Emerson College professor, Julie Lellis, has an exciting project lined up for her public relations classes.  Students will have the opportunity to devise a mini-plan for a client, outlining potential PR strategies and tactics.

March Communications has been selected as a “client” for this particular project.  As the client spokesperson, I had the honor of speaking in Professor Lellis’ classes yesterday, providing students with an overview of March and a specific goal we’d like to achieve, which is obtaining greater visibility within the media.

Next week, students will each be assigned to a client, and will have a month to compile a mini-plan.  A Q&A discussion board will also be created, allowing students to ask clients questions as the semester carries on.

Students will be graded individually on the ability to 1) effectively define a client problem, 2) explore the goals and objectives for a potential public relations plan, and 3) articulate effective strategy options that would combine traditional and non-traditional media options.

Other clients include:

• Fawn Heart Cronin Personal Training
• Jumpstart
• Lovehue.com
• Winslow Management

We’re excited to be part of a stimulating, hands-on project, allowing Emerson students to experience tactical public relations.  I’m looking forward to the mini-plans, as they may spark some great ideas for March’s internal PR.

I came across an article that warned us social media users about what kind of information you are sharing on the internet. A survey from a British based insurance company came up with some interesting results. It seems that 40 percent of the social media users are sharing their holiday plans and 33 percent are sharing their weekend plans. We already know about cybercrime and hackers, but social media brings another type of criminal, the social media burglar. It’s not difficult for a burglar to determine when you are on vacation when you are tweeting about when and where you go.

“Taking precautions like setting your home’s lights on a timer is great, but if your Facebook or Twitter account is shouting, ‘Loving sunny Florida!! Be back April 5!’ a potential burglar knows you’re not home,” said Kevin Smith, Webmaster and manager of McBryde Website Design.

Sharing information and pictures with new friends on the internet can be dangerous, but that’s old news. Still, most people are willing to share enough details about their arrival and departure to make it critical information for a burglar. Especially Twitter, it’s so easy to drag about your vacation plans and how long you take off from work. Facebook is a different story, you are able to lock your profile and make it just accessible for friends. But then again, if you have pictures of your living room and entire house, it can be used as a map of your house. And if you share your holiday plans on the internet, a burglar can commit the perfect crime.

I’m not here to say that we must act paranoid, and not trust anyone anymore, but the internet is a place filled with fakers and false identities. So, be cautious with what you share and who is able to read it.

Facebook and Twitter are wonderful social networks and will bring us to the next level of communicating, but in the wrong hands, it is possible that they can be used for criminal purposes.

By Mick van Est

The reports tell us where we aren’t and where we should be against competitors but that is only part of the picture when looking to measure PR.  It’s a great start and I look forward to speaking with Apollo tomorrow to dive in to the detail.  More to come…..

It’s commonly known that social media is the new tool to connect and reach your target group.  You might even say that we have entered the social media era and platforms like Facebook and Twitter will play the lead part in future business, as well as our personal lives. In Europe, Facebook and Twitter are gaining more members every day, which allows the U.S. to globalize their social media strategy and focus their international marketing on European Facebook and Twitter members. The social media branch is growing in Europe and is becoming an increasingly beneficial marketing tool for companies.

The article says: “According to comScore Facebook is the most popular social network in 11 out of 17 European countries. Other social networks are feeling the pain of the Facebook growth but still play an important role.”

Despite the size and success of the United States’ most popular social network, local European social sites aren’t struggling as much as you’d think. So, what kind of social media sites should you target? Here are some facts about European based social media sites from the article to help you:

“Skyrock lost a lot of visitors to Facebook, but is still a dominant player. It has 22.6m French users. 30% of them also use Facebook, but the majority can be found on this French site.”

“In Spain Facebook has become the biggest social network in the past year. Two years ago Tuenti was the most popular. Tuenti has ‘only’ 6.8m users where Facebook has 10.5m- but why leave out 6.8m users?”

“In Germany StudiVZ Group is still market leader.”

“Holland, one of the smallest countries in Europe has the most loyal fans when it comes to their home based social network. Hyves still has twice as many users as Facebook in the Netherlands. A remarkable number which can be largely explained by the deep roots they have.”

According to the Financial Times, the Dutch based Network Hyves has made a profit over the past four years. I am a Dutch citizen and I am not surprised at all about these results. Almost every Dutch citizen is found on Hyves, despite age or occupation. If I wanted to search for Dutch people for information about businesses, or just looking for friends, I would start at Hyves.

In 2008, I worked as an intern at Myspace Holland and was very curious about the development of social media in Europe as Myspace was establishing offices throughout Europe, mainly to gain more members. But what was supposed to be a 5 month internship was cut down to a two month internship. What happened?  Myspace Holland was supposed to beat Hyves in users, content, and advertisers. They pulled the plug on the Myspace Holland office since they only had 500,000 users after 2 years, while Hyves was still the leader with 7 million users, which amounts to about a third of the entire population of The Netherlands.

Facebook and Twitter are growing in popularity in Europe, but we should not forget that the home based social networks are still good functioning channels to reach your European audience.

By Mick van Est

Throughout the past five years, we have worked with technology clients of all sizes from all over the world, with particular expertise and focus on telecommunications, security, clean tech, enterprise software and services and consumer technology.

What sets us apart from the high-tech PR crowd is an intelligent and creative application of public relations to the rapidly evolving brave new world of ‘media.’  We have a strong European heritage and combine a knowledge of global business drivers and local and sector-specific expertise.

A BIG thanks to all of the March PR employees for their hard work and dedication!  Keep up the great work.

Former Golden Girls star recently announced that she will be appearing on Saturday Night Live.  The New York Daily News reports that White may appear in a special “Women of Comedy” episode with Tina Fey, Amy Poehler and Molly Shannon, but details have yet to be sorted.

Through the power of social networking, over a million fans joined the Facebook fan page/petition, “Betty White to Host SNL (please?!” after she starred in a Snickers Super Bowl ad.  White also starred in The Proposal, a 2009 movie with Ryan Reynolds and Sandra Bullock.

With social media, anything is possible!  Thank you for being my (Facebook) friend.

I came across an interesting point on Chatfé’s blog when Paul Orlando, CEO of Chatfé, described Chatfé as an antidote to the conversations sparked by smokers bumming a cigarette.  In my recent conversation with Paul, he said he thought that while NYC’s cigarette tax is a good thing overall, it extinguished a conversational spark that existed for the last 50+ years.  When people ask strangers for a cigarette or a light, it’s often an excuse to talk to someone.  Paul notes that, “smokers were members of a culture that had a built in mechanism to talk to another person without any pressure.  Now that that’s gone, I hope that Chatfé can bring forth another conversational spark.”

Chatfé recently won the Best Business Viability award at Microsoft’s BizSpark, for which one of the evaluation criteria was how it addresses a business problem.  Chatfé succeeded in this category, Paul notes, because the technology and platform enable individuals and businesses to engage with people in a different way where text is not enough.  People can have an opt-in, free-flowing conversation and go deeper into learning.

This past February, Paul presented at Dorkbot on his experience on what happens when connections are totally random and when they’re completely filterable.  Paul calls Chatfé the “reverse of a social network,” in that they’re working on getting people to speak to one another instead of relying on text and images.  They want to move beyond the popularity of things like Twitter followers, Facebook friends, profile images, etc. and bring conversations back to voice, surrounding topics people really care about.  Paul calls it a “pleasant wrong number experience.”

So who is Chatfé for exactly?  Well, on their website, they say it’s for everyone, including entrepreneurs, students, artists, club-crawlers, sports-lovers, and language learners… basically anyone looking to talk about different topics or spark a debate.  Paul mentioned, however, that they’re “exploring working with a non-profit customer who would benefit from using Chatfé technology to enable their members to connect.  A support group that connects qualified members confidentially and anonymously by phone would be a great way to do that.”

No matter how Chatfé evolves in the coming months or years, it is certainly a breakthrough concept that will be interesting to follow and see how it can be put to use either personally or within various industries.

That you can buy a ‘green’ car is nothing new. But, with the possible exception of the battery-powered, plug-in electric Tesla Roadster, your choice is limited to a set of largely-mainstream econoboxes: Toyota Prius, Ford Fusion, Honda Civic, etc.  There are exceptions to be sure, but most of these marques, while well respected, haven’t produced many cars worthy of a poster for a teenager’s bedroom wall or the creation of a special savings account to be emptied during a mid-life crisis.

But what about a green supercar? Manufacturers have been flirting with it behind the scenes for years, but it always seemed like a pipe dream: A car that can do 190 miles-per-hour AND get reasonable gas mileage? Where do I sign? Well, you can’t, because they don’t exist.

Well that all changed this week. How about a hybrid Ferrari? Oh yes. Well, sort of.

The latest trend to grace the world of cars, it seems, is the hybrid supercar. Porsche, Lotus, Ferrari and Audi, to name a few, all debuted new concepts for ‘green’ go-fast machines. None of them are actually commercially available yet, though.

But they sound great, right? Now you can be green and not sacrifice the fun factor. Unfortunately, some of these concepts still seem a bit too much like mere headline-grabbing PR vehicles (pun very-much intended).

I question, for example, the actual greenness of the Ferrari 599 HY-KERS concept. It’s a hybrid, yes. And Ferrari says, according to this NYTimes.com piece “Within three to four years, every Ferrari in our lineup will offer some version of hybrid operation,” which is great.  But the HY-KERS also has a massive 12 cylinder engine in it still. The normal 599, which uses that same big 12 cylinder, gets roughly 9 mpg (gulp), and the HY-KERS says it will increase that number by as much as 50%…to about 14 mpg then. That’s…not very green.

But what can’t be denied is that Ferrari really knew how to make the most of their new concept with the press. Because they attached the hybrid/green moniker to it and splashed it with some green paint, they got a boat-load of coverage for it. It’s a simple, clear example of issues response: knowing what the media wants to hear about, and working your message in to it. Obviously there are some genuine intentions from Ferrari to make the company more green by offering a hybrid version of every model in the future, but they’re a long way from actually doing that.  But what they were able to show this week is that they understand it’s important to be seen as an industry leader who is thinking ahead.

Man people generate a lot of info these days…..most of it just repeating what many thousands of others have also just repeated themselves!  I’d like to know how many more times the same information now features online since Twitter emerged….

At some point hopefully the chatter will die down and Twitter will emerge for what it seems most useful for…that being listening.

Chatfé, pronounced chat-fay – a combination of the words chat and café – is a new kind of social platform that lets you have anonymous phone conversations with like-minded people.  I recently wrote about Chatroulette, which may sound similar in that both services pair you with strangers to talk anonymously, however Chatfé doesn’t randomly pair you with just anyone, they match you up with other people based on topics you say you’d like to talk about.  Users are able to express interest in a conversation by adding topics to their conversation queue, either by posting a new topic or clicking on existing ones.

In my recent conversation with Paul Orlando, CEO of Chatfé, he says, “At Chatfé we are interested in helping make meaningful conversations that are also in the moment, so we needed to provide some context — that’s why you see topics — that’s the starting point for users to self-select into something.  Nothing based on pictures, profiles, gender, just what are you interested in talking about.”

Chatfé and Chatroulette have two other major differences.  Firstly, Chatfé is purely audio and conducts all interactions via phone, unlike Chatroulette, which incorporates video.  While you must user your own phone to conduct these calls, Chatfé calls both users and connects them to begin the conversation so that no personal information is exchanged and no one’s personal phone number is seen via caller ID.

Secondly, on Chatfé you have to register, whereas with Chatroulette, you just type in the URL and go.  The registration is part of Chatfé’s efforts to make their networking platform safe.  They continually state that everything is done in a secure way that protects your privacy.  Paul notes that, “If you try both, you’ll see that Chatfé and Chatroulette aren’t that similar. And there’s a time and place for both.”

Paul said that the idea to start Chatfé came from their CTO, Steve Wang, who 10+ years ago received a call from a wrong number, but instead of hanging up, he ended up having a great conversation for 30 minutes.  He thought: what if we could give people that experience whenever they wanted and let them ask questions, give advice, talk about whatever they wanted, in a safe and fun way?  And thus, Chatfé was born.

In my post on Chatroulette, I noted that some people have expressed a dislike for the service due to inappropriate behavior, and when I asked Paul if he anticipates any similar situations with Chatfé, he commented that, “the user behavior you get on Chatroulette is predictable and due to the fact that their site design encourages it.  It’s not that all the perverts in the world decided to go there; it’s more that the site helps bring out that behavior.  It’s easy to ‘next’ people and video means that decisions can be made purely on an immediate visceral reaction.  So, while it is possible to have a good talk on Chatroulette, lots of people are likely to hit ‘next’ before the talk even has a chance.

“I’ve seen statistics saying that the average length of a user interaction on Chatroulette is around 5 seconds, at least for men. But on Chatfé, the average length of talks is about 5 minutes. To me, that says that people are enjoying their talks and they are making the effort to communicate, listen, answer questions, and, in short, do all the things that they would normally do.

“Because of the way we built Chatfé, we haven’t had a problem with abusive behavior.  We don’t listen in, but we talk to our users about their experiences.  If there is ever abusive behavior and we get complaints, we can simply block the offending phone number.  So far, behavior is overwhelmingly positive.”

This is a very new and interesting concept, one which you’d presumably have to assume at least some level of risk when connecting with strangers to try and generate meaningful conversation out of thin air.  And, though Chatfé is still very new and was only just recently opened up to the public as a beta version, it’s quite common for social networks such as this to evolve over time as companies realize how it’s most being used, what it’s most being used for, what audiences make the most of it, etc.  Already, Paul sees potential for this to happen with Chatfé, saying, “It’s great to start with a direction in mind and the best companies actively listen to their users, learn and adapt. Just look at how Twitter evolved past its origin.”  Indeed!  So while it has begun as a conversation platform, who knows where it will be in a matter of years, or even months?

Stay tuned for part 2 of my interview with Paul Orlando, CEO of Chatfé!