I was honoured to be asked by the wonderful Tiffany St James and Dan Bowyer to speak at the LiveTech event as part of LondonLaunch:LIVE this week.

Here are my slides:

[slideshare id=9809857&doc=livetech-law-111021062053-phpapp01]

I spoke about Brand and Reputation Management, Social Media Amplification and adding the magic to your event.

And, as a good summary here is an interview I did afterwards to WinkBall.

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This week has been a busy one for Bournemouth, hitting the headlines for a couple of the wrong reasons:

1. The flash flooding
2. The tragic loss of a red arrow at the airshow

We’ve also seen what has been dubbed as the “Schrodinger’s dictator” (conflicting reports of Gadaffi being alive and dead), which in a similar way closer to home also occurred with the red arrows pilot: some saying he was rescued alive by dog walkers, whilst others that he died on scene.

Add to this the false reports of riots doing the rounds on social networks and I felt a blog post was in order.

My thoughts in no particular order on when to RT / FWD or re-post:

1. Please THINK before you post – it’s to easy to get caught up in the “first, first, first!” online culture.
2. Forwarding unconfirmed rumors can become self-fulfilling (as I’m sure was partly the case with some riots around the UK). I saw (and due to past involvement in radio, started receiving phone calls!) a growth in rumors that the McDonalds in Bournemouth was on fire… having walked past it only 5 minutes earlier, I was quick to point out it most definitely was not to those asking me and subsequently onto twitter & Facebook.
   In the case of the pilot, whilst mainstream media was careful to state the situation of the pilot was unclear, many were saying he was alive – while I’m generally an optimist, imagine what his wife would of been going through if she’d been anxiously scouring the web for news…
3. Consider the reliability of your sources – having a large number of followers does not necessarily make you either a reliable, or authoritative source – exhibit A: @queen_uk – a lot of people were RT’ing a post from a twitter account with a following in the ten of thousands, a quick look at it’s history made it clear it was a barely reliable (or literate!) source.
4. Rule 32 of the internet: “Pics? or it didn’t happen” – if someone states something as fact, challenge them to provide proof, if in doubt don’t re-post or clearly label it as unconfirmed/unreliable.
5. Use NSFW if the item you are forwarding is Not Safe For Work! (As a rule of thumb, if I wouldn’t share it with my mother, it’s NSFW).
6. Remember not everyone loves: LOLcats / motivational saying / Jokes…

What would you add to the list?

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Beware the “tweet n delete” twitter spam twitzend.info

Twitter spam is nothing new, nor are rogue apps that promise followers and tweet on your behalf… but recently I’ve spotted an odd new trend, what I’m calling the “tweet n delete” twitter spam.

I spotted similar looking spam messages on a couple of accounts recently, when I went to view the accounts to warn the owners on the first 2, there were no messages listed, so I assumed the offending spam issue was resolved….

When I saw one from a friend of mine, I replied to him to suggest he check his authorized apps and he replied he hadn’t sent anything, I checked his feed and sure enough there was no spam… then the following day, there was another one from his account – this time I took a screenshot and checked his feed to find it was no longer listed.

<<<<< screen shot of the twitzend spam

vvvvv Screen capture of the feed for that time

 

He was keen not to be sending spam, so sent me his login details – as expected I found the rogue app listed (slightly in disguise) – A quick check of the link from the spam message (tinyurl translated to twitzend.info) confirmed it was the app in question and I removed it.

 

 

Forgetting the fact it’s a waste of time to fake bulk up your following numbers, beware authorizing websites to update your twitter feed.

If you do see a friends account tweeting anything odd, that’s then not listed in their stream when they/you check later, suggest they go to twitter.com, login, select settings (top right) and applications tab to see what is listed and remove ones they don’t need or recognize.

Thanks to @darylhales, club manager extraordinaire, for letting me login to his account to get to the bottom of this one.

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I really enjoyed speaking at the National Housing Federation #fedcomms event yesterday, in our session there were two 15 min talks, one from me and then Jamie & Michelle from Freebridge community housing followed by a panel discussion.

Here are my slides from the event, the rest are on housing.org.uk

The discussion was especially interesting, some good questions and I carried on some of the conversations through lunch.

I feel we covered the brief well, with only 15 mins the goal was to encourage people to start thinking about some of the issues and not to try and comprehensively cover all legislation etc

+ sorry to those that had to stand at the back!

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Working with the team at Liz Lean PR we conducted a snapshot survey of 100 people (around Bournemouth, in February) to see what the general population were saying about their employers online and if they’d received any guidance from their employer on what they should say.

This was partly inspired by the upcoming (now live) changes to the ASA Cap Code:

“From 1 March, marketing communications on companies’ own websites and in other third party space under their control, such as Facebook and Twitter, will have to adhere to the non-broadcast advertising rules as set out in the CAP Code.” (Source: ASA)

A (massively) simplified version of the code would be: ensure that all your communications are legal, decent, honest and true.

We asked 4 questions:

1. Do you use Facebook or twitter? (yes/no)
2. Have you ever written about the company you work for on Facebook or Twitter? (yes/no)
3. Has your company given you any guidance on what you can/can’t write on Facebook or Twitter? (yes/no/don’t know)
4. Have you ever heard of the new ASA standards / CAP code? (yes/no)

Full details and responses to the survey in our press release on Pressitt.

The two key findings that stood out for me were:

1. Half of all employees have admitted to writing about the company they work for on a social media website, such as Facebook and Twitter (49%)
2. A staggering three quarters of those who have written about their company online either did not know of, or had no guidance from their employers regarding what they could or couldn’t write (75%)

Think about that for a minute, the implications that 1/2 of your staff are writing about your business online on social networks… and it’s not just the expanded ASA remit that needs to be considered, regulation such as the FSA could also apply to your business.

Liz Willingham, from Liz Lean PR summarises it better than me:

“The results of our survey highlight the importance of good communication from the top down. As ambassadors of your brand, employees need to be made aware and given comprehensive guidance on how to conduct themselves in all situations to protect the overall reputation of the company.”

We’re looking to put on an event for our clients after Easter, in the mean time if you’d like any guidance please do drop either of us a line.

If you want some interesting views from leading experts on the new ASA Cap code changes I strongly recommend this eConsultancy post.

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