This month the SABRE Awards, which celebrate the very best and brightest in PR over the last year, announced it’s long-awaiting shortlist.
Onlinefire and its sister agency Eulogy! had an amazing four campaigns shortlisted. The quality of the entrants was incredibly high and given the strong level of competition – there were more than 1,600 entries overall, of which only 20% were finalists – we’re really chuffed to have achieved what we have.
Onlinefire’s ’30 Peas’ campaign, which brought home a CorpComms award for Best Digital Campaign last year, has been short-listed in the Consumer Marketing (New Product) category, whilst Eulogy! has also been shortlisted for its campaigns for Comedy Central, the Post Office and Mortascreen.
This is a fantastic achievement and a testament to the hard work everyone’s put in to make these campaigns stand out amongst their competitors.
Plus, it means another awards ceremony and, judging by celebrations at last year’s PRCA Awards, we certainly know how to enjoy one of those!
So all that’s left to be said is well done Onlinefire and Eulogy! – fingers and toes crossed for success!
We just wanted to wish a very heartfelt congratulations to Eulogy!, our wonderful sister agency in this crazy PR World.
Why, you ask?
Well, the PR Week Top 150 Leagues came out this week and moved up an astounding EIGHT places on 2009. They now reside at number 57 in the Top 150. And in the Top 50 Independents, they’re at number 21 – up 4 places from 25 in 2009. Well done everyone!
—Andrew
Unless you were under a cloud of volcanic ash (oh, wait…), you’ll have known that last night saw the UK’s first ever leaders’ debate on ITV. The event, despite an Icelandic volcano’s best efforts, has dominated the news agenda across all media platforms for the last week.
Online opinion tracker Tweetminster provided consistently interesting facts throughout proceedings and in the aftermath with regards to interest in the debate on Twitter. Throughout the debate, a staggering 35,483 people tweeted 184,396 times, with an average frequency of 29.06 tweets per second.
To put that into some form of context, that’s fifteen times more tweets than were seen for #askthechancellors and almost triple the volume of tweets posted during BNP leader Nick Griffin’s infamous appearance on Question Time – both of which saw significant surges in interest themselves.
Admittedly, in the context of the entire UK population those figures seem less impressive. However, they still do add to the belief that - in social media circles - the appetite for political consumption is there.
What these debates and the interest around them have demonstrated, is that while social media isn’t a direct replacement for other media, it’s a hugely engaging complement to other platforms.
The observations provided on Twitter, even though much of it was superficially commenting on the state of the leaders’ make up or what they were scribbling on their notes, made the leaders’ debates incredibly exciting.
The TV debate on its own may have made for relentlessly dull viewing (BBC Parliament, anyone?), but Twitter added a whole new dimension, providing an outlet for discussion and amusing insight not just from your average Joe, but from people in power, too. Throughout the debate I was enlightened of the real-time thoughts of Alistair Campbell, the Evening Standard’s deputy political editor Paul Waugh and MPs John Prescott and William Hague.
What other aspect of the media could offer such close insight?
The leaders’ debate was part of a continuing acceptance that engagement in politics means more than simply voting at a ballot box. People are interested and engaged, but just in increasingly complex ways, including social media.
This interest in the leaders’ debates, be it superficial or not, can only be seen as a positive. Millions of people tuned in to the debate on TV and thousands of those cared enough to express some form of opinion. In the world of low voter-turnouts and sentiment for politicians being at its lowest ebb, that can only be a good thing.
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—Andrew Boyers
The General Election is unlikely to be dominated by social media, as it was in the 2008 American presidential election. It will, however, be the first in this country to be influenced by its presence. One only has point to Barack Obama’s success to see the benefits of using social media as a grassroots support tool. While millions of dollars were raised and on-the-ground activists united behind Obama, I did not detect much political discourse permeating through the official channels of his social media platforms. Arguably, the opposite is the case in the UK - little political online activity in this country is aimed at recruitment and fundraising. There are, however, a number of politicians and commentators who seek to communicate with voters and influence the political agenda through social media - @kerrymp, @torybear, and @campbellclaret, to name just three.
Indeed, both the major party leaders, David Cameron and Gordon Brown, have sought to harness social media with their own viral video efforts – Webcameron and the Number 10 YouTube channel – with debatable degrees of success.
It’s fair to say that politics and social media in the UK is still the preserve of a comparatively small group of people either inside the Westminster bubble itself, or those with a strong interest in what’s going on in the corridors of power.
However, discourse within that small group is having an impact on a wider scale – and much of that conversation is generated through social media. For example, many people will have seen the numerous parodies of the David Cameron ‘We can’t go on like this’ Tory posters generated by @mydavidcameron and documented in the wider press.
Even at this early stage of electioneering, political capital has been gained and lost by the major parties’ presence on social media and other users’ reactions to the parties.
This is only likely to intensify as the number of people interacting with politics via the Internet increases. Moving forward, social media avenues such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube will be vital to engaging with the electorate as a whole and in particular youth voters, a highly apathetic generation, according to a Guardian article.
So while we probably won’t see Gordon and David ditching their despatch boxes any time soon, it’s certainly worth noting that their stance and success are going to be increasingly influenced by online activity, starting with this year’s election.