Social Networks

Sarah Palin's Twitter Problems

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Sarah Palin again left us scratching our PR noggins this week. Fan or not, she's crushing it in terms "Going Rogue". So why did her people outright kill her sizable AKGovSarahPalin Twitter account and open SarahPalinUSA to promote the book? Are they people who run the 7-figure Facebook Fan page? The new feed has been languishing all week at between 24,000 to 25,000 followers. You can maintain a following with a simple Tweet announcement after simply changing one's screenname.

We thought it had something to do with public offices or PACs needing to migrate to a personal brand for legal reasons. We checked in with Nicco Mele, founder of poli-digital consultancy EchoDitto in Washington who is nearly as confused:

Continued after the jump:

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GOP Continues Social Media Push

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How much of a role did social media play in powering Barack Obama to the presidency? The topic is still being debated. Regardless, Republicans have upped their efforts in the social space, hiring new media managers and building social networks.

The GOP has also formed a "New Media Caucus." Ryan Walker, chief of staff for Rep. Bob Latta (R-Ohio), a founding member of the New Media Caucus, told The Hill, "[Latta] saw a void in our own offices communication after the Obama campaign ...and we've been running with it ever since...It's been easier than I thought to get people on board."

Of course, like many learning the ropes in social media, the GOP hasn't been without their stumbles - one of which being party Chairman's Michael Steele's "much ridiculed" blog, "What Up."

Pharma Marketers: FDA Taking Too Long Developing Social Media Guidelines

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The FDA held public hearings just last week to discuss establishing guidelines for pharmaceutical marketers operating in the new world of social media. Already some are complaining that the process is taking too long.

"Does the FDA get it?" If it did, "they wouldn't be having this meeting now, many, many months after it was already apparent how quickly Web communications is changing," Mark Senak, author of the blog Eye on FDA and a senior vice-president at Fleishman-Hillard told BusinessWeek.

John Bell, President of the Board of Word of Mouth Marketing Association and Managing Director, Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide agreed that things will take a while. "We're spending time today in initial discussions that is as much about how the process should unfold as it is what should be the precise guidelines," he told PRNewser last week.

PRNewser's Twitter Lists

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Two weeks ago I weighed in on what Twitter's new Lists function means for the PR business. Since then, I have been curating our own lists for your reference and ours. We'll continue to edit and add new lists, and will look at ways to use a one to follow more immediate issues and see how the industry is getting involved.

Connect with @PRNewser and help us find interesting and useful feeds. So far our lists are:

[Editor's note: Clicking these links while you're logged on to Twitter will display the latest Tweets from feeds included in the Lists. To follow a List, visit the @PRNewser]

Agency feeds--PR firm feeds including divisions of conglomerate agencies
Agency heads--CEOs and principals of firms
Internal PR--Including people on PR or social media teams within companies and organizations, as well as their department feeds
PR & marketing beat--Trades, blogs, and people covering PR and adjacent news
Social gurus--PR people who are deeply involved in social media for their clients or the company they work for. Yes, we expect a lot of debate.
Vendors--Newswires, database and list services, journalist-to-source matching, monitoring companies, and more

Also have a look at @Mediabistro's Lists for niche media, J-schools and profs, multimedia journalists and more.

Survey: 84% of CMOs Say Less Than 10% of Budget Goes To Social Media

Four out of five CMOs (84%) said less than ten percent of their budgets go to "experimenting through social media and non-traditional communications channels," according to a study by The CMO Club and Hill & Knowlton released this week.

Our guess as to the reason why the number may be so high? No CMO would want to admit to "experimenting" at a time when budgets are being cut and every dollar is being watched. The survey covered a variety of other topic areas as well.

Ogilvy's John Bell: FDA Social Media Guidelines Will "Basically Follow Same Process" As FTC Blogging Guidelines

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John Bell, President of the Board of Word of Mouth Marketing Association and Managing Director, Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide, was one of the last presenters today at the FDA's public hearings on "Promotion of FDA-Regulated Medical Products Using the Internet and Social Media Tools." We caught up with Bell late yesterday to get his take on the proceedings.

Asked about how much of the hearings pertained to advertising and how much pertained to PR, Bell said, "Today's stated focus is about what guidelines should be developed for social media, which is this netherworld in between paid and earned media. Unfortunately it covers all grounds."

Part of the problem, Bell said, is that health-care marketers, "can't jam all the crap you put into a print ad into a tweet." So, what is end game with all of this? "We're spending time today in initial discussions that is as much about how the process should unfold as it is what should be the precise guidelines." PRNewser's takeaway: this is going to take a while.

Bell and WOMMA were heavily involved in the recently issued FTC guidelines around disclosure in social media. Drafts for those guidelines were posted for comment late last year, he said, and the final draft came out in October. "I think what will happen with the FDA, is basically to kind of follow the same process," he said.

All Eyes on D.C. As FDA Begins Hearings on Pharma and Social Media

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Hundreds of advertising, marketing and public relations executives have gathered in Washington, D.C. today for FDA public hearings on "Promotion of FDA-Regulated Medical Products Using the Internet and Social Media Tools." The hearings are just one step in the FDA's process to develop policy and guidelines for pharmaceutical companies looking to use social media to promote their products.

"What's happening is these new media are emerging at an increasingly rapid rate, and are being regulated by an agency that moves very slowly...In essence, you have a regulatory communication crisis developing," attorney Mark Senak, who advises drug companies as a consultant for Fleishman-Hillard, told the Associated Press.

PR executives speaking at the hearings include Peter J. Pitts, Partner/Director, Global Healthcare, Porter Novelli, Peter Nalen, President, Compass Healthcare Communications, Rick Wion, Vice President of Social Media, GolinHarris, Rohit Bhargava, Senior Vice President, Digital, Strategy & Planning Group, Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence and John Bell, President of the Board of Word of Mouth Marketing Association and Managing Director, Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide.

A full list of speakers is available via the FDA's website, in addition to a live video stream of the hearings. Naturally, there is also a Twitter hash-tag, #fdaSM.

LinkedIn And Twitter Play Well Together

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Have you always wanted to sync up your Twitter and LinkedIn accounts? Well, now you can, thanks to a deal announced late yesterday by the two social networks. The deal makes it easy to send LinkedIn status updates to Twitter, and "Tweets" to your LinkedIn profile. You also have the option of only syncing certain content from each profile. The LinkedIn deal comes on the heals of deals with both Bing and Google, both announced several weeks ago.

In a video announcing the deal, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said, "The general idea of putting a little Twitter in everything, is being able to inject into LinkedIn a little bit more of this fresh, kind of here's what's going on with these other things, but with a little bit of curated sense in terms of your professional life...You want the widest possible distribution."

Blogger Complains Because Companies Want "Free" Reviews

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ProBlogger, the popular blog that teaches one how to make a living off blogging, published an interesting guest post from a former beauty/fashion blogger. In the post, the blogger talks about how she was so excited to do "product reviews" and get all sorts of free stuff sent to her by companies.

She even signed an $8,000 deal with, "a large pharmaceutical company to write six posts for them to try educating readers on the benefits of their product...the only thing I had to do was to get the copy reviewed by the pharmaceutical company to ensure that I wasn't using any medical words in the wrong way."

But then the economy took a turn for the worse and the blogger's freebie parade slowed down. What did she learn? People were actually asking her questions like how many unique visitors her site had and to send links of recent, relevant coverage before sending products. That didn't work out, so the blogger got into another niche, "healthy eating and healthy lifestyles," which she said worked out much better.

"One company (which manufactures supplements) that contacted me to send products for review also wanted to know how much it would cost to sponsor spots on my site. They actually wanted to pay to have banners on my site and not only receive a free review!" she said.

Um, free review? Companies aren't supposed to pay publications for product reviews, or to influence them. Although it does happen. This post, in essence, sums up the difference between how media has traditionally worked: build audience/content, sell advertising against said audience/content - versus how it is unfortunately working for some bloggers: the content is the advertising.

What Twitter Lists Mean for PR

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Twitter's new Lists functionality rolled out last week to a certain amount of fanfare in the blogosphere, and in media circles. It's designed to help users track groups of people, topics or trends without further clogging up one's main feed. Some might see this as a virtual school lunchroom, where the cool kids get even better tables and nerds become literally listless. Social media consultant and immensely popular blogger Chris Brogan is concerned about the exclusionary aspects of stuffing people into little boxes. He has a point that drier things like travel, airline and workaday newsfeeds work well in Lists when you need a quick look at a niche universe.

Adding to Brogan's take, Twitter in my opinion was a messy but fun replacement for RSS for some users. Now Twitter Lists can replace them altogether if one chooses. For example, with a few clicks you can create a List of news sources covering China, or a List to track the best deals on electronics with nary a complaint from the personally branded.

Poynter believes Lists could change the way Twitter is used altogether, by adding new elements of customization, discovery and curation (the buzzword for the fall), making Lists "something for every journalist, editor and news organization to keep a keen eye on."

What about for the public relations business?

Our quick take is that Lists will create a new layer of lobbying for clients and PR people themselves as they ask to be included on the more prominent ones. Clever PR people will also use the function to track their clients and competitors, and to keep an eye on issues bubbling up that may require a response. More paranoid users and aspiring astroturfers now only need one account as you also have the option to create closed lists.

More after the jump:

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Previously

Interview: Andrew Noyes, Manager of Public Policy Communications, Facebook

Google SideWiki: What Are the Implications for PR?

Younger Employees Teaching Senior Execs Social Media

On the Social Newsroom: 'Crowds Typically Like Crap'

Coca-Cola Launching 200 Country Blogger Tour

HARO to Segment Email Blasts By Sector

Foursquare Founder on PR: "It Pretty Much Takes Care of Itself"

MySpace "In Freefall" as Marketshare Drops More Than 35% in Last Year

Tracy Morgan Joins, Miley Cyrus Quits; The Challenges of Celebrities and Twitter

Which Brands Are Doing the Best on Facebook?

FTC Clarifies Blogger Guidelines: 'We've Never Brought a Case Against Somebody Simply for Failure to Disclose'

Five Popular Types of PR Tweets

FTC to Bloggers: Disclose Payments or Face $11k Fine

Looking at Social Media Costs: $400 for a Tweet Up, $15k a Month for Training

Nielsen: Time Spent on Social Nets Tripled Over Last Year

FDA Schedules Public Hearings To Discuss Big Pharma and Social Media

Twenty Percent of Tweets Contain "Requests for Product Information or Responses to the Requests"

Do PR Agency CEOs Need To Be Twittering?

Twitter Recovers from DNS Attack

"Mommy Bloggers" Fight Back?

Edelman's Steve Rubel Ditches Blogging

Bloggers and Marketers Closely Watching Proposed FTC Guidelines

Twittering the 140 Characters Conference (#140conf)

Deloitte: Survey Reveals More Than Half of Companies Have No Social Media Policy

J.Crew's Internal Blogging Policy Document

Forrester's Josh Bernoff: Who "Owns" Social Media Question A Lot Like Who "Owns" the Internet

BusinessWeek's CEOs Who Twitter (PR Included)

What Would Jesus Tweet?

Twittering Social Media's Role in Building Your Brand at PRSA Digital Impact

eMarketer: Bloggers Not as Negative as We Thought?

Poll: How Long Until Twitter "Novelty PR" Wears Off?

Today's Twend, Twanalyze Your Twitter

Is ExpertClick Stealing Journalists from HARO?

MediaOnTwitter: The Ultimate Database?

How To Get Re-Tweeted: Advice from Three PR Pros

Facebook Founder Chris Hughes to GMMB

Cision Adds Social Media Data and Metrics

World's Longest Email Signature

Twittering "Making the Brand" at Social Media Week

Guest Post: Tweet. Meet. Give. This Thursday at NYC Twestival

Tune in at 4 PM for "When Social Media Becomes Unsocialable"

PBS Mediashift: Chain of Corporate Comm. Can't Keep Up With...Vast Non-Linear Web of Information

The Grail of DIY PR for $99 Bucks a Month?

PRWeb Lets You TweetIt

The New Blogger Relations: Sway Them or Buy Them?

A New Whitehouse.gov, And First Blog Post

Looking to Build a "Community" Site?

Ogilvy PR Launches "The Daily Influence"

2009 PR Predictions: A Deafening Echochamber of Linkbait

Israeli Consulate's Twitter Presser, Today at 1 PM Eastern

VivaKi's Superfriends of Social Media Get REAL

More Money in Social Media?

LinkedIn PR Manager: "You Wouldn't Hand Over Your Rolodex to Everyone You Meet at a Conference"

MicroPR Seeks To Connect Media and PR on Twitter

Survey: Almost Half of Journalists Use Facebook and LinkedIn To Assist in Reporting

Obama on YouTube; FutureWorks CEO: "Treat us like customers"

Do We Need PR Anymore Now That We Have Social Media?

Is Your Agency Co-Opting Your Personal Brand?

LinkedIn Companies Beta Tool Reveals the Revolving Door

Rubel: Don't Get Caught Up on Individual Sites and Technologies

Social Media Overload: Thinking Through Facebook Friend Requests

Nielsen Releases August Numbers: Social Nets and News Sites

Are You a Weblebrity?

What PR Blogs Should You Follow? PR Friendly August Index

The Grassy Knol of SEO

Stay-Off-My-Lawn Baby Boomers Not Interesting in Social Networking

ProBlogger on "Using" PR People to Build Traffic to Your Blog

How Does a Social Media Campaign Succeed?

McDonald's to Employees: Participate in Social Media, Get Taken Off Fryer Duty

Is it OK to Blog for Clients?

The Feedback Kickback

Edelman's Steve Rubel on "Faint Signals"

WIRED's Chris Anderson on the Value of Secrecy Vs. Transparency and PR People as Storytellers

Comments: To Edit or Not to Edit?

Chris Brogan on PR: "It's about getting to know me before you fart in my face"

Steve Rubel on Marketing Pollution

Will PR Ruin Twitter?

PBS Looks Into Social Media Releases

Scrabble Wars

Slide.com Busted For Fake Reviews

NYT & Facebook

Pogue On PR and "Web 2.0"

SXSW: And the Worst Social Media Campaign Goes To...

SXSW: Facebook PR Inserts Zuck's Sister Between Him and Julia Allison

Live From SXSW: Zuckerberg's Not Done

Facebook Hiring a Communications VP

Survey: Agencies "Don't Get" Social Media

How to Create Content for Social Media

Idea Grove's Spin Thicket Gets a Pruning

PR Pros Celebrate New Way To Spam Fast Company

10% of Fortune 500 Blogging

Twitter.com Down, PR People Freak Out

There Is A Band Called Public Relations Exercise

BtoB: Social Networking Growing in BtoB Space, But Still Behind BtoC

Are You Getting Facebook Right?

Is Apologizing By Blog the New Press Conference?

Read more on PRNewser >

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