mihnea miculescu

digital pr rants & a motley of tech blabber

PR catastrophe: Grainger Games at the GMAs

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Wow, this is an absolute treat.

This little retail chain wanted to get closer to the game media, so they sponsored this year's GMAs. But check out what their people did at last night's award ceremony:

 

Expertly alternating between shouting whilst sitting down and shouting whilst standing up, at one of the particularly coked-up chaps even decided to jump up on stage and start thrusting his pelvis towards the audience. 

 

But wait... There's more. You can read the full (and rather juicy) story right here. And then the organisers' very elegant apology. (via @vikkichowney)

Guardian open up their newslists to the public


The Guardian have just opened up their news desk newslists to the public, allowing anyone to see what their news desk writers have planned for the day (looks like they're using Google Docs). It's called Open Newslist. What's even more interesting is that they're trying to link it to Twitter:

You can tell us what you think of individual stories and suggest lines of inquiry using Twitter by tweeting to the hashtag #opennews. We will retweet a selection in the panel of our tweets opposite. Alternatively, try contacting whichever reporter has been assigned to the story by clicking on the link next to their name and sending them a Twitter message.

An awesome tool for PRs, I'd say! (via Andrew)

Think-Work-Play

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Think-Work-Play is a webzine that celebrates the creative process. It’s about showcasing inspirations and influences, processes and prototyping, editing and exhibiting. It’s about getting inside ideas and exploring concepts, where they come from and how they end up. The aim is to shed light on creative processes in different fields.

They've got proprietary content but also daily tips on awesome things to do around London - one of the coolest things I've come across is a concept store that I now really want to visit (apparently I need an appointment)! You can also stay in the loop via their Facebook and Twitter.

Some kinks in Facebook's armor

I use Facebook's 'business offerings' quite a lot these days and here are some problems I think they need to solve quite quickly. Before I go mad trying to dodge them.

  • Enable activity alerts for page admins (the usual notification system would probably do the trick but then again something hardcore would be much nicer, like being able to split your own Facebook account into 'personal' and 'professional' and get the relevant notifications for each one) - until then I'll have to live with NutshellMail and/or the more basic yet functional Hyper Alerts
  • Now that they're phasing out the old page insights (apparently it's just not recording any data from 2011 so that's that), they should probably fix the timeframe bug I keep seeing - if I set a timeframe to cover, let's say, the past 3 months of activity, it just returns a big fat error saying "Data Source did not complete: There was an error reading the data source. VisionQuest++ failed to start"
  • I'm soon planning to merge a handful of place pages with a proper business page for a client - however, there seem to be all kinds of risks (the most alarming of which is that some people have been losing all their data in the merging process). When Facebook announced the 'merging' feature, it mentioned that it's not reversible - however people are reporting that the 'unmerge' feature has been quietly enabled. Maybe it's a sign to just stay away for now?

Facebook Search with Booshaka

Twitter isn't the only network you should search through when you're tracking your brands, but then again Twitter does have the upper hand in making it all much easier by having scores of third-party apps to help you do just that.

Not anymore - check out Booshaka, a new Facebook search tool. "There's already Facebook search" you say? Well, I ran some comparative tests over the last few days and surprisingly enough, Booshaka did catch a few more posts. It needs more work but it's definitely worth checking out...