Noun. The act of using Twitter to lessen/destroy a company’s reputation

It is perplexing to why Twitter has gained so much popularity during this year when the social networking organism formed during 2006. The majority, if not all, of the available PR blogs have at least one article on Twitter. This blog is an ode to this but it is also true that most blogs have far too many articles concerning Twitter and its functions – this is the tightrope this blog treads.

I cannot lie. I have done work and indeed still doing work for clients where Twitter has become an important part of the promotion mix. With ePR being such an up-to-date method of raising a company’s image Twitter could be seen as a God send for those of us who understand the effectiveness of the network. Anybody who signs up to Twitter could be regarded as lambs to the slaughter as PR Professionals use every tactic necessary to hunt down users who fulfil the interests of the clients they are working on behalf of. Even I, a student, have had suspiciously relevant Twitter accounts add me concerning club nights and student promotions.

Like with any system though, Twitter is not without its downfalls.

I cannot describe the series of events to blame for the unfortunate encounter with the hasty village locals. It may have been when I pointed out a beaten track and guided the rest of my family in that direction. I had recognised a lady, called Linda, from one of the local churches at Mevagissey harbour and so it seemed wise to follow in her direction. We knew that the parade to celebrate feast week at Mevagissey harbour in Cornwall was going to start from St Peter’s Church. Who better to follow than a church goer? Our bet paid off very well indeed. Keeping a safe distance behind to avoid recognition or conversation we followed Linda and found ourselves outside of St Peter’s. Although we also found ourselves surrounded by a host of other village locals who were all very excited about the upcoming events in the village later that evening. We shared their enthusiasm but we were still cautious to start conversation.

All of this local camaraderie is so alien to a Londoner who lives most of their life suffering from a variant of mute blight. It is widely known that one of the worst things you can do in public is achieve eye contact with a stranger. Let alone start a conversation with one.

Thank you very much for downloading the second podcast. How am I doing? Very well thank you. Before continuing any further with this podcast a little bit of housekeeping.

Housekeeping

This podcast can now be found on the iTunes Store. Simply search for “Musings of a Public Relations Student” or click the text link I have provided on the written article for this podcast.

For those of you who are regular visitors to my blog you may have noticed that the shrink and expand options on all the blog articles have been disabled. Unfortunately this has resulted the home page of my blog to be stretched down your monitor by thousands of words. This bug will be fixed once Ajaxed WordPress, the plugin I use for the shrink and expand feature, has become compatible with the latest version of WordPress which I currently run.

On with the substance of this podcast.

Ambassador of business

In the last podcast I mentioned that I had been a Student Ambassador for one of my old colleges. The title “Student Ambassador” sounds far grander than the job role actually is. The basics of the job is to promote the university where you study at along with the course you are taking. Now, I am aware that Public Relations students and practitioners visit this blog.

This article marks the beginning of a new series of podcasts giving you the option to listen rather than read from the glare of your monitor. Depending on the format of the podcasts the majority of recordings will also be avaliable in standard text form. Podcasts can either be streamed or downloaded from this website. Before not too long podcasts will also be avaliable through the iTunes store.

Before I begin I want to thank you for downloading and listening to this first podcast. Not too sure how the audio will sound as I have no official recording gear as such. Most microphones seem to give me some sort of artificial lisp. Unless, of course, I do have a lisp… Anyway, I hope everything sounds bearable. I have tried the art of podcasting in the past and unfortunately I never really felt it to catch on. This time though, I will make an effort. I know from my own experience that constantly reading all the time can become quite tedious and so I hope listening provides a breath of fresh air into my tiny corner of the interweb.

I’m not too sure about the frequency of podcasts which will bless this site currently or how this new form of media will aid in my PR related articles.

I have considered writing this blog post for the past couple of days but sanity stopped me. Unfortunately, I can no longer contain my excitement. Google Wave is going to be awesome! However, this article is merely a product of speculation. Currently Google Wave is only open to a small number of developers but it is expected to be released later this year.

Why on Earth is Google Wave relevant for this PR Blog? Quite simply, after Google had developed Google Maps they sat back and then got ambitious. Imagine the scene, many geeks (but geniuses) sat in a room. One of these geeks makes an observation, “Email is a bit old, isn’t it?” Perhaps a small silence and then an agreement “Lets sort this problem out” and so Google Wave was born. The possible future of internet communication.

Google Wave is an attempt to replace the email and quite rightly so. Email has been around since the early 1980s and the internet has changed so much since then. Incidentally this has caused communication technology to change as well. The introduction of the 21st Century saw an explosion in social networking. Users were easily able to communicate with each other, not just through text but through the mediums of image and video.

Blogging, blogging, blogging and more blogging. It is a peculiar phenomenon really. It can’t be said that people earn a particular amount of money from writing down their experiences, thoughts and opinions. At least the majority of individuals don’t.

Although you may know it already I’ll begin with a little explanation to what the blogging phenomenon is. The word ‘blog’ is a contraction of the word ‘weblog’. Essentially a weblog is an online journal, the digital alternative to column inches in a newspaper. Although an alternative it is very similar. For a year I kept an online journal at YourLocalGuardian.co.uk which was just identical to the stories a columnist may cover in the newspaper. The same applies for the writings I made for Space Newspaper at the University of Gloucestershire.

I started to keep a blog a few years ago, the catalyst of which was certainly two-fold. I had been reading an awful lot of factual books and had formed some opinions around certain subjects but a passion to write also existed. Before I kept the blog I would attempt to write books when on holiday or write the occasional poem to release some anxiety or troubles I had been going through.

An article concerning Public Relations by a Mr Loïc Le Meur has recently come to my attention. The charming title of his article is “PR Secrets? Bullshit” and can be found here.

Mr Loïc Le Meur

There are a worrying amount of users, particularly on Twitter, labelling themselves entrepreneurs. Unfortunately Mr Loïc Le Meur falls into this category with a difference, he is a serial entrepreneur. I have no personal discrepancy towards Mr Loïc Le Meur for choosing this title but the definition of entrepreneur is so widespread and almost a cliché for anybody trying to avoid the title “business man”. A “serial entrepreneur” only raises questions in my mind of other associated titles such as “serial killer” or “serial rapist”. Anybody confessing to be a “serial entrepreneur” then signs his own death warrant in my mind. There is also a worrying trend between the arrogance needed behind this un-academic title which is usually associated within the individual’s views. You are not to be disappointed with Mr Loïc Le Meur where this is concerned.

I’ll begin by assessing the term ‘PR Secrets’ as seen in the article title. He associates that the term is simply fuelled by those working within the industry to capture clients. With this I completely agree.

I have now finished first year of University! Although what an inconsiderate amount of time it has been since this blog was last updated. Unfortunately this may become habit since University work was more than I first expected.

So much has happened since I last wrote a blog upon this website and indeed throughout my whole first year of university. Not that years of university are actual years, closer to 9 months, which begs the question why tuition fees are being raised and terms are being shortened. Undoubtly university is the place to be in this abysmal economic climate. It might be sunny outside but the job market is terrible. Many friends of those at university have come down to visit complaining about the death of the temporary job market and how their jobs are constantly on the line. Strangely it is the furniture industry which seems very badly hit. People are just not replacing their furniture, causing a lack of orders and the loss of jobs. When furniture chain MFI closed many smaller manufacturers also went bust. It seems that our country is slowly becoming far more focused upon the smaller businesses as the larger chains fall. Then shock sweeps across my face when people vote for the conservatives to come back in.

Wrote this article in regards to a PR project involving pethouseclub.com. These were some of my thoughts surrounding ePR.

In order to develop a social networking website it is necessary to follow modern website models. An increasingly blurry area of social networking is the balance between free and premium content. It is seen generally on the internet that any knowledge or produce should be distributed freely. This has been partly caused by the General Public License and Opensource movements which have propelled internet technologies forward for the good. The problem this article addresses is simply:

How to build an online community and make a profit?

It is no easy question to answer. Traditional systems for paid registration no longer work in the current technological climate. There are many websites out there holding vast amounts of information and users would much rather research than pay out. Therefore I see the task to be building an online community and then later reap payments from the website, which shall be discussed later. The benefit of free registration is community growth (if the website project fits a market) and if so possible accelerated growth.

A couple of weeks ago at the Philosophy society we discussed ‘The Prince’ by Niccolo Machiavelli which is really an instruction manual for a leader. The whole the book seems to be littered with hypothetical imperatives in which Machiavelli believed a leader should act. In this way he seemed to imitate Immanuel Kant but the focus on morality was less severe. Obviously these circumstances are subjective to the philosopher’s own ideas and time period in which the book was written. As the only PR student at the society I could see a lot of crossovers in which philosophy, dubbed as the “broad church”, also infiltrates aspects of PR.

In particular, conversation swerved onto the recent American presidentially elections and Barack Hussein Obama’s win. This then diverted to politics in my own country, Britain and the image of Gordon Brown. A couple in the group believed that Margret Thatcher was making a positive comeback even though when she was Prime Minister people seemed to hate her ideas. I could see how Tony Blair’s popularity fell in office but now he would most likely be preferred over Gordon Brown. It seems that a leader has his character judged rather than the ideas he stands for.