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Fortunately, I pushed the button! Today I don’t hesitate to confirm my past thoughts: Indeed! I already gained a lot from blogging! And do you know what? Recently, my blog won the Euprera Social Media Award 2010 for the best student blog at the European Public Relations Education and Research Association (Euprera) Spring Symposium in Ghent, Belgium. This year the University College Arteveldehogeschool hosted the event (I was impressed by the modern campus). Wow! I’m speechless and very happy about that!

Last but not least, I would also like to thank Anderson Lima who run the PR and New Media Module at Leeds Metropolitan University last year for the insights into social media and Richard Bailey through whose blog I took notice of the Euprera Social Media Award.

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Golden seashore, blue ocean made of sparkling breakwater, warm sunbeams stroking your skin – finally, the tropical dream came true. Unfortunately, not for me but for the British charity fundraiser Ben Southall, 34: He was one of the 16 finalists who recently spend three days swimming, snorkeling, diving and lounging under the close scrutiny of Queensland Tourism officials. They psychometrically tested the candidates for the ‘Best Job in the World’, the ‘Islandreef Job’ (read my recent posts number one and number two about the competition to get more information and the latest press release published by Queensland Tourism). Ben Southall staved off competition from almost 35,000 worldwide applicants to secure the post and was awarded the $150,000 (£73,000) contract beginning July 1 to serve as the caretaker of a tropical Australian Island. He now has the chance to swim, explore and relax on Hamilton island, in the Great Barrier Reef, for six months while writing a blog to (source: The Guardian). If you like to read his blog click here.

A successful social media campaign and its imitators

The recruitment for the ‘Best Job in the World’ was part of Tourism Queensland’s Islands of the Great Barrier Reef Campaign. The cooperative marketing campaign aimed to highlight the Islands of the Great Barrier Reef and showcase Australia’s own unique Island experience, to the global market (source: press release published by Tourism Queensland). I think, I don’t need to tell you again that influential newspapers like The Guardian, The Mirror or BBC or German newspapers like Der Spiegel or Der Focus picked up the story once more among other media. According to Der Spiegel the marketing campaign exceeded all expectations of Tourism Queensland: Tourism director Anthony Hayes is of the opinion that there will be more bookings within the next 12 month at the end of the campaign. Probably the ranger casting will become an annual event? In anyway, there are already imitators of the campaign: According to Der Spiegel Taiwan thinks about starting a similar competition to promote its tourism.

‘The moral of the story’

What remains to say? As mentioned in earlier posts the ‘Islandreef Job’ competition was a striking campaign idea which was based on some remarkable PR and marketing decisions like the concept of the admirable independent blogger like you and me, the integration of the audience in the voting and the content-rich website (read my recent blog post) and supported by social media tools like Facebook, Twitter and Youtube (read my recent blog post). Doubtlessly, a short-term campaign success. Will it become a long-term success, too? Only time can tell.

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Easter break + more or less nice weather = travel time!? If you were lucky you might have spend some days away from home. Wouldn’t it be a strange idea if every step of this journey would have been observed by someone? I think so. But there is one particular journey on which it can be very beneficial to keep an eye. Any idea? I think about the customer’s journey on a corporate website.

Web analytics tools like Google analytics, Omniture, Hitwise and Web Trends make it possible to track what is going on on a corporate website or corporate blog. This is especially helpful if the target of an online PR campaign is to drive traffic to these websites. The web analytics tools make it easy to identify where the traffic came from, for instance.

Keyword: online evaluation

But analyzing a corporate website is just one thing – the online environment provides other interesting opportunities to evaluate the success of PR work, too, of course! Just think about blogs, for instance: Regarding the corporate blog you can easily get an idea of how many people are engaging with the company by looking at the frequency of comments. Counting the volume of conversations, comments and track backs to the corporate blog is one option to evaluate it. Another possibility is ‘The Conversation Index’ developed by Stowe Boyd. This index measures the degree to which a blog generated conversation. Additionally bookmarking sides like Technorati or Kineda are helpful tools to measure a blog as the rank blogs according to their popularity.

The challenge of the online environment

Doubtlessly, the online environment gives versatile chances to measure online PR activity. The mentioned tools are just one part of an interesting, new working field (if you’d like to get a deeper insight into it, why not read my fellow student Jennifer’s or Sam’s blog). Nevertheless, I think it is important to keep in mind that the exploration of the online world requires a large dose of common sense, a structured approach and enough knowledge of the technologies that are available to help, too!

Anyway, I’ll set off for another virtual journey now! If I get across interesting PR topics, I will let you know, for sure!

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Golden seashore, blue ocean made of sparkling breakwater, warm sunbeams stroking your skin … Admittedly, I’m catched in this summer-like daydream again! I got lost in it for the first time when I recently blogged about the ‘The Best Job in the World, the ‘Island Reef Job’. The idea about earning £70,000 for blogging about the Islands of the Great Barrier Reef/ Australia while living rent-free in a three-bedroom villa, complete with pool on Hamilton Island is tempting if you look out of the window and all you see are trees and shrubs devastated by the stormy weather. Quite apart from the rain.

Wild Card candidate selected

But stop building castles in the air! I promised to keep an eye on the competition of Tourism Queensland for you. After the top-50-shortlist from over 34,000 applicants for the job was announced on the website some time ago, the Wild Card candidate for the final round of the competition has now been selected by the visitors of the website: It’s Claire from Taiwan. “Clare has done a remarkable job of promoting her quest for the Best Job in the World in Taiwan and has become an overnight media celebrity. She has been in virtually every newspaper, on every TV network in the country, plus online media and social networking sites”, says Tourism Queensland CEO Anthony Hayes in a recent press release.

All up 475,855 votes were received during the Wild Card voting process. Clare received 151,676 votes – almost three times that of her nearest competitor, Mitchell from Canada who received 55,532 votes, followed by George from Ireland with 30,372 votes.

A successful social media campaign

Influential news papers like ‘Der Spiegel’, Germany, reported on the progress of the competition again (just a quick reminder: the winner will be named on May 6^th 2009). As far as today the Island Reef Job seems to be still a very successful social media campaign. For instance, Queensland Tourism set up profiles relating to the Island Reef Job on Facebook, Twitter and Youtube (further information about Facebook, Twitter and Youtube on Wikipedia).

I’d like to pick up Queensland’s profile on Facebook as it is an interesting example to show that Facebook is not just a social networking site for students anymore but a great place for companies to communicate, too: Queensland’s Facebook page aims to help visitors share, plan and organize their trip to go there.

Facebook – a communication opportunity for companies

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With regard to Facebook marketing David Meerman Scott* names different useful ways to deliver information and ideas to a network of people who are interested in a certain topic of which two can be found on Queensand’s profile, too:

1. Friend-to-friend communication: In its personal profile Queensland is promoted as a amazing travel destination. You learn about the country and get reasons why it might be rewarding to travel there, for example.
2. Groups: Queensland keeps interested people informed on their profile (additional material include e.g. e-brochures and podcasts). Currently, it has got about 4.500 fans who actively take part in the communication process as you can see on the wall.

You see, Facebook can be an interesting marketing tool for companies. The following quote of Walter Doyle, CEO of uLocate, puts it in a nutshell very well: “People are sensitive to corporate content. It’s okay to be corporate if it is funny. Entertainment, fun, simple, and whimsical are all good.”  In other words: The experience on Facebook has to be very simple and devoid of commercialization. Indeed!

*Book: The New Rules of Marketing & PR – How to use news releases, blogs, podcasting, viral marketing & online media to reach buyers directly’

Did you know that London has got a premier blogging pigeon? You don’t? No problem at all! To be honest, I haven’t heard of it, too, until I started planning a trip to the city some time ago. I came over the ‘Pigeon Blog’ by chance while searching for insider tips about London. Since then I can’t get the interesting idea of a blogging pigeon out of my head.

So who is ‘London’s premier blogging pigeon’? His name is Brian Pigeon. He’s living in Soho, on Beak Street, right above Bistro 1. “Soho Square’s a great place to hang too, especially in the summer. Bread bits everywhere. Heaven for the pigeon”, he says in an interview published at www.londonist.com. But what the hell does a pigeon blog about? ‘The infamous Brian of Pigeon Blog fills us in on everything from why London rocks, what’s up with the squirrels and what happens when the pigeons party in Piccadilly Circus‘. Marvelous! I love the idea of describing London through the eyes of a pigeon in a blog! Reading Brian Pigeon’s blog was a funny variety while searching for tips for my trip. Incidentally I got information about the city, too, that were different from those repeating voices about London you find all over the web on official travel websites.

Besides the stories about London the pigeon blog tries to entertain with some pigeon videos, too. To my mind, the content is better than the videos, but that’s a matter of taste.

Tell your story

The pigeon blog is an interesting example for the nature of blogs: Blogs are written by somebody who is passionate about a specific topic and wants to tell the world about it. The blog of Brian Pigeon is an unusual one, of course – but does this matter? Yes, he’s claims to be a genuine urban pigeon describing the life of pigeon’s in London – but still, he’s an independent voice in the blogosphere, too. And as you can see from my trip-example, bloggers – whoever they are – became an valuable and important alternative source for information nowadays (I came across some other interesting blogs and unofficial websites about London, too. Check them out, if you plan a trip to London:, ‘diamondgreezer’, ‘london underground’,‘london.thewayweseeit’, ‘londonist’,londonreviewofbreakfasts’, ‘kudocities london’, ‘derelictlondon’etc.).

Blogs – a viable channel for corporate communications

But not only think about all the individual bloggers, like Brian Pigeon, who make their voice heard in the internet. Think about corporate blogs, too: Blogging can be an incredible tool for a company, e.g. to reach and inform customers, to generate talk about a product or the company as a whole and to build goodwill. While investing little – as a blogs are simple to set up – companies can establish strong and interactive communication directly with the customer (By the way, I really love the following truthful quote of David Meerman Scott: “If you can use Microsoft Word or successfully buy a product online from Amazon, you have enough technical skills to blog.”). Based on my own experiences as a customer I’m convinced that customers profit from the increased access to dialogue, too: Isn’t it a good thing to get more useful information and support from a company, for example?

Surely, blogs can be used in different ways by companies. I’d like to point out ‘The Three Uses of Blogs for Marketing and PR’ by David Meerman Scott (‘The New Rules of Marketing & PR – How to use news releases, blogs, podcasting, viral marketing & online media to reach buyers directly’):

1. To easily monitor what millions of people are saying about you, the market you sell into, your organization and its products.
2. To participate in those conversations by commenting on other people’s blog.
3. To begin to shape those conversations by creating and writing your own blog.

You see, there are good reasons for companies to enter the blogosphere (read more about corporate blogs at Brian Solis’blog e.g. post a) post b))! And never underestimate a blogger like Brian Pigeon – a voice is a voice, no matter who it is belonging to: it can shape the conversation about a company! Think about this excerpt from the above mentioned interview with Brian Pigeon: “How and why did you start blogging? I started the whole thing as a bit of a laugh really. Just the day-to-day doings of a London pigeon. Never thought it would catch on. To be honest, I wasn’t sure anyone was going to be that interested in a pigeon’s point of view. Just goes to show. Jesus. Last year I even got into the Time Out Top 50 London websites, and all I do is go on about stuff we pigeons get up to. Amazing, really.” Indeed!

Do you like to get a deeper insight into corporate blogs? Check the following links to get an idea how different companies set up their blog:

McDonald’s corporate social responsibility blog

Wells Fargo Blogs

Microsoft Community Blogs

Hewlett-Packard employee business blogs

Sun employee blog