Monday 25 June 2012

Twitter Reinvents Itself


Twitter got itself a makeover last week- including a brand new logo - and all apparently for the benefit of advertisers.

Two years ago Mark Zuckerberg took to the stage at the Cannes Advertising Festival. Last week Jack Dorsey, creator of Twitter, stood in exactly the same position, pitching his vision for the future to the marketing industry. The event has always attracted executives, but the social media boom has widened its audience, and last week the world’s media had their cameras firmly trained on the stage. Consequently Dorsey won Media Person of the Year and dominated the press. 

Twitter’s plan is to improve its technology, allowing multi-national brands to manage conservations and campaigns in different countries from the same accounts.

The Californian-based company has high aspirations and plans to roll out its advertising products – promoted tweets, promoted trends and promoted accounts - to 50 territories by the end of the year.

It seems the six-year-old tech company has a lot on its plate for the next six months. Un-phased by the amount of work to do, Chief Executive Dick Costolo says ‘we are still growing quite fast month on month in the UK, Mexico, Spain, Italy, France.’

It seems Twitter – for now at least - has escaped the backlash Facebook has had to endure with regards to advertising on the site. Since the Twitter London office opened last year, more than 140 advertisers have signed up.

Plans for office openings in Latin America, particularly Brazil, are next on the agenda. Activity in Western Europe is also set to increase, with Spain and Germany the first countries to get their hands on the new product.

Many brands have been supportive of the opportunities Twitter has been offering. Absolute Radio said they wouldn’t have had the ‘immediacy at a massive scale’ from a YouTube, MSN or Yahoo! Homepage takeover.

The station gave away £250 every hour for 24 hours to winners tweeting what was playing using the promoted hashtag,  #nowplaying.  And the results – there was a 7% increase of listeners on the day of competition, 76,000 mentions and cost per engagement calculated at 4p.

For now at least, it looks as though Twitter has reason to be chirpy.

By Stephanie Rock

Friday 15 June 2012

Nancygate


No one enjoys Monday mornings. In my experience they normally involve burnt toast and a prolonged search for clean underwear/ my oyster card. Yet for the Downing Street Press Office, this Monday was exceptionally bad.


Yes, as the World was waking the news was breaking that David Cameron had… left his daughter in a pub. The incident may have happened a few months ago but its negative implications as to our national security, combined with the pure comedy value of the situation, ensured the news spread like wildfire.
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Of course blame was being tossed like a hot potato- I could almost feel a bead of sympathetic PR sweat forming as I imagined the PM’s PR team trying to bat it from his door. We are all familiar with the mantra ‘no publicity is bad publicity’, but I suspect the fallacy of this statement becomes clear when in the midst of crisis management.


So how was this crisis managed?


All in all, I think well, although it did take Downing Street a while to settle on a sequence of events.  An overzealous individual -no doubt with the PM’s best interests at heart- announced that Mr C himself had gone to retrieve Nancy. The subsequent revelation that it was Mrs C who had rushed to her daughters rescue, left Downing Street’s press machinery rather embarrassingly exposed.


Be it the result of luck or manipulation, the UK became divided fairly early on in proceedings. On one side there were those who questioned Cameron’s suitability as PM when he was apparently incapable of baby-sitting. On the other were the sympathetic parents; those who had found themselves in similarly hot water and viewed Cameron’s parental failure as proof of humanity.


The heated debate, which ensued between the two parties, enabled the Camerons to maintain a contrite silence. Apart from a brief statement in which Mr Cameron deflected all responsibility away from his security staff (no-one likes a telltale), they let the pro-child-abandonment team raise every argument in their favour. Their silence and general demeanor gave the impression that they knew they had been wallies but are too busy running the country to become embroiled in domestic quibbles.  This is arguably the best possible outcome when they had been undeniably silly.


Luckily for the Camerons, they also had the support of a man who I suspect knows which side his bread is buttered. Stephen Hollings, Landlord of The Plough at Cadsden, was quick to jump to the PM’s defense. His vocal descriptions of the PM’s dedication as a father and restrained approach to booze, have no doubt ensured life-long patronage from the Cameron clan, along with a steady stream of celeb spectators, eager to spot the PM at his local. 



There was a moment it looked like Downing Street might breath a sigh of relief, but then there was the Leveson inquiry…


By Polly Robinson

Wednesday 6 June 2012

Learning to fail


Recently I’ve read a lot about failure, the most interesting being an article about a school set up in the US to teach students how to fail. Ironically it failed to attract any students. However it got me thinking, we live in a world obsessed with success, where failure is a negative term. But how can we so quickly forget that failure is a part of life? To fail is to be human.

If you think back to you when we were children, learning to walk…We didn’t just get up one day and decide today is the day I will walk. No there were the days, weeks, months of trying, falling flat on our faces and bums, wobbly legs and shaky first few steps – but ultimately we succeeded. I think the one big difference between now and then is that we were then brave enough to try, determined to succeed no matter how many times we ‘failed’.

Living in a world obsessed with success makes us scared to fail. However failure can be motivating; if everything were handed to us on a plate, I know I would find it hugely demotivating. What would be the point in doing anything if it was all that easy? I strive for the challenge. Don’t get me wrong, I’m never 100% sure of myself; the first sign of trouble I do get nervous and panic, but at the same time I love the feeling. Will it or won’t it make it into the paper? Will my idea at our brainstorm meetings be met with a roar of laughter? It’s easy to be scared and keep your opinions to yourself and shy away from group discussions. What’s harder is having faith in yourself and being brave enough to speak your mind, and to share your thoughts and ideas. The best example of this is the many lectures I sat through at university where when the lecturer asks a question and the whole hall falls silent. Why? Because no one is brave enough to speak and ultimately fail. But how can you expect to learn, grow and succeed unless you are willing to take a risk?

Failure only makes us stronger; the things to take away are ‘what have I learnt’ and ‘what have I done’. The point of failure is to recover and learn from it. Put the failures behind you and move on from them. No one is perfect the first time around…Henry Ford said, “Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time…” So it’s time to stop being scared and learn to embrace failure. As Joseph Chilton Pearce said, “In order to live a creative life we must loose our fear of being wrong”. 

By Pema Seely