A recent post about some Pareto analysis of the Porter Novelli Twitter sample , “Porter Novelli Twitter folk – the 80/20 rule”, stirred up a little bit of interest on Twitter — and made me think again about what I’m doing and why. Partly because those conversations were off-blog (and I’d like to capture the answers I gave somewhere more permanent) and partly because I’ve now had time to think of better answers I thought I’d set them down here.
First, a little background. This Q&A is the sixth post in an impromptu series about the Twitter people where I work (Porter Novelli, the international public relations agency.) By now you might think that I’d be tired of this stuff, but you’d have another think coming. Here’s a quick list to bring you up to date.
Looking at this, you might also think I clearly had nothing better to do than analyze Porter Novelli people and their Twittering ways. In fact, as an experimental data set, I couldn’t really ask for anything much better. It’s sufficiently large (more than 200 people), international (I’ve counted more than 10 countries — and I’m sure there are more), and I have some real-world access to all of the people in the sample, which means I can compare my findings with some hard data.
That said, the experiment is more about learning about how we can analyze Twitter networks — about discovering how representative they are as a word-of-mouth (WOM) channel for example, and what they can tell us about other kinds of social network, or about finding new ways to analyze such data sets — than it is about answering any specific questions. So I’ve not got any carefully mapped-out research plan. Instead I follow paths that strike me as interesting, or possible, or that are suggested to me by friends and readers.
Marian Salzman (our Global CMO here at Porter Novelli) has had the inspired idea of getting people in the agency to tweet about the most exciting story this week (probably) — the inauguration of Barack Obama
On Friday 19 December 2008, we finally pressed the “Go” button on the new Porter Novelli site. It has taken us three months of planning and nearly six months of design, development and bug-fixing to get to this stage, so you’ll understand that we’re justifiably relieved and proud.
This is, I think, a great improvement on our old site. The old site was characterized by low information content, Flash front page, and the occasional shark. I’ve circled the shark in the following screengrab from our old site.
In order to keep all our various stakeholders involved at every stage of the project, we set up an “Under Construction” blog on TypePad, a Flickr set or two, and shared many of our planning docs on Scribd (you can see all of these on the blog.)
Because Porter Novelli is a global public relations network, we sent regular updates to the senior leadership around the world asking for feedback, case studies, and fact-checking. We couldn’t have done it without their help.
Our design and development partners were interactive design consultants Wilson Fletcher. I’d worked with Mark Wilson in the past life on a project for the Discovery Channel, and was impressed by his teams creative thinking and rigourous approach. One of the key objectives for the new site was to make something that would validate and be accessible to multiple audiences, and they’ve achieved that with grace and elegance! Continue reading ‘The new Porter Novelli site goes live’
Porter Novelli has been working on its own “online influencer mapping” tool for about six months now. Recently, I’ve started posting screen grabs on our Flickr page to see what people think about it. I thought it was probably time to share some of the images here.
Version 3.5.4 (Always in Beta)
The project is named Rufus after the character George Carlin played in “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure”.
For those of you who know how network analysis works and what it’s used for, this is revolutionary only in that it’s fast and accurate enough to use as an exploratory tool.
For those of you who have no idea what network analysis is or how it’s used in many, many situations, 2009 would be a really good year to start finding out.
For this graph (which took around 5 mins to generate), we took as a seed list the first 50 back links as generated by Yahoo Site Explorer (http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/.) We’ve tested this up to 100 seeds, but there’s plenty of room to go further.
Following a PRCA roundtable this morning to discuss Ofcom’s research into social networking, I’m pleased to share a (very draft) version of our new Social Media Policy.
[edit: the "our" in that sentence means "Porter Novelli's"]
You can see a larger version, and download a copy as a PDF or Word Document over here at Scribd. Alternatively, you can click the “enlarge” button (what the orange arrow’s pointing to in the image below).
I’d appreciate as much feedback as possible. It would be nice if you’d share what you have to say (whether positive or negative) in the comment stream below. That way others can see what you’ve said, and build on it. If not, I’m happy to receive anonymous comments by email.
I’d like to say a big thanks to Richard Ellis from the PRCA, and Justin Le Patourel and Sam Carter from Ofcom for putting on a wonderful show this morning.
I received this today. Anyone interested? I shan’t be going
Dear all,
The Gillette team needs your help. We are looking to recruit 20 men that meet the following criteria:
single
25-45 years old
takes an active interest in his appearance
Each man, in return for £50 and a Gillette goody bag, would need to come to the London office straight after work on Friday 25th July to take part in an experiment for the evening. In advance of arriving at the office each man will have been using a deodorant sample for a few days (we will confirm nearer the time).
At our office, they will be introduced to psychologist David Moxon and be fitted with heart rate monitors. The first experiment will involve each man presenting for 2 mins on a randomly selected topic.
The men will then travel by underground to a speed dating event (hence they need to be single, and heterosexual I’m afraid).
After the speed dating they are free to go.
The results of this experiment will be used as part of the PR campaign to support the launch of Gillette’s new deodorants in 2009. We will therefore need to ask the men to sign a confidentiality agreement.
Please could you send me the contact details of men you think would be interested in doing this, or give them my contact details to get in touch.
Jack + Bill, a New York public relations agency, is hosting an open casting call to select one model, women’s apparel designer, jewelry designer and fashion stylist. Winners will receive complimentary PR representation leading up to New York Fashion Week.
Mat Snodgrass out of New York and Atheer Al-Salim out of London have joined the ranks of Porter Novelli bloggers. Welcome!
Matt has taken (and passed) the Greenfluencer test on yet another new PN blog: Greenfluencer.com. The Greenfluencer blog is the brainchild of David Zucker who believes that with the excellent pick up of last week’s report, the term is well on the way to being the next google, kleenex, or hoover (brand name becomes verb).
We’re the people who are willing to change our lives to decrease our ecological footprint. The people to whom everyone else turn for green advice. The people who are the moral arbiters of product consumption and who give the green yay or nay to your products and practices.
The comment stream, on the other hand goes off at the deep end slightly: the word “consumption” doesn’t seem to go down so well…
But the story (and the comment storm) got picked up by Arduous, and Arduous’s post got picked up Eco’burban, and her article got reposted on All Green Info so the story’s well on its way. Nothing like a little bit of controversy to get things started.
This blog is pretty much over for now. Please visit my new blog at The Magic Bean Laboratory This blog was kept by me, Mat Morrison, a London-based digital comms planner (read: 'marketing geek'). While this blog occasionally reflected projects that I carried out at work, it's a safe bet that the opinions expressed here were not those of my clients or employers.
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