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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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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So what’s been happening at Waves PR

Cafe Bar @ Cornerstone wine evening

I realise that this is a lazy blog, just rounding things up a little, but there’s a lot been happening.

There’s an executive summary of things you can participate in at the end, but the deatil, in alphabetical order, just for the sake of having some (order, that is):

I fix the translation and distribute press releases for AIA Software. This process is OK for online stuff, but isn’t terribly engaging, so I’m hoping to deepen that relationship to something more productive for them and more rewarding for me. They’re at Plugfest in Gouda this week talking OpenDoc.

Elegant Cuisine, an Oxford caterer, has opened it’s new bar in Didcot, the Cafe Bar @ Cornerstone. They had an amazing wine evening, one which we hope will be the first of many. We’re also planning some social media training for the team at the Cafe Bar so that they can start sharing more of the good stuff that goes on whilst actually in the bar. As they had celebrities and storm troopers, hold regular science nights and Open Mic nights, there’s no reason they couldn’t have a really exciting social presence. We are also updating their website – very needed. Read more »