Sam Blogs….

I am sure you all remember this:

This was seen as an online marketing masterpiece. It was a very succesful viral video and also a very engaging advert. It has been viewed nearly 12,000,000 times on YouTube and many more via television. The idea that ‘life is for sharing’ also conforms to the 2-way participation methods that Public Relations prides itself on. All in all then, a very sound example of online/new media marketing and PR.

However, now T-Mobile have another campaign running.

Whilst this again goes along with the idea that ‘life is for sharing’ and yes, it does provide another chance of a viral marketing campaign for t-Mobile, am I the only one who finds that all this is becoming a bit boring? Maybe even becoming passe?

I hope it isn’t getting to this stage for many, but I fear that the reliance on these methods to advertise have a very short shelf life and the longevity of the campaigns may decrease as people become anaesthetised to them!

Well it has been a busy for weeks for most students what with deadlines for coursework and exams. It is safe to say I have been pretty stressed out. However, it seems to have been an even busier few weeks for Gordon Brown and his merry bunch of idiots in the New Labour party. It was been widely reported as the worst period in his tenure, facing criticism not only from the back benches and opposition but also from within his cabinet.

Much of the criticism was focused, amusingly, around a certain youtube video regarding MP’s expenses. The video gathered all sorts of coverage, from being ripped apart on Have I Got News For You to the usual BBC news reporting. However, it is hard to take this man seriously. Take a look for yourself…..

Now I am sure you will admit that, whislt this was a rushed video to try and limit the damage caused by the crisis of ‘expenses’, the facial expressions of Gordon Brown are quite worrying. However, this is not the main issue that has been raised regarding the video. As I mentioned, this was sort of a ‘holding statement’ in response to a issue that was snow-balling into a crisis for the government. Labour’s use of communications as a method of damage limitations has back fired in the past and this is a further example of it. What the premier was proposing in the video was rejected in the House of Commons – leaving him with a fairly large amount of egg on his grimacing face.

Now, the backlash of this defeat – his first in the commons – has lead many to question the Government’s methods. Hazel Blears, Communities secretary, crticised the use of ‘new media’ by the government – stating ‘YouTube if you want to’. Blears then went on to suggest that new media does not aid the communication process or image promotion of the Labour party and more time should be given to old fashioned face to face politics – ‘knocking on doors’ and ’setting up stalls in town centres’.

Personally, I agree. Whilst new media does assist in reaching certain audiences and provides an instant resource for both the public and media to use, it can not and should not do so at the expense of face-to-face communication. Politicians are representing the people and should interact with them at a personal level – after all we elect them to serve us. to try and do so over the internet not only leaves yourself open for criticism from all angles but it also allows people to look at your silly face again and again and again.

In other news – Birmingham City have been promoted to the Premiership. Excellent.

Following on from my previous post, regarding the song I have put up on youtube, I have found ot a few handy little tips when looking at how popular and how wide reaching your video is. As a member who has a video up, you can click on a button marked ‘insight’ when looking at your own videos. This takes you to a screen which examines views, popularity, discovery, demographics, community and hot spots. Basically these tell you all you need to know regarding the viewing figures of your video.

Looking a bit deeper, the views section plots a line graph to show when your video received the most views, plotting time span along the x axis and number of views on the y axis. This would be incredibly useful if I was a company who had posted an advert or viral video, so to measure whether or when my video was most popular and presents data which may mean you have to rethink the placement of video if the number of views are dwinderling.

The next section is popularity, this takes the form of another line graph, but instead of number of views on the y axis, it plots how popular your video is compared with others on a scale of 0 to 100. Again this would be an invaluable tool if you were utilising youtube to put information regarding a product or an advet as it would give you a comparison between your and other’s content.

Following on from that is a section on Discovery. This is the most impressive part of this entire tool, it allows you to see how people discovered your video. It plots a bar graph of how people are finding the video. The majority of ours comes from a youtube search but it is the other results that are most intriguing. It shows you how many times your video has been viewed by an external link – and on what site, so it takes me to blogs that people have posted my video on!! Amazing in my opinion, so I have had a look at what people have been saying and it is quite positive. To think if you were a company, you could see how many people had embedded your video on their pages and then see what they were saying and join in the debate! How cool is that?! Add to that you can see what people searched in google to find it and also from what other videos people went to yours from, building a huge picture of your audience.

The demographic analysis tells me that the majority of viewers are males between 18 – 24, again very useful if you are company targeted specific stakeholders. Oddly, 3% of the views are from people aged 65 and over!!

The community section is a youtube internal evaluation of where members were from who commented on or rated the video. This again will help a company in see who is engaging with the video and whether or not your video has caught the interest of an unintended audience in a different country.

The hotspots section shows the points in which most people are rewinding to during the video or when people are leaving the video, obviously this is important to show if you are keeping your viewers attention and whether or not there is a certain part of the video that people are enjoying!

Well I hope you like my insight into youtube ‘Insight’!

Incase you have missed the video, here it is again:

This week I took a small but enjoyable step to becoming famous! After me and my mate had made a song in his studio – a tongue in cheek remix of the Super Mario Bros. theme tune – we sent it to a friend who works as a DJ on Radio 1. Little did we know at the time that he would play it whilst standing in on a show the following Thursday night. The song, called Mario is Dead by the Super Dub Bros (us) was played late on in the show as you can see by the tracklist (see right down the bottom). Following him playing this the show received numerous texts saying how much they liked the tune and asking what it was. The Dj then told us to get a myspace and the song on youtube so that people could find it if they liked it. So, heeding his advice I made a myspace and uploaded the song onto youtube (see links). The DJ, Jaymo, then stood in for Annie Mac on her Mash-Up show on Friday and again played the tune and this time gave it a bit of a plug. This was on Friday night, early that day we had only had 30 odd views on youtube but following it being played the views have increased to 756. Now that excites me, over 700 views in 3 days! It just shows how important it is, if you are making music, to use social media so to give people and example of the music you make and where better to do it than on the hugely popular myspace and youtube.

So the next step for us? Well hopefully it can be played again on the radio a few times and in the mean time, I am going to try and start engaging on different forums, with different bloggers, with people interested in the music genre on twitter and try and get a buzz going about it….. Hopefully you have all checked it out, and whether you like it or not it has again raised the profile further – a key feature of PR 2.0!!

Driving back up from a lovely day spent with my family on Mothering Sunday, I was listening to Radio 1. On a Sunday night, from 8pm they have a show called Switch. The show is part of an online series that the BBC run, covering many discussion topics and using a lot of user generated content. A main aspect of the show is using online content – be they videos on youtube or music on myspace. Listening to the show it really reinforced the power that new media has and the ever increasing important role it plays in society. The show also featured a discussion on the use of twitter and Facebook status updates to inform people as to what you are doing. Annie Mac, the presenter, who confesses to using her BlackBerry to check Facebook and update her twitter whilst working out, raised the issue of whether anything is sacred now that we have to tell everybody about everything we do. This is an interesting question, although I feel the answer is that in the main we enjoy our online friends knowing what we are doing, be it out of self-importance, vanity, showing off or just being generally sociable.

The program was followed by a show called the Surgery, Radio1’s help and advice show. The show’s main debate was centred around whether we are spending too much time online. I found this quite an interesting topic especially following on from a show that featured mainly online content! An issue that I raised was that in a time of recession where money is tight, we are going to spend more time online as it only usually costs our service provider charge to do so. With twitter and facebook becoming ever popular, it does not look like we will be spending any less time online in the near future.

Personally, I feel the BBC are on to a winner with these sort of shows as most people have an interest in the area and also most people use social netwroking sights or online media. The use of these in the main content of radio shows will only increase the listening audiences interaction with the program and therefore hopefully increase audience numbers.

It is always important to evaluate. No matter what you do, you can never be sure how well you have done it or whether your goals have been achieved unless you conduct a decent evaluation.

The rise in new media and Web 2.0 has meant that evaluation has a)never meant so much and b) never been easier. For instance, take this blog, the best evaluation I can carry out is by looking at how many people comment and how many people interact with what I am blogging about! With twitter, people are encouraged to follow you and respond to your tweets. There is no better evaluation on twitter to let you know you are doing badly than nobody following you or responding to what your twittering on about!

In PR, we are told that the most important part of the communications process is the evaluation. After all, without an idea of who your communication is reaching and how well it is being received you may well be barking up the wrong tree entirely. Web 2.0 then allows you to evaluate on a daily basis, looking at who is interested in what you and others are saying, picking up tips and hot topics to talk about. The contsant process of evaluation and interaction can only aid the PR communications process further.

I am sure many people would have heard about this story before, but I really can’t get my head around it. Not only is this an example of how stupid the guy writing the status was, but it is an example of the power that you give Facebook when you live your life completely through it. People can see where you are going, where you have been, how you are feeling and how drunk you were on Friday night. This guy – as his status makes clear – was not feeling like going into work as he was still recovering from partying to hard. So he put it on his status and his work caught him when he made a claim for sick leave. Unbelievable!

It doesn’t stop there though, I have ‘text’ the text information service 82ASK and asked what they can tell me about myself. They returned with information that I am from the West Midlands, probably attended South Bromsgrove High School and that I am recently 22 and interested in Birmingham City F.C. and dance music. Now, all of this information was sourced from my Facebook page that they can’t access, just by looking through my friends and things that I was a fan of. So if these people that don’t have access to my page can find out so much about me, I am half expecting the majority of my online friends to be able to compile either an in-depth social diary or a decent biography of my recent years!

A man was recently convicted of stabbing his wife to death for changing her relationship status on facebook to single.  Further to this Virgin Airline workers have been reprimanded for calling passengers chavs and commenting on the poor safety standards if the airline on their facebooks.

In contemporary society, we need to be more aware and more careful than ever when living out our lives on the internet. Not only can anybody see certain information about you, but more importantly they can see how drunk you were on Friday.

Take it easy online and stay virtually safe.