Thankfully, Friday has arrived. Setting aside for a moment the landmark Supreme Court decision that upheld Obamacare as truly the news story of the week (or perhaps the year, or even decade), let’s dip our toe into the PR, social media, and advertising pool for a look at some of the stories that caught our eye this week which you may have missed. Not necessarily listed in their order of importance, here are some stories that we felt were worth passing on to you, our loyal readers, as significant for our industry:
#5 – First noticed on Katie Paine’s & Partners “The Measurement Standard” newsletter, a study of Facebook Behavior Reveals Men Are More Influential, Women Influence Men More than Women. Fascinating stats in this study and considering that Facebook is a platform with 900 million global users and counting, any insight we can gather on effective ways to reach the influences is gold.
(Side note – If you don’t read or subscribe to Katie’s Measurement Blog I highly recommend that you start. She is wicked smart about effective ways to measure social media, public relations, media relations, internal communications or blogs).
#4 – This week, Ad Age reported that the Top 100 Advertisers Boosted Ad Spending but Not in Traditional Media. The article states that more advertisers are allocating ad budgets to unmeasured disciplines including search marketing, online video and some forms of social media. The article goes on to state that some expect the Internet will pass newspapers this year as the nation’s 2nd largest advertising medium behind TV.
Whoa.
But before you go jumping to any conclusions and shifting your budget to unmeasured media, consider the industries studied and draw your own conclusions about whether this strategy jives with your target audience. One thing is clear: more companies are realizing that traditional advertising mediums aren’t helping them to connect with their customers as much as the newer mediums on the block.
#3 – An interesting story this week came from the push and shove wars of the major tech companies to create socially structured workflow processes that Microsoft bought Yammer to succeed in its social enterprise efforts. This story has many interesting side notes such as the fact that it only took four years for Yammer to build up its business and subsequently be sold for a cool $1.2 billion. That’s pretty impressive. What some pundits are wondering is if this move by Microsoft is too late. Considering the fact that Salesforce.com, Oracle, Google, and SAP have busily been integrating their business use social networks into their own product lines, is Microsoft late to the party?
#2 – Are you a small business owner that uses Twitter? You may want to take a look at the list of the Top 50 Twitter Influencers Worth Following published over on Dun & Bradstreet’s Credibility Insights blog (thanks to Jay Baer’s Convince & Convert daily email for alerting us to this story). Although this is an impressive list, a quick glance at some of the comments will tell you that not everyone agrees with this ranking and some question the criteria used to determine the list. Draw your own conclusions.
#1 – There has been a lot of discussion recently on PR pros editing Wikipedia pages, and this week the “Wikipedia Best Practice Guidance for Public Relations Professionals” was released to help set guidelines and best practices. Backed by a number of international public relations bodies, and drafted by the UK’s Chartered Institute of Public Relations, the guide is meant to foster “mutual understanding” between Wikipedians and public relations practitioners. If you are like me, and recognize the tremendous influence and SERP prowess that Wikipedia entries can have for a company but want to keep ethics and transparency paramount in your editing, you will want to read this document.
That’s it for us this week. Tip of the hat to all of you loyal readers of the PRBreakfastClub blog and hope you are remembering to mix a little fun into your routine this summer.
Any news stories from this week you would like to add?