It had to happen. It was inevitable. Rumours are abound on Mashable and Advertising Age that Facebook is adding location features this month, which probably means the end for existing location-based services like Foursquare and Gowalla. Facebook’s huge critical mass allows it to get to where its smaller rivals could only dream of being and at the flick of a switch.

For more on that and an interesting company called Sticky Bits, check out my Bullet Points blog post.

Informative piece on Mashable on how PR people are using Social Media for real results.

I often think about how I can make what it essentially an intangible (what Social Media calls ‘engaging’ with people) into something that is genuinely tangible (i.e. increases profit).

This article says a few things which are well-known to many (e.g. you can track keywords on Twitter), but it also outlines lots of good points:

·         Twitter should be embraced in multiple ways – “shooting out information, re-tweeting interesting articles in the space, participating in conversations and reaching out to security bloggers”

·         Blogging is still very relevant, especially to B2B PR as it goes beyond the press release and allows the kind of detail journalists often require

·         Brands that already have a great image can primarily use Twitter to build further loyalty through competitions

The article also looks at the red-hot topic of Social Media measurement. @joshdilworth (CEO of Jones-Dilworth Inc., a US PR and Marketing firm) claims to look at least 13 different tools when measuring the effectiveness of campaigns. If this is true then I applaud the guy, but this seems chronically time-consuming. I’m still dreaming of the silver bullet for Social Media measurement – one tool that gives a simple gauge. I doubt this will ever appear as it is like measuring PR: extremely difficult and highly prone to subjectivity.

Regardless of the measurement debate, this is another re-enforcement of the need for PR people to at least have a basic understanding of where Social Media fits into their role.

What do you think about measurement and the relationship between Social Media and PR?

Now that there are so many free and good quality blogging platforms out there, will traditional websites one day be a thing of the past?

Even traditional websites, where someone buys the domain name etc., tend to be increasingly simple in terms of layout. This follows a consumer trend for clear and easy-to-understand messaging and functionality on websites. Presumably this comes from the saturation of content we face on a daily basis and people needing to disseminate information quickly. The next step in the road to simplicity is surely blogging platforms being used more widely by big brands.

There are some things blogging platforms aren’t yet internally capable of doing; having a back-end e-commerce springs to mind. However, I wonder if one day e-commerce functionality will be properly integrated onto blogging platforms like Posterous or Tumblr. (Here is a head-to-head breakdown on Mashable between Posterous and Tumblr for those who are interested).

Using blogging platforms does raise certain issues over who ultimately ‘owns’ the site, but maybe this will become less of an issue over time. Maybe having the ‘.posterous’ or ‘.blogspot’ puts people off as they feel it dilutes their brand. You can remove this from the url, but it will always have reference to the blogging platform somewhere on the site. I personally don’t see that as an issue and, in time, I think the vast majority of consumers and brands will feel the same: what matters is the core content of the site and it’s functionality.

What do you think?