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.