Posts Tagged ‘Twitter’

Anthony
LaFauce

Digital is More than Social

Friday, October 7th, 2011

ExpertsHere’s the setting: I’m at an impromptu networking event with some of the regulars and we’re all talking shop. Most of us are Digital PR folks, some program managers, some PR professionals, some video guys. In walks a new guy, whose sunglasses I’m sure cost more than my car, who immediately introduces himself and starts talking about what he does.

He’s a Senior Digital Whatever at Whatever Firm, a smaller shop around town I wasn’t too familiar with. All of us begin talking digital media–different tools, things we have seen work before and things that we know will fail. New Guy keeps coming back to social media, which is obviously an important part of digital media. But he fails to add any value to our conversation when we get to things like video editing, writing PHP and using mobile.

The group was fine with New Guy until, maybe after one too many Cosmos, he declared that all of those “old forms of digital” are worthless and the only thing that matters is social media. (more…)

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Kaitlin
Doody

Cracking the QR Code: QR is to mobile as URL is to Web?

Thursday, September 1st, 2011

You’ve seen them on the metro on your way to work. You’ve seen them while flipping through Time magazine. You’ve seen them on mailings you’ve received from your favorite retail store.

We even came across a QR code while on a tour at the Newseum in Washington, D.C., with our GLOBALHealthPR partners.

These pixilated square icons are popping up all over the place and they seem to be the cool thing to do – after, of course, you get a Twitter handle and a Facebook page.

QR Codes, which are short for quick response codes, are scannable barcodes that can be read by most smart phones. When the phone registers the barcode, you are then taken to the specific web page. It’s a fun, useful way for marketers and communicators to provide easy access to more information about your product, brand or company on the web. Here’s a cool look at what some folks have planned for QR codes in the digital healthcare space with a mobile hospital feedback system through the Health 2.0 Developer Challenge.

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Kelly
Barrett

BDI’s Social Communications & Healthcare 2011: Empowering employees to ‘play’ with social media

Tuesday, July 19th, 2011

Last Wednesday, I had the pleasure of attending the Business Development Institute’s Social Communications & Healthcare conference in New York City. It was the third year that BDI has put on the conference but one of the first times the event has included such robust case studies from industry leaders.

It is unfortunate that in pharma, we really don’t have many social media case studies to look at, yet. And this isn’t just because social media is new, because really, it’s not that new anymore (and what’s new today is old tomorrow). The problem lies more in the fact that so many companies and agencies are doing innovative stuff that they aren’t yet allowed to disclose. Here at Spectrum, a number of our progressive social media-related initiatives are highly sensitive and stay confidential. However, in the meantime, it’s inspiring to see all the ways people are finding to best socially communicate.

BDI Wrap Up from Zemoga on Vimeo.

(Pixels & Pills covered the event and they provide a ton of great video interviews that you should check out. And New Millenium Research & Consulting has photos up on their Facebook.)

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Kaitlin
Doody

Five Things I’ve Learned about Twitterviews [Twitter + Interview]

Tuesday, June 21st, 2011

The Associated Press says the world’s first Twitterview was conducted in 2009between ABC’s @GStephanopoulos and U.S. Senator @SenJohnMcCain. Others say there were earlier Twitterviews conducted as “long ago” as late 2008. Either way, in the past few years, we’ve seen the Twitterview crop up as another powerful digital media tactic for public relations campaigns.

Looking through the PR pro lens and applying the hands-on experience I’ve gained from organizing two Twitterviews this year, I have come up with some top tips to keep in mind.

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Anthony
LaFauce

It’s Not How Many People Follow You.

Wednesday, September 15th, 2010

twitter_spam

I am not going to lie, the other day I was a little upset when talking to some social media folks about twitter. I was introduced to a ‘newbie’ in the social media world and our introduction was, ‘and she has over 2,000 followers on twitter.’

I took the introduction with a smile and a grain of salt but I have to admit, it bugged me. I was with a group of ‘experts’ and they were impressed with the simple number of followers this person had. When I went home I looked through her twitter feed and followers (I have to admit I ran a few influencer reports on her) and found out her twitter feed could be viewed as ‘SPAM’.

Her feed was mostly ReTweets of news articles and tweets used to attract bots as her followers. Although this is a great trick for a news style twitter feed that is aggregating information,  for a personal twitter it seems a bit wrong. http://www.spectrumscience.com/blog/wp-includes/js/tinymce/plugins/wordpress/img/trans.gif Her account was analogues of what is wrong with many corporate accounts. (more…)

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Anthony
LaFauce

Twitter Can Save Your Life Part 2

Thursday, August 12th, 2010

twitter-bird2Several years ago when I was at The Social Times I wrote a blog post about how Twitter could save your life as a multi-channel messaging tool. If you take a second to look at the comment section of that post you can see there was some back and forth about the usefulness of Twitter (@Martin Ringlein).

Why am I bringing up an article I wrote almost 3 years ago? Today Susan Kinzie wrote a great piece about how innovative developers are starting to create tools to use Twitter as a method for finding people in distress. The article talks about an online survey the Red Cross conducted that reports that more and more people are using social media as a tool to find help.

While the article wraps up by saying that in an emergency the best thing to do is dial 911, it is great to see people starting to explore the ways in which multichannel tools can help out. Imagine tying in my Foursquare, Twitter, Ping.fm and Facebook page into some sort of Geo-Targeted/911 connection tool that would tell all my followers where I was, what was wrong and how they could help.

As an avid lover of tech it is exciting to see these developments coming to fruition. Do you have any examples of folks using social media or developing social media tools to help during a disaster? Let me know.

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