Twitter is getting more traction also in Finland. Jaiku is fading away and more and more Finns are joining Twitter. (Follow me in Twitter!)
Now at least two Finnish PR agencies have been testing out how to use Twitter. Cision Wire Finland and Net Profile are both feeding links to press releases of their clients in Twitter.
Curretly these accounts have only handful or no followers. Cision seems to have created Twitter accounts to all of their Nordic markets. Netprofile is tweeting about their clients, so it is not really a PR wire. I guess these activities are mainly done for SEO at the moment. (There’s no traditional SEO value, because nofollow link values.) This kind of usage of Twitter is a quite traditional push-PR.
If you are interested to know how to use Twitter in an effective way for public relations, I recommend you to read about MicroPR. The main reason behind MircoPR is to force PR firms to approach bloggers and other social media voices in the open using open social flow apps like Twitter. MircoPR also enforces PR agencies to jettison the old press release model with all the claptrap. In MicroPR bloggers, journalists, analysts, send a public message @MicroPR when you want to reach PR professionals. This approach enables a broader, more effective network of resources for stories today and in the future.
I find it quite funny that the video refers Finnair’s management approach as blog-leadership (blogijohtaminen). If you are unaware of the Untergang meme, check the first(?) Untergang mashup about Xbox live.
The Finnish airline, Finnair, has been using their blog as a communication channel on a dispute over employment terms. This is a quite unorthodox public relation method on this kind of issue – at least in Finland. In the most recent blog post Finnair’s CEO, Jukka Hienonen, gets frank about the wage negotiation with Finnair’s pilots and their demands.
The corporate blog is a neat way for Finnair to express its views on this issue. The other party in this dispute, the pilots, is having harder time to voice their opinion on the topic. While pilots are resorting to press for expressing their views, their message is also filtered and toned down.
One interesting detail in this controversy is that Panu Mäki, a pilot, has reproached Finnair in Kauppalehti for not publishing his comment in the blog. Finnair has stated that they only approve short and brisk comments in their their blog. Maybe Finnair should have commenting guidelines stated clearly somewhere in their blog.
In the latest Alertbox article the grand old man of web usability, Jacob Nielsen, digs into corporate press sites. His study concludes that the situation with corporate newsrooms could be better.
As 3 studies of journalists show, they use the Web as a major research tool, exhibit high search dominance, and are impatient with bloated sites that don’t serve their needs or list a PR contact.
If journalists can’t find what they’re looking for on a website, they might not include that company in their story. Journalists repeatedly said that poor website usability could reduce or completely eliminate their press coverage of a company.
The study shows also dominance of search in information gathering. Journalists tend to use search as their first step. This is not a surprise at all and needs to be taken into account when designing and creating content for press sites.
Nielsen also hits the nail on the head as he questions the spend on outbound PR when companies neglect simple steps to increase the effectiveness on of inbound PR. Satisfying journalists who visit your website should not be that hard.
Äijäruokaa blog is writing about bad PR pitches he has received lately for a Finnish PR agency. It seems that some lazy PR people haven’t been thinking much before sending their mass pitches to Finnish food bloggers. The spam emails that they were sending look like straight out of the Bad Pitch Blog.
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