As some of you may know, I am currently writing my dissertation about social media’s impact on PR (any PR pros reading this, how about you help me with my survey?).

For the past few weeks I’ve been ‘diving’ into a number of books and other sources to learn more about the profession and see how it has evolved over the years. Accidentally I even found a recent video, which highlights the history of Public Relations. I may not agree very much with the facts shown in the beginning, telling us that PR began way back in 49 BC. Maybe so, but rather unconsciously and not as a planned strategic tool; it wasn’t until the end of the 19^th and the beginning of the 20^th century and the emergence of the media when PR came along as an ‘official’ discipline.  

Everyone is (still) talking about social media. The networks however are so many and so different: Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube, LinkedIn, Digg, Pinterest... Do you get confused sometimes and don’t know where to begin? If so, have a look at the Flowtown’s infographic below – it gives you the basic knowledge and first steps for your social media activities.

Everyone is talking about Pinterest; there is at least one blog post a day in my Google Reader about it; it even started to annoy me a little bit. So, I decided it was about time to try it out and find out why people (and businesses) love it so much.

Pinterest is a social catalogue, a kind of an online pin board where you can share images and videos of the things you love – art, sports, fashion, beauty, science, technology, architecture, journeys, absolutely anything; or you can even plan weddings, holidays and journeys; find recipes, (re)decoration ideas; gifts and of course search other people’s boards. The idea behind it is: “a picture is worth 1000 words”. The social network launched ca. 2 years ago and is apparently becoming so popular that in the last 6 months the site visits increased by 4000%! 

Do you like beer? I sure do – it’s so refreshing, especially in the summer. Well, even if you don’t drink beer, I think you’ll find Heineken’s campaign during the Open’er Music Festival in Gdynia, Poland quite refreshing.

What do you do at such festivals? You are there to enjoy the music, have fun and meet new people. Knowing this, the Dutch brewing company decided to give the music lovers an easy and entertaining way to connect with each other – the U-Code, a personalized QR code that entails your own message (if you don’t know what QR codes are, here's a good article). The aim was to introduce Heineken’s new brand message “Open your world”. 

A few days ago I came across an interesting whitepaper by LEWIS PR about the social media challenges brands and organisations are facing globally. The main emphasis is on the fact that nowadays “every brand is a global brand”.

Thanks to the internet and social media buyers can easily learn about companies and their products, they can interact with them as well as with other customers and most importantly they can express their own opinions. Organisations on the other hand have to listen to these multicultural, multilingual voices and correspondingly respond. The paper looks at the challenges of a multinational social media strategy, that works across borders, but also suggests some ideas how to cope with them, so I thought I should briefly present these to you.

Here it goes: