Flipboard is one of the new generation of news readers that provide a slick app to let you subscribe to news and topics on media websites, blogs and other social media and social networks.

The latest updates make it really easy to create your own magazine by curating interesting content that you find.

There are already more than half a million user generated magazines available, most probably read by the editor and her mum. However, it is still potentially a useful tool for PR and corporate communications professionals. One important thing to remember is that although Flipboard call it a magazine, all you are actually doing is curating existing content and not creating new articles.

I’ve created my own magazine called PR and Corporate Comms News. You can subscribe to it here.

These are some of my initial thoughts on how corporate communications and PR professionals can use it:

Select your Flipboard sources

The first step is selecting the right sources. The easiest way is to simply to browse the categories in Flipboard to add your favourite sources. For example mine include the FT, Harvard Business Review and The Guardian.

Then you use the search bar to search lots of social networks, but more importantly it also searches for RSS feeds which nearly every media site provides. This means you can add your favourite and more niche business and professional websites and blogs. Rather annoyingly Flipboard presents these (most useful) results last so you have to click more and then scroll right down past all of the social networks to get to the best results. So to add this blog you can simply search for “Stuart Bruce” or “A PR Guy’s Musings” and it will appear in the RSS feeds list.

The RSS search frequently fails to find feeds for sites that have them. If the search does fail to find the exact publication you want then you can manually type the full URL of the RSS feed into the search bar. An easier way to do it is to go to the site in your browser and then copy the RSS link so you can paste it into Flipboard.

Within Flipboard you can also connect your other social networks including Twitter, Facebook, Google+, YouTube, Flickr, Instagram, Tumblr, SoundCloud, Seino Weibo and Renren.

However, a big time saving tip is you don’t need to add every source as you can also easily add content to your magazine using a bookmark from your desktop browser. To install it go to the  Web Tools on the Flipboard website.

Create your Flipboard magazine and add content

Creating your magazine is as simple as finding the content you want to add in Flipboard and clicking on the + symbol and then choosing the magazine you want to add it to. They call this ‘+Flip It’.

At the moment it is still quite clunky and has a ‘beta’ fail to it and in the app the only way you can create your magazine is when you add your first piece of content.

You want to think carefully about the name. Remember you want it to be useful and interesting for readers so a descriptive title such as “PR and Corporate Comms News” is a better title for my Flipboard magazine than “Stuart’s PR Stuff”. You then want to write an interesting and compelling description. Mine is:

Public relations and corporate communications news and views for the digital and social era. Curated by international PR trainer and consultant Stuart Bruce.

Getting the title and the description right will make it easier for people to find you when they search and browse the user-generated magazines in Flipboard.

You will also want to go to the web tools page on the Flipboard website to add the browser bookmark tool that lets you “+Flip It” from sites you visit on your laptop.

On an Android phone or tablet you can also use the Share function to “Flip It” into your Flipboard magazine. You can also add a bookmarklet to your iPhone or iPad to do the same thing (although I haven’t tested this).

Curating the right content – including your own

The key to making your Flipboard magazine interesting is to curate useful and relevant content from lots of different sources. If you limit yourself to too few sources then your readers might as well read those publications rather than your curated one. Why listen to the monkey when you can hear the organ grinder?

The clever bit is to include some, but not too much, of your own content into your magazine. This should include:

• Blog posts – contrary to what the fashion-concious social media gurus will tell you blogs are still a very important channel for publishing your own content. They are one of the best ways to demonstrate expertise, in-depth knowledge and that old PR stand-by ‘thought leadership’.
• Mentions in news articles and features – in the good old days getting editorial coverage was only part of the equation. The bit that too many PR people missed was ensuring that relevant people actually saw these ‘press cuttings’. A Flipboard magazine is a great way of collating and distributing your online ‘clippings’. The fastest way to add them is simply using the ‘+Flip It’ bookmark in your browser.
• News – news releases, white papers and articles from your corporate website and social media news room. Remember that this isn’t always your most compelling content so be selective and only include the best content.
• Multimedia – you can include videos from your YouTube channel, photos from Flickr or Instagram, or even podcasts from SoundCloud.

Editing your magazine

You still can’t edit your magazine properly within the app, but Flipboard has now added a basic web editor tool. It lets you change the order of the stories and choose an alternative cover story. It also provides you with basic analytics showing how many readers and ‘page flips’ you’ve had, as well as how many articles you’ve curated. The web editor also enables you to create a new magazine.

Promoting your magazine

If you’ve given your magazine a good title and description then you should start to pick up some subscribers who find you directly via Flipboard. However, you can also help the process along by sharing the magazine directly with your contacts via any of the social networks you’ve connected to Flipboard. The short URL that Flipboard generates prompts people to download Flipboard and subscribe to your magazine. As with all automated services don’t just use the copy it generates, but write your own that says something relevant to your contacts.

If you are logged into Facebook the short URL it generates for you to share also shows some of your Facebook friends who already use Flipboard (or at least those who have connected it to Facebook). This means you can selectively send private messages to those people you think would be interested in subscribing. In the hurly burly of social network updates it is easy to miss what people have shared. As you know these people you should be able to judge if it is appropriate to send them the link via email, Twitter DM, LinkedIn message etc. But be sensible and don’t spam all your contacts with private messages.

And finally don’t forget the most important way to share content is still email. Simply email your relevant contacts and remember to include an explanation of what Flipboard is and why they should subscribe to your magazine.

Who uses Flipboard?

One downside is that Flipboard is only currently available for Android and iPhone so despite the fact it is a free app your magazine won’t be available to the millions of Windows Phone and Blackberry users. It’s also not the only news reader so lots of your potential audience might be using alternative readers such as Google Currents or Feedly.

Flipboard claims it has 56 million users with particularly strong markets being the USA, United Kingdom, Japan, Canada and Spain.

Please subscribe to PR and Corporate Comms News and let me know if you create your own magazine.

This video from UNICEF Sweden is a powerful reminder that Facebook Likes don’t really mean much, despite the obsession by some in the advertising and marketing business. In UNICEF’s case it quite literally tells us that Facebook Likes don’t save lives.

Picture from UNICEF Sverige Flickr.

Even in 2013 you find sceptics who don’t appreciate how the internet and the social web is disrupting traditional media consumption. Experian Hitwise has just published research that shows in 2012 the UK spent 37 billion hours online, but as that is far too big a number to comprehend it has helpfully distilled it into how it would look in a single hour:

Social is the biggest single element taking up 13 minutes of our time. News takes up just three minutes, which is depressingly below the time spent on shopping and alarmingly is the same as ‘adult’!

I’d like to say I had amazing insight and realised then how important blogs and the rest of social media and social networks would become. However, the truth is rather more mundane. When I was first elected as a local councillor in May 1999 I was one of very few to set-up a website. However, as I’m not a developer or designer, it was quite hard work to keep it relevant and up to date. And as I was very busy as both a local councillor and running my own PR consultancy it was time I didn’t have. That’s why when I first started reading blogs I thought it looked much, much easier and faster than trying to run a website.

Only two UK politicians had blogs before me. The first was former Sheffield Hallam MP Richard Allan and the second was Tom Watson MP. Richard stepped down in 2005 (his successor is current deputy prime minister Nick Clegg MP) and he is now a member of the House of Lords and works as director of policy in Europe for Facebook. Shortly after I started my councillor blog The Guardian did an article about me ‘Blogging for better bins’.

My PR blog was one of the first in the world, although it is a bit harder to track the exact timelines here as some people have changed blogging platforms or domains and archives aren’t always available. I was in the first 10-2o to start a PR blog. Some of the few before me who are still blogging today are Phil Gomes, Tom Murphy and Neville Hobson. Those starting shortly after include Richard Bailey and Philippe Borremans. This highlights one of the benefits of blogging as I’m now friends and have met them all except Phil (who I’ve only met via Google Hangout).

Both my councillor blog and my PR blog were hosted on a now defunct blogging platform called 2osix.co.uk, which was the UK division of a German blog publishing platform. Some of the people at 20six that I came across back then are still active today. PeerIndex founder Azeem Azhar and Sunstone Capital partner Max Niederhofer were both involved, as was freelance  journalist Johanna Payton.

Unfortunately the 20six sites are now unavailable, but you can still see an archive at Wayback Machine. This was my first PR post which explains why I chose 20six rather than the more popular and well-known Blogger:

My second post was hopefully more interesting and was about Alastair Campbell, the BBC and Andrew Gilligan in which I managed to avoid using the word Iraq, but did use the word frisbee.

My first councillor blog post was on Blogger, but I then switched it to 20six as well:

I deliberately let my councillor blog lapse when I was no longer as a councillor as it was always meant to be about local council issues rather than a generic political blog. I do however occasionally update Bruce on the World, which is my political and personal blog for posts that aren’t relevant to my professional PR blog.

My PR blog has had three platforms –first 20six, then Typepad and now a self-hosted WordPress blog.

This post is to say a huge thank you to all my readers and subscribers (so thanks Dad!) for sticking with me over the 10 years and hopefully A PR Guy’s Musings will still be going strong another ten years.

You still meet many politicians who are sceptical about the value of Facebook. A familiar story is that they are too busy in their day-to-day life as a local councillor doing case work, attending community meetings, leafleting and door knocking to bother with Facebook. Many also see Facebook as being for young people and they don’t bother to vote anyway.

This new video from Facebook has some interesting insights that prove how wrong the sceptics are and how it is as foolish not to connect with constituents on Facebook as it would be never to deliver leaflets or knock on doors.

If (like me) you don’t have time to watch videos then some of the key statistics you need to know are:

• 27 million people in the UK use Facebook every month
• That’s more than two-thirds of the British internet population
• On average they spend seven hours a month on Facebook
• One in five minutes online is spent on Facebook
• 25% are under 25…
• … but 30% are over 50 – so it’s definitely not just young people
• People act on the recommendations of their friends e.g. 16% have bought something and 37% have listened to new music
• 60% of people use Facebook most at night – so that’s when they are most likely to see your updates

And one of the best ways for local councillors to start connecting with people on Facebook? Good old-fashioned leaflets through the door directing people to your Facebook page.

Neville Hobson has an interesting post on the latest iteration of TweetDeck. Like Neville I was an original TweetDeck fan, in fact we were probably both amongst the first to use it after Ian Dodsworth launched it.

When Twitter acquired TweetDeck and re-launched it I continued to use the original Adobe Air version for a while. However, that could not continue as I do a lot of training PR and corporate communications professionals on how they should integrate social media into their communications strategy and how to use it effectively on day-to-day basis. For the training I just could not justify recommending a tool that did not exist any more.

The problem was – and still is – that there is no alternative. The original TweetDeck remains the best social media management client I’ve used. I’m currently using HootSuite and have also used MetroTwit (which is now the app that Neville now uses), however neither are quite right.

The features I’d want in my ‘perfect’ Twitter program are:

• Cross platform – I’m PC based, but ideally for my PR training I need an app that Mac users can also use. In business and government (where I do most of my training) Macs are a distinct minority, but one that I’d like to provide for.
• Multiple network – Not just Twitter, but also Facebook, LinkedIn and eventually Google+ when Google sorts out the API. Other networks such as FourSquare, Tumblr etc are nice, but less important.
• Multiple accounts – This is the obvious place to put the freemium model to work. Two of each type of account for free and a subscription model to pay for extra accounts.
• Resizable columns – Column and font size are both very much personal preference and mine is for small and narrow to fit the maximum possible on the screen without needing to scroll.
• Maximum use of landscape – To see as many columns as possible I prefer control icons to be at the top/bottom of the window.
• Bity link shortening – I use my sbpr.co vanity URL for link shortening and need to be able to continue using this automatically. With Hootsuite I have to manually shorten links using a Chrome extension rather than relying on the Owly shortening service. A bonus, but not essential would be integrating the Bitly stats into the program.
• Translation – This was one of the fantastic features of the old TweetDeck. I don’t want to tweet in other languages, but I do follow a lot of people who tweet in their own language and English. A ‘rough and ready’ translation is enough for me to stay connected.
• Scheduling – Either manually or through integration with a service like Buffer.
• List management – Seeing how many are on a list, de-duping (making it easier to sort contacts onto different lists) etc.
• Columns – Options to include tweets I’ve sent, retweets, mentions, favourites, DMs in/out, recent follows, recent unfollows etc
• Conversation threads – see all the @replies and option to see retweets.
• Filters – Filtering options on columns like the old TweetDeck.
• Preview – Quick preview of profiles and links, videos, photos etc.
• Photo uploading – I’m fairly relaxed about which service, but some people aren’t so probably best to offer options.
• Reweet and reply options – Settings to choose old style/new style, include hashtags, reply all etc
• Profiles – Display follower numbers under avatar and potentially ‘influence’ scores (I know all the caveats and my preference would be for Kred and PeerIndex not Klout). Also show if it is a protected and/or verified account. Show if you are following an account and if they are following you and from which of the accounts you’ve got set up. Plus being able to see timeline and @mentions

Quite possible I’ve missed something that I think is essential off this list.

What else do you think is essential?

What client/app/program is the best and which do you think comes closest to providing my list of essential features?

The world map of social networks is updated every six months by Vincenzo Cosenza. The latest shows that Facebook is continuing its relentless growth and dominates much of the globe. The most obvious exceptions are Russia, China and Iran. The other big two remain Twitter and LinkedIn.

In Russia the top networks are Odnoklassniki and V Kontakte, but significantly with Facebook in third place. In China it is Qzone, Tencent Weibo and Sina Weibo. In Iran it is Cloob. Other networks worth noting are Badoo, Orkut, Tuenti, Skyrock, Xing and Mixi.

Related articles

• Twitter active users in Arab countries (stuartbruce.biz)
• Most influential UK PR, social, SEO, marketing blogs (stuartbruce.biz)

A new infographic illustrates how Facebook is being used in the Middle East, North Africa and the Gulf. To take advantage of rapid growth of Facebook in the Middle East Facebook is opening a new office in Dubai to focus on dealing with advertisers from the Gulf. The new Facebook office will initially just have three people and will be in Dubai Internet City, one of the free zone business parks.

I’m delighted to be once again one of the speakers at the excellent SAScon Search – Analytics – Social Media conference. I’m going to be talking about ‘Social Commerce – Show Me the Money’.

It promises some great content with lots to learn and some excellent networking opportunities.

One of the keynote speakers is Bruce Daisley, UK sales director of Twitter and other speakers include:

Dom Burch, Head of Corporate Comms & Social Media, ASDA @dom_asdapr LinkedIn

Kristal Ireland, Head of Digital at Propaganda Agency @kristalsmile LinkedIn

Steve Kuncewicz, Head of Legal, BooHoo LinkedIn @stevekuncewicz

Simon Wharton, MD, PushON and Founder SAScon @psychobel LinkedIn

Ben McKay, Head of SEO at Moneysupermarket.com @yetanotherben LinkedIn

Martin Bryant, Managing editor, The Next Web @MartinSFP LinkedIn

Andy Betts, Digital & Marketing Strategist @andybetts1 LinkedIn

I’ve just highlighted those that I know personally or have heard speak before, so some of the other speakers might be good as well