickthrough rate.

I used as one of my test examples the New York Times (@nytimes) – not least of which because they still use the bit.ly URL shortener. So we have publicly available data on clickthrough rates.

Using FavStar, I could see that the all time highest RT’d @nytimes Tweet was this one, with 3776 RTs. FavStar also provides a measure of the amplification effect. It has a limit of 1000 RTs – by this measure, this particular Tweet reached at least an addiitional 317,000 Twitter users via RTing.

Bear in mind that New York Times has 6.1 million followers (without getting into the fake/inactive follower debate again here). So the ratio of RTs to followers for the NYTimes best ever RT’d Tweet is 0.06pc. (Over the last month, the average RT rate for all NYTimes Tweets is 70 – many thanks to the rather nifty Nixon McInnes ReTweet tool that allowed me to work this out very quickly).

Over the last month, the most RT’d Tweet for the NY Times has been this one. And looking at performance, it has gained 6776 clicks so far.

If we take one of the least RT’d Tweets in the last month – this one – we can see it has a substantially lower click through rate – 249 clicks.

Clearly there are some big caveats here. Factors such as the timing and content of the Tweet surely have some bearing on whether it gets Retweeted – and thus increases the likelihood of a link being clicked.

I appreciate this is hardly a scientific study – based as it is on one example. But at the very least, it should put some broad parameters on people’s expectations. If even the most followed media properties on Twitter don’t see the RTs for their Tweets reach into three figures, then the likelihood that run of the mill of accounts (ie most Twitter users) will see RTs reaching double figures is low. Then again, by focussing on those quality users whose reach and relevance has the most meaningful impact for your audience, low RT rates don’t have to be such a disappointment.

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Digital marketing digital pr Featured General PR online pr tech pr Technology PR

Dynamically updated Twitter lists now possible with Lissted

We all know that Twitter lists can be very handy. One of the benefits of a list is that it allows you to keep track of what particular people are saying without actually having to follow them. Monitoring multiple lists in Tweetdeck or Hootsuite is certainly easier than having everything piling into your home stream

However, the main beef with lists historically has been the pain involved in maintaining them. Sure, there are some lists that you can “set and forget” (for example, if you have a fixed list of people that you know will remain stable for some time).

But what if you want to create a dynamic list? Imagine you want to maintain lists of people who match certain criteria? So long as they meet the criteria, they stay on the list – if they don’t, they get removed. PR professionals, for example, may wish to keep tabs on certain journalists because they may have Tweeted or written about things relevant to a particular client. The problem with this is that more often than not, there is a shelf life to the journalists interest and/or relevance to the list the PR person creates.  Trying to manually update a list in this way is a dull, unproductive bore.

Unless I’ve missed it, I’m not yet been aware of any way of automatically maintaining Twitter lists. At least ones that might have meaning for a PR professional.

Until now that it is.

Realwire’s Lissted tool, launched back in June, already provides a neat way of both identifying relevant media for PRs to target as well monitoring journalist conversations on Twitter.

Built on a robust database of over 12,500 individual journalists and media outlets, Lissted lets you have see exactly which journalists are Tweeting or writing about any topic or issue.

Let’s imagine you want to know about any journalist mentioning your client’s name in the last 24hrs. Realwire will happily show you those journalists that have either mentioned the client in a Tweet – or referred to the client in any content they have linked to. You can also view the results in terms of Klout score (handy if you are looking at a lot of results and want to focus on the ones that potentially have the biggest reach and impact). You can also get automatic email alerts when any journalist Tweets or links to relevant content, based on the keyword parameters you set . Having used the tool in anger over the last two months I can vouch for the usefulness of this feature (here are some screen shots of the results in Lissted itself  along with what the email alerts look like).

Now, Lissted has added the ability to create dynamic lists of journalists.

You can see how this can be a real time saver. Here are some sample dynamic lists created by Lissted.

Cabinet Reshuffle

iPhone 5 

Take the iPhone 5 list. This is a list of technology journalists and media outlets who have mentioned the iPhone 5 in the last 3 days. If someone stops talking about iPhone 5, then they drop off the list. Conversely, any new journalist talking about iPhone 5 will be added. You can see how this can be useful. Depending on the criteria you set, you get an automatically updated Twitter list. Being able to keep a rolling track of relevant journalists in one list that requires no manual intervention is really rather good. And if you import the list into Hootsuite, you can further filter on the list by keyword and/or Klout score (so you could filter further on journalists within the list based on additional criteria).

I gather from Lissted that there are additions and enhancements planned for the tool over the coming weeks.

Any PR professional who wants to spend more time on having meaningful conversations with relevant journalists rather than fiddling around trying to maintain Twitter lists would do well to have a look at this new Lissted feature (or Lissted generally if you haven’t done so already).

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Books Digital marketing digital pr Featured online pr

Book launch – Share This: the Social Media Handbook for PR professionals (CIPR)

Last night saw the official launch of Share This: The Social Media Handbook for PR professionals at Google Campus in Bonhill Street, London.  It was the icing on the cake for a great collaborative process that has hopefully delivered something of real value to PR people in the UK. And beyond. CIPR CEO Jane Wilson (see below) revealed last night that the book will be published in the US in August.

Jane Wilson CEO CIPR

Big plaudits also go to my old chum Mr Stephen Waddington (pictured below) for pushing the project forward. Without him, this wouldn’t have seen the light of day. And of course, huge thanks to all of my fellow co-authors who are all, I think, justifiably pleased with the outcome:  Katy Howell, Simon Sanders, Helen Nowicka, Gemma Griffiths, Becky McMichael, Robin Wilson, Alex Lacey, Matt Appleby, Dan Tyte, Stephen Waddington, Stuart Bruce, Rob Brown, Russell Goldsmith, Adam Parker, Julio Romo, Philip Sheldrake, Richard Bagnall,Daljit Bhurji, Richard Bailey, Rachel Miller, Mark Pack, and Simon Collister.

And in case you were wondering, here’s what we got up to after the launch party – a curry in Brick Lane. Outstanding.

And here’s a quick video of yours truly giving a flavour of one of my chapters in the book: What has Google Ever Done For PR?

[wpvideo 95BktlLj]

I do hope you’ll buy and read the book. And of course, I think we’d all welcome any feedback!