✅ Monday briefing: Socially Mobile applications open, organisational listening, public relations research, public relations and management, week in Twitter, moving to Mastodon, and more...
Data and Insight, Industry, Good and Bad Practice, Media, Social Media and Platforms, and Tools
This newsletter is crowdsourced each week from our blog and community of practice for people studying and working in marketing, media and PR. It’s a hive mind, newsroom and source of information, help and support. You’d be welcome to join us.
Socially Mobile has opened applications for a new cohort starting in January 2023. The 10-week executive education programme aims to support practitioners in realising their earning potential. It’s a specific intervention aimed at helping build management skills.
Fully funded places are available to people from lower socio-economic backgrounds, as well as under-represented and under-served groups including ethnic minority practitioners, the LGBTQ+ community, women returners and those with disabilities. Here’s how to apply.
Data and Insight
📖 ORGANISATIONAL LISTENING: Most organisations (and people) don’t listen. In Organizational Listening, Jim Mcnamara sets out the importance of listening to conversations in the public and private sphere and a plan to build a scalable listening architecture. The book is packed with useful case studies. The book was published in 2016 but is new to me. Spotted Dr Jon White.
✋ WIDENING INEQUALITY: A Institute for Fiscal Studies report finds that income inequality in the UK is widening due to inflation, wealth and house price growth. It is no longer possible to raise yourself out of poverty through hard work. The inter-generational divide is also widening. Source Sarah Waddington CBE.
Industry
🎓 PR RESEARCH: The ‘degrees not required’ debate in public relations is reductive and unhelpful. There is some incredible research work being driven by universities to promote the value of public relations, however practice and research are entirely separate communities. That’s a huge, missed opportunity. Source Stephen Waddington.
👔 PR AND MANAGEMENT: A new whitepaper published by Vuelio explores the opportunity for public relations to contribute to management. It sets out a relationship perspective of an organisation and the role of practitioners in supporting the leadership of an organisation. Source Stephen Waddington and Dr Jon White.
Good and Bad Practice
🏩 AIRBNB MARKETING: airbnb reported the benefit of investing in public relations in its recent financial results. It said that reducing its dependence on search marketing and investing in brand marketing and public relations had paid dividends for the brand. Spotted Andrew Bruce Smith.
😬 AI FAIL: KFC apologised for sending a promotional message to German customers suggesting they celebrate Kristallnacht, a Nazi-led series of attacks in 1938 that left more than 90 people dead. An automated artificial intelligence marketing system was blamed for the failure. Spotted Craig McGill.
Media
🗞️ LOCAL NEWS: Regional publisher National Word, founded by former BBC editorial director Kamal Ahmed, is investing £1m in The News Movement (TMW). The social media-first title launched last year is building a young audience fo local news across Instagram, Snap, TikTok, Twitter, and YouTube. Spotted Alan Morrison.
😀 JUST SAY YES: Slate writer Dan Kois provides an insight into the daily onslaught of pitches that journalists receive from publicists in an experiment in which he said yes to every pitch he received for a day. Modern media relations has more in common with spammy email marketing than relationship building with journalists. Spotted Stephen Waddington.
Social Media and Platforms
🐦 WEEK IN TWITTER: After laying off half its staff Twitter is now asking some people that have been fired to return. A new $8 verification scheme was immediately abused and pulled. UK Business Secretary Grant Shapps has written to Twitter to ensure that its redundancy process followed UK law. Are you keeping up? Spotted Michael Greer and Andrew Bruce Smith.
📱 MOVING TO MASTODON: The failure of Twitter is teaching us important lessons about authentication, data portability, and governance. Mastodon is emerging as an alternative social platform to Twitter. It’s a decentralised network built on open source software. Here’s what I’ve learnt in the past week. Source Stephen Waddington.
💻 LINKEDIN ALGORITHM: The first 90 minutes after you post on LinkedIn is critical to its reach. Respond to comments. Hashtags have almost no impact on reach. The ideal video length is between 20 and 60 seconds, square format. These insights are from Richard van der Blom's LinkedIn Algorithm Report. Spotted Andrew Bruce Smith.
Tools
🗃 MASTODON NETWORK: Building a network from scratch on a social media platform takes work. If you’ve joined the network please add your details to this open source directory to help people find you. There’s a useful tool called Debirdify to find users from your existing Twitter network on Mastodon. Spotted Stephen Waddington.
📺 LIVE ON YOUTUBE: YouTube is opening access to its Go Live Together feature. Now all channels with 50 subscribers or more can launch Go Live Together streams - providing new engagement and interaction options during a YouTube live broadcast. Spotted Alan Morrison.
🖼️ INSTAGRAM TOOLS: Instagram is rolling out in-app post scheduling tools to professional accounts enabling users to schedule photos, carousels and reels up to 75 days in advance. A personal user can switch to a professional account by making the switch in account settings. Spotted Alan Morrison.
Vuelio, mentioned in this newsletter, is a Wadds Inc. client.