The ROI within social media has long been a bone of contention, and seems likely to become ever more so, with the equally lightning spread of both social media use and savage budget cuts. In a tightening economy, businesses have to make sure that they’re getting more return on their marketing investment. 

‘Inability to measure ROI’ was named by marketers as one of the most significant barriers to the adoption of social media tactics by their organization from a poll quoted by MarketingSherpa.

So why should your company be in the social media arena?

1. To engage your audience: it’s where your audience are, and shapes how they think.
2. To generate referrals – A customer is worth far more than their initial spend with your company: you need to factor in future purchases and the influence they may have through social media.
3. To stay competitive: 44% of the Inc 500 reported social media was very important to their business/marketing strategy in 2008.

But are the old metrics of online ROI still applicable to social media?

Measuring the impact of online advertising used to be relatively easy. It was all about analytics: Unique Visitors, Page Views, Cost per Clicks. But those engaged in social media must now attempt a way of measuring not just the online advertising within social media, but the framework surrounding that advertising.The IAB’s ‘Social Media Ad Metrics Definitions’ have gone some way to filling the gap, by clearly defining three platforms, and then provided metrics by which the effectiveness of each might be measured when planning a campaign. They include:

• - Social media sites: Unique Visitors, Cost per unique visitor, Page views, Visits, Return Visits, Interaction rate, Time spent, Video installs, Relevant actions taken.
• - Blogs: Conversation size (no. of sites, links and reach of a conversation whose content includes conversation phrases relevant to the client), Site relevance (Conversation density, Author credibility, Content freshness and relevance)
• - Widgets and Social Media Applications – Installs (no. Applications), Active Users, Audience Profile, Unique User Reach, Growth, Influence, Installs – (no. installed per User)

However, according to Augie Ray, “Perhaps one of the most concerning aspects of this report is that a reader might get the idea that every action is equal. The report suggests that “Comments posted” are worth measuring, but it says nothing whatsoever about sentiment within those comments. In the entire report, the following words do not appear even a single time: “Sentiment,” “Attitude,” “Rating,” “Positive,” and “Net Promoter Score.“  Check out his post on The Customer Collective to see his ‘dimensions’ by which clients should analyse a blog’s suitability for their brand.

I’m still wrestling with the social media metrics though, and nothing I see above has really told me about anything other than new media versions of traditional media campaigns: where to place your ad, sponsored widget or sponsored conversation, and how to judge its effectiveness.  How about real social media, finding out how your forum is contributing to your reduction in online support, how customer reviews are affecting sales path, whether your 30 second TV spot crowdsourced in an innovative UGC campaign really made your audience feel engaged?  It’s really not all about online advertising anymore. It’s about what else is happening in the social networks, very likely somewhere your company isn’t.

But you’ve got to measure something to know if what’s working and how …

The ubiquitous Jeremiah Owyang provided an excellent guide on how to measure your social media programme as far back as 2006. (Don’t let that put you off though: it’s still completely relevant.) He starts off with the basics: if you haven’t got a goal, then you can’t measure against it. Then build in measurement of this before you launch – not as an afterthought; as part of the process.

He guards against trying to measure it all – it can lead to ‘Analysis Paralysis’ (and don’t we know it)

Importantly, he exhorts us to monitor alerts as they happen, “A negative meme, an exploding battery could shatter your brand: are you watching in real time?” and finally, he helpfully provides a list of attributes to measure:

• - Activity (Web Analytics of blog or site)
• - Tone (Sentiment)
• - Velocity (Spread over time, URLs, Trackbacks)
• - Attention (Duration on site)
• - Participation (comments, trackbacks)
• - Many qualitative attributes (comments, what did they say, what did they mean)

So where does that all leave the ROI question?

Divided, I’d say, into three main camps.

The Deniers: What, really, is this obsession with ROI? This is the group who are most resistant to any attempt to measure social media; possibly because past attempts have been so clumsy and obviously missing the point.

The Definers: Never mind the community stuff. Just give me the click through rate. Please. IAB’s new metrics were made for this group. They are the ones who’ll be the best audience for the new definitions, and are likely to be hugely comforted by a large benchmark and a level playing field upon which to chalk it.

The Dedicated: It’s not a perfect science, and it’s a lot of work. But we’re getting there. This group are realising the importance of using every available system of measurement we have: web analytics, buzz monitoring, community management listening – the whole gamut – to try to bring in as near to a 360 degree picture of people’s reactions to and interactions with, a brand, as is currently possible.

I’ll leave you with this opinion from MetricsMan:  a really useful resource on all matters social media and PR ROI:

“ROI is a financial metric – percentage of dollars returned for a given investment/cost.  The dollars may be revenue generated, dollars saved or spending avoided.  ROI is transactional.  ROI lives on the income statement in business terms.

Value is created when people become aware of us, engage with our content or brand ambassadors, are influenced by this engagement, and take some action like recommending to a friend or buying our product.  Value creation occurs over time, not at a point in time.  Value creation is process-oriented.  Value lives on the balance sheet.

From a sales process perspective, the ultimate value of a social media program may be in increasing the number of people who are likely to buy our products and services.  Other programs may be designed to improve or protect corporate reputation or to build and enhance brands.  Much of this value is said to be intangible.  It is goodwill that becomes tangible at the point in time a transaction occurs.   When buying decisions happen, your investments in marketing, brand and reputation work together.  They become tangible.  You can measure the ROI.

Many of the well-intentioned but misguided attempts to rename or reinvent what ROI means in social media – return on influence and return on engagement probably getting the most play – seem to be the result of an inability to distinguish value creation from ROI.”

Seth Godin recently predicted that by 2012 “there will be no significant newspapers printed on newsprint in the US“.

Now
whilst that may be sensationalistic in terms of timescale – there is no
doubt that the newspaper industry is in trouble. In the six months to
March of this year the decline in US newspaper weekday circulation
almost doubled (Source: Bloomberg) and a number of historic US newspaper titles have already hit financial trouble.

Yes
the recession has hit media spend – but the core issue is that more
& more consumers are getting their news from the internet.

But that’s not really new news. What is new is how the internet is increasingly becoming the source for breaking news.

Last
Thursday night I was doing some things around the house with BBC News
24 on in the background. But rather than seeing a journalist on the
screen – there was a caption with an image of the TMZ.com
site leading with the news of Michael Jackson’s death. For the next
couple of hours the BBC’s news was simply reporting on the news from
TMZ and the LA Times. Mainstream news media reporting breaking internet
news.

In September last year, Robert Peston chose his blog to
announce the proposed Lloyds/HBOS merger before breaking the news on
BBC.

More recently, with reporting restrictions in place, the
news from Iran has been lead by blogs, Tweets and videos from people on
the streets.

In a 24-hour global news cycle no single news
organisation is going to have the coverage to capture every breaking
news story. So thanks to Twitter, blogs & the camera-phone the
power of the consumer-journalist is massive. News can be broken by
anywhere, anywhere, at any time.

Social media is increasingly driving the news agenda.

The challenge for the established media therefore becomes two-fold:

• How do they drive revenue from their online properties,
• How do they continue to verify the myriad of consumer-journalist sources?

Virgin Atlantic have announced a Travel social network as part of their 25^th Birthday, aimed at the ‘inspirational’ travel market. Much like the BA Metrotwin, which was specifically created for the to London-New York traveller, the vtraveller is aimed at frequent flyers. Now I am not about to go about disputing the power of social media or the idea of having a branded social network. What does concern me is what brand owners think can be achieved through branded social networks and how long they think users will stick around for if they aren’t properly supported, particularly if the branded social network’s unique selling point (in this case sharing pictures and travel experiences) is not really unique at all!

A social network is a great way of getting your users together, but getting them there is only half of the battle – you have got to get them to stay as well. How? Social networks should address an unmet need, not replicate what works for others. A great way of driving engagement with your brand is by ensuring you provide feeds to share content with other social networks – it’s not always necessary to reinvent the wheel, just hitch a ride with a passing juggernaut, in this case Facebook and Twitter!

When brands decide to create social networks they should try and keep the branding as subtle as possible and have something unique to offer, like HMV’s Get Closer (full disclosure: Get Closer was LBi’s work, not that I am biased!) or Disney’s Disney Xtreme Digital. Get Closer offers music fans a unique sharing experience and exclusive music treats whilst the U.S aimed Disney My Page is aimed at providing a safe social environment for a pre-teen audience – a demographic many other social networks avoid due to the legal issues surrounding under 14s.

To get the most out of social media it is vital that you don’t push your brand onto users but instead aim to pull in users voluntarily, giving them a unique (softly) branded experience in a comfortable social environment.  If you want an example of how things can go wrong when brands go against this advice just look at Habitat – you couldn’t have missed the furore over their recent Twitter spamming, where an over-zealous intern used non-brand related hash tags that were trending in order to drive views of their tweets. Note: If I’m looking for Tweets about the Iranian opposition leader, I really do not want to know about your latest offer on garden furniture! 

Of course when managed well branded Twitter accounts can be a great example of how to use social media. Twitter enables you to follow users mentioning your brand and provides a great tool for monitoring your brand perception in a real world example. Where Twitter works best is when the brand has a legitimate reason to use it – on the DR end Dell have famously made millions from tweeting specific short-term offers whereas Innocent Drinks and ASOS have manage to drive terrific brand engagement simply by being themselves and talking to their users like real people.

It is more important than ever for brands to be considering how they position themselves within the social media sphere. Ultimately it’s all about being believable – if you have no legitimate reason to exist within a social space then think carefully before you move. With so many social networks around branded networks have to ensure that they have a real reason to exist in the space before they invest, otherwise there is a risk all that investment will end up going into a network that users use twice and ultimately can’t remember their password for.

Bringing back Woolies was never going to be an easy task given that the old Woolworths was such a loved institution.  So it’s been nice to see the Woolies team embrace social media, and place collaboration at the core of its brand strategy.  To a point it was a no brainer – if people love the Woolies brand and (mostly) loved the Wollies product range,  then why not get those people closely involved in developing the newly revamped Woolies 2.0.

Over the last 20 weeks, since the Barclay Brothers bought the Woolworths brand, the Woolies team have been getting their loyal following involved in the relaunch process as much as possible by blogging, Facebooking and Twittering.  And with much success: the Woolworths blog has had over 500,000 visits and nearing 1000 comments;  Twitter  2380  followers; 5,865 Facebook fans.

Importantly the Woolies team seems to have been genuinely listening to the their customers – and in particular have brought back an online version of their much loved Pic n Mix – which they’ve dubbed Click n Mix – which I love!  

Happily the guys at Glue kindly dropped off a bag of Click n Mix to the office yesterday, which I devoured like a school-kid.

You can see my v.amateur video tour of Woolies’ Click n Mix here:

Boring old telly has been getting a lot more fun lately, if you are using Twitter. The micro-blogging service is increasingly becoming the back channel of broadcast, where people turn to exclaim delight or disgust about what they are watching. Tuned into Channel 4′s My Monkey Baby, and wondering what others are thinking about the parade of monkey loving characters? Popping onto Twitter and searching for the programme title reveals a trail of hilarious tweets, and you can add in, that is, if you actually want to confess that you are watching the show.

A television programme can come alive when you chime in with your own views, and see the intelligent, dumb, off-colour or utterly bizarre commentary of others, adding a whole new layer of entertainment experience. In America, broadcasters are fully embracing the interactive power of Twitter, with even local news stations inviting people to tweet in with updates about the weather conditions, or share views on issues. Political elections were the first and most noticeable examples of how the views of many can be shared using Twitter, as seen when Hack The Debate aired on Current TV in the lead up to the presidential elections.

For broadcasters, the service can be an instant way to guage if programming is having any impact on viewers, or, for the more clever, use the service to ignite interaction with audiences. When a show starts “trending” on Twitter, broadcast executives can know they have a hit, as has happened with Eurovision, ITV’s Britain’s Got Talent and Channel 4′s Surgery Live.

Twitter got noisy surrounding Eurovision, as it sparked hundreds of amusing tweets about the song contest, and gave rise to an alternative tweeting voice when journalist Ewan Spence used Twitter to cover the event from the show’s frontline in Moscow, sending tweets, blogging and podcasting from the event. Followers of @ewanspence got treated to extra facts, insights and a few trumpeted early previews of what was to come, as entrants paraded on stage in gladiator costumes, thigh high patent leather boots or full green body paint.

“I decided to offer pithy, humourous, pre-emptive insight of what we were all seeing, and joined 1,000 other press people from around Europe to cover Eurovision,” he said.

With viewing figures of 10 million in the UK, and 112 million across Europe for Eurovision this year, Spence thought that 2009 would be the year that millions of fans would tweet about the song contest, based on the growing number of entertainment trending topics he noticed, and recognizing that this year Twitter’s popularity has expanded, with estimates of 33 million monthly visits. He out-tweeted much of the official BBC correspondents by speed of updates and depth of information, winning rave reviews from followers. Several said they preferred the commentary of the renegade Eurovision tweet host to the banter of Graham Norton’s debut year as Eurovision host.

“The public love it, but mainstream coverage does not match up to the public viewpoint so the Internet’s communities are augmenting what they see using Twitter,” he said. Listen to an Audioboo interview with Ewan Spence here.

Ewan Spence

While Spence may still be a rare visionary in how he used Twitter as a journalist, the big broadcasters are certainly wading into the water with experiments. Channel 4′s Surgery Live invited people to send in questions using Twitter, some of which the show’s host Krishnan Guru-Murthy then posed to both the doctors, and even the patient, on live television. Following along with the programme’s hashtag of #slive, a rather surreal conversation developed with audience members, with one even asking if the patient’s brain tumour was edible. Brave, risky, groundbreaking, Channel 4 proved that entertainment can also be educational, and the show did manage to top Twitter’s most watched trending topics.

“What this new generation of social media brings is a networked conversation which is global, searchable, tagable and open. In other words, unlike emails, text messages or phones, you can join in a discussion among numerous people from right across the Uk and beyond — fellow viewers, experts, medical students, enthusiasts, all manner of interested parties — live and simultaneously,” said Adam Gee, Channel 4′s Cross-platform Commissioning Editor for Factual.

Channel 4 has just started a new programme incorporating Twitter, beginning to share updates from documentary film maker Ed Wardel, who is putting his wilderness survival skills to test in the Yukon, for the series Alone In The Wild. The programme airs in July, but Wardle has already started tweeting about his experience. 

Using Twitter, and other social media websites, to add interactivity to television watching might just be transforming how we interact with the medium, and Twitter’s founders are keeping an eye toward possibilities, with news that a Twitter television show may be in works for the future. 

“Twitter’s open approach might have the power to transform television — the dominant communications receiver worldwide. We’re very excited to see where these experiments take us,” posted Twitter founder Biz Stone on his blog.

In the not to distant future, a new transmedia entertainment venture called Purefold from Ag8, a partnership production with Blade Runner director Ridley Scott and Tony Scott’s RSA Films, will see an even more multi-layered approach to integrating social media with viewing experience. Purefold will cull storyline ideas from comments people share on Friend Feed, and other social networking websites. The programme is not planned to air on any maninstream channel, as episodes will be spread across the Internet’s video sharing platforms, and brands will be invited to collaborate in the content creation to fund the programming.

Confused? You are not alone. Best stay tuned, and have some fun participating in the 2.0 tool of Twitter, and think of it as training, to get ready to adpot for the entertainment world flashing forward to even more futuristic technologies. 

Watching television and tweeting at the same time,

-Lisa

Over the weekend, Tiphereth Gloria’s blog (the excellent ‘Digital Tip’) over in Australia alerted me to an incidence of Twitter madness from UK furniture retailer Habitat.  The story has now extended to mainstream news outlets picking it up, for example see this piece by Sky’s Twitter correspondent Ruth Bartlett.

In a nutshell, Habitat didn’t just blast out price lists and special offers via its Twitter feed.   That would have been fairly harmless, if pointless, as with Twitter you can of course decide to unfollow anyone who doesn’t take your fancy.   Instead, they forced themselves into popular conversations by the use of hash tags – the way in which popular trends and subjects on Twitter are grouped.   This included things like #iPhone, which meant that if you were searching Twitter for info about Apple’s smartphone you would have come across Habitat’s posts.

Spammers and get rich quick merchants use this method of getting attention through hash tags all the time.   But it’s not what you’d expect from a premium brand.

However the worst thing was that whoever Habitat outsourced its feed to also used hash tags to do with the Iranian elections, a crisis which has of course cost lives.   Above there is an example where they used #Mousavi (after the Iranian opposition leader) to call for people to join their database.  The reaction from the Twitter community was pretty much as you’d expect, below is a small selection.

Habitat has now admitted its mistake, though in fairly mild terms and in brand speak.  It’s also scrubbed its twitter feed clean, though the results live on thanks to the joys of search.

My guess, for what it’s worth, is that the Habitat press office had nothing to do with this directly.   Communications professionals would (hopefully!) not think it a good idea to spam Iran election feeds with info about flat packed furniture.   I could be wrong of course but instead I assume that they outsourced this job to someone – and someone who knew something about Twitter, as a complete novice wouldn’t be clued up on hash tags. And that the brief read ‘get us X,000 followers fast!’ (or words to that effect.)

If so, perhaps it’s a case for checking out the credentials and online footprint of whatever social media “expert” you bring on a little more closely?

Update (25 June) - Habitat has published an apology and put it down to the fact that they turned their feed over to an over enthusiastic Intern.

The music industry is not well, we all know it, and for the most part, likely contributed to the grandiose, well-publicised downfall.

While digital innovation — a la Radiohead’s now canonised In Rainbow’s — have put power in the hands of the consumer, the question needs to be asked: who is looking out for the little ol’ musicians, who now have more pressure than ever to produce money-making albums to appease beleaguered music labels?

A company called Blink TV has come up with a plan.

While Blink TV can’t really help musicians on the album quality side of things, it can help bands put together a kick-ass live show, an increasingly important stream of revenue for the labels, and all at a reduced cost.

It’s an interesting business model, Blink TV supplies video screens and visual content for the live music industry, however the company subsidises the hiring costs of the giant screens, and the production costs of the live shows in exchange for media rights and some onscreen advertising.

The company is currently on tour with indie-band Snow Patrol, and has created pre-show entertainment, customized by the band, including music selected by the band set to time-lapse photography of the stage being set up.

Blink TV says the resulting imagery builds anticipation within the crowd prior to the band’s arrival on stage. The package includes targeted advertising which helps offset the significant rental costs of the video equipment and allows the band to incorporate more visual elements into its show.

The company is expanding as well, recently hiring former NME and Uncut live advertising manager Alex Wright as its business development manager.

It’s an interesting partnership, but hopefully the company can sign on with more indie acts, recently adding Keane to its client roster. But whatever helps drive ticket sales is something that bands and labels alike can welcome with arms wide open.

It’s received wisdom
that social networks make it possible to connect to people half way
around the world based purely on your similar interests and so
communities are no longer defined by where you live.

But what if that isn’t so, and we are in fact connecting with many of the same friends, but just in different ways? A study that I recently picked up on makes this case. It suggests that very often, we’re using these networks not to talk to people in New Zealand, but to someone half way down the road.

Noshir Contractor and William J. White of Northwestern University studied virtual worlds like Everquest and Second Life.
These computer generated environments are places where you can remain
totally anonymous if you so choose. So you’d imagine that these are the
very places where people aren’t bound by geography.

Not so. The researchers found that geographic distance did play a
part in choosing your friends. But in the sense of the closer they are
the better. To a certain extent that does of course make sense. If you
are from Australia and someone else is from Mexico not only do
completely separate time zones come into play, there’s also the
language barrier to contend with.

However, Drs Contractor and White actually found that people based
10km away from each other were 5x more likely to be playing together
than people 100km away from each other.

That’s something I was told when launching the kids world Club Penguin in the UK last year – that often participants play on there with their existing friends after school. And similarly,
looking at the teen version of Second Life, the researchers found that
players did make new friends, but just as in real life these were
friends of friends. In other words, by and large they stayed within an
extended social circle, something that as an aside should reassure
parents.

I know 1st hand that often applies to blogs and bloggers as well. In
the UK (and I imagine it’s not so different elsewhere) if you organise
a bloggers lunch, not only will you find that the people there largely
already know each other, they already link to each other too. So most
UK tech PR blogs, link to other tech PR people in other agencies – the
type of people they already encounter in their daily lives – and so on. 

It would be an interesting side study to do the same to Twitter accounts. As (unlike on Facebook) it’s generally acceptable to follow strangers on there, does it break down barriers?

From what I see from my own colleagues the answer is initially no,
eventually yes. You sign up and follow people who might be sitting at
the other end of the room from you. But eventually after seeing who
they follow, and checking out their followers’ followers, the
boundaries do start to dissolve.

So, in conclusion, even though there’s been a lot of research about
the existence of virtual friends, what this study tells us is that our
virtual and real networks are sometimes not so different after all.

Instead, “people
end up playing with people nearby, often with people they already know.
It’s not creating new networks. It’s reinforcing existing networks.” It’s sometimes less about creating new friendships than about deepening the ones we already have.

..to see how etailers are still ignoring the lowest hanging fruit that could generate them the most revenue: their beloved existing customers.

It’s madness. These guys have purchased from you before. They love your brand. They recommend it to friends and even buy their Christmas gifts from you. They cost you a third of the amount to market to and they typically spend at least 30% more with you. So why oh why do you still treat them like everyone else?

Experian recently carried out some research into online retailing called ‘Engaging Online with the Empowered Customer‘. It revealed this piece of information: 70% of revenues were generated by just 30% of customers.

The smart marketers will read this and agree. Please just  do the sums and you’ll see that it’s so very very clear. In fact, I’ll do the sums for you just to prove my point:

Right, say your £100,000 of revenue comes from 1000 customers. If the above stat holds true, then 300 of them contributed £70,000 to the revenue (£233 per head), and the remaining 700 contributed £30,000 (£42 per head). Simples. So if you want to make another £10,000, what’s going to be easier? Getting your loyal 300 customers to spend an extra £33 with you, or reaching out to 700 new customers to spend £14 each?

So spend more time and effort on your loyal customers. Give them something special for their next purchase. Surprise them and give them an automatic discount when they are next purchasing. It’s like showing up tonight with a bunch of flowers (or organic chocs) for your beloved. Unplanned, but very very welcome earning you much needed brownie points.

Hey, what about asking them to recommend a friend or two? Don’t be shy. These guys love you. They’re just delighted that you’ve recognised them as ‘special’ and would do almost anything for you.

So please do something with these brand fans. Extract the information from your database and plan an 8 week campaign where you court them and make them feel loved. A little investment now will yield massive rewards and incredibly loyal lifetime customers.

With the release of the government’s Digital Britain report this week, it comes at a timely juncture in the industry of public relations, where new technology tools are increasingly being used for communications campaigns, far more than in past years. While the main highlights of the report address infrastructure needs, improving digital access for all and controversial funding decisions for media resources such as the BBC and Channel 4, the ensuing discussions of the report have put digital on the intellectual radar for all, including those crafting PR strategy in what is more and more a fractured, niche-driven digital media landscape.

Previously, and still today, traditional PR professionals, and clients, have been reluctant to include digital media in their outreach strategy, among some excuses being:

• Our clients don’t care about blogs, they only want to be in the Financial Times.
• We don’t have the budget or time to manage online outreach, as well as traditional media outreach.
• Why should we care about what someone says in a forum or a tweet about our brand?

Now, partly by force as a result of high profile cases such as Amazon experienced with bloggers and Twitter, or Domino’s experienced with employees posting inappropriate YouTube videos, partly because of recessionary budget restraints on PR budgets, and partly because it seems that the tipping point of mainstream involvement in social networking has been reached (Oprah Winfrey is on Twitter!), it seems digital has snowballed into a force that must be reckoned with — like it or not.

The government’s Digital Britain report addresses many issues, and its recommendations are controversially being debated among many industries, but one of the key things it does is further force digital into the forefront of public attention and gives it a new level of credibility among businesses who may have previously scoffed at the online world.

For many years now I’ve been an advocate of using digital media for communications outreach and have advised many clients in how to incorporate new technology tools into campaigns, often being met with a mix of disbelief as to if it would be a worthwhile investment, and general befuddled ness as to what I’ve been talking about. It seems the whole wide world is now turning new attention to using digital media, and this, I think, is exciting and positive both for people and bussinesses.

While many of us who can be classified as early adopters of the digital age are already well established or have even moved onto the next new thing with tools like Audioboo for the iPhone, FriendFeed, Su.PR and the coming soon Google Wave, we’ve all got to remember that there are millions of newbies from all walks of business and humanity that are just testing out the tools of the online world, with a bit of intimidation and fear.

It is is up to us, who are deeply online, to welcome, to teach and to help newocmers navigate this territory. It may be your family members, your co-workers or even your boss, who have basic questions, and if the government is going to see any success from its Digital Britain report, it is up to everyone who is already active online to be friendly mentors and teachers in helping the rest of the world catch-up with digital life. Yesterday, after reading over the report, it seemed to be a 200+ page document stating a lot of the obvious. However, these last few weeks, I’ve got more and more people both professionally and personally asking me questions about the basics of how to use Twitter, how to write a blog, how to manage the weird professional/personal world of Facebook, and what might seem obvious to some, just isn’t to most.

Recently I’ve also joined the ranks of being a trainer with Pinnacle PR, a company providing all levels of communications training. My role is instructing a course in PR 2.0, providing a comprehensive look at the many multimedia digital media tools available online, and giving real-life workshops in how to construct campaigns with the tools. With the release of Digital Britain this week, I’m seeing more of the increasing importance digital is playing for business, and, based on training and conversations with people, understanding more that it is still, in fact “new” media for most people.

If you are in PR, and would like to increase your skills of PR 2.0, or other offerings from Pinnacle PR (including traditional courses of media training, media relations, crisis communications, strategic campaign planning and more) sign up for a course, and get a 10% discount up until the end of July. Pinnacle PR has offices in London, Brussels, Dubai and a newly opened training centre in Bahrain, where experienced instructors both from the media and public relations sectors provide junior up through senior level executive courses and instruction.

Training for the digital future,

-Lisa