Cash for tweets scandal

Transparency. It’s a word I hear bandied around a fair bit working in PR. But is there a line that can be crossed between promoting a product or service and manipulatively deceiving consumers into making a purchase?

This week, high profile celebrity tweeters have been in the spotlight for failing to be transparent about whether they’ve been paid or showered in freebies to tweet about brands to their millions of followers. The Office of Fair Trading is investigating whether tweets that promote luxury goods are deceiving the seemingly sedated masses into buying products to be just like their favourite celebs.

What do you reckon? Do you take tweets from the stars with a pinch of salt? Or do you think Liz Hurley casually mentioned Estee Lauder ten times because she just loves their cosmetics?

Maybe this should just be seen as another PR tactic to support celebrity endorsements via social media, and clearly this works if consumers actually believe that verified celebrity accounts are windows into their lives behind closed doors. I sometimes wonder if we give Joe Public enough credit, but the government seems to think that there are serious ethical issues to think about here.

According to the OFT: “Online advertising and marketing practices that do not disclose they include paid for promotions are deceptive under trading laws.”

Here’s a few examples of these 140 character ‘adverts’ which are reportedly earning some celebs up to $10,000 a time!
‘

Apparently there is a brand new Playstation Move waiting for me at my office in the morning. Tres exciting.’ – Lily Allen

“CAN’T WAIT FOR MY NEW RANGE ROVER” – Henry Holland

“oooh, best mascara ever, Estee Lauder’s sumptuous” –Liz Hurley

“At BBC studio. Yeay they have Costa Coffee here. Need an espresso” – Peter Andre

It will be interesting to see the outcome of this investigation. You might be seeing ‘spon’ and ‘ad’ cropping up lots more on Twitter in weeks to come. But will these tweets lose their impact if the author clearly states that they have been paid to write it? What do you reckon?

Definitely worth a watch...

'The Food That Makes Billions' is definitely one to check out on iPlayer if you get the chance. I stumbled across the first episode last week and was hooked straight away. Entitled 'Liquid Gold' it provided an amazing insight into how big brands and marketeers have turned bottled water into a necessity. If you fancy a change from I'm a Celeb or X Factor, upcoming episodes will be focussing on cereal and yoghurt. I'll defo be watching.

CRC is cutting it

When we first started hearing about the new trend of so called ‘pay what you think’ restaurants and bars, most people seemed to think it was a recipe for ruin. Brits are renowned for being tight so will always pay the bare minimum right?

Turns out this is not the case. In fact, the pay what you like business model has been rolled out successfully in a variety of industries. Look at Radiohead for example. The band decided to hand fans the power to pay whatever they wanted for their album, In Rainbows, and they ended up making a pretty penny.

Last week, award winning salon Cutting Room Creative in Leeds city centre launched its ‘Pay What You Think It’s Worth’ promotion. They are so confident in their service and the talents of their stylists that they have decided to put this to the ultimate test and let customers decide how much their CRC experience is worth.

Whilst this is a rather bold move for the local business, in an industry that thrives on people skills and great customer relations the ‘Pay What You Think It’s Worth’ promotion will hopefully see people digging deep for their CRC service.

Half way into the promotion and the campaign is exceeding expectations; with the majority of clients, old and new, paying on the nose and many generous souls paying even more. Is this the reaction you would have predicted?

Fancy paying what you think it’s worth at Cutting Room Creative on Albion Street? Call 0113 269 7070 to book.

Word of Mouth on the street

Today I’ve been reading about the most popular iPhone app of the minute, and one of the most clever, innovative and provocative ideas I’ve heard in a long time. Tom Ewart of Publicis is right. The public *have* grown tired and bored of the shock tactics used by charities to jolt us into donating to the plethora of good causes out there, (and don’t even get me started on the clip board people that stalk me in the street and make me feel guilty as hell).

Publicis, working on behalf of Depaul, is the agency behind iHobo. Like the good old fashioned Tamagotchi, iHobo is your very own interactive homeless man, whose life you are responsible for for three whole days. Like Tamagotchis, this high maintenance iHobo needs you to provide food, clothes and small change at any time of the day of night or he could end up buying drugs or worse still, dying.

This 'game' with a message brings to light some of the key issues the charity wants its key demographic to think about, but in a creative way which really provides the user with a more tangible connection to the people it needs to help.

Depual, the largest UK based youth charity dedicated to preventing homelessness, needed a way to tap into young, affluent donors after discovering that their average donor is 65 or older. This has clearly influenced the decision to utilise powerful word of mouth techniques, social media, and a little bit of controversy.

Ultimately though, whilst this has brought the charity well and truly into the public eye, will the app make a significant difference to donations? I haven’t seen any stats on this as yet, but my guess is it will be a success. With the option to donate £1, £3 or £10 at the end of the three days, it seems almost guaranteed that anyone interested enough to download the app (210,000 as of last week) will be interested in donating at least £1 to this worthy cause.

Happy Birthday Pacman!

Procrastination has been taken to a whole new level today with the Google homepage being transformed into iconic arcade game Pacman, which for the record is 30 years old today.

I always enjoy a good topical Google logo, but this has to be my favourite so far; probably because it’s the first ever fully interactive playable doodle, and it’s had absolutely the desired effect. Everyone seems to be talking about it, playing it, losing at it and being distracted by our little yellow friend. Genius.

(Try inserting another coin to see Ms Pacman join the party. 2 can play using the WASD keys!)

Port in a social media storm

Once again I have found myself totally out of the social media loop recently, but there seem have been some interesting goings on in the ever merging worlds of PR and social media this week, which have given a newbie PR like me a lot to think about. Due to the nature of my new job, social media will form a large and important part of the strategic campaigns I will be working on. Where there seems to be a pretty standard process to traditional media relations with certain dos and don’ts, PR practitioners still don’t seem to have such a straightforward rule book for social media relations. It seems apparent that we are still learning.

If you’re not aware of the this week’s storm which saw one agency being heavily criticised for its handling of a client’s social media arm, I suggest you check out the blog posts below and interpret them as you see fit.

http://www.wolfstarconsultancy.com/2010/05/12/pr-doesnt-need-to-get-social-media-wrong-this-time-vodafone-again/

http://adamvincenzini.posterous.com/my-response-to-the-wolfstar-blog-post-pr-does

http://www.wolfstarconsultancy.com/2010/05/13/response-to-comments-on-vodafone-post/

I’m not really interested in taking sides on this issue (as interesting as that may be). I am however interested in the implications of this issue for PR and social media, and as Stuart Bruce said; “highlighting an industry problem, and working together to fix it.”

This matter really seems to stress the two sides of PR and social media. The public side, and the stuff that is, more often than not, kept out of the public domain. Stephen Davies, for one, has shrewdly suggested that one implication of this could be that social media is not actually *that* social. What he means by this, is that our identities on social networks are purely designed for social networks. They are not really a true representation. They are how we wish to be perceived in a particular domain or field. Whilst there is of course rivalry within the PR industry, it is not that common for agency bashing to appear in the public domain, it is more a behind closed doors kinda activity. But perhaps these discussions should be more ‘social’?

Budding PR and social media officers like myself should be keeping our eyes and ears open for incidents like this. Something we keep hearing about is ‘blogger engagement’, but clearly there are ways of engaging with bloggers that are more successful than others. I have always been wary of blanket style press releases, but I’m sure they have been shown to work in some cases with the right hook. It just seems that this takes the personal touch out of blogger engagement which for me is one of the main factors of its success.

V interesting stuff...

Follow the Reality TV road...

I have to admit, one of my favourite guilty pleasures of the moment is the fabulously camp BBC Over The Rainbow. Yes, I am a self confessed ‘friend of Dorothy’...as in I follow the show on Twitter, not the other thing.

The BBC’s latest search to find the West End’s next protégé seems to have reignited an old debate, that turning the musical theatre audition process into a reality TV show is depriving the professional trained performers out there of the lead roles they covet. Is it really fair that some people go through years of training, singing in the chorus and grafting to work their way up to lead roles, when seemingly an amateur off the street, who, like Connie Fisher, has been working in a call centre, can bag a leading role of a lifetime by appearing on a reality TV show ?

My very favourite West End Star, Kerry Ellis, who has just been tasked with filling the shoes of I’d Do Anything winner Jodie Prenger as Nancy in Oliver!, seems to think that Reality TV can only have a positive effect on the industry. After all, it is “bringing musical theatre to the masses” she said diplomatically on BBC Breakfast the other day. However, she also made sure to point out on more than one occasion that, she has gone about her career the “traditional way” and proved that it can work. But is Kerry just one of a lucky (but extremely talented) few?

Kerry also hopefully chimes “there’s so much work for everyone out there”. But this is in stark contrast to Sheila Hancock, who warned Over the Rainbow contestants that only 20% of people in the industry have work at any one time.

We should remember though, that as much as the media loves a good rags to riches story a la Connie Fisher, in reality, the majority of contestants on these programmes, have the training behind them before the audition (including Connie). Lee Mead had even appeared in the touring production of Joseph and His Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat before bagging the role of Joseph on Any Dream Will Do. The star has gone on to admit that the only way he felt he would achieve the success he was after was to go down the TV route. So perhaps the professionals should just treat reality TV auditions as any other audition, as it seems this is the direction the industry in going in.

If you fancy watching Kerry’s full interview see the vid below, if not, I urge to watch from 0:23 to see why Kerry has been so successful in this world!! I will be seeing her in action in Oliver very soon myself, I can’t wait!!