The Friday PR and Social Media Cheat Sheet #024

If you work in PR and are interested in the latest thinking on media monitoring, PR planning, media analysis and social media measurement, these are the must read stories from the last week.

• Has Twitter redefined the global news cycle? Citizen journalism is on the rise, and Gigaom offers an interesting look at how social media has impacted news reporting. Whitney Houston’s death, for example, was all over Twitter around an hour before any mainstream news outlets got hold of the story.
• The Premier League plans to almost double the size of its communications team as part of a major push to develop a “clearer voice” across social media, creating new Facebook and Twitter accounts as well as a revamp of organisation’s website being part of a multi-million pound strategy.
• Econsultancy took an in-depth look at how the online bank first direct has implemented a great customer service strategy using Twitter.
• Social media marketers could be faced with some issues for targeted ads after an analysis of the online universe shows the actual number of users on Twitter, Facebook etc could be as small as one-third of the reported total, as many accounts are empty, fake or contain no profile information.
• Tic Tac has launched a fresh new marketing campaign called Shake It Up, which is centred on its new mobile app. Check out this video for a good look at what’s on offer.

Can’t see this video? Click here to view.

• Apparently the differences between men and women can even be extended to your social media preference. Slightly spurious? Maybe, but Tech Crunch suggests that 97% of Pinterest’s Facebook fans are women, while two-thirds of Google+ users are guys (read: male employees of Google).
• Smart Insights offered an insightful 12-step “how to” guide on online marketing via Pinterest.
• Continuing the Pinterest theme, Metrica’s own Alison Jarrett explained that the popular social media site sees clusters of users in locations as specific as the Midwest US, while Foursquare has taken South East Asia by storm leaving UK users in their dust. As Phil Spencer and Kirsty Allsop would say, it’s all about location, location, location.
• Made Up Stats wrote an interesting piece on the ownership of Twitter content, explaining that a bit of common courtesy and acknowledgement goes a long way.
• Animal charity PETA really miss the mark with their new “My Boyfriend Went Vegan” video campaign, suggesting that going vegan gives you more, ahem, oomph, in the sack. In reality the video shows girls wearing neckbraces and eye-patches, which offers a wildly different image than what the charity was aiming for:

Can’t see this video? Click here to view.

•  A really clever person has made this amazing interactive model showing the ‘scale of the universe’ .

PRMoment.com’s ‘Good and Bad PR’ awards

Good PR

• The Greatest Movie and TV Franchise ever made, The Muppets, is back (as if you hadn’t noticed…) and their PR team wins Rich Leigh’s Good PR award. As well as parodying Twilight posters and announcing the sultry Miss Piggy as the new face of make-up brand Mac, the team has also created Muppet cupcakes. These beauties were sent out to celebs and high-profile Tweeters, including Stephen Fry. I’d feel bad eating one of these, they look amazing!

Bad PR

• PR Moment suggests that the recent Liverpool FC/Luis Suarez farce is this week’s Bad PR, after the Liverpool player sent football pundits and fans alike into a frenzy of analysis over the handshake that never was, and probably had Liverpool’s comms team sat head in hands at the thought of the ensuing PR battle.

Pinterest: USA vs UK

Related posts

• The Friday PR and Social Media Cheat Sheet #021
• The Friday PR and Social Media Cheat Sheet 005
• The Friday PR and Social Media Cheat Sheet #025
• The Friday PR and Social Media Cheat Sheet #023
• Tim’s week in social media