Davos town: not the most accessible venue Photo: Reuters

Preparing for the World Economic Forum – aka Davos – is such a stress. Not for me, but for my wonderful colleague Jane who spends weeks fixing, and then re-fixing, meetings so I can get the most out of it.

The beauty of Davos is that one can meet large numbers of the world’s most important/interesting/powerful/egotistical people in the space of four days. Interviews that would otherwise take months to arrange, and hours to travel to, take place in a small Swiss ski resort. It’s a journalist’s dream – and a PA’s nightmare.

* It being a ski resort, Davos is not the easiest place to get to. The flight to Zurich is fine, but then you have a choice – a train journey during which you have to change twice, or a two-and-a-half hour car journey with cartoonish icy mountain road bits thrown in free at the end. I plumped for a car this year, and used the time to start “tweeting” (ie micro-blogging on twitter). With no more than 140 characters to put in your email-cum-blog, it takes a while to get used to.

An innocent attempt to pass on a story about how Lord Levene (chairman of Lloyds of London) was impressed with the Davos hospital – after slipping and whacking his head on a ski – backfired. I ran out of characters and had to split the message in two, giving the impression that I had been pleased that the noble Lord had taken a tumble. I can only hope he dismisses it as a twitter schoolboy error on my part. And quite how interesting “traffic in Davos is bloomin’ awful. Worse than London/Atlanta” is to people, I’m not sure. But there is something quite compelling about it – I can see why Stephen Fry has become an addict.

* Americans have dominated Davos in all the years I have been attending. But they are nowhere to be seen, enabling the Chinese and Russians to flex their muscles. Chinese premier Wen Jiabao was a big hit with the business and media crowd at Wednesday’s private session. Knowledgeable and confident, he hit most of the right notes – including references to his recent re-reading of the work of Adam Smith. Warm applause from an audience including Henry Kravis of private equity house KKR, Sir Martin Sorrell of media conglomerate WPP, BP’s Tony Hayward, and Stephen Green of HSBC.

Davos is all a twitter with Wen and Vlad – Telegraph.

And thanks to the imploded economy, this one on Sunday may be the all-time pressure cooker. The decision to spend $3 million — $100,000 a second — to air a 30-second Super Bowl ad seems almost indefensible.

It is a particularly sticky wicket after a week in which 70,000 layoffs were announced and labor statistics set a couple of firsts: Unemployment was up in every state in December, and people getting unemployment benefits has hit a record. The quiet question: How many jobs could be saved by not running a Super Bowl spot?

“This is the first Super Bowl of the Great Depression 2.0,” says Steve Hayden, vice chairman at Ogilvy Worldwide perhaps best known as the co-writer of the “1984″ Apple ad that set off the Super Bowl ad frenzy 25 years ago. “Being on the Super Bowl this year is like driving around in a Duesenberg in 1929.”

Don’t tell that to 30-some brands that bought the 33.5 minutes of ad time in the NBC game broadcast, including veterans such as Budweiser, Pepsi and Coke and first-timers such as Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes, Pedigree pet food and Denny’s.

The common goal: $100,000-a-second worth of ad buzz. Buzz means Web hits after the game and, in good times anyway, that translates into sales.

There’s no telling what it means in the worst of times, which is why NBC had two ad slots left Thursday. “I’m not going to tell you it hasn’t been a tough slog,” Dick Ebersol, chairman of NBC Sports, said early this week. “But we have not crashed price in any way, shape or form.”

Advertisers who bought in are rethinking what to air. They’re doing more research. They’re focusing on hallmarks such as heritage. They are even alluding to the economy — some seriously, some with a chuckle.

“The biggest danger every Super Bowl advertiser faces is being ignored,” says advertising research guru Don Bruzzone.

More Below:

Marketers face pressure to deliver with Super Bowl ads – USATODAY.com.

Generally, the goal of public relations is to create or manage a buzz around a business, product, service, brand or individual. According to Wikipedia, “public relations is the practice of managing the flow of information between an organization and its publics.” With the emergence of social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Myspace and LinkedIn, businesses have almost unlimited access to the public. In order for PR to successfully manage the tide of information, PR representatives must venture beyond traditional media outlets to Web 2.0 in order to monitor all messages. In fact, social media management should be an integral piece of your public relations campaign.

Through social media management, a PR pro can help businesses interact with clients, customers and prospects to increase brand awareness and direct traffic to the desired website. A channel like Twitter allows your business to engage with customers, other industry leaders and the media to grow your list of followers and update them on your latest company news. Another top networking site and PR opportunity is LinkedIn. Through discussion forums and queries regarding a particular industry, you can be positioned as an expert. A high level of involvement online improves brand/business recognition and gives search engines and crawlers extra opportunities to find you and place you higher on search engine rankings. Regardless of which sites you use to increase your exposure (or your clients’), below are five ways to get the most out of social media as part of your public relations strategy.

1. Link to articles. Almost every media outlet has online versions of articles and news segments. When an article runs about your business, let others know by posting a link on your social media networks. This not only heightens brand awareness, it also shows the publication or channel that the public is interested in what the reporter said about your business. Bookmarking sites like Reddit, Delicious, StumpleUpon and Digg are also great ways to flag an article for others to find through keyword searches.
2. Drive traffic to website. Do not forget to always include your website in every email, blog comment and forum post. On LinkedIn, for example, after answering a question or posting on a forum, include your URL. If your post was interesting or informative, chances are high that the viewer will click on your link for more. In public relations, the online objective is to do more than just raise awareness; it is to direct interested parties to the business? door or web page. Then it is up to the business to make the sale or pursue the relationship.
3. Be an industry expert. Rather than focus on selling, present yourself as an educator. If you are in the IT industry, answer general questions and prove yourself to be a credible resource. When others view you as an industry expert, they will be more likely to turn to you for their IT needs and refer others to your business. This particularly applies to LinkedIn or any professional network.
4. Respond to feedback. The general public freely gives opinions all over the World Wide Web. A big aspect of managing social media is maintaining a pulse on what your customers and prospects are saying about you or the brand you represent. Gossip is no longer exchanged behind your back, it is public and is as simple to find as a Google or Twitter search. Once you discover comments, whether positive or negative, respond. If people sing your praises, thank them and use the feedback as a testimonial or an opportunity to retweet on Twitter or include as a status update on Facebook, FriendFeed or LinkedIn. If you come across disgruntled customers, it is best to make it right and put your best customer service practices to work.
5. Involve the audience. Some of the best viral marketing campaigns involve audience participation on Twitter, Facebook fan pages, YouTube and Myspace. One way to harness attention of your business through public relations is to host a contest. If you have a new product, invite your customers to think of a name for it. Include directions on your website, then direct participants to submit YouTube video entries and vote via Twitter or other sites. Not only would this make your company be incredibly searchable, but you generate a big hype around the new product that may warrant news coverage for your company as well.

5 Ways to Integrate Social Media with Public Relations | SocialComputingMagazine.com.

The social networking site is exploring ways to measure and create new services around users’ sentiment.

Facebook may be at it again.

Efforts by the popular social networking site to better leverage the enormous amount of data it has on its users’ interests haven’t always gone over well. But with the privacy flap over its Beacon ad program now in its wake, Facebook may be next studying how to tap users’ information for a new purpose: to make their online experience more in sync with their mood.

Tech blogger Robert Scoble mentioned the plan in a blog post from a discussion he said he had this week with Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and CEO, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

According to Scoble, Zuckerberg said Facebook is studying “sentiment” behavior: Based on users’ posts, the site can tell when bad news has hit, like stock prices tumbling.

Facebook did not return requests for comment by press time.

The speculation comes as Facebook continues seeking ways to parlay its staggering traffic into advertising revenue and to develop new business models. Thus far, the site’s success in either has proven limited.

Privacy, security and advertising

It’s unclear how much of this plan — if any of it — will make it into a live feature on the social networking site. It’s also uncertain whether it’s even a good idea, considering some of the problems Facebook has encountered in the past when it’s explored other ways to monetize user data.

Complete Article…

InternetNews Realtime IT News – How Ya Doing? Facebook Wants to Know..