Facebook 'fans' are fickle creatures...

Most brands are terrible at using social media: they celebrate their 'likes' and tweets and mentions, and then they abandon their consumer to the competition... Lithium, a social media marketing agency, have published 6 'dos' of social media that PR students may find pretty useful.

For instance, just 98% of Facebook 'fans' never return to the brand page a second time - why aren't brands using their contacts to lure them back again and again to build genuine relationships? Only 0.5% of fans mention the brand they like on Facebook - so is Facebook really that useful to brands? 61% of fans only 'fanned' to get the coupon or offer...its cunning and cold hearted and completely understandable. Forrester analyst Sucharita Mulpuru summarises it neatly, that selling on Facebook is like "trying to sell stuff to people while they're hanging out with their friends at the bar".

Lithium have done just what we recommend in the B2B lecture and created white papers on 6 key topics, including 'Why Facebook shouldn't be the centre of your social strategy' - some of these may be pretty useful for this module and in future careers.

Another example is their white paper on 'Nailing social media marketing ROI': (only) 42% of marketers want to demonstrate the value for money of their social media strategy - only 4% think they do it well.

Have a look at the website and see whether you're a fan...

Has AVE had its day?

Advertising Value Equivalent (AVE) has long been the industry standard for measuring PR, despite extensive academic rejection and criticism by more experienced practitioners, culminating in an explicit call to oust AVE at a European Summit of PR practitioners on Barcelona in 2010. Yet, AVE continues to permeate practice.

AVE simply measures the value of the space that PR occupies in media, traditional or new, calculating it in terms of what would have been paid for that space if it were advertising. Some agencies combine this with a spurious calculation of what the 'added' value is given that the article is more credible as 'earned' space, written by a journalist or blogger say, rather than 'paid for' space. But, as the Barcelona summit concluded, all this measures is the cost of media space, not the value of PR, and it does little to inform future activity.

Tom Watson's article, in press for Public Relations Review, sums this all up neatly, in an easy to read history of the 'orphan metric' that will really help support this module. You will need to access it via UWE library if you have access to it, but if you're not affiliated to a uni probably not worth the price as it's pretty simple.

Is this the new global democracy?

A key theme of this module is the transformative power of the internet: on reputation management, crisis management, and on public affairs. Where once private lobbyists held sway in the corridors of power in democracies around the world through financial clout and personal connections, the internet now hands power back to the people.

Avaaz are an activist group that exists almost entirely in the virtual ether of the internet, spanning international borders and lobbying at the highest levels for global change. At just 5 years old, the organisation claims to be a 'roots up' consulting its tens of thousands of members around the world about issues to campaign on. The organisation targets government policy around the world, whether targeting governments direct about issues within their own countries, or influential outsider governments and international parliaments such as the EU to pressure others.

Issues may concern government policy for their own citizens, such as Uganda's anti-gay laws, or India's ongoing failure to address abuse of women. They also impact on some of the world's largest corporations, targeting companies such as Shell by pressuring the Nigerian government to impose a legitimate $5 billion fine on the oil giant for the 2011 Bonga oil spill when 40,000 barrels of oil leaked into the Atlantic Ocean.

With  'people power' now spanning borders from smartphones, tablets and laptops around the globe through organisations such as Avaaz, governments and corporations may no longer be able to ignore upstart action groups. This is a fundamental shift in power towards the little guys requiring fundamental changes in practice and policy by governments and corporations around the globe.