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Top Social Media Sites December 31, 2008

Posted by Angelia Chandra in Research data, Social Media, Social Networking, Weblogs.
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I found one interesting statistics data called Top Social Media Sites 2008 published at www.washingtonpost.com today. This research is conducted by comScore, an Internet marketing research company that provides marketing data and services to many of the Internet’s largest businesses. (see Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ComScore)

comScore ranked websites by its worldwide traffic stats dated November 2008, as follows:

  1. Blogger (222 million)

  2. Facebook (200 million)

  3. MySpace (126 million)

  4. WordPress (114 million)

  5. Windows Live Spaces (87 million)

  6. Yahoo Geocities (69 million)

  7. Flickr (64 million)

  8. hi5 (58 million)

  9. Orkut (46 million)

  10. Six Apart (46 million)

  11. Baidu Space (40 million)

  12. Friendster (31 million)

  13. 56.com (29 million)

  14. Webs.com (24 million)

  15. Bebo (24 million)

  16. Scribd (23 million)

  17. Lycos Tripod (23 million)

  18. Tagged (22 million)

  19. imeem (22 million)

  20. Netlog (21 million)

Blogger, which is on top of the chart, has grown 44% since the last survey in November 2007. Facebook, surprisingly, is up 116% reaching 200 million users. My Space is pretty steady while WordPress has grown 68%. On the other hand, Windows Live Spaces is down 22%.

Click here for similar ranking in 2007.

The “Dell-Hell” issue December 27, 2008

Posted by Angelia Chandra in Social Media, Weblogs.
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As I mentioned in my previous blogs, negative comments or stories about products or services is inevitable in the practise of PR on the Web 2.0 world. “Dell – Hell” is one such example of a negative comment that appeared on a blog and brought down the company reputation. not-dell-but-hell

It all started when one customer, named Jeff Jarvis, complained about a Dell laptop he had bought by writing all of his complaints on his blog and tagged it Dell – Hell. However, the Dell company did not give him any response. His blog was then followed by other unsatisfied users and this got larger and larger and eventually resulted in Dell’s sales drop.

Fortunately, after a lot of efforts, Dell managed to cope with it. Now Dell has its own corporate blog called Direct2Dell and it even has its own employees’ blogs called Your Blog.

Take a look at Jeff Jarvis’ blog – The Buzzmachine where you can find more information about the Dell Hell issue.

Or click here for a shorter explanation of this issue as well as some interesting lessons from which PR practitioners could learn, also written by Jeff Jarvis.

The Trend of Blogging December 26, 2008

Posted by Angelia Chandra in PR and Web 2.0, Research data, Social Media, Weblogs.
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Weblogs is one of the applications that play an important role in the PR 2.0 industry.

This year, there are about 346 millions people in this world that read blogs and there is an 11% growth compared to last year. (source: The McCann research – the Social Media Tracker Wave 3).

More and more people are reading blogs online. So I think instead of spending a lot of money for media relations programme trying to convince reporters to cover news, why not try to create a blog or target bloggers to help us convey our messages directly to our target public online? We no longer need to wait for the traditional media to cover our news. We are now free from their filter and we have the power to send our messages across directly to our targeted public and this is all so GREAT!

After setting up blogs or having bloggers write our stories, we should be happy that all our hard work are actually worth it. Just take a look at the research result below:

Blogs Usage

However, there is a problem. Not everyone is writing a favourable story for us. Someone might post, write or leave negative comments and/or stories in their blogs and we have no control over that. Of course, we should be worried about that!

However, according to David Meerman Scott in his book “The New Rules of Marketing and PR”, he said: “I strongly believe that comments from readers offering different viewpoints than the original post are actually a good thing on a blog, because they add credibility to your viewpoint by showing two sides of an issue and by highlighting that your readership is passionate enough to want to contribute to a debate on your blog”.

I agree with David as it is much more credible to have both positive and negative comments/stories on blogs. It makes much more sense to the readers that all the opinions do come from actual users of the products or services rather than just posting some edited comments on the blogs, for example. We need to welcome such negative feedbacks and then find an effective way to handle the criticisms.

“The New Rules of Marketing and PR” – by David Meerman Scott December 22, 2008

Posted by Angelia Chandra in PR and Marketing, PR and Web 2.0.
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Book Cover

These days I’ve been reading this book. It is definitely one interesting book and I learn quite a lot from it. This book is very accessible as it is written in blog-style which makes me feel like I’m reading a story book. It also provides a lot of examples and links so I can then find out more about a particular topic from resources on the Internet.

The first chapter starts with an interesting title: “The Old Rules of Marketing and PR Are Ineffective in an Online World”. It struck me that I’ve got a lot to learn to work in the new media as all the old rules applied in the traditional media that I have learnt are not applicable in the case of new media.

So what are the new rules that we all have to know then? According to Scott, these are the new rules of Marketing and PR:

  • Marketing is more than just advertising.
  • PR is for more than just a mainstream media audience.
  • You are what you publish.
  • People want authenticity, not spin.
  • People want participation, not propaganda.
  • Instead of causing one-way interruption, marketing is about delivering content at just the precise moment your audience needs it.
  • Marketers must shift their thinking from mainstream marketing to the masses to a strategy of reaching vast numbers of underserved audiences via the Web.
  • PR is not about your boss seeing your company on TV. It’s about your buyers seeing your company on the Web.
  • Marketing is not about your agency winning awards. It’s about your organization winning business.
  • The Internet has made public relations public again, after years of almost exclusive focus on media.
  • Companies must drive people into the purchasing process with great online content.
  • Blogs, podcasts, e-books, news releases, and other forms of online content let organizations communicate directly with buyers in a form they appreciate.
  • On the Web, the lines between marketing and PR have blurred.

I second his thought on those rules, especially the following rules. First, the rule – “Blogs, podcasts, e-books, news releases, and other forms of online content let organizations communicate directly with buyers in a form they appreciate” - is similar to the statement from the video I posted here previously that “PR should engage people when, where and how they want to be engaged”. I think this is one advantage of Web 2.0 which was hardly done in the traditional media because we didn’t really have as many ways in sending our messages across. Nowadays, with Web 2.0, we can send our messages by using the media that is mostly appreciated by the targeted public. Of course we should do some research to determine which platform is the appropriate one. It’s about sending the right messages in the right time, at the right place, with the right way.

Secondly, with regards to the rule that says – “On the Web, the lines between Marketing and PR have blurred” – I do think that actually, be it on the Web or in real life, Marketing and PR should work hand in hand with each other anyway. It is ideal to work within an Integrated Marketing Communication (IMC) concept. It would be good if Marketing and PR are supporting each other. The messages would be addressed and understood better by the public. However, I realise that in the real life, it is hard to practise IMC for reasons that we all know well.

Later on at the part three of this book, there are lots of “How To” tips which are very useful. A must-read book for PR practitioner who is interested in new media!

If you are Athens users, click and log in here to read the book.

More about Social Media December 19, 2008

Posted by Angelia Chandra in PR and Web 2.0, Social Media, YouTube Videos.
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While browsing today, I came across an interesting video on YouTube that helps me understand better about the relationship between PR, Web 2.0 and social media.

This video titled “What’s the Buzz About PR 2.0/Social Media?” is created by Robert Sears, the PR 2.0 Social Media Manager from the SSA Public Relations agency based in Denver and Phoenix – USA. He talks about the usage of social media in PR.


I agree with his statement that in using Web 2.0, PR should engage people when, where and how they want to be engaged. I do really think it is important to find out the “when, where and how” our targeted public want to be engaged with. Now with the emergence of Web 2.0, we have plenty of choices to convey our messages across. We can upload videos on Youtube, upload pictures on Flickr, create a profile on Facebook, post stories on weblogs, and etc. But we can’t just use all of them, we need to know what our target public are really involved with. We need to know whether they only read blogs or watch videos or both.

Another interesting point that Robert made in his video is that social media provides a global public focus group. Everyone expresses their opinions online which somehow lets us know what they think about our products and services. It provides us a valuable insight into what they really wants and needs. So, simply get online and you can follow their conversation to find out what they really wants or needs. This is such a great contribution from Web 2.0 since consumer insight is one important point in PR.

PR and Web 2.0 – An Overview December 18, 2008

Posted by Angelia Chandra in PR and Web 2.0, Research data, Social Media.
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New media, especially the emergence of web 2.0, presents a significant impact for the Public Relations industry as it has challenged how public relations is practiced. PR is no longer only about sending out press releases to media and hoping to get the news appear on the media by building good relationship with the journalists. By the emergence of web 2.0, PR is now about communicating directly with the public without relying solely on the traditional media.

So what actually is web 2.0? To make it clear, I looked it up in Wikipedia and it says:

“The term Web 2.0 is described as the changing trends in the use of World Wide Web technology and web design that aim to enhance creativity, communications, secure information sharing, collaboration and functionality of the web.”

Web 2.0 is about the interconnection and interaction between the web and the users. It allows users to do more than just get information from the web. Users can now participate and “interact” with the web. That’s why Web 2.0 could help PR to communicate directly with the public. I really think that It is a new, helpful channel for PR to disseminate information to the public and then somehow get feedback from them. Social media, one of the platforms based on Web 2.0, is used largely in the PR industry.

According to Universal McCann company, in one of its research - the Social Media Tracker Wave 3 (conducted in March 08), it defines social media as the online applications, platforms, media which aim to facilitate interaction, collaboration, and the sharing of content. The research shows that there is a significant growth of social media usage which includes social networking, blogs, RSS, widgets, podcasts, photo and video sharing, message boards and chat rooms from year to year.

social-media-usage

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More and more people are getting online and using social media. I think that it is important for PR to take a look and understand this growing trends of social media usage so we can then take advantage of it in conducting PR practices. It is both fun and challenging to make use of Web 2.0 as PR now has new channel to communicate with the public BUT no longer can control the spread of the public’s opinion because they can now express their opinion freely online, anytime and anywhere.

So how effective is new media used in the PR industry? Even better question: Should PR concentrate only in new media or use both new and traditional media? Well, keep following my blog and you’ll find out more..