Alerti Social Media Monitoring and Management Service

Guest Post, Murray Newlands, Influence People

As a Public Relations professional, keeping up with your campaigns is a big part of your day-to-day work, and staying current on industry trends is a must. A social media monitoring and management service can be a big help. Whether you are a newcomer to the idea of social media monitoring or a veteran who is one of the 2 out of 3 professionals who isn’t “happy” with their current social media monitoring tool, I am happy to announce the launch of Alerti in the US and UK this week.

Alerti’s founders were on a mission to create a single, customizable interface for managing and sharing information from the web. Their result offers all of the advantages of the big name services at a fraction of the cost. I expect their current userbase of thousands of French users to grow substantially in the coming months. I’m working with Alerti and am excited to offer Waves PR readers a chance to try Alerti FREE for 3 months. More on that in a minute…

Alerti In Action

Alerti provides a simple, effective tool with a single interface to collect and manage relevant information from around the web, empowering you to follow what is being said about you, your brand, or your competitors on the internet, to measure the engagement of your communities, and to interact with them.

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Where does the line fall for PR people?

BM thrived on the 'crisis' attention

By Claire Thompson, freelance PR and social media consultant, Waves PR

PR company Bell Pottinger is again under the spotlight, along with lobbying, and will probably remain so for a while. (For anyone who hasn’t seen the story, Stuart Bruce pulled together a great Storify timeline yesterday.)

Like Burson Marsteller before it with its Facebook/Google story scandal, Bell Pottinger will be squirming uncomfortably, but, like Burson Marsteller, Bell Pottinger is already taking on difficult, often unethical clients, and this kind of publicity will encourage more of the same kinds of clients.

And like Burson Marsteller, it will probably revel in the publicity for what it’s doing, and even use it to build it’s crisis management practise as its name becomes associated with the word crisis, and all those linking to it inadvertently help push it up the search engine rankings. And it’s certainly flushed out that the company has friends in high places within the establishment, making it attractive to more of the same.

Bell Pottinger’s latest ‘sin’ has been to use Wikipedia (Article in Independent, Thursday December 8, 2011), and some of the things it’s ‘accused’ of doing online leave me uncomfortable. I’m hoping that it might spark a sensible debate here around what is, and what isn’t acceptable. Now I’ll stick my hand up and say I’ve done some cackhanded things online before now, and I’ve been called on them, and I’ve apologised. The spotlight was uncomfortable, and hand on heart I’ve always tried to remain ethical whilst serving my clients the best way I can.

But ethics are a tough subject (see the open v copyright debate), and the Independent’s Wikipedia editing article highlights just that. Bell Pottinger tried to put a comment from a client  The Prostate Centre on a cancer related page. Without seeing the comment, my initial thought was that if I had prostate cancer, I might be pleased to see that information. Adding Professor Roger Kirby as an expert? If he’s a professor and has genuine credentials in his field, I would have thought that was fair.

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Press release distribution services – a survey

With my SEO PR Training hat on, we’re collating information on press release distribution services which will be published next month.

If you are from a service that would like to be included, you can complete your details here:
http://www.wavespr.com/media-and-blogger-resources/company-background-seo-pr-training/the-seo-pr-training-press-release-distribution-survey/

And if you’ve used a service and would like to offer some feedback, you can do so here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/PRDrating

We haven’t surveyed the recipients of releases (aggregation sites, journalists and bloggers)  yet: there would be all kinds of flaws with any such survey, but we  are considering ways to do this without running the risk of increasing spam from the ill informed to them.

The PR Week That Was

Femke and Rob, SIG, in training

So another busy week went by at Waves PR

Early in the week I visited Elegant Cuisine, who have had some changes.  There are some super plans ahead for their Cafe Bar @ Cornerstone, based in the Cornerstone Art Centre in Didcot. It has some lovely engagement going on through its Twitter account @BarCornerstone – making some firm friends along the way, without worrying about the numbers game – and has plans for great things using social media. It’s even holding a Tweetup in December (in Didcot), a brave move for a small bar.

Elegant Cuisine also briefed me on a pretty amazing wedding package on offer – more details on this later – and a website refresh in the offing: more on this later as well.

On Tuesday I worked with SIG – the Software Improvement Group – on some multi-cultural, multi platform media training, which was great fun, and again, it wasn’t just traditional offline media that we discussed. We had been discussing a fun campaign, but off the back of the training changed tack a little, and are developing a campaign based around great software development teams.

Global Integration’s global working video competition has been getting a lot of attention, if no entries yet (although we’ve had some brave attempts from spammers). This has been an amazing learning curve. We knew before we started that we wouldn’t expect thousands of entries, even with a prize as big as $15 thousand. What we perhaps hadn’t anticipated was that the real value has been around the conversations that people have been having and the interest stirred, and if just one of the ideas that people have been discussing materialises, the competition will have been well worth it, and may well run again next year.

The Global Integration new website is also developing behind the scenes, and we may have something to show there soon.

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