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So you may have seen a report on Twitter doing the rounds, that details the most stressful careers in the US.

Now as a PR I don’t mind brand developed reports, as long as they are impartial, well researched and provide clarity about how they arrived at their conclusions. I’ve done a few myself and they’ve generated positive press and consumer responses.

However, CareerCast.com‘s report seems to avoid all of these things and ends up being an object lesson in self serving link baiting (which is why I’m putting no follows though all the links in this article.) According to their ‘research’ into 200 professions, PR comes second to commercial airline pilot as most stressful. How do they define stress? According to the recruiter, uncertainty about job stability and work life balance are the key indicators.

With paramedic coming an enviable ninth, am I the only one that finds the whole thing slightly offensive, while a missed deadline or a low turnout event can be a bit nerve-wracking it’s not a life and death situation.

The survey also appears to miss out on a plethora of other ‘stressful’ careers for the sake of a headline that’s relevant to their audience – bomb disposal expert, asbestos remover, crocodile farmer, Marine, hostage negotiator and President of the United States of America are notable by their absence.

Anyway judge for yourself – and PRs, please stop with the self serving reports, it’s stressing me out.

Top 10 most stressful professions:

1. Commercial airline pilot

2. Public relations executive

3. Senior corporate executive

4. Photojournalist

5. Newscaster

6. Advertising account executive

7. Architect

8. Stockbroker

9. Emergency medical technician

10. Real estate agent

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Google’s ‘Panda’ update is receiving a high level of search, SEO and even mainstream media attention, but the repercussion for brands engaging in social media is one can of worms begging to be opened.

Big fat juicy worms, like will sites currently considered valuable for brands to engage with suddenly lose their influence?

And has Google search become a crowdsourcing exercise, enabling uninitiated users – or even deliberate hacktivists with a bugbear – to hypothetically ‘block’ a credible brand website out of search?

Malcolm Slade sheds light on the latest Google algorithm, summarising as Google’s effort to provide better quality content-rich results and flush out the thin, low-value ‘spammy’ ones.

Known as the ‘Panda’ update, the algorithm launched in February and lowers the rankings for sites deemed ‘thin’ (affiliate-based, link farms, those with too much mirrored content). According to Google, this impacts 11.8% of queries.

Though we’ve yet to see the function rolled out in the UK, US Google users can now ‘block’ sites they consider to be of little value and in so doing, reduce a site’s rankings.

Without clarity on the algorithm, it is still unclear how UK sites are already caught up in the cross-fire; though Searchmetrics analysis indicates that the impact on a number of UK sites is both intuitive and surprising in equal measures.

While online newspapers such as The Independent, The Metro and The Mirror have all improved in rankings – unsurprising given their rich and frequent content – influential tech and gadget sites such as Zath, Pocket Lint and Electric Pig have significantly dropped in rankings.

Our sources tell us that some of the sites reported to have dropped in rankings are also seeing their traffic plummet as, one can only assume, a direct result.

It already looks like rich-content sites, which built influence through SEO link-building are now becoming the victims. Google itself, acknowledges this, by stating on Google webmaster central that if anyone “knows of a high quality site that has been negatively affected by this change, please bring it to our attention in this thread.” To-date the post has received 1620 replies.

It’s easy to see SEO and content as a chicken-and-egg dilemma, but if the latest Google update highlights anything, it’s the necessity to make creating rich content priority number one.

Source: Holistic Search Marketing

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As this is the immediate future blog, rather than my own, I obviously steer away from anything too personal (apart from my various press trips of course). But if you’ll indulge me, I’d like to share a little anecdote with you.

I listen to the @wittertainment podcast every week; I like the movie reviews and also the slightly high brow general banter.

Last week, Mark Kermode reviewed Source Code (which I enjoyed), and made the point that good science fiction movies (like Source Code) take complicated ideas and explain them to audiences in a digestible fashion.

This idea struck a chord with me.

Not only because I agree wholeheartedly with the sentiment, but also because I was thinking that this is exactly what agencies like immediate future do with social media.

Social media is in many ways its own universe; different planets, worlds, ecosystems you never knew existed because you’d never thought to look. To the uninitiated, how alien must a site like icanhazcheezburger.com look on first visit? Lolcats, lolspeak, lolbuilder – it’s no more or less weird than anything in Star Trek. It doesn’t take much getting into though.

We take ideas that, from the outside looking in, seem bizarre and alien to many client audiences, and bring them to life, showing our audience the new world of possibilities that opens up to them as a result of engaging in social media. Foursquare is a great example. Mention geo-location tools, and people blanche. Give them examples of how it has been used and how it could be used further by brands, and it becomes much more clear real and believable for clients.

Science fiction is constantly evolving too, and so is social media. New platforms spring up, new ideas take shape, new audiences start engaging – it’s a tremendously exciting space to be in. Occasionally frustrating, sometimes baffling, but still filled with endless possibilities.

So all we need to do now is to continue down the road of making the world of social media more open and accessible to those people who are sceptical about it, mainly because it is seemingly filled with geeks who talk in an alien language. We need to open people’s eyes. It’s an open church. Everyone likes Star Wars, right? So everyone should love social media.

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We’ve been hearing a lot recently about how Facebook fan numbers aren’t the be all and end all.  Brands should concentrate on engaging with their existing fan base. Even Facebook’s own are towing the line. David Parfect, agency sales group head at Facebook recently told the audience at the Social Media World Forum in London that brands should look beyond fan numbers. In his own words David said: “Just because a brand has 17,000 fans on Facebook, that does not mean these fans are engaged with them. That is just where the marketing should start.”

Fangager has listed the top engaged pages on Facebook based on their active fans. Looking at these pages closely, we’ve identified 5 recurring content themes that drive fan participation. While these pages listed by Fangager are mainly celebs, personalities or sporting clubs, their key themes can be adopted by brands to generate conversations on their own Facebook pages.

Lifestyle focus

The majority of pages with high interaction levels are lifestyle brands such as sports clubs, celebs, musicians etc. and the input from fans stems from these passion points. Even traditional product focused brands, such as Red Bull and Converse don’t use Facebook as a tool to directly promote their products. Their pages are filled with content that relates to their other ventures, for example Red Bull and extreme sports.

News and service announcements

As with most social media platforms, brands use Facebook pages to tell their customers about their latest news and often link to their website or blogs. Man Utd, which is third in Fangager’s list, uses this tactic a lot on its page. Nearly 4,000 people have comments on their latest post about Rooney’s match ban.

Platforms like Windows Live Messenger and even Facebook itself use their pages to tell fans about the latest service announcements, which for most people is more convenient than visiting an external page.

Personable

To help break down barriers between brands and their customers, some pages have adopted a personal tone which has helped keep them connected to their fans.  Some examples of these are:

• Justin Beiber – his page is populated with things he’s found interesting and make use of ‘I’ so it is as if he is personally writing to his 20 million fans. His average post receives around 7,000 comments.
• Skittles – it posts funny/random content to its fans and takes a personal approach by using ‘I’ instead of ‘we’. Its recent post that said: “I balance out my electric blanket with a refrigerator pillow” received 11,000 likes and 700 comments.
  

Questions

Almost all of the pages listed by Fangager use questions to help drive fan participation. Questions can be related to products and services or have no obvious connection at all. We’ve seen this work particularly well on the Sony UK Facebook page, which we manage alongside our client. For example, when we asked Sony’s fans  to tell us what they wanted to see in future home entertainment products we received over 50 comments.  

Event

Some of the top engaged Facebook pages often post links to brand events, whether they are real life such as gigs or sports fixtures or calendar events like product launches. Over 16,000 Man Utd fans were listed as attending the clubs Champions League match with Chelsea recently and fans posted over 9,000 comments.

Photos and videos

It may seem pretty standard nowadays but posting videos and photos on Facebook pages is a good way of increasing interaction with fans. For example, a video posted onto Justin Bieber’s fan page showing him pranking Willow Smith received over 74,000 likes and 20,000 comments. Exclusive, behind the scenes content also goes down well with Bieber’s fans.

You can view Fangager’s list here: http://www.fangager.com/site/top100/more/

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We’ve been doing a lot of work around crisis and how crises are accelerated by social media, at immediate future recently. You might say it’s a passion for us, and it’s also a major worry for many brands who want to protect their reputation online.

However, it seems that one particular industry in the UK feel that they are above negative criticism and don’t worry about alienating their support base. Namely, Premier League football clubs.

Monday saw Mohammed Al Fayed (no stranger to controversy) unveil his much talked about statue of Michael Jackson outside Craven Cottage.

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

He put it here because he can no longer put it in Harrods, completely oblivious to the fact that there is no correlation at all between his team and Michael Jackson.

As anyone with even a cursory knowledge of football could have predicted the backlash from Fulham fans was not exactly positive. Apparently it was a surprise for Al Fayed. His response beggars belief:

“If some stupid fans don’t understand and appreciate such a gift this guy gave to the world they can go to hell. I don’t want them to be fans. If they don’t understand and don’t believe in things I believe in they can go to Chelsea, they can go to anywhere else”.

Can you imagine this response from anyone else in any other industry in the world? The news coverage is littered with quotes from Fulham fans complaining that they are going to be a ‘laughing stock’ because of the statue. Al Fayed and the Fulham board are completely ignoring the customer base and actively telling them to defect to a competitor. Of course, because of the nature of football, they know most people won’t defect – but it is still staggering for a club who aren’t exactly full to capacity every week.

No brand could get away with this, or the various other fails that have affected most Premier League clubs over the years. Even Sky Sports were forced to react during the Andy Gray/Richard Keys crisis, conscious that the Premier League could throw their toys out of the pram and defect to a competitor. Unlikely, but a serious enough threat to Sky’s cash cow to force them into action.

I struggled to think of any brands who could treat their customers in this way and not have their revenue and image irreversibly tarnished. The only one I think who comes close is Apple – there are plenty of documented issues with their products, but their position of pre-eminence within the world of consumer tech is pretty much secure. For now at least.

I wonder how long Premier League clubs can go on in this protected bubble outside of the real business world. All things come to an end, eventually.

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What do ancient philosophy and social media have in common? Well, let’s see. In a possible world in which Aristotle transcends time to come face-to-face with the social team at Facebook HQ; he stands there in his toga and sandals and asks everyone to stop rushing around and sit cross-legged on the floor for a moment of metaphysical contemplation. The social team stares at him blankly in a vacuum of stunned silence, before darting their collective heads back to the future and keeping their fingers tapping firmly away at the technical revolution.

Me: “Sorry Aristotle, they just didn’t have time for contemplation.”

Aristotle: “Well when they do have time, could you please point them in the direction of Physics 239b11, I think they might like the Dichotomy paradox of motion.”

Me: “Sure thing Aristotle, you’re the man.”

The Dichotomy (Paraphrasing Aristotle, who in turn paraphrases Zeno of Elea)

It is impossible to walk from A to B. To get to B, you must first walk half way and this should take you half the total time of the journey, assuming you are in constant motion. To walk half way, you must first walk a quarter of the way (i.e. half way to half way) and even before you can walk a quarter of the way, you must walk an eighth of the way (i.e. half of half of half). Therein lies the problem: how do you even take a step forward from A, when the space in front of you can be divided an infinite number of times and should therefore take an infinite amount of time to cross? A bit like social media, no?

You’re a brand, you want to take a simple step from A (no social media integration) to B (successful social media integration). But, before you can reach successful social media integration, you need to know your brand voice. And before you know your brand voice, you need to know your strategy. And before you know your strategy you need to know your risks. Suddenly, the space between your brand and that ever-so-simple goal of reaching B starts dividing in front of you. And as the social media landscape continues to change at lightning speed, where do you even start?

The truth is that you can walk from A to B. You do it every day. But perhaps there’s comfort in knowing that a seemingly new and perplexing problem is reassuringly ancient.

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