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Many public relations professionals who investigate Foursquare often struggle to grasp the usefulness of it or geolocation gaming in general. I would argue, however, that for any leisure, tourism or travel sector business, games like Foursquare can form a major part of their public relations campaign.

Geolocation gaming, where users ‘check in’ to locations and are “rewarded” with points and badges, is seen by many as pointless, or even an invasion of privacy. Others find automated Tweets and Facebook updates of check-ins annoying and tedious. Some voices just don’t get why geolocation gaming falls under the remit of public relations at all – isn’t Foursquare a sales promotion or marketing tool?

Of course there are grounds to this criticism, but my response is to remind dissenting voices that perhaps they don’t understand Foursquare because they are not its target demographic. In short, critics don’t get Foursquare because they are just too old to see why it is fun. Without this understanding, how can a public relations professional see why Foursquare is relevant to their profession?

The kids (and some big kids) like to play Foursquare and other geolocation games like Gowalla and Yelp. They want to see which of their friends is the biggest socialite. They find the tips their friends leave at locations useful and it helps them discover new things about towns and cities. They don’t care about privacy (and, yes, they HAVE read Orwell’s 1984). In fact, making public their every move is no big deal.

Geolocation gaming is not to everyone’s taste, but cold hard facts don’t lie. Check out the incredible rise of Foursquare in terms of the sheer volume of unique users: http://www.flickr.com/photos/wallofhair/4232092914/ . This is predicted to continue rising exponentially.

So why is this relevant to PR? Well, public relations professionals can use Foursquare in many different ways. Here are three examples.
- Many bars in the US offer free food or drink to the person who has checked in the most to their venue. Incentives can be given to the mayor of any venue. Imagine a fun version of Tesco Club Card and you might be getting close to what Foursquare can offer business
- From a reputational point of view, restaurants, bars, gyms and pretty much any organisation with a physical location needs to keep an eye on Foursquare and find out what others are saying about their company. If tips on the site are negative then this reputational issue needs to be addressed. Likewise the leaving of positive comments can be encouraged, like a virtual guestbook in a hotel or restaurant. Foursquare can provide third party endorsement
- The leisure, travel and tourism industries can use Gowalla in a slightly in a slightly different way. This platform has “trips” which users can take. I could for example, take the London Pub Crawl or the Frank Lloyd Wright Tour. Any organisation in the travel sector can upload a trip, giving them the opportunity to promote their resort.

Further reading
- Foursquare was created by Dennis Crowley. I’ve corresponded with him over email. He’s a nice guy.
- There is some more interesting information on Foursquare in this presentation. Not all the slides are relevant, but have a look if you are interested:

- Foursquare has just signed this interesting deal as detailed in the Daily Telegraph: l
- Facebook is predicted to acquire Foursquare or one of the other geolocation games. Or bring out its own. Geolocation gaming is not going away
- Here are some interesting tips for Foursquare virgins
- This New York Times provides some interesting background on Foursquare:
- Foursquare is going to appeal more and more to young hipsters who enjoy celebrities, music and other frivolity. Just look at this deal with major US entertainment companies:
- This blog adds some more meat to the pro-Foursquare bone
- Programmers have created applications using Foursquare such as this one

Every so often, something occurs which shows why social media has to be integrated with other areas of PR expertise, such as reputation management.

Issues with errant tweeting, as experienced by Vodafone on Friday afternoon, illustrate why so many larger organisations are still as skittish around social media as a Chelsea player taking his wife to a John Terry pool party.

Vodafone typically uses its Twitter account to dispense technical advice and deal with customer service queries so its followers were probably aware that the overly informative Tweet about homosexuals and a desire for ‘large semi-aquatic rodents’ was unlikely to be official corporate policy.

The company responded quickly and admirably, replying to almost every ReTweet of the original message with a personal response explaining: “We weren’t hacked. A severe breach of rules by staff in our building, dealing with that internally. We’re very sorry.”

Simple, honest, apologetic and, most crucially, indicates that Vodafone has a social media policy. It was breached, the same way that email policies can be breached or employees can ignore that rule about not punching colleagues in the face.

The company’s actions simply indicated: ‘No social media crisis here. Move along.’

www.data.gov.uk launched today, which sees the government join – and arguably take a lead in – the ‘open data revolution.’

You can read all about it here and at the site’s own blog.

At time of writing the web site was crashing and no doubt there will be lots of coverage on another Government failure.  However, at its launch there are bound to be glitches and to focus on the negative would be the narrow minded thing to do.  Let’s instead look at something all together more interesting.

What does this mean for the vast majority of UK businesses?  It means that more data than ever is available.   The availability of ‘perfect information’ is one of the key tenets of the free market, so making this content available is arguably going to create efficiencies.

Crucially, third party developers can now create their own applications to process the data.  These are then uploaded onto the site and available to all.  There are already applications available such as this one which looks at house prices.

From a PR and marketing perspective there are two immediately interesting considerations:

• Does the ability to build applications for clients present a commercial opportunity?  For example, agencies could build an augmented reality tourism guide for UK cities, which might be ideal for hotels, or leisure sector organisations?  Consultancies might choose to create an ‘economic report’ application, for accountancy firms or banking clients.  There are endless options here for consultancies to consider.

• Is the site a risk for the Government that could backfire?  For example, how will the Government be able to manage the development of third party applications?  How long will it be until, say, the Conservative party build an application which turns the Government’s own data on itself?  We have already seen The Guardian use crowd sourcing to examine MPs expenses and this sort of content will be much easier to create thanks to this website.  Will the Government fall on its sword?  Or, will a mischievous anarchist group or a terrorist organisation build applications which can be used against the state.  Imagine the negative headlines!

The latter point, of course, is the product of an over fertile imagination and one would think that the Government has already weighed up the risks.

Launching the site is a brave move and let’s hope that it proves to be successful.  The Office of National Statistics’ website was always slow and clunky to interrogate.  It helped if users had a grasp of advanced statistics, to really make the data work for you.

Now, via the third party applications, access to data should be a lot easier.

‘Homeworking’ just hit a bit of a benchmark throughout the region.

Britain doesn’t do extreme weather very well and, unless you really like risk, using a car wasn’t a great choice in the worst snow the North West has seen for decades. First thing this morning, public transport websites were crashing faster than a philandering golfer.

Like many Manchester PR agencies, Citypress employs a number of people who live in the city centre. Without the need to consult confusing fake social media sites for travel information, the biggest barrier to those commuting on foot was trying to avoid dozens of people shuffling through the slippery conditions, looking at their feet while shouting ‘Yeah, it’s really snowing!’ into a ‘phone.

In the suburbs it’s safe to say that the email subject line ‘working from home’ was quite popular. A high percentage of employees in the region put the kettle on and took their technological connectivity for granted, answering emails with one thumb while stirring their tea.

At the beginning of the last decade, not being at your desk meant more disruption. Putting in calls to clients, ‘getting stuff in your book’ and writing press releases – on a PC if you were one of the 30 per cent of households sporting a home computer 10 years ago (compared to almost 80 per cent at the end of the ‘noughties’).*

You would even have been able to email your work to the office via dial-up if you were among the 10 per cent of early adopters who had an internet connection. Even then, sending anything larger than a web document took hours, a stark contrast to this morning when everyone on Twitter had posted a picture of their road/car/balcony/driveway by 8am.

None of these things are a modern concern for the snowed in PR person. ‘Working from home’ is such a seamless transition that we barely think about what impact, if any, it will have on our ability to do our jobs or for clients to contact us. Direct telephone lines re-routed, smartphones in hand, you don’t really even need a desk.

Of course this is all totally relevant if you work for a PR agency in Manchester and absolutely no use at all if you’re a bus driver.

*Office for National Statistics

‘Tis the season to be jolly. Has been for a while if you count how many times you’ve heard Slade since October.

So let’s mock the world of social media similes, but in a festive way.

We can call it ‘Jingle Bell Jargon’.

There’s nothing wrong with a good simile, plenty of people use them very effectively in tweets, blogs, presentations and meetings. It’s just that the world of social media does seem to spawn some hilarious ones. You’ll have seen them promoted by people with 45,000 Twitter followers and user names such as @SocialMediaGuruSEOPRspecialist.

“Social media is like a slot machine” is a new favourite – unearthed when trawling Google recently. But, this isn’t going to be a list of the funniest similes already in existence, that’s way too subjective.

Instead, via the mini-crowdsourcing mechanic of texting a few Manchester PR colleagues, here is the Citypress Top 10 Totally Made Up Christmas Social Media Similes 2010:

1. Social media is like Santa’s sack. You have to be good to get the best presence (see what we did there?)

2. Twitter is like a massive turkey waiting to be carved. If you serve up too much on one plate, no-one will be interested when you offer any more.

3. A Facebook friend is like an eager child, waiting to check the tags on all the presents under its tree of followers.

4. YouTube is like an advent calendar. Every day you open a new moving window of fresh knowledge.

5. Bringing social media knowledge to the meeting table is like being the Wise Man who carried the myrrh. No-one quite knows what it is but it’s the talk of the stable.

6. Managing a good LinkedIn profile is like carol singing. Hit all the right notes and people will open the door to you.

7. Talking about social media is like hanging decorations – you have to get the right balance or your tree will fall over.

8. Twitter is like Quality Street – not everyone likes every tweet in the tin.

9. Google is like Father Christmas. It knows what you want and whether you’ve been bad or good.

10. Getting social media wrong is like smashing a snow globe. All the parts are there but you’ve ruined its charm.

Are you groaning yet? I hope so. The alternative is nodding sagely and cutting and pasting one of those into a presentation or Twitter update.

If you feel the need to add your own please use the hashtag #jinglebelljargon.

Season’s Greetings.

I’m loath to second guess Rupert Murdoch.

It’s easy to dismiss his recent strop over Google and YouTube as the ramblings of a 78-year-old media mogul woefully out of touch with the digital age.

But this is a man worth billions, one who successfully monetised pay per view football when many doubted it would work and, despite the apparent failure of his $580 MySpace acquisition, he must have a genius long term strategy.

Surely?

He says he is in favour of the micro payments route – online pence removed from your digital purse for reading articles from The Times, The Sun, The News of the World and hundreds of other titles in his empire.

But micro-payments is the model publishers should have introduced 10 years ago, before they gave away all their content for free and began price wars and DVD cover offers which further eroded our loyalty to one print newspaper yet ensured that we had a copy of Where Eagles Dare to stick on while we sleep off our Sunday roast.

Although the music industry was slow and litigious in its response to online file sharing, there are now pay models, such as iTunes, which work to a degree. There will always be piracy.

And that is what Murdoch claims he is dealing with….

Piracy – outright theft of News Corp content.

Except Google isn’t stealing his content, it is aggregating it, sharing it. To read the NOTW’s latest revelation that there is an X Factor crisis I still have to land on a News Corp site, where the publisher can then ask for my payment.

So did we just ‘steal’ that content or direct you to it?

Murdoch may as well ask WH Smith to tell customers not to glance at a print edition of The Sun if they aren’t going to buy it. Google, like the newsagents’ shelf, is the shop window for his product.

Bloggers and Twitter users are potential street sellers, shouting out headlines to an online audience.

Yet Murdoch is still talking about removing News Corp titles from Google AFTER any pay walls are in place.

There seems to be absolutely no logic to that.

Unless being anti-Google as well as anti-BBC is Murdoch having fun and generating global PR to further his long term aim of using new best mate David Cameron (if elected) to slash BBC budgets and push for fresh online regulation to protect his content.

Because for micro-payments to really work, all Murdoch’s rivals need to follow suit, and his online ‘competition’ is hard to define and counteract with new legislation. Google is the key. If he can force it to the table to account for unproven crimes then he can get the biggest online player in a defensive position over regulation.

For instance, Murdoch openly hates the BBC for its ability to launch new digital ventures such as iPlayer and give away its content without the commercial pressures faced by publishers who rely on advertising.

But remove the BBC from the equation and you still have millions of online consumers who will happily take similar free news and gossip to that found in a News Corp title from any number of other sites or blogs. Even proposed ‘paid for’ content from a columnist such as Jeremy Clarkson or a chequebook exclusive will hit someone’s blog soon enough.

And Murdoch knows this. He needs to create a villain in the all powerful Google because the BBC, whatever faults it may have, is still much loved in the UK – kicking it too hard is like repeatedly punching Bruce Forsyth in the face.

David Cameron should be nervous. Murdoch’s sharks are tearing their last pounds of flesh from Gordon Brown and heading his way.

They’ll expect to be fed.

I smell a digital media conspiracy.

And it goes a little something like this.

Buoyed by the web hits created by Sachsgate in 2008, shadowy online content czars representing each of the UK’s main media outlets meet somewhere secret.

On their agenda is just one topic, to discuss how such snowballing scandals can replace the outmoded fallbacks of Princess Diana and Big Brother, which have served their printed front pages so well.

They hatch a plan. It involves a new breed of media consumer they call the Twitterati – crucial for fuelling the scandal – and an idea stolen from America, where partisan commentators such as Glenn Beck have given up on reporting news and decided to become the story, realising that this is quicker than waiting for the next celeb to stumble into their fake outrage trap.

Silently, the Daily Mail’s czar summons Jan Moir.
Despite being a meeting of digital minds there is a low-tech National Lottery draw feel to proceedings and Jan plucks a ball from the modified bingo machine.

It reads ‘Gay Scandal’.

She nods gravely and steps down to make way for The Times’ AA Gill. His face breaks into a grin as he sees ‘Dead Baboon Scandal’ on his.

Next up is The Guardian’s Charlie Brooker. He triumphantly holds up his choice in the light like a Hobbit with a quest. It states ‘Jan Moir Scandal’.

And so it begins.

The digital age of scandal after media scandal.

One columnist implements it, a hashtag is born, another columnist covers it. A bazillion page impressions for everyone later we move on.

To Richard Littlejohn.

Sat in his car outside a pet shop with a lottery ball which simply instructs: ‘Punch a kitten’.

Public relations. It’s not about Champagne and glitzy nights.

Well, not at Citypress.

Granted, we are acquainted with both occasionally, but it isn’t at the Paris Hiltonesque rate that flits across the average mind when you tell people that you work in PR.

In fact, with the agency headcount growing to 30 people, socialising en masse has become a bit unwieldy.

But, to paraphrase Frank Gallagher, we still know how to throw a party – 12 of them actually. Dinner parties.

October sees everyone at Citypress tie their apron strings for our second annual Come Dine with Me competition.

If you’re familiar with the cult Channel 4 show you’ll appreciate how competitive a pleasant evening of food and drink can get.

But on TV there’s only five contestants. We have four groups of six people cooking in pairs. We’re catering for vegetarians, coeliacs and people who live in Chorlton.

All of this culminates in a Grand Final in November. Liposuction in December.

We’ll embarrass the winners next month.

You may be familiar with the concept of the ‘so bad it’s good’ movie.

I don’t want to cast aspersions on what, for many, may be favourite films, but Keanu Reeves and the late Patrick Swayze are two of the genre’s key actors, making Point Break the benchmark film. This is fact.

But I’m not sure it works as a marketing ploy, even when the explosion in sharing digital content allows both good and bad campaigns to make an impact.

Whereas many truly awful campaigns once died on the daytime TV circuit, today’s worst examples are emailed, Tweeted or have Facebook groups dedicated to mocking them.

One recent example is so bad that it’s tempting to dismiss it as a spoof. Unfortunately it’s not. The Windows 7 ‘launch parties’ video on YouTube is over six minutes of marketing so knuckle-bitingly cringeworthy that I challenge you to get to the end.

The official version has had nearly one million views but adding comments has wisely been disabled. Remarks below this unofficial version reveal why.

While Apple continues to redefine cool with its products and marketing, Microsoft has chosen to promote one of its core launches with a cheap looking campaign seemingly devised by a team of Apprentice hopefuls. I can hear Alan Sugar now.

As a contrast, look what this group of French Canadian students produced to promote their university in Montreal. Cheap, effective, over a million views.

It isn’t even an original idea. Just a good one, well executed.

There is a word which describes what the Conservatives are trying to do by linking the UK’s inner city drug problem to cult US TV drama ‘The Wire’.

Verisimilitude.

Apologies. I know it’s unpronounceable and looks like an excuse to use a big word but it describes what shadow home secretary Chris Grayling was attempting to generate when drawing the comparison. It is what any solid campaign needs for credibility and clarity.

But there’s a fine line between verisimilitude and marketing nonsense – for instance, does anyone believe David Beckham would get excited about a pen that isn’t jewel encrusted and only works with ink extracted (sustainably) from a rare squid?

And that’s part of the problem with the Conservatives evoking a cult TV series constantly plugged by The Guardian. It smacks of one too many ‘blue sky’ sessions at Millbank where ‘no idea is a bad one’ and everyone is giddy at the thought of Government. It’s just a little bit too try hard.

Can we expect Gordon Brown to stumble out of Number 10 in a vest, dressing gown and slippers to fetch his paper as he enters what his makeover people call ‘Operation Soprano’. After all, someone paid $11,000 for this.