Blogcamp – how to build a great mummy blog

Last Thursday I went to Blogcamp. Oh lordy, I sound like a true geek, but actually it was incredibly fun, informative and there were some rather lovely cupcakes (must find out where they came from!).  The best thing about Blogcamp was that I got to meet some fabulous blogging mummies (New Mum Online, Working London Mummy, Actually Mummy, Red Ted Art, Lunchbox World, My Mumdom, Ravelled Threads (who’s not a mummy, but a brill blogger), An Imperfect Life and The Scrummy Mummy).

The first presentation of the day was utterly hilarious. Bangs and a Bun, whose blog I highly recommend, provided some genius snippets of advice. The first being that when you’re writing your blog, you have to know what you’re purpose is – your identity – and inject some of ‘you’. As a PR professional, this is pretty standard advice, but applying it to my own work is not so easy. I feel I found my voice very early on in my blog, but its purpose changed as I came to realise what that voice was. I started my blog to discuss both work and mummy issues, and working mummy issues. I quickly realised that PR and mummy stuff didn’t really fit together and have since started another blog (along with my own business) to discuss the PR side of my life.

My main goal from this blogging exercise was to engage with other mummies. As a working mother, I fast found myself losing touch with the NCT ladies I had spent my early parenting days discussing sleepless nights, smelly nappies and breastfeeding issues with. There was simply no time to meet with them and entering the blogosphere gave me not only an outlet for my thoughts on the highs and lows of motherhood, but conversation and reassurance from other mothers out there. And that’s why I loved Blogcamp so much. I got to meet other mummies going through the same weaning, teething, sleeping problems and I met other people with a passion for words and blogging. We all want to feel understood and in this group, I felt I was.

The next presentation was from Domestic Sluttery about building your community. All very useful stuff and another great blog I was introduced to. We also had a presentation on Internet safety from TalkTalk. Following my recent post on my nephew’s jaunt around the net, this was very interesting. Toby is not quite at the age of having to worry, but he sure as hell knows how to work an iPad. Before he’s out of nappies, I’ll need to form a game plan to keep him safe.

We then moved onto the more technical side of blogging. The most interesting thing from the design man, Daffyd, was that we read websites in an F pattern. Again, it’s something I do every day, but without realising. This behaviour should dictate how your blog/website is formatted. We read along the top first, then down the left side, then back across the right (or something).

The final talk of the day, was brilliant. @LeeSmallwood managed to take the fairly techie topic of online search and turn it into something meaningful. We discussed meta description, titles, trends, H1 headers, images and tags – all of which can help your Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

I now have a blogging to-do list as long as my arm.

Thanks Sally Whittle, over at Who’s the Mummy for organising such a fab event. It was mucho enjoyed.

Twitter: The next CNN?

In the aftermath of Osama bin Laden’s death, there was much noise suggesting that Twitter had seen its CNN Moment. While I don’t deny that Twitter is a powerful force of news aggregation and dispersal, I wonder whether those articles were placing just a bit too much emphasis on Twitter as a source of ‘breaking news’.

There is no denying that Twitter had an important role in the world’s awakening to the events on 2nd May. Sohaib Athar or @ReallyVirtual, unknown to him, was tweeting the mission live as it was being carried out: ‘Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1AM (is a rare event)’. Twitter was also the first to ‘speculate’ on bin Laden’s death. Keith Urbahn, Chief of staff for Donald Rumsfeld, tweeted at 10.45pm EDT, ‘So I’m told by a reputable person they have killed Osama bin Laden. Hot damn”. It then took 20 minutes for the media to confirm what many now already suspected, thanks to the Twitverse. So the question is, did Twitter break the news? Are CNN, The BBC and others now at risk of being outdone by Twitter.

In this case, and the many that have come before, Twitter did not break the news. By Urbahn’s own admission he was not a reliable source. His tweet was unconfirmed speculation; It was rumour – not news. 20 minutes later the news channels confirmed his theory and this is news. Twitter is not a form of journalism; journalism is a profession with specific skills and best practice. Twitter is a platform for news to be spread. It would be crazy to say that everyone using Twitter is a journalist. Had Keith been a journalist, from a reputable media outlet and had he confirmed sources and statements, then that is another matter.

What we can say with certainty is that Twitter and other social media are changing the rules of news for journalists and consumers. The World is shrinking and news spreads like wildfire. At 11pm ET, ahead of Obama’s speech there were 5,106 tweets per second and once the speech was finished 5,008 tweets were being sent per second. According to Geoffrey Fowler, Wall Street Journal, there were 1.3 million people commenting in some way on bin Laden’s death between late Sunday night and Monday morning. These conversations, whether they be on Twitter or Facebook, find themselves onto people’s screens; people dont have to be looking. The information society has created a 24/7 flow of news and while I’ve no idea how many people these tweet’s were reaching, I’d guess it was an absurd amount. What this hammers home: Twitter and other social platforms are incredibly powerful.

Osama bin Laden’s death a double-edged PR sword for Obama

When Osama bin Laden was shot dead in Islamabad the President must have been ecstatic. The news has propelled his support in the polls, with four in 10 Americans seeing Obama in a better light.

Obama was once seen as a weak Commander in Chief; a poll by Reuters in March this year revealed that only 17 per cent of Americans saw him as a strong and decisive military leader. His action, or inaction as some see it, over the recent spate of Middle East uprisings have left many with a feeling that he lacks the hard decision-making skills necessary for the Presidency. This apparently sent Hilary Clinton over the edge!

I wonder whether his critics will be quite as harsh on him now. Probably not. This is PR win number one… Obama is no longer the most indecisive, weakest Commander in Chief in American history, but the guy who rid the world of evil.

The second PR win from this is that the killing of bin Laden will help Obama in his quest to withdraw troops from Afghanistan. These combined factors will give Obama some breathing space and a very healthy start in his election campaign.

However, a PR fail, has been the inconsistencies in information provided to the public on the circumstances surrounding bin Laden’s death. At first there was a torrid of resistance by bin Laden’s armed men and bin Laden had used one of his wives as a shield from the bullets. This made the story spectacularly more palatable to the media, allowing sensationalist headlines. Yet this information was then overruled by stories that bin Laden was in fact unarmed and the wife had run at the US military. Just a small U-turn then!

This has cast a shadow, albeit small, on the success of Obama and his military’s actions, which makes you question why they couldn’t just get their story straight from the outset? Well, social media probably played a role. The story ‘broke’ on Twitter and the power of social media spread the word thick and fast. Obama’s administration had very little time to produce their statements and when the news went public he was probably still in the middle of working out what he was going to say.

This is one of the more pertinent examples of how social media is playing a role in world news. The trend of hearing news first on twitter or facebook is not going away and organisations need to be aware of the implications of social media and plan their communications accordingly.

Big Blue’s a social media star

The term ‘social media’ has seen B2B marketers and PR professionals reach for the headache tablets. Developing a social media strategy is undoubtedly a must (‘Engage or die’, as Brian Solis puts it), but finding a good starting point and getting buy-in from busy key advocates within the company can become a painful exercise.

Large entities have usually developed a strong culture of a few key people communicating key messages with a few key channels (i.e. favoured journalists and analysts). Moving into a World where any employee can engage anyone in the World is overwhelming to say the least. It raises images of a series of scenarios that sees the person with responsibility for social media, running around trying to mop up leaked information, incorrect messages and general tomfoolery.

In trying to figure out a way forward in B2B social media strategy I’ve come across a great deal of success stories in the B2C space. These examples indicate that social media is a great way to build brands, create relationships and ultimately contribute to profit making and there is only a handful of bad examples. However, B2B case studies are a little harder to uncover. That’s why it was great to read an article on Computing.co.uk highlighting ‘Big Blue’s’ awe-inspiring success in social media.

IBM has benefitted from £2.5m a year in productivity savings since it implemented its social media strategy in 2007. Money speaks louder than words and this is a fantastic example of how social media can produce great rewards for a large B2B company.

IBM is making full use of its employees’ brainpower, while allowing customers behind the scenes insight. This humanises the big brand, builds relationships and allows the creation of meaningful content. Not only is IBM successfully using social networks as part of its marketing and sales process, but it is leveraging them for cross-functional collaboration, enhancing product development.

This offers me hope for social media in the B2B space and certainly provides lessons for other large companies considering how to utilise social networks.

Email is dead, long live email

With 500 million users, Facebook is the World’s biggest social networking site and while Facebook claims its ‘new messaging platform’ announcement yesterday is not meant as a ‘Google killer’, it is bound to have rattled a few cages in the webmail world.

The platform allows you to decide how to send your message, whether SMS, chat or email and the message is received through whichever device (mobile, PC, iPad) works best for the recipient, allowing real-time conversation.

I’m not sure exactly what is so exciting about this; is it not just a Google Wave announcement, which at the time fell on deaf ears? However, stats show that the way kids communicate has moved beyond email and voice, and they’re the future.

Throughout time our means of communication has evolved, from banging sticks in the Caveman days, to the spoken language, to written, to telegram, to post, to email and now apparently email doesn’t quite cut it. So is email dying out?

I admit that in my personal life I sometimes use Facebook to communicate about events and send personal messages, but I do so with the reassurance that the intended recipient receives email notification. And while I have used Twitter to contact journalists and analysts in the past, with good results, I still think that telephone conversation and email have a huge role to play and I am sure that other industries are the same. It also doesn’t bear thinking about what such a platform will do for the written language, but that’s a whole other issue.

What Facebook is doing is trying to get us to spend more time with them to ensure an increase in advertising spend on their site, something Google has already cracked. It will be interesting to have a play with the platform, but I’ll eat my hat if this forces email to extinction. But then, who knows – if I make to 100, perhaps I’ll receive a one-liner from the Royals via Facebook to my most convenient device!