by Tim B

There’s been a particular buzz around Twitter this week thanks to a pair of interesting lists put together by Stephen Davies. The lists featured a breakdown of which UK PR professionals and journalists are on Twitter. LitmanLive.co.uk has since aggregated the totals for each UK PR agency and put this information into a league table and at the top, blush, is Hotwire with a total of 16 tweeple/PReeple.

It’s not about sheer quantity on Twitter though, as presence does not necessarily mean your taking part in the conversation. Stephen Waddington of Ranier PR put the names from Stephen’s original post through Twitter Grade, which is a tool that quantifies a person’s relative influence within the Twitter community on a percentile basis.

The results were blushworthy for Hotwire again, with 4 of the Hotwire team featuring in the top 50 list. DM boss Drew Benvie places a very respectable second, with Ben Matthews, Dom Whitehurst and Phil Sheard coming in at sixth, 32^nd and 49^th respectively.

Twitter’s just one place we work with on our client campaigns, but it’s excellent to see the team getting profiled for their rankings and participation.

The new managing director for Hotwire’s corporate practice chats to fellow Hotwire director, Brendon Craigie.

So Andy, great to have you onboard.

You have worked with some of the biggest brands in the technology industry. Looking back what are the campaigns you have the fondest memories of and why?

I’ve been fortunate to work with some incredibly talented people who have delivered some stunning work. One or two highlights that stand out would be working with Bang & Olufsen to help maintain and build its iconic brand status and at the other end of the spectrum, working with ARM on its global communications programme. This was particularly satisfying as we worked on a truly global basis working partners from all four corners of the world. The fact that ARM is a home grown success story makes the pleasure of advising and supporting them all the more satisfying.

Everyone’s talking about social media and its impact on PR. As someone who has been operating at the front line as one of the founders of Friction.TV what is your feeling on where things are headed and any major learnings from the past two years?

I still think social media is in its infancy as a core PR tool. There’s some great thinking and some great execution but we still don’t know what the real long term impact of the new methods of communicating are going to be. Competition to own the space is an added complication and will continue to be so through 2009. I believe PR has the opportunity to own social media but we’re being challenged by a host of other digitally oriented agencies.

Hotwire is well known for its practice-based structure and its emphasis on industry knowledge. Can you tell us a bit more about Hotwire’s new corporate practice and what the thinking is behind creating it?

I see the new practice as bringing together existing skills with new thinking that will add another layer to the services we offer to our client base. In the current economic climate, clients are looking more than ever to agencies who can build and protect their corporate reputation alongside the ability to use PR as a demand creation tool. Our current vertically oriented practice structure sets us apart in terms of industry knowledge and specialist media relationships. I am looking to create a more horizontally oriented corporate offering that will add value by working closely alongside this well established specialist market approach.

Looking at the horizon, if you were to do a bit of future gazing, what do you see as the major trends that will impact the way large corporates approach PR over the next few years?

We are entering the world of the empowered consumer and this will have a fundamental impact on the way organisations approach PR. Building reputations and more importantly protecting them, we will require a detailed knowledge of the customer and a willingness to accept that they have a direct say in the destiny of the organisation. The importance of the traditional media will not go away but the impact of the internet will become even more keenly felt as social media drives multi-point conversations that cross over conventional stakeholder lines. PR agencies must adapt quickly to the opportunities presented by social media but we must not forget the core skills inherent in driving successful communications programmes.

Finally, the US election has been a massive endorsement of the power of democracy. What are your views on Obama’s campaign?

In just four years, the use of the web as a campaign platform has been transformed by the emergence of You Tube, Facebook and MySpace. Both candidates used these sites widely to the extent that politics reached a whole new generation, something that was reflected in the high electoral turnout. I think this online component played directly into Obama’s hands as he was able to reach out directly into an important group of disaffected Americans who were galvanised around his message of change. I believe his age and approach connected him more directly to the digital natives, a group that is normally considered politically apathetic. But I think his message also struck a chord with the rank and file Americans who were fundamentally tired of George W Bush’s policies. Plus, you can’t take away the fact that McCain’s choice of running mate was frankly bizarre!

I’ve been trawling through the avalanche of US election analysis. Some of the most interesting relates to the voter turnout.

I thought it would be interesting to look at some of the data on voter turnout and try to make an assessment on the impact the online campaign had. There has been lots of discussion of the impact Obama’s online campaign had in encouraging greater voter participation but what evidence is there to back this up?

The Wall Street Journal’s ‘Numbers Guy’, Carl Bialik, wrote an interesting post which clarifies the broader point around voter turnout. He highlights that while references to a record turnout are good headline fodder they don’t tell the whole story because they don’t account for population growth. Just two of the last 15 presidential elections — in 1988 and 1996 — didn’t set a new record by this count. Michael McDonald, a political scientist at George Mason University, expects the final count will top 133 million, of 213 million eligible voters, for a turnout rate of 62.6%. This falls short of McDonald’s estimates for turnout rates in 1960 (63.8%) and 1964 (62.8%). Final voting figures take a few months to confirm so these are only forecasts.

Thinking about the impact of Obama’s online campaign it is worth noting as Carl Bialik points out that in both these later elections voters aged 18, 19 and 20 weren’t allowed to vote.

So what of the youth vote, which you would expect to be proportionately more influenced by Obama’s online campaign? CIRCLE (The Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement) conducts research on the civic and political engagement of Americans between the ages of 15 and 25. Preliminary CIRCLE projections show the turnout for young Americans (ages 18-29) is higher than in 2004, a year of significant increase, and is much higher than it was in 2000 and 1996. An estimated 21.6 million-23.9 million young Americans voted in last Tuesday’s presidential election, an increase of at least 2.2 million compared with 2004, according to national exit polls, demographic data, and projections of total numbers of votes cast. CIRCLE projects the youth voter turnout will be between 49.3% and 54.5%, an increase of 1 to 6 percentage points over CIRCLE’s estimate based on the 2004 exit polls.

Robert Putnam’s book Bowling Alone struck a cord when it captured data on how US society has become increasingly disconnected from family, friends, neighbors, and democratic structures over the past 30 years. Has Obama succeeded in using the Internet to reconnect and build bridges in US society? On a superficial level it certainly appears to have worked in terms of giving people the sense of having a stake in the campaign. However, democracy is not just about casting votes it is about much broader participation tied to a sense of being able to shape and influence the world around. This greater meaning is captured on Obama’s site which includes the quote: “I’m asking you to believe. Not just in my ability to bring about real change in Washington… I’m asking you to believe in yours.”

Whether Obama can sustaining the energy and belief that he has kindled remains to be seen, but I agree with CIRCLE’s Peter Levine that the signs are promising.

“From a nonpartisan perspective, it is heartening to see young people so motivated and engaged in a national election,” said CIRCLE director Peter Levine. “Young Americans are also involved in community service at record rates. We must build on the momentum from this election to find ways to keep them civically engaged. It is also critical that those who did not vote for Barack Obama, or who did not vote at all, will feel included in politics, government and community affairs.”

Check out these San Jose State University students sharing what the election and their new president means to them:

http://link.brightcove.com/services/link/bcpid1578089393/bctid1904707242

In the last week the media turned on three high profile figures - Kerry Katona, Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand. We’ve taken a look at what went on from the PR advisers’ side, and what the media was thinking when these stories came out. While Kerry Katona’s story has died out, one thing is for certain. Russell Brand’s Channel 4 show tonight should get a record audience. And get him another day in the papers as a result.

An article was published recently in Business Week on the 25 most influential people on the web. It’s a mix of people from large and small brand-name backgrounds, but shows a little of how these people work, their road to success (or at least in BW’s eyes) and in the article one of the 25 people profiled is called ‘the communicator’ - Loic Le Meur of Seesmic, Le Web and Typepad. Here is the link to his part of the article.

The feature reminded us of a story that was published in Fortune magazine some time ago titled How I Work. The feature profiled 12 CEOs and execs from large firms focusing on how they work in exteremely different ways, looking in a large part at how they communicate. Starbucks’ CEO starts his day with a coffee, a broadsheet and report handed to him by voicemail. Google’s Marissa Mayer works through 800 emails a day and 14-hour Sundays in front of her email.

What we found of particular interest in these articles was the focus placed on the role of communication in how a business leader operates and how that makes a story in itself. Or is it just because we’re in PR that we see the comms part first…

By Brendon C

Anyone interested in taking a closer look at issues and their impact on the Twitter network might like to check out free measurement tool Twist (http://twist.flaptor.com/).

To bring things to life I looked at the closing of the football transfer window (midnight on Monday 1st September) and the buzz around Dimitar Berbatov’s move from Tottenham to Manchester United for £30.75m and Manchester City’s signing of Brazilian forward Robinho from Real Madrid for a British record transfer fee of £32.5m.

Here you can see how interest in these two transfers peaked as deadline day loomed. Robinho’s shock transfer to Manchester City caused the greatest stir (A peak of 395 Tweats compared to Berbatov’s 172), no doubt infuriating Chelsea fans who thought they had this deal in the bag.

Worth noting by way of comparison to Twitter that the BBC’s online text commentary  (<http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/football/7590492.stm>) of the final day of transfer activity generated over 16,000 texts which shows Twitter has a way to go to rival more mainstream channels, but hey it’s early days.