Must Have PR
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I’ve just been through a week of grad interviews and am now out the other side… feeling a mixture of pride, excitement and bewilderment.
You hear every day how hard it is for graduates to get jobs and you see it too when you’re interviewing… grads from three years ago, desperate to get off the paid internship schemes and get cracking with their careers.
So why are we still seeing intelligent young graduates come to an interview with a top ten PR agency totally unprepared (apart from well stocked supply of cockiness that they have a degree?)
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We were fascinated to read The Drum’s insider story on the secrets behind MailOnline’s huge 100 million readership in January. The relevance to US audiences and that sidebar; that much we knew. It was the approach to SEO techniques that is really interesting.
Having worked with Yahoo! to launch omg! in the UK, we know all about using search trends in conjunction with online celeb news, and the latest Comscore figures showed omg! to be the second biggest celebrity news site in the UK, only behind the Mail. But the extent to which MailOnline keep on top of trends is intriguing, looking at traffic on an almost hourly basis and actually making publishing decisions based on what they see in the up to the minute search trends.
I’ve made my opinions on SEO and journalism fairly clear, but this takes it to another level. Of course you could argue that it makes complete sense, Paul Dacre’s mantra is always ‘we give the readers what they want’ and what better way of serving what your audience exactly what they want than publishing what you can see they’re searching for?
It also begs the question, should we be pitching stories on subjects we can see for ourselves are on the rise in order to increase the likelihood of publication? Next time we’ve got a celebrity interview to offer the MailOnline, we may just wait until we can see their search stats climbing.
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It has not been a great couple of weeks for brands on Twitter.
McDonald’s in particular seems to have come in for a bashing. Last week’s golden arch themed outrage was over an article by Alex James in The Sun where he suggested the fast food chain was ‘in some ways, like a Michelin starred restaurant’ (the comparison wasn’t actually inaccurate, by the way). Now the McDonald’s vitriol has latched onto a hashtag - #McDStories - which the company used on their official Twitter account. Now reported as a Twitter campaign backfiring (I’m not sure I would call it a ‘campaign’, it was a couple of tweets asking for stories) by UK and US national media, what it consisted of was Twitter users posting negative stories about McDonalds using the hashtag they themselves had started.
The odd thing I find about media reporting on a story like this is it is almost self-fulfilling prophecy, what starts as a few predictable negative tweets generally only reaches critical mass after an article or blog post stokes the flames. The reporting of a ‘social media crisis’ is often what creates the crisis.
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Today’s RAJAR figures show something of a radio revival: Almost 92% of the nation now tune in on a weekly basis, with Radio 4 leading the charge in terms of growing listener numbers.
Some put the highest figures since records began in 1999, down to technological advances - mobile phones, iPods, digital TV and online ‘listen again’ services have all made radio more accessible. But those of us in the know suspect it’s also to do with the engagement factor.
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The internet has revolutionised modes of discovery. I know I was excited the first time I used music recommendation service Last.fm – a constant feed of new music fed to me, based on the music I already knew I liked. However, the excitement didn’t last, though it may have been expanding the list of artists I listened too, it was narrowing the different kinds of music I made time for. I have since always found the ‘people who liked this also like…’ principle to be flawed, as it generally serves you up a plate of ‘more of the same’. To really find something new online, you have to force yourself out of your comfort zone.
