(hat tip to rocknsane)

It claims to aim marketing professionals; however a lot of the examples, facts and figures are on the advertising industry. That does not mean that this wouldn’t be a useful read for PR and marketing pros, as the lines of where social media and digital fall under are grey.

Event thought 172 pages might seem daunting at first, it’s quite an easy and fast read with lots of break pages to help not get you overloaded with too much information all at once. The book starts with a brief evolution history of the digital world from 1969 until 2009, with useful facts and figures you can pull out during both business meetings and cocktail parties at which you want to casually show off your internet knowledge… or if you that person who likes to be perceived as a cocky know-it-all. Drawn from the authors’ personal experiences they tend to write more on the practical knowledge side of social media instead of abstract theory, a plus in my books and something which a lot of other ebooks don’t cover. Another plus is that you can share specific pages with ‘friends’.

You can download Oh My God What Happened and What Should I Do? by clicking here or the image below and pay with a tweet or a facebook update instead of $14.76 on Amazon.

Will this be a blessing or a curse (for businesses, PR peeps/marketeers and users alike)? …you decide.

Facebook Introduces ‘Places,’ Lets Users Check in From Venues

by Irina Slutsky
Published: August 18, 2010

PALO ALTO, Calif. (AdAge.com) — In front about 100 reporters from almost every news outlet in the Bay Area and beyond, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced this evening his social network’s long-awaited geo-location product called Places.

The mobile product will focus on three major features, he said: It will allow users to share where they are with their friends; allow them to see who is near them; and allow them to discover new places around them. And company executives were quick to push Places’ privacy controls in an effort to stave off criticism that has plagued Facebook during the past year.

Places is a mobile product for “advanced mobile browsers” and can be accessed through Facebook’s most recent iPhone app or via touch.facebook.com.

Several of the major players in the local-mobile digital space, including Gowalla, Yelp, Booyah and Foursquare, were on hand at the press conference and some showed off ways they’ll be integrated into Places. While many pundits suggested Facebook’s impending launch of location would be the death of Foursquare and its location-based ilk, the companies — at least publicly — appeared eager to work with Facebook and tap its 500 million worldwide users. (Yelp, for example, boasts 2.5 million users of its mobile app, a fraction of Facebook’s user base.) Mr. Zuckerberg said this first version of Places will only roll out in the U.S.

While Facebook didn’t introduce monetization plans for Places, it suggested that was coming. “You can imagine a whole world can develop around this,” Mr. Zuckerberg said. “But we’ll check in on the monetization at a later time.”

Still, there are opportunities for any marketer with a physical location to benefit from Places by taking some basic steps.

“[Business owners] can claim their business’s Places page, and every time anyone checks in from that location, that’s a huge deal,” said Chris Cox, VP-product. “We wanted to make sure that feature was available before we launched.” About 1.5 million business pages exist on Facebook, and each one can merge that page with their Places page by “claiming” it, or letting Facebook know that business belongs to them. Facebook will verify it, Mr. Cox said, but he said he’s not sure if it’ll be giving away stickers for owners to put on the door like Yelp does.

Places is, in some ways, a reach extension for marketers — when people check in from a venue, they essentially broadcast their presence at that spot to their Facebook network — as well as way to attract new visitors through the discovery feature. “It’s an additional venue where you can communicate with the customer as they’re walking by and provide them with something of value,” said Lisa Bradner, president of Chicago agency GeoMomentum.

And, eventually, it could be a place they can offer discounts and marketing messages to people within a particular proximity — whenever Facebook introduces such a feature.

Tom Bedecarre, CEO of AKQA, suggested that while Foursquare popularized the gaming aspect of checking in from physical venues, with Places the prize could be not just a “mayorship” of a venue, but a coupon or other type of award. “It creates another level of engagement with the consumer. If you check into the Gap, let’s make a special offer for you,” Mr. Bedecarre said. “If you check in at 3 p.m. near a Starbucks, it’s ‘Hey, do you want a special on this latte?’ We see your favorite movies on Facebook, and the movie theater nearby can say, ‘Hey, this movie is playing here, come in now and we’ll give you a free popcorn.’

“I can see advertisers connect the dots as quickly as Facebook allows them to,” he added. “It gives them a chance to put an offer in front of someone when they’re in a position that allows for an immediate transaction.”

view when clicking on collapse

As PR professionals dealing with Digital, we are sometimes asked for online activities, such as banner ads, not traditionally in the PR discipline but which tie in with the other planned online activities. Consider this good example of a banner ad when talking with a client or your multimedia designer.

Especially for Cypriot readers: please remember that an attention grabbing banner ad is not necessarily the flashiest one which will give the website visitor a migraine (or an epilepsy attack) after 30 seconds of being on the site. Sometimes less is more.

On June 30^th the Cyprus Action Network of America (CANA) started with an online plea towards Jennifer Lopez not to go through with a concert agreement celebrating the inauguration of a new luxury hotel built on the illegally Turkish-occupied part of Cyprus, indirectly commemorating the 36th anniversary of the 1^st Turkish invasion to the island, intending to also celebrate her birthday there with her whole family which would violate a UN embargo.

A facebook fan page was then created titled AGAINST JENNIFER LOPEZ PERFORMING IN OCCUPIED CYPRUS gathering close to 20,000 fans (today: 23,500 fans) and consequently bringing the attention of international mainstream media to the matter, such as The Daily Telegraph, ABC, Digital Spy, Toronto Sun, OneIndia, Yahoo! News, The Huffington Post,  The Guardian, The Improper, the Philippine Daily Inquirer, the AFP, TF1, Sydney Morning Herald, tons of blogs and celebrity websites etc, etc… The fan page admins also motioned fans to write directly to JLo’s agent via email, imploring her to cancel the concert, aside from also signing an online petition against the concert taking place.

The result was Jennifer Lopez and her team announcing on July 8th, approximately 1 week after this online grassroots campaign started, the decision not to go forward with the concert, with the following statement released on her official website:

“Jennifer Lopez would never knowingly support any state, country, institution or regime that was associated with any form of human rights abuse. After a full review of the relevant circumstances in Cyprus, it was the decision of her advisors to withdraw from the appearance. This was a team decision that reflects our sensitivity to the political realities of the region.”

This is the first successful social media campaign taking place in Cyprus. Should this incident had happened BF (before the facebook era), without a virtual, globally accessible  place allowing people to voice their disagreement of what such an action symbolizes, it would have gone unnoticed by the global community. This just goes to show what a huge impact social media can have in our day and age.

Note: Sadly, this incident did spark an unnecessary friction among Greek and Turkish-Cypriots, resurfacing the propaganda taught in schools since 1963, forgetting in the process how people from both sides were victimized by Turkey’s actions and having people forget that this issue here is on a political and NOT a personal level and should not had been taken as such.

Additional Resources:

• More background information on the protest can be found here – on the Hellenic Vanguard blog.
• Additional news coverage on the decision to cancel the concert can also be viewed here, here, here and here.

Actor Isaac Mustafa posed as the shirtless ‘Old Spice Guy’, originally for this ‘The Man Your Man Could Smell Like’ commercial (which scored close to 19 million views across all video viewing platforms). Wieden + Kennedy then took this campaign a step further into the online world, by making personalized short videos for Twitter and blog fans (sometimes celebrities) as a response to tweets and questions addressed to the Old Spice Guy. The results were pure magic, mostly because of the real time posting of the response videos, the excellent engagement achieved with Old Spice Guy fans and a great sense of humor.

In terms of numbers, 180+ short videos featuring the Old Spice Guy scored 5.9 million views, 22,500 comments, with practically all online impressions being positive and that’s just for the period of  13-16 July (source: Mashable). The campaign has (sadly) now ended but it still enjoys the worldwide ripple effect of its escalating popularity.

My personal favorite is this response to George Stephanopoulos with some tips for Obama to gain more female popularity.

As a by-product of this campaign, an Old Spice Guy voicemail generator was created by Nelson Abalos Jr, for Old Spice Guy fans to create a personalized voicemail message, worth checking out.

Additional Resources:

You can view all of the Old Spice Guy videos at the Old Spice YouTube Channel.

For the Top 10 funniest Old Spice Guy response videos, click here.

Mums in Cyprus launched in December 2009 and it provides a platform for moms to meet, find information on and talk about… erm, the things that moms talk about. This social network is starting to become influential (by Cyprus standards) with 400+ members, 11 featured languages and business directories etc for all 4 cities across the Republic of Cyprus. I was impressed with the good job Carine Khoury,  its creator did with the site and how social and community oriented it is. It’s built with a Social Go platform and some of its key features are:

• Video chat
• A forum
• A blog (updated regularly)
• A playgroups per city
• A businesses-useful-to-mums directory
• and even a Twitter Account (@mumsincyprus)

Mums in Cyprus has had its first appearance in mainstream media with this The Cyprus Mail article.

If you know of other parent-oriented online communities or blogs or if you are starting up one in Cyprus, contact me to include it here.

2010 World Cup Dedicated Twitter Page

You can even follow the matches in real time (or at least the conversation around them) by clicking on the listed match you would like to follow, like the South Africa vs. Mexico match. As an added feature, the tweets for each team appear in a separate column under the flag of each country. As a colleague suggested this is a great tool for following predictions too.

South Africa vs Mexico match on Twitter

This is a great example of how an offline campaign can be integrated with social media, by using the correct tools (in this case, real time is a huge advantage and great opportunity for using Twitter).

Happy game watching!

Additional Real Time Resources:

http://worldcup.tweetbeat.com/

I know it’s been a long while since I’ve updated this blog and I won’t give you none of the “oh I’ve been so busy” excuses. The truth of the matter is that there is soooo much written on social media and how they relate to PR every day, which makes me think each time I’m about to write a new blog post, what’s the point of adding yet another post on this subject. That wouldn’t add something of value now would it, which would fail one of the basic principles of social media.

This is why I am strongly thinking of shifting the direction of this blog to social media and PR in Cyprus specifically (or online marketing or new media marketing or emerging media communications or whatever you want to call it) and here is where I need your opinion and feedback before doing so. My argument for it is that there aren’t any blogs specializing in social media or PR/marketing in Cyprus (feel free to correct me if I’m wrong here), this is a market I really know (I live here), can observe closer and leave you with conclusions on the subject without the need to draw from external sources, plus I have a pretty good knowledge of social media in other countries and on a global level (heck, that’s what I’m paid to do) so I would be able to deliver a good comparison of social media in Cyprus versus other countries, as well as catch international social media trends about to enter Cyprus, bringing them to your attention before they even do.

So then, how do you feel about this?  Would you be interested to read more about social media in Cyprus? Now is the time to speak or forever hold your peace.

Seth Godin,  a great marketing thinker (and blogger) of our times, managed to get an inspiring group of more than 70 entrepreneurs, bloggers, thinkers to contribute a one-pager essay on one word they suggest for people to focus on for 2010. All these one pagers put together form What Matters Now, an easy to read (and free) eBook that will make you want to be a better person this year.

You can download What Matters Now by clicking on the book’s title or the image above. You can also click here to view Seth Godin’s original blog post introducing What Matters Now, where you will also find a note announcing that a print edition is now available, of which all proceeds will go to Room to Read.

Happy reading!