CSR awards

Good news! Our corporate website has just come 3rd in a survey published in PR Week by consultancy Lundquist in the last week, where they looked at the FTSE100 here in the UK. Each website was assessed using a set of 76 evaluation criteria, drawn up on the basis of a survey conducted by Lundquist of 184 CSR professionals and sector experts from 30 different countries.

The end of micro celeb?

Apparently, according to the press Lily Allen has given up all social media, and even given away her PC and Blackberry. Well, assuming this isn't just a publicity stunt by our Lil, what does it all mean to the future of social media as we know it?

Well, I'd suggest not a lot. The twitterverse is well served by random minor celebs posting what they had for lunch, or in Liz Taylor's case gushing uncontrollably about what shock awful film she's just been to see. Having one drop out really isn't going change that.

In fact, if anything it's a sign of maturity. I doubt Lil would have been so quick to drop social media if it had been giving her a decent return (trans. significant publicity) on her (trans. her publicist's) investment (trans. time keeping up to date with 17 year olds bombarding her with crap online).

So thanks Lily, you've just started to make my life a little easier. I can now point at you when I'm having discussions at work about "why are you using something like Twitter for something serious" and say "Well, that's great. They're leaving us to it, maybe it's a bit too serious to take lightly. Remember how that happened with websites? Remember how that happened with mobile phones??"

More about our use of social media

I gave an interview to Q4 about our use of Twitter and other social media in investor relations activities

Enjoy!

http://www.q4blog.com/2009/09/14/how-rio-tinto-uses-twitter-for-investor-relations/

Webinar Replay - Social Media and Investor Relations Trends

an interesting posting by the guys at Q4 web systems all about the growing trends in using social media in investor relations

Webinar Replay - Social Media and Investor Relations Trends

Posted using ShareThis

Twitter, the new presswire

We've been having some issues in Shangai recently, and naturally our media relations and corporate comms teams have been carefully monitoring the situation through a variety of channels - most notably the more tradition media monitoring services provided by some of our agencies.

Most interesting in all of this, was how much quicker breaking news came through on Twitter. I use Tweetdeck here, and I've set up a number of searches on it - that means I was getting updates in realtime as I keep Tweetdeck running in background on my PC.

This really pays off, as you pick up the auto-tweet postings from many of the major newswires quicker than our media monitoring services were picking up the emails.

Not that I gloated, but to get breaking news from CNN or BBC news before our press team did made my day.

Twitter - coming to a ticker tape machine near you!

Habi-tweet. How not to use twitter.com

Poor Habitat. They've been caught spamming using hash tags in their tweets.

http://www.socialmediatoday.com/SMC/103334 have the story in it's full glory from SMT's website.

Quite what they (or their agency) thought they were doing is really anyone's guess. It's just one step short of trying to embed Google-friendly keywords in the HTML code on your site and hope that it comes up in a search....

And to just then delete your tweets and hope they get swept under the marketing rug isn't really quite good enough. Particularly when people have been so kind as to screenshot them.

I think my biggest concern on this whole story is the rather cavalier way that Habitat has treated a social media platform, and for a consumer facing brand these days that's a fairly major issue.

@guardian. Funny, no really, very funny

Apparently the Guardian newspaper is now only going to be available by Twitter.

And I quote...

Consolidating its position at the cutting edge of new media technology, the Guardian today announces that it will become the first newspaper in the world to be published exclusively via Twitter, the sensationally popular social networking service that has transformed online communication.

Fantastic story. And what a great day to publish it. Time to sit back and see how many social media consultants fall for it.