A common problem faced by PR Flacks is how to delicately tell your client that it is unlikely that their latest product  announcement will make the front page of the Financial Times.  With the advent of Social Media, I think we are now going to be having similar conversations with clients but this time saying no-one really cares enough about your brand yet to create content for you for free.

Denny’s, the American diner chain, recently launched a competition piggybacking on the current USA election campaigns. To be in with a chance of one meal at Denny’s per month until the next election in 2012, candidates need to submit a short video to the obligatory YouTube channel by the 5th August, in which they campaign for the ‘real’ breakfast against the fake fast food breakfasts. The top six entries will then be put forward for a public online ballot and after the 15th August the country’s best Presidential poser will be announced.

The competition is part of Denny’s “Vote for Real” campaign, itself a component of Denny’s “Don’t Fall for Fake” initiative which is based on trying to persuade people to have a real breakfast at its restaurants. The company kicked off the effort this spring using an election-themed campaign, playing off the presidential election, with guerrilla marketing tactics, PR, TV spots and in-store activities.

So a nice, integrated campaign, built on a nice relevant platform.

The Vote4real microsite for the competition is pretty well done, though a little light on content.  It’s interesting that it has gone with a traditional press release and not the more avant garde SMPR.  The PR team also seems to have done a pretty good job in raising awareness of the competition as part of the ongoing campaign in the marketing press.

Only drawback is that two weeks into the competition there are zero entries.

It’s difficult to say why there is such a muted response.  Perhaps the restriction that it needs to be an impression of either John McCain or Barack Obama has put people off; Perhaps it is that the prize is not the biggest or the shinest.  Or perhaps its because people don’t care that much about breakfast to spend time and effort making an advert for why Denny’s is better than other fast food outlet breakfasts.

Which is something Denny’s should’ve been told before spending lots of time and effort creating a fake campaign that no-one cares about

We’ve pulled together a little spreadsheet of useful feeds. You can add these to your feed reader to help you monitor what’s being said about you (or your client, or any issue that you care about).

Take a look at Brendan’s article: How to create a News Tracker with NetVibes for some other ideas.

This isn’t a perfect list, by any means; but for most people, it’s should be more than enough to get you off the ground. A lot of these feeds are hidden somewhere behind the sites that they come from; just try (for example) finding the feeds you’re looking for on YouTube, Wikipedia, or Reddit without using this!

It will save you time, too. Hacking about with the URL cuts out about a minute of painful fiddling on the site. This is the commando way to do stuff. If commandos fiddled around with digital media monitoring, of course.

We’ve included Kingsley Joseph’s Social Media Firehose – for a lot of people, that may be enough on its own – or already be too much. We prefer using separate feeds to creating one giant metafeed. Others don’t.

A note of caution

Depending on the search engine behind the feed, different searches can give you wildly different results. For example q="hello world" can give different results than q=hello+world. You may need to play about with this.

Your browser will convert non-standard “unsafe” characters used in search term (spaces, plusses, punctuation, and quotation marks, for example) into their safe equivalent. These can be recognised by the percentage sign before them, but can make the search term hard to read/create.
If something is broken, it’s most likely anything that looks like this.

%20 = (space)
%22 = ” (double quotes)
%2b = + (plus sign)

If you’re really determined to fix it, take a look at this useful tool for decoding/encoding URLs

The list

I’ve embedded this as a Google Spreadsheet (you can see the original here: some useful monitoring feeds. I’d appreciate any feedback on how this works for you.

No, this is not yet another post on the Long Tail but a look at two recent bouts of Twitter activity. Both were short term in nature and had differing results.

The first was the Inaugural Blood Drive Tweetup which took place on 3rd July, neatly timed ahead of annual spike in blood demands caused by the national holiday. An initial announcement went out on Sunday 29th June on the blog of Austin resident and blogger Michelle Greer. It encouraged everyone to sign up to donate blood between 10am and 4pm at a particular location and to spread the word by blogging, tweeting and joining the Facebook group. As well as generating a huge amount of buzz on Twitter and the blogosphere far more importantly it led to 100 donations that day, may from first time donors.

Hopefully those first timers will keep going back to donate and other people who couldn’t make the actual Blood Drive Tweetup donated elsewhere or will do so in future.

The drive received some mainstream media attention too and is a perfect example of how social media can create something of meaning offline that then also feeds back into generating more online conversation.

Verizon’s Twittering Teddy was also a short term engagement, using social media tools to raise awareness, this time of Verizon’s FiOS Internet service but seems to have been far less warmly received by some.

The Twittering Teddy is one of the DIY projects to be found on Verizon’s My Home 2.0 site and is basically a hacked Teddy Ruxpin which will speak your twitter stream for you, obviously enabled by the super fast fibre optics as provided by Verizon FiOS. For a brief two week period you could tweet directly to the original and watch the cuddly critter speak your tweet via the www.2pointhome.com/teddy site. After then it was auctioned on eBay for charity.

Apart from actually being fairly scary – really check the making of making of video from about 2.04 onwards and tell me that it isn’t scarier than Daleks – the short period of the activity really limited how successful this campaign could have been.

It seems the campaign was started simply by the teddy following 20 key people on twitter, followed by some emails with more detail, which makes the coverage it received impressive but I feel they could’ve have achieved more if they had let the teddy twitter on for a bit longer.

It does seems as if initially the campaign was going to last longer, an article about its launch in PR Week explained:

After 10 days, Verizon will auction off the bear for charity on eBay, while the virtual Teddy continues his spokesperson role via a Twitter page on the My Home 2.0 site, reporting from behind the scenes of the show, sending out links, and answering questions.

Verizon Hires a Teddy Bear that Twitters, PR Week

Which a spokesperson from Verizon’s PR company backed that up on the same article.

[We] needed a spokesperson, an ongoing voice that people will listen to because everyone is trying to come up with a novel Twitter campaign.

Jason Chupick, a PR consultant at Campfire, PR Week

Yet as stands, its last tweet was five days ago and it only has 370 followers and, assuming it followed everyone who messaged it, only 430 at its peak. Which means that Verizon has lost out on the opportunity to easily engage with those 400 or so people and keep them updated on the other various DIY projects the Verizon gurus are putting together. The short term-ism of the engagement has also led to some calling it a stunt, though I really don’t feel that was the intent behind the idea.

Verizon didn’t need to go quite as far as the example set by Burger King with Subservient Chicken, which first appeared back in 2004 but it is still there and ready to follow orders four years later, but I think it would’ve got a lot more out of its twitter engagement if it had lasted a lot longer.