A line in Amelia Torode’s latest blog post got me thinking about how social media and social networks could have an important role to play in improving equality in the workplace.

Despite a raft of legislation the UK’s employment landscape is far from equal and the gap between pay and opportunities between men and women remains far too great.

There are lots of reasons why there aren’t enough women at senior levels and those that are there don’t earn as much, on average, as men. One reason is that at the moment women are disadvantaged because they have gaps in their careers because of maternity leave. I’ve long advocated that one way to improve this is not just to make paid paternity leave available to fathers, but to make it compulsory. That way you equalise the career gaps and as a massive bonus dads get to spend more time with their children.

What Amelia said that made me think was this:

“Through Twitter I feel plugged in and connected to the advertising – digital – comms community that I am a part of so although motherhood is all consuming at the moment I don’t feel cut off. This has to be a fairly new phenomena – the way that social platforms enable non-working mothers to stay in the loop professionally.”

She’s right. Through social media and social networks, both external such as Twitter and internal like Yammer, you can enjoy your family life and stay plugged into your career. Through online trade media you can stay on top of what’s happening in your industry when you’re no longer seeing the magazines that used to come round the office.

I know some people will start complaining about work/life balance and work intruding into family life. But there’s a lot of nonsense about work/life balance with most ‘experts’ putting far more emphasis on work or life, when the really important emphasis is balance. New communications tools let me enjoy more family time, not less. They are not intrusive, but liberating.

So the question is can the internet and social web help to improve the disgraceful inequality in our workplaces?

Yesterday Mashable had an absolutely ridiculous article on the ‘Future of public relations and social media’.

Some of its analysis and expert opinion was truly breathtaking in its simplicity.

News releases still aren’t dead

First up for being wrong is the assertion that the press release is dead. Please, we were there in February 2006  with Tom Foremski’s ‘Die! Press release! Die! Die! Die’ and we’ve been there every year since – and the traditional press release is still alive and kicking. Back then I pointed out that Foremski was an ex-Financial Times journalist and what sort of idiot PR person would target the FT with a press release and expect it to work on its own?

It’s all about using the best tool for the job and frequently that means both a traditional news release and a social media news release. There are thousands and thousands of journalists out there who just want a well written news release that they can edit easily to fill the pages of regional papers, weekly papers, trade magazines etc. Sending out an identical news release to hundreds of journalists has ALWAYS been a fairly useless tool for generating news stories, especially if you’re targeting big media outlets such as national newspapers and broadcast news.

Social media news releases are fantastic and we use them successfully all the time for our clients, but we also know why we’re doing it and what we’re trying to achieve. It’s not just about leaping aboard the latest bandwagon.

It’s all about brevity and YouTube video announcements

Apparently social media is all about brevity and making things shorter. I suppose that’s why we add all that extra content in a social media news release is it? If brevity means faster, then tripling the amount of content is a big fail.

The next stellar idea is to direct time-starved journalists to a YouTube video with a message from the CEO making the announcement. Wow! That’s going to save them time and get the message across quickly and accurately isn’t it? Or not. Let’s see, first they have to spend three minutes watching it then they’ve got to transcribe it to get the quote out in order to be able to write their story. Or is it just that the PR person wants to control the message and stop that pesky journalist reporting the story? Instead the journalist can just embed the video and leave the inquisitive reader to be sold the unedited company line. I don’t think so.

Don’t get me wrong I like the idea of CEOs and directors utilising YouTube, but let’s stop and think about why and what we want to achieve. As supplementary content for a journalist creating online content it has a value, but as a primary delivery channel it’s far less efficient than the traditional news release. It would be great content for the end audience, but not for most journalists. A live video webcast where journalists and the public can ask questions directly would have far more value.

Successful pitches have always been succinct. When I started in public relations that meant if you were faxing a news release with all the background information the journalist needed then the cover sheet would have the compelling pitch. You’d also have a 20 second verbal pitch prepared for phone calls. The only difference today is that your succinct pitch might be delivered by email or even Twitter with a link to the full news release (please never an attachment) on the web.

Crafting a good news release hasn’t changed

The idea that social media news releases need to be “more brief and focussed” is nonsense. In the old days a good news release told the whole story in the first paragraph, I think that’s as brief as you can get. The rest of the news release has always been about adding background information. Social media news releases are exactly the same – get across the news and pertinent facts as succinctly as possible, and then support it with supplementary content.

Monitoring is most important today, not in five years

Another piece of hokum is that apparently today the most important public relations tools are the broadcasting tools, but in five years time, the most important tools will be the monitoring and measurement tools. What total and utter nonsense!

Using monitoring and measurement has always been one of the most important aspects of public relations, even before the internet existed. Back then it was all about analysing print media for competitor coverage, seeing what story trends were emerging so you could create content that fitted, responding to what was being said about your industry sector etc.

We do exactly the same thing today on the internet. The main changes are that the volume of content to be monitored and measured has increased dramatically, but we also have far more effective tools for doing it.

One of the few intelligent comments came from Chuck Tanowitz who points out that you can’t just measure influence online. He uses the example of Mayor Setti Warren who has just more than 700 followers on Twitter, so he’s obviously not that influential. Except when he was elected as mayor he got a call from President Obama, so maybe he does matter.

Social media isn’t free

And finally there’s the example of the company that saved $270K in expenses by using social media. Except I’m not sure it did. What it did was fire its PR agency, apparently saving the $250K fee, and saved an additional $20K in events (travel, venue, promotions etc). Instead it brought its PR in-house and focused on social media. This anecdote might mean something if we knew how much time was then spent on this by people in-house – they do have salaries and presumably were doing something before getting this additional workload. And saving $20K in events – it’s a tiny amount and probably only relates to one or two events.

Rant over, comments welcome.

For some weekend fun enjoy your own Twitter parade (follow the link for a full screen version of the animation) via Tom Murphy.

My presentation from last night’s Chartered Institute of Public Relations Social Summer series of guest conversations about social media and corporate communications:

Next week’s is Iain Dodsworth of Tweetdeck fame.

Next Thursday it’s my turn to do the Chartered Institute of Public Relations Social Summer. It’s a series of early evening events every Thursday at the CIPR headquarters in Russell Square. My session is titled Social media is too new for us, we can’t take risks.

For many big corporates and brands the social web still appears to be like the Wild West where the normal rules don’t apply and you don’t have any control. Stuart will demonstrate that once you get past the technology and jargon, it’s not as different and scary as it looks. The session will show that even PR pros seeped in traditional media relations can and indeed need to adapt to the new world, that even the most conservative brands in the most conservative industries can and should embrace social public relations. The session will cover:

• How you can make your traditional media relations more successful by becoming social
• How you can translate your traditional PR skills for online and social media
• How you can persuade the reluctant CEO or board to embrace the social web

You’ve already missed some good ones, but coming up tomorrow night is Stephen Waddington and Philip Sheldrake on Has the PR industry failed to reskill for SEO – and will social media be the next missed opportunity? Also coming up is Iain Dodsworth of Tweetdeck on Twitter, Julio Romo talking about social media, news and TV, and Ged Carroll on Social media no-no’s.

The news that renowned management consultancy McKinsey is to start counselling its clients on social media should send a shiver down the spines of public relations and corporate communications consultancies.

McKinsey has partnered with Nielsen BuzzMetrics to form NM Incite, a social media consultancy. The new company claims it will “help businesses harness the full potential of social media intelligence and focus on measuring the impact social media has on businesses.” NM Incite currently only operates in the USA, but Nielsen has said it is looking to expand into other markets.

Simon Collister is sceptical that a management consultancy can offer genuine communication consultancy and cites the example of “chatting with a senior PR consultant who was lamenting a ‘brand strategy’ put together by the client’s management consultancy.”

Drew Benvie is far more positive, but points out that the services on offer from McKinsey’s new division are all pretty old bread and butter stuff for digital veterans.

I view it as both an opportunity and a threat. The opportunity is that it’s yet more evidence about the strategic importance of social media and its impact on businesses and organisations. The threat is that the management consultants will take more and more business from traditional PR consultancies.

PR still suffers from a reputation of being a ‘fluffy’ management discipline and unfortunately it’s too often justified. At Wolfstar we’ve spent considerable time over the last few months in investing in creating a new communications audit consultancy tool that has an extremely rigorous process and quality control behind it. It’s exactly the sort of tool that many management consultancies offer to clients. We’ve recognised that public relations professionals have got to up their game if they are to compete in the modern world.

Just in case you’re wondering, the big, bad wolf in question is me and not some ‘other’ PR agency

I’ve just commented on Stephen Davies’ blog, but thought it might be worthwhile expanding it and giving my apology a bit more exposure.

Stephen’s absolutely right about leaving the client name in that ‘post’. It was wrong and that’s 100% my fault, for which I apologise profusely. I’d already asked Jed not to mention the PR agency. When I was approving it I originally took out the client name, but then (in retrospect foolishly) put it back in because I thought it was relevant in the context of it having a previous issue in the social media space.

My other mistake was not making it even clearer that it was the second email that was the problem. The first was just a mistake and should have been ignored. I truly believe the second ‘apology’ email should have been handled differently and was worth calling out. Sorry if you disagree, but that’s what I think.

I’ve always believed, and still do, in telling it like it is. It’s a Cumbrian thing.

One disappointing,but predictable, aspect to me is that it’s apparent that some of the people commenting/tweeting haven’t actually read the post in question, or the follow up, and are more jumping on the bandwagon of it’s bad to criticise a competitor. Which I’d agree with if that’s all I knew.

What is OK in my book is to criticise what people or companies do, which is what the post was about. That’s why I don’t mind the flack over what we did, but I do take issue with the more ‘generic’ big, bad wolf criticism.

Fast Company has a fascinating article on ‘Five steps to earn social currency’, looking at the results of research by Vivaldi Partners (an international brand consultancy) and Lightspeed Research. The study examines more than 60 companies and assesses customers’ brand affiliations, advocacy, and sense of community, among other factors, for how they create true value for the companies, no matter whether it’s online or off.

To me what’s most interesting about the findings is how it confirms many of the things that we’re always explaining to client. Lots of the ‘big number’ gimmicks – such as apps, games and viral videos – might generate volumes of ‘buzz’, but achieve very little. Public relations practitioners have always had to focus on providing ‘something of value’ – the story, content, event or whatever has to benefit the recipient. That’s why many of the ideas suggest are designed with ‘social currency’ in mind.

Simply achieving more and more Facebook fans, Twitter followers or YouTube viewers achieves very little in itself. Erich Joachimsthaler, managing director at Vivaldi Partners, explains "There is a lot of wasted effort in social media. We forget that these programs have to pay into something, a shared value or a social context where the product actually gets used." What’s valuable isn’t mere buzz but what Joachimsthaler calls "social currency."

Fast Company has helpful pulled out some of the most interesting findings including:

Dunkin’ Donuts ‘advocacy approach’ is more effective than Starbucks’ big numbers approach.

Beer drinkers care about totally different things to big brewers who are potentially wasting millions of pounds of their advertising and marketing budgets.

Axe’s (Lynx) over-the-line risqué humour is just seen as a goof, whereas Clinique’s instructive approach (YouTube videos showing how to apply make-up) has earned it stronger social currency with its consumers.

Burger King and Wendy’s help demonstrate why gimmicks marginalise trust. Wendy’s ‘You Know When It’s Real’ makes the product the hero, while Burger King simply relies on stunts created by advertising agencies which might get lots of attention but as Joachimsthaler says: "it doesn’t motivate me to have a hamburger at Burger King today." Indeed they probably do more for the ad agencies’ ‘social currency’ than they do for the poor old client that is paying for it all!

I attended Communicate Magazine’s Social Media in a Corporate Context conference last week and sat on the ‘judging’ panel for a session which aimed to examine social media newsrooms in the style of an X Factor audition. The other ‘judges’ were Ruth Sunderland (Business Editor of The Observer) and Sam Proctor (Director of Emerging Media, PR Newswire).

As well as being on the panel, I have a lot of experience in creating social media newsrooms for our clients. In fact, two social media newsrooms that the Wolfstar team has implemented were presented for judging!

You only have to search for the #smcc10 hash tag on Twitter to see that the session went down very well. And, I was obviously very pleased at how popular our social media newsrooms for Sony Ericsson (presented by Merran Wrigley, Vice President Head of External Relations, Global Communications) and First Direct (presented by Amanda Brown, Head of Media Relations) were with the audience! The third social media newsroom presented was by Keith Childs for GM Europe.

@juliusduncan: Best Social Media Newsroom at#smcc10 X Factor? I think it’s @first_direct !

@lucynixon: Missed #smcc10 yesterday? I loved Social Media Newsrooms, X-Factor style: http://su.pr/2lhNdt

But, let’s go back to basics and forget all the X Factor related stuff.

To those who haven’t used or created a social media newsroom before, the two key questions are:

• What is a social media newsroom?
• And, why do I need one?

A social media newsroom (or SMNR) is essentially an online centre for all of your information. This can be information that anyone, from customers to the media would want to get hold of. In a typical SMNR you’d usually find news releases, photos, video content, contact details, links to social media assets and the list could go on and on.

You need one because it will completely change the way you and your organisation approach stakeholder engagement and media relations.

Although customers can access your social media newsroom, it’s mainly there for the media, whether this be journalists or ‘citizen journalists’ i.e. bloggers and other publishers of content on social media and social networks. It essentially gives them a way to quickly and easily access the information they need. You can also start being smarter about what you put up there, getting to know the media you want to be in a dialogue with will allow you to tailor your content to their needs making the resource much more worthwhile to you and valuable to journalists.

I’ve already touched upon some of the key functions of a social media newsroom, but here’s how one example of the final product looks:

As you can see, there are:

• Press releases and news articles
• Photo content – using social photo sites such as Flickr and Picassa to make it easier to share and embed photos
• Video content – using social video sites such as YouTube, Vimeo and Brightcove
• Audio content (podcasts) – including listing them on iTunes and other sites
• Social bookmarking and other sharing tools such as Delicious and Digg
• Contact details
• Tags and categories – to make it easier to find information and improve SEO
• Links to other corporate social media assets such as blogs, Twitter etc
• Instructions about how to use the site
• Corporate backgrounders, spokesperson biographies etc
• Search functionality

But, like every other form of activity online, there certainly isn’t a ‘one size fits all’ approach. We work with our clients to find out what they want, how it can work and how best it can be implemented. And it’s definitely not just a case of ‘build it and they will come’. A new social media news room also enables you to totally modernise the way that you do media relations and much of the consultancy we provide is helping in-house press and corporate communications team understand the new rapidly changing demands of journalists and how best to meet their needs.

And there are some stumbling blocks along the way, we have a list of the key components that make up (what we consider to be) a perfect social media newsroom. However, we can rarely achieve the perfect SMNR due to the constraints that most large corporates face. Challenges include getting ‘buy-in’ from other departments and functions, legal restrictions, for multi-nationals – language, geography and time-zones, and corporate IT infrastructures.

For Sony Ericsson we worked closely with its in-house IT department who actually built the social media newsroom for us based on our brief, project management and specifications. One of the challenges here was being able to incorporate all of the functionality we wanted within the constraints of the existing corporate content management system (CMS).

The third social media newsroom presented at the conference was meant to be GM Europe. This was the first social media newsroom in Europe and started in August 2007 as a ‘standalone’ site that wasn’t integrated with the traditional press room on the corporate website. Keith Childs explained that this has now been rectified and the old generic GM Europe social media newsroom no longer exists. Instead all of the social elements have now been added to GM’s various newsrooms for its brands.

As well as First Direct and Sony Ericsson we’ve also built a series of multi-language social media newsrooms for Philips in Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland. As far as we’re aware the Philips social media news rooms were the world’s first attempt at creating a suite of multi-language newsrooms.

But, we’re not the only ones who have done this well, here’s a great social media news room from Cisco:

If you want to know more about how a social media newsroom might help your business or organisation then give me or one of the Wolfstar team a call on +44 (0)845 838 7282.

Three Auburn University students have created ‘Operation Hug Taylor Swift’ which I think is one of the best social media ‘campaigns’ I’ve seen. Why? It had a specific objective and it achieved it.

Michael Wekall, Ryan Leander and Matthew Mahaffey had a simple mission "Do whatever it takes to wrap our arms around Taylor Swift."

In January they started by building a website www.ahugfromtayloreswift.com with their favourite quote "I’ve always been a hugger… If we all hugged more, the world would be a better place."

They then just started doing more – t-shirts, funny videos. Facebook, Twitter, their blog, YouTube and not forgetting good, old mainstream media. They kept slogging away from almost three months, creating some great content.

And then, in March Taylor Swift, suddenly responded. Not so say “yeah guys you can have a hug” or to give them the brush-off. No, she decided to play their game and take it all to a new height – creating fantastic attention for he and our three guys from Auburn.

Taylor recorded a video on her website saying that she doesn’t give hugs away easily and that they’d have to earn them by completing a series of challenges.

The challenges, which she wanted to documented on YouYube videos, were:

1. Help a little old lady across the street.
2. Use the number 13 in a creative way
3. Wait for an email on Monday at 12:30pm

It wasn’t just the guys from Auburn that responded. Hundreds of Taylor Swift fans around the country started sending them their videos and photos. Michael, Ryan and Matthew edited them into funny videos.

When the email arrived it told them to get to Auburn University Hotel and get as many students as they could to create the world’s biggest karaoke sing-a-long. After 30 minutes of karaoke, Taylor appeared on the giant video screen with a personal message for the guys "Wow, I really wish that I was there to see that. I really wish that I was there right now. Wait, I have an idea…"

And then Taylor appeared on stage to give each of the guys a hug, or two…

Michael Wekall, Ryan Leander and Matthew Mahaffey that’s one great online portfolio you’ve just created for yourselves. Excellent use of public relations, social media, social networks and word of mouth marketing.

Hat-tip to Tom Murphy and Robert French.