Brilliant. We hadn’t thought of this ourselves, so thanks for pointing it out.

Yet another media relations disaster for the coalition which currently seems to be reeling from one PR mess to another on a daily basis. The response from the business community has, not surprisingly, been one of fury, with David Cameron now holding talks with business leaders at Number 10 in a bid to “address the potentially damaging divide between the private sector and Government.”

Meanwhile, in other news, Rebekah Brooks has been charged with conspiracy to prevent the course of justice, once again dragging David Cameron into the spotlight given his relationship with Brooks and of course his former communications advisor Andy Coulson – see our previous blog “when a spokesperson needs a spokesperson”.

All we need now is for Greece to leave the Euro and the mess will be complete for this week. But hey, let’s not make a Drachma out of a crisis.

With many England fans eagerly anticipating the forthcoming tournament, the calls from the general public to make Harry Redknapp the England boss and to lead the charge into the Euro’s are still ringing in many ears. The FA must have its own reasons for appointing Hodgson but the backlash should England crash out of the tournament early might be painful to watch.

Essentially, England either has to win the whole thing or at the very least reach the quarter finals and do us proud, for it to be seen as anything but a failure. Typically, fans and the nation will initially blame the players, then the manager and then in turn, and ultimately, the FA for appointing the manager in the first place.

From a public relations perspective, had the FA chosen Redknapp they couldn’t lose. If England went on to do well or even win the tournament, the FA would have been seen to have made the right appointment and they, and Redknapp, would be heroes. If the squad didn’t do so well with Redknapp in charge, they could have shrugged their collective shoulders and said: “well, you wanted him” and the media would have very little to go on given that most of them backed him or at least fuelled the speculation that Redknapp would take charge.

Like the rest of the country, we’ll be cheering the team on in June, let’s hope that they do well and the FA don’t spend the rest of July with tin hats on, in the trenches, under a media barrage of “told you so”.

And we’re not talking about Z-list-celebs-skirt-blows-up-in-a-gust-of-wind-Marilyn-stylee stunt at the Soap Awards. We’re talking about the strategic campaigns that have been precisely planned and executed by the talented PR staff working behind the scenes.

Our favourites of the year so far have been the Tropicana sun installation in Trafalgar Square, which banished the winter blues briefly for Londoners up early enough to enjoy it in all its glory.

Then there’s the Castlemaine XXXX island that has been leased by the Australian brewery, who are now asking members of the public to decide how the island should be developed (the research trip alone would have been worth the potential ridicule from colleagues for suggesting such an outlandish idea).

The Anton Berg Generous Store also caught our eye (and made us a little peckish as an office of chocolate lovers) as the world’s first chocolate store where you could only pay with a promise of a good deed rather than money. Backed up by signing into Facebook and contacting the person you promise to do the good deed for, the video has so far racked up an impressive 70,000 plus hits on YouTube.

And we can’t talk about great stunts without mentioning HROC’s recent choice as campaign of the week, featuring a seemingly innocuous button placed in a sleepy town in Belgium.

Celebrating the launch of a new TV channel TNT designed to bring some ‘drama’ to local television, when the ‘push this button for drama’ button is pushed all hell breaks loose with a series of comedy antics unfolding too numerous to mention, catching the unaware pusher completely off guard. So far the video has amassed an immense 30,000,000 plus views showing what a little creative thinking can accomplish.

Seemingly, the age of the PR stunt appears to not only be alive and well, but is also a successful means of getting across your message to a wider audience in a memorable way. You only have to search #prstunt on Twitter to find more great examples.

Stunt activity is a fun and fast way of gaining awareness, editorial coverage and buzz about a product or brand. With the use of social media; news of stunt activity can spread like wildfire, meaning talkability can sky rocket while ROI can be easily monitored qualitively e.g. how may people are engaging with it, who is tweeting/Facebooking about it? Hopefully, if the campaign has been well planned, it will reach its target audience and more.

HROC’s most recent stunt took place at the Ideal Home Show for our client Geberit AquaClean – a state of the art WC that cleans you with water and includes a model that dries you also. The product range was launched at the show last year and, with no ‘new’ models to speak of, our brief was to re-ignite interest in the product and generate activity to create a buzz and additional footfall/interest in the stand.

Thus, the ‘Jubiloo’ was born (get it? Jubilee and loo… I’m wasted in PR). The theme explored the notion of the Geberit Aquaclean as a throne befitting Her Majesty herself. With that in mind, we drafted in the UK’s most qualified Queen impersonator to meet her loyal subjects, which tied in perfectly given that the HRH Prince of Wales officially opened the show (coincidence… I think not!). Throughout the event the Queen and the Jubiloo caused quite a stir with more than a few having to double-take.

Of course, stunts don’t always go according to plan and there are some horrible examples of stunts going wrong (we’re too kind to name any of them). Whilst the right stunt can make a brand, a wrong stunt can easily break a brand too, so it’s important that you have the right team behind the idea to plan it as precisely as possible.

But in the end, remember: ‘there is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about and that is not being talked about’ (Oscar Wilde).

Why are companies giving blogs the cold shoulder?

Reports have indicated that one of the main causes for companies not wanting to maintain a regular blog is the perception (misguided as it is) that blogging is a lengthy process, involving finding an appropriate subject, researching it extensively and then writing a blog about it. Most companies don’t want to give up that much of an employee’s time for something they have little ability to quantify.

With the emergence of Twitter so too came micro blogging – the ability to blog without the fuss of writing a full post. This is great in theory and can be used as a quick hit way to target key demographics without taking too much time. So it’s understandable that companies are favouring Twitter and other social media channels over blogs, right? Er, wrong!

Twitter and Facebook may be the premier forms of engaging through social media, but the problem with these platforms is distinguishing a single voice or opinion against a sea of noise – and sometimes with the extra challenge of doing so with a limited number of characters.

By having a blog to fall back on, you have three ways of having your opinion heard (throw YouTube into the mix and you have four), which not only results in establishing yourself within the framework of a conversation but also drives traffic to your site.

But blogging does not have to be long winded – in fact, the average blog reader only stays on page for an average 96 seconds, so it’s better that your blog is concise and shows a succinct argument that in some way asserts a positive opinion of your company to the reader.

Why Blog?

Where blogs differ from other social media channels is that they have the unique advantage of positioning a company at the forefront of an issue within their field.

The blogs you will find on our website are about creative, digital, PR and advertising issues because it’s what we know and do day in day out. By having an engaging opinion on something you stand out from the crowd and blogs allow you to convey this better, and in more detail, than some other channels.

Twitter and Facebook are great for quick messages but should always link back to a blog, website or some other anchor, and be used as a secondary method of spreading news as opposed to the primary.

Don’t get me wrong, blogs are not easy to maintain. We do it for a number of our clients and it can be hard work, but one of the primary reasons that companies cease blogging is because they underestimate the time blogs do take and set unrealistic blogging calendars, whilst overthinking their posts.

A blog post once or twice a month is more than enough to get you noticed by search engines along with your key audience and the sooner you realise you are not writing ‘War and Peace’ the better your ability to blog will be.

Blogging helps SEO

It’s true!

The more a company can update their blogs, the more search engines will take note of the constantly updated content and rank you higher in searches.

By effectively using Twitter and Facebook to promote blogs you can help build the mentions of your company on search engines but this alone is not enough.

Once the post is written and uploaded you need to spend some time developing relations with the blogging community by commenting on other articles that relate to your subject matter. This is in the hope that those you comment on will then link to your blog (if they like the content) and help promote it. This link building is one of the most important aspects of increasing SEO and fundamental to good blogging – more links equals more mentions which in turn equals better rankings.

Better search engine rankings can mean the difference between page one of Google and page two – incidentally, studies have shown that 94% of internet searches click a first page result with less than 6% making it to the second page. Something to consider before you pull the plug on your blog!

Final thoughts (in the guise of Jerry Springer)

Blogging is a vital (and mostly free) tool for companies to assert their position on key industry issues, share news stories about their company (in particular growth etc) and generally raise awareness.

Blogs should be over 250 words and less than 1000 words (250 to register as new content with search engines and less than 1000 so readers don’t doze off mid way through).  While the temptation is to use Facebook and Twitter only, by eliminating blogs you lose the use of one of the most influential platforms for generating awareness of your company…effectively cutting off your corporate nose off to spite your face.

Take care of yourself and each other!

Labelled Google Drive, the product will challenge the supremacy of established cloud service providers; Dropbox and Microsoft’s SkyDrive.

Google Drive initially offers 5GB (gigabytes) of free storage space to users. Customers can then pay for more space on a rising scale.

And although experts have questioned Google’s late arrival in the market, they are still expected to mount a huge challenge to established companies already providing this service.

16TB of storage can hold up to four thousand DVD quality feature length movies.

Live Your Life in the Cloud

Sundar Pichai, senior vice president of [Google] Chrome and Apps, released a blog post stating: “Today, we’re introducing Google Drive – a central place where you can create, share, collaborate and keep all of your stuff.

“Whether you’re working with a friend on a joint research project, planning a wedding with your fiancé or tracking a budget with roommates, you can do it in Drive.”

Users will be able to upload, manage and access photos, videos, documents and all other forms of digital paraphernalia to the virtual cloud.

Google Drive can be installed onto a PC or Apple Mac or downloaded to an Android phone or tablet. Google is working on an iPhone app for the Apple mobile operating system. They anticipate it being ready within weeks.

Users who are visually impaired can access Google Drive with the aid of a screen reader.

Hanns Kohler-Kruner from tech research company Gartner said:”Google Drive will hit some competitors very hard and shake up the market.

“It will also create another stream of more focused and potential ad revenue for Google around the content of personal files on Google Drive.”

Movies that have been uploaded to Google Drive will become available on Google+ boosting the appeal of the fledgling social network.

Fully Searchable Drive

Drawing on its search engine expertise, Google will hope to differentiate the service from others.

The Drive will be fully searchable by keyword and file type, activity or user. The service will also use OCR (optical character recognition) to recognise text in scanned documents.

This will allow users, for example, to search a scanned newspaper clipping for specific words in the newspapers articles.

Image recognition will also be possible in Google Drive.

“If you drag and drop photos from your Grand Canyon trip to Drive, the next time you search for Grand Canyon, photos of it will pop up,” said Sundar Pichai in the blog.

A user will get the first 5GB of storage free of charge.

After that customers can upgrade to 25GB for $2.49 (£1.50) a month, 100GB $4.99 a month, 1TB for $49.99 or 16TB for $799.99.

When users upgrade to a paid account, their Gmail account storage will automatically expand to 25GB.

Microsoft offers maximum yearly subscriptions of $50, this will buy 100GB of storage.

Dropbox customers can purchase up to 100GB at a rate of $19.99 per month or $199 per year. They also offer larger amounts of storage to groups of people. The amount of storage and costs are determined by how many users share the space.

Will Facebook Join the Fray?

As people look to access their digital content from a variety of places and devices the cloud service market place is likely to become ever more popular.

Dropbox pioneered the storage cloud concept, but now runs the risk of being undercut by its competitors.

Principal analyst at research company Ovum, Richard Edwards, commented that Google was “very late” to get on board but that its move could encourage others.

“Facebook doesn’t have a cloud service but this may prompt it into an acquisition,” he said.

“If Facebook was to buy Dropbox that would be a game-changer.”

As news of Google’s intentions spread, existing cloud providers overhauled their own systems.

Dropbox began to allow its customers to grant non-members access privileges to their files via email links. Before this both parties would have to be signed up to its service and share common folders.

Microsoft’s SkyDrive has now integrated the virtual drive into Windows Explorer and Apple’s Finder so that it can be used as an extension of the desktop.

Microsoft has also improved the capability to access content stored on the drive from iPads and iPhones as well as Windows Phone-based handsets.

As from May 26th 2012, the European Union’s Privacy and Communications Directive will mean that websites have to seek permission from their visitors before they can drop a cookie onto their computer’s hard drive.

Despite the impending deadline, when KPMG scrutinised the websites of 55 UK corporations, many of whom are FTSE 100 businesses, they found that most were still to implement the required changes, meaning that they run the risk of receiving a heavy fine that could be as much as £500,000. It was also disclosed by the IT manager’s association Socttm that public sector bodies and councils would also find it incredibly difficult to comply with the rulings.

KPMG found that, out of all the websites that were analysed, only one site gave its users the choice to opt out of having a cookie dropped on their hard drive. Two websites indicated that they were in the process of modifying their cookie policy to comply with the legislation, whilst two of the other sites did not use any cookies at all. KPMG carried out the survey in March 2012.

Stephen Bonner, a partner in the Information Protection and Business Resilience business team at KPMG, told Computer World UK: “With less than 50 days to go before enforcement, our analysis has found that the majority of UK organisations still need to complete substantial work to their websites.

“Whilst the majority of the websites we analysed made a reference to the use of cookies under either the terms and conditions or specific privacy policies, and some also state how the cookies are being used, this is not enough to ensure compliance with the directive.”

He continued: “Organisations now need to focus their efforts on establishing an inventory of their websites and the cookies currently in use, before evaluating their purpose and establish a pragmatic plan to ensure compliance.”

KPMG has encouraged organisations to make a start by implementing requests for consent that are related to registration, log-in and other comparable processes.

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has said that it is ‘vital’ that corporations start to make changes to abide by the legislation, and have recommended new guidance by the International Chamber of Commerce UK.

“The results of this survey show that many websites still have work to do,” an ICO spokesperson said.

“Last week the ICO welcomed the UK guidance launched by the International Chamber of Commerce. We recognise that this guidance provides organisations with a good starting point from which they can work towards full compliance.

“We are also receiving positive feedback from websites who are already implementing new and innovative approaches aimed at making their websites compliant with the changes. We will be updating our own cookies guidance to ensure that best practice advice is shared across the industry.”

As well as established businesses, the legislation will affect anybody who has an affiliate website, displays Adsense adverts or runs third party analytics on their site to track user behaviour and visitor statistics such as Google Analytics. It is yet to be seen what the full impact of the legislation will be, but the digital team at HROC will be keeping an eye on developments and will update the blog with any further news regarding the EU ruling.

The inaugural awards, in association with leading media analysis website PR Moment, celebrate the best and brightest talent within the PR community. Split into two regions, the award events were attended by more than 400 representatives from some of the best PR agencies in the country.

The award, which was for the Midlands, Wales and the South region, follows another trophy win for Best Campaign £10,000 and Under at the CIPR Pride Awards in December 2011, along with numerous other nominations.

Steve Sherran, Managing Director of HROC PR, comments; “To be recognised by our peers is a great honor and we are extremely proud of our Dirty Cash campaign.

“The campaign shows what can be achieved by some creative thinking around a low interest category and is also a credit to the talented team behind the scenes of HROC PR, who pride themselves on getting under the skin of every client and building great campaigns on their solid foundation of knowledge.

“We look forward to winning more Golden Hedgehog awards over the coming years.”

The campaign achieved an ROI of 450:1 for client BioCote and gained extensive media coverage in the UK and internationally, including features on CNN and NBC. The extent of the coverage firmly solidified BioCote’s reputation as leaders in the anti-microbial field.

Panda was intended to stir things up, and it certainly managed to do just that. This blog will take a look at the implications of the Panda update and what Search Engine Optimisers have learned a year on.

Quality Counts

One of the main aims of the Panda update was to penalise low quality content. The internet is full to the brim with interesting and useful content, but it is fair to say that it has amassed a sizeable amount of trash as well. Before Panda, the quality of a website’s content was never a deciding factor in determining its ranking on the Google results page, so a website with poorly composed and irrelevant information could rise high and enjoy top billing in Google solely down to a good optimisation strategy.

That was, until Panda prowled the web. The update was aimed at stamping out poor quality content and reminded SEO marketers that informative and useful content was what mattered, and search engine results would be determined by this.

Panda also concentrated on duplication of content as there were many webmasters that published the exact same articles across many different sites. This was something Google became unhappy with as the same content appearing in their result pages compromised the quality of its listings. Websites that contained duplicate content were hit very hard with the Panda update. In response to this, many of the so-called content farms took drastic measures by deleting most of their content and making dramatic changes to their publishing policies.

Did Panda Make a Few Blunders?

Regardless of all the hype and publicity that Google’s Panda update received, it was far from perfect and blunders were made. The algorithm changes did penalise sites that were guilty of containing low quality content, but it also affected a number of sites that were innocent of these crimes.

The websites that were wrongly affected mainly consisted of smaller businesses; this led to critics accusing Google of having a scatter gun approach to the little guys whilst turning a blind eye to the bigger corporations. To add to this, the update still managed to miss many of its intended targets resulting in a sizeable number of low content websites still ranking highly today.

What conclusion should we draw?

SEO marketers now know that the quality of content is king and it is more important than ever to make sure their websites reflect this. Panda has let a few sites slip through its paws, but the days of good optimisation carrying more weight than quality of content are largely over. Putting the accuracy of the update to one side, Panda’s main objective was to serve better quality results up to the end user and this is something that all SEO marketers should be realising and striving for from this day on.

Rather than waiting for the changes to be implemented and learning how to reuse your page’s features, we’ve listed some of the confirmed changes so that you can prepare for them beforehand. 

Here are 4 changes to look out for:

1. Cover photo

Say goodbye to the picture row on your page, a cover photo will now replace this. If you haven’t seen it yet on anyone’s profile page, it’s basically a header banner that spans the top of your page. To make sure your cover photo stands out, all profile pictures will be now be resized to 180 px by 180 px – significantly smaller than it used to be. Before you get too excited about the marketing opportunities the new cover photo feature provides, there are a few restrictions you’ll need to know about:

• Your cover photo is prohibited from displaying any promotional sales messages such as “40% discount” or “download it from our website”. Neither may a cover photo make use of any calls to actions such as “call us for a quote!”

• Facebook has also stressed that cover photos may not cite any of Facebook’s features such as “like” or “share”

• Cover photos have also been explicitly banned from displaying any information Facebook deems appropriate for the “About us” tab. This includes contact information such as a website address, postal address and email address

• Facebook also makes clear that all cover photos must be unique and so any activity incentivising or encouraging fans to upload your cover photo to their profiles is strictly prohibited

For a great example of what a business cover photo should look like, take a look at Macy’s Facebook page.

2. Pinned posts

The new ‘pinned posts’ feature enables you to highlight a story and expand it so that it extends across your business page. To do this, click the star icon on the top right hand side of your post. You can now also pin posts to the top of your timeline to ensure that your message will be on display in a prominent position for a week. So, if you have a message you don’t want anyone to miss – the launch of a new website or product, a promotion, or even an event that you’ll be attending and want your fans to know about – this feature will be a welcome change for you.

3. Milestones

The whole rationale behind timeline is storytelling, so to support this endeavour businesses are encouraged to share the big events that have happened in the life of the brand by creating milestones. From inception to product launches, milestones let you share your story with your fans allowing them to feel more part of the brand family.

4. Facebook messages

A long overdue change that Facebook has announced is the ability for Facebook pages to message its individual fans privately. Though this facility is enabled by default, through the admin dashboard it can be turned off. Previously, admins would have to message fans through their personal accounts to address any issues but that will all be changing, meaning that admins will be able to keep their privacy. However, there is an important restriction to this: fans can only initiate messages, a page can only respond once it has been messaged.

We’re excited to see the value these changes will bring to Facebook communities and look forward to seeing how brands will use these to strengthen their online presence. Have you started to use timeline for your business page? What benefits or challenges have you faced because of it? Let us know in the comments below or tweet us @hroc_pr.

Below I have listed a brief explanation of what happened and how a website owner can tweak their strategy to account for these changes and ensure they don’t suffer an unexpected drop to their search engine result page ranking.

Google’s image search algorithm received some minor alterations with the result that more relevant images would show in their recently expanded Universal Image Search. Plainly speaking, this means that image anchor text, descriptions and filenames should be tweaked to be more descriptive about the specific page’s content.

Accurate detection of ‘official’ website pages. Google hopes this adjustment will improve the detection of official web pages whether that is government, charity or simply a corporate main page. In plain English, make sure your website contains authoritative URL’s so that Google finds your official or main page. Many pages that were once misidentified as official (i.e. sites that targeted brand names or trademarks) will no longer be considered to be.

Improvement to the local search results. This amendment nicknamed ‘venice’ will deliver much better location targeted results. In short, if you are located in Birmingham, you’ll not have to worry so much about Wolverhampton-related results; the Panda update will detect results from a user’s location more reliably.

The ‘primary’ Panda update helped to make recent changes and updates to websites and blogs more sensitive; you should notice changes made to your website take effect much sooner. Ensure that your site’s content is fresher than your competitors’, this way your content will win through against others.

Google’s link analysis has been changed. The Panda update has done away with the old method that Google used to evaluate links to and from your website. Simplified, this means that you should make every link incoming to your site or outgoing completely relevant to the content it is linked to, thus maintaining a high relevancy score.

And finally…

… Google has tweaked their Turkish weather search feature, nicknamed ‘hava’ this update will let you know what the weather is like in Turkey should you fancy a trip to Istanbul.

In conclusion

The major updates to Panda 3.3 that could help or hinder your SERP rankings are listed above. Most of the other updates centre on user interface tweaks and other non-search specific features.

As usual, to avoid experiencing problems with the latest Google Panda update, make sure that you have good, relevant copy on your website and that you are linking to other quality sites.

If you always consider your visitors’ user experience when you are creating content for your site then you will be singing from the same song sheet as Google and won’t go too far wrong with any Panda updates past, present or in the future.

Search Engine Optimisation should be a cornerstone of your online marketing strategy, so if you have any questions or concerns regarding the Google Panda updates and how they might affect your search engine rankings, please do not hesitate to contact us, we will be very happy to help.