David Strom's December story at RWW about the "Ten Biggest PR Blunders of 2011" mentions things that happen every year for as long as I've been in this game. The story isn't so much about blunders as pressure to please the client being passed onto journos, but boy, did it rark up a PR person in the comments section.

This is great.

There's a meme that regularly does the rounds, in which journalists (the 'hacks') lambast PRs (the 'flacks'), listing their various shortcomings and idiocies.

However, in this case, a flack decided he/she had taken enough, and decided to bite back.

Whereas I've worked in, and for PR agencies for some years now, I've not worked directly with journalists that often, so I can't comment on a lot of this. But I do recognise some of it, and in fact, when I forwarded it to a friend who works for the BBC, she thought it was hilarious. In fact, she thought the original piece that triggered this was grossly unfair to flacks.

Anyway, you decide. It's amusing and infuriating in equal measure.

Nice infographic from Flowtown here.

Google+ is a strange beast. On the one hand, I see it every day because my home page is set to Google, and I'm always logged in, so I see it whenever I fire up my browser. So, you could say it's won the homepage war, mainly because it's been around longer than Facebook (and because I want to search for things quickly rather than wait for Facebook to fire up).

On the other hand, apart from playing around with it a bit, there is VERY little activity there. Flowtown shows that only 17% of users are active, and while I don't have comparable figures for Twitter or Facebook, it doesn't sound that great to me.

And while Facebook is a true platform, in that people can build their own apps and deliver them to this richly connected environment, Google+ resolutely is not. Everyone is helping Facebook to grow, while only Google is growing Google+.

As is often the case, only time will tell. I recently came across a study I did from a couple of years back in which 'some' of the brands were on Twitter. Today, they all are. So perhaps this will happen with Google+. In the meantime, Flowtown tells us that 61% of the top 100 brands have Google+ pages. Maybe B2B is where Google can establish a social media foothold. But going head-to-head with Facebook could be picking a fight it cannot win..

As I deleted my 100^th electronic Christmas card, all I felt was annoyance -- rather than merry or joyous or whatever it was supposed to make me feel. A good 50% of these mostly cold and soulless emails were from PR firms I’d never heard of. I assume they got my name from Klout or Cision or Vocus or any of the other list peddlers that bring as much joy and relevance to the season as Jacob Marley did. Which got me thinking...

Does anyone measure the effectiveness of these silly things? 

KD Paine - 'The Princess of Measurement' - writes a lovely piece about ROI.

I wish I had her brain. She's so good at picking out the important bits, putting them together in interesting ways, and showing real value. And I have a sneaking suspicion that, when she tells us that her clients often say "I've been meaning to get in touch..." on receipt of her cards, it's more to do with her being damned good at what she does than the beauty of the cards. She could probably send a blank sheet of paper through and get a similar response. Now *that* would be an even higher ROI!

Anyway, one other point to mention is that I sometimes get guilt when I use snippets of other people's posts on my blog. I know I'm giving them free publicity, plus a link, but part of me feels I should comment on their post instead. So, why don't you jump across to Katie's blog for me, read what she has to say, and respond?

How will social media impact businesses in 2012?

We sought expert opinions from a wide range of pros you’re likely familiar with.

We are grateful for the dozens of social media professionals who have written over 600 articles for us since we started Social Media Examiner in October 2009.

To give you a glimpse of what we can expect in the next 12 months, we decided to tap their knowledge and expertise. Here are their predictions of where social media is headed in the next 12 months.

I was going to add Part Two to my social media predictions, really I was. But I just read this and thought, well, they've done such a good job, I may as well throw it your way. It seems to boil down to media, strategy and mobile.

Of course, everyone's saying 'this is the year of social media' but then again they would (and have been for quite some time!)

My friend Steve Farnsworth recently shared a link to some tips from Matt Ceniceros at Applied Materials about how to encourage blog posts from team members who hate blogging.

Something about that concept got me thinking. It wasn’t encouraging team members to blog, as that’s critical for all organizations seeking to embrace the notion that every company is a media company. It was the point about team members who “hate blogging.”

They don’t really hate blogging. They hate their job: and that’s a problem beyond the fact that you can’t get them to blog.

Love this.

One thing I never really 'got' about social media, and blogging in particular, was why other people didn't really want to do it. I think this post has given me at least part of the answer: it's because they don't really like their jobs!

It's a broad brush and a hard line (are these mixed metaphors?) but I like it. It accounts for why I so seldom see comms people who actually read the papers, or read business publications, or listen to podcasts, or actually do anything outside of their immediate work that is even slightly work-related.

The way I've approached this topic before has been "Your job just changed. Tough." But from now on, I might change it to "You don't like your job. Tough."

Anyway, hop on over to thefuturebuzz.com for the full piece...

This is pretty good, from my ex-employer Fleishman Hillard.

Everyone likes graphics because they (usually) make things clearer. In this one, anything big and green in the centre is good, because it's a nice, living social media presence. Anything red is bad, because it's dead. The FH solution is simply to delete the dead stuff, but also they talk about envisioning your social media as one big distributed web. This is neat thinking, and powerfully puts across the concept of each social media presence being 'for' something, alongside other presences, rather than approaching them as separate, siloed presences with no real reason for existing. Pop over to Mashable and read the full article.

Facebook is renowned for rolling out new platform changes at a moment’s notice, but if early buzz is to be believed, this Thursday’s F8 developer conference will offer something a little bit special.

Major changes are expected that could fundamentally reshape the way content is found and shared on the world’s largest social network.

Will it be the dawn of a new social era, or is Facebook about to follow Myspace into the pit of abandoned platforms?

I really like EConsultancy. I don't know anything about their training but I do know they have an excellent publishing operation going. This is just one of their well written, insightful pieces and it comes at a very important time for Facebook. Don't just sit there, hop on over to EConsultancy and read the full article.

This is only the first time that online gamers have figured out the solution to a complex scientific problem. Foldit co-creator Seth Cooper said that their spatial reasoning skills allowed gamers to succeed where powerful computers had failed before and expressed hope that their game, and others like it, would lead to many such accomplishments in the future.

Ah well, just goes to show, if you have a great idea, someone else has usually had it before you. In this case, gaming for 'real' problem solving. As someone whose spare PC in the loft is helping cure cancer and find aliens, I've long held the view that it would be great to create a game that enabled people to have fun while helping solve problems. I also figured that whatever humans could do in this area, computers could probably do better. Quite possibly however, I felt that maybe we could win at spatial or verbal reasoning. And it looks like we have our answer. Nip over the thenextweb.com for the full piece, but in summary it looks like gaming could have a future beyond smashing cars and killing people.

These are your new social media pin-ups. They're the guys who are going to save Delicious - by quite some way the most powerful, effective and yet simple way of sharing content online. It was also by quite some way the largest, but the dolts at Yahoo couldn't figure out what to do with it or how to make money from it. I'm really really really hoping Steve Chen and Chad Hurley establish a model that does this and yet remains as powerful through its simplicity. Time will tell. But in the meantime, go and read this interview which gives their take on how they want to move forward with Delicious...

People are going bananas over ROI for social media.

I can understand why - you need to know what's making you money - but in the context of other communications, I just don't get it.

Consider your website. Apart from e-commerce, how much money did it ever make you? Or save you? Did you ever measure it? Or did you just set up a website because you felt you should?

I think this is because websites came about during the late 80s and 90s when we were all awash with money. Perhaps it's because we're in such straitened times that everyone's shouting Show Me The Money. Maybe when we emerge from this black hole social media too will become just something you do.

But even today it's kind of unfair. I'm not sure people put the same pressure on PR to account for itself. Even advertising is a waste of approximately half your money (although online can and does provide greater accountability).

Anyway, what do I know? The New Web gives you 10 nice case studies where ROI factored, either by direct causation or indirect assocation.