“I think it’s over-reaching the expertise of some mid-level employees to expect them to stoke a community when they haven’t been empowered to speak for their company.”

Sorry, what?

I really enjoy diversity on the internet and how different people can express themselves in distinct ways. And I really like how Twitter noise and clever phishing is nudging people back to writing essays online.

I know that some companies and pundits like to communicate with facts displayed as lists. It’s a natural evolution from FAQs and blogrolls to lists. Others might not like lists but that doesn’t mean they aren’t useful.

I think it’s over-reaching the expertise of some mid-level employees to expect them to stoke a community when they haven’t been empowered to speak for their company.

It’s up to prospective clients to make their own value-for-money determinations. That’s why it’s good to compare client references when exploring communications professionals who purport to expand your reach. It’s relatively easy to find communications and PR consultants at nearly every price point in today’s competitive market.

I’m off to make my Christmas list now. I think I’ll do it on Twitter and tag the folks on this comment stream as a start. Thanks for contributing your thoughts.

Community isn’t about transparently using people online to benefit. Marketing and online PR people in Ireland are still not getting this…

Giving invites to Irish bloggers and Twitters to blog and tweet like zombies using hashtags does not work.

In fact, the usual faces at the usual events organised by the usual people smells of shill and for sale.

Thank you for putting this into words. It badly needed to be said, and I agree with it 100%. Nice one, Alexia. I think there’ll be a big landing in the near future as more people become clued into what companies are charging for when they really, ethically, shouldn’t, and how cheaply some people sell themselves.

I don’t think you’re quite grasping the concept, I could be entirely wrong and I’m quite happy to be corrected but shouldn’t one of the main points of PR be to engage people rather than have them unfollow you, tailoring the way you do things to get the best result possible through feedback? Alexia is simply stating an opinion and rather than being courteous and reasonable, you merely restate your position ad nauseum and seem content to make yourself out to be the victim of a self-appointed elite merely because their view doesn’t agree with yours.
Yes these hashtags may annoy some and you can never keep everyone happy but by trying to do this with every market when there are other viable alternatives rather than upsetting people, are you not just allowing situations like this to arise when previous similar behaviour on the part of marketing and PR firms has caused irritation? And even if it wasn’t foreseeable, then it should be reasonable that there should be some amount of poise shown in how the end result is handled, something I haven’t seen.

I might be crazy, but this isn’t very good from a business perspective when you can’t engage with and make those who don’t share your worldview feel like there is some validity to their argument. People will always comment on what they find effective and likewise, the exact opposite so by deciding to involve yourself in the industry, you’ll have to learn to deal with criticism and be gracious about it

Let’s call a spade a spade here.

As someone familiar with the work of SZ, Ruby Card anyone, its fairly obvious they’re hacks jumping on the social media bandwagon.

I watch their antics and laugh, and move on. This kind of coverage (even negative) is chapter 2 in their “social media for dummies) play book. They’re already done with chapter 1 “write top ten lists for more traffic”.

Giving them this kind of coverage will unfortunately actually give them credibility and traction before their clients get s chance to really find them out.

The plan involved creating lists by way of bundling people from a hashtag topic, which not only proves effective, but also uses twitter itself (rather then using a form or other form of media on their website, etc.).

The only argument I can see for this being spam is by including a link to the site – but the link merely served as a way to explain what’s going on to people who might not know otherwise.

I wouldn’t equate this with the moonfruit idea of spam. Moonfruit was a bit of fun, and worked really well for them at the time (didn’t it go from 1 Macbook Pro to 1 per day or something?).

We’ve all seen awful online PR campaigns, and some god awful PR people mis-using social media in general. But I do feel SZ have done good here to be honest, by using the medium they’re trying to promote in the first place.

So what happens now? I write a story, Tweet it in the manner you have requested and it still gets 50 tweets like this http://www.simplyzesty.com/sz-news/traffic-techcrunch-send/
Is this going to annoy you as well? Seriously just hit the unfollow button and don’t subscribe to our blog, life really is too short. Our content is not for everybody by any means and I certainly don’t think it is in anyway relevant to you as you are a veteran of the internet but we often get posts like this http://swearimnotpaul.blogspot.com/2009/11/blogs-what-i-like-simply-zesty.html which is why we write the blog. Not everybody has as much in depth knowledge about marketing and business in general as you Lexia and some people actually want to learn about Facebook pages an menial stuff like that, thats why we write the blog.

The lists themselves were just a fun little project for the week. Nothing serious and a resource for people to use as they saw fit. You think they are spam, I think they were a little harmless fun…we are never going to agree on that.

The email from iFoods was actually nearly 2 years ago at this stage and I admitted at the time that it was a mistake and I thought that after nearly 3 years of giving content away for free you might have let that one slip and give me the benefit of the doubt but obv not Shame really.

I think Tommy hits the nail on the head here http://trusttommy.com/2009/10/22/the-irish-twitter-complex-2/

I am more than happy to talk in person about this but have no interest in getting dragged in to the usual slagging match online as I don’t find it useful, our opinions are too far apart anyway and I just want to concentrate my time writing content for our readers who do enjoy it.

N