10 Top Tips for Successful Event Management

Recently, Bullet PR was asked to organise an ‘Old Hollywood’ themed cocktail and dinner event for multi-national telecommunications giant, Huawei, for their Asia-Pacific CTO Forum at Auckland Museum’s Event Centre.

The purpose of this occasion was to provide Huawei’s 150 international guests with a sophisticated welcoming taste of our local Kiwi culture, along with a few other treats. Because this event was such a success, we thought we would share some of our Event Management secrets:

1. Decide on a theme: Choosing a clear theme always makes your job easier. In this instance, we recommended Old Hollywood because it was elegant, glamorous, and easily understood by different cultures. When choosing the theme for your event, you should never feel limited to picking something like ‘Old Hollywood’. A theme could be anything from an era in time, to a chosen colour scheme. Both of which can be just as effective if done well. Read the rest of this entry »

Alistair Helm, Realestate.co.nz talks iPhones and homebuying

As a frequent scouter of open homes, I have found the new Realestate.co.nz iPhone app absolutely invaluable. I love the fact that I can go for a walk around the neighbourhood on a Saturday or Sunday morning and see all the open homes in my area on my iPhone. It makes sticky-beaking through other people’s houses an absolute doddle! And I’m not just saying this because Realestate.co.nz are our clients.

iPhone apps are about making life easier for people, and this one delivers this for homebuyers (or nosy people like myself) in spades.

I thought I’d share this little clip from Alistair Helm, CEO, Realestate.co.nz as he talks to Newstalk ZB about this awesome new Real Estate app.

Correlating social media with ROI… a ‘this much I know’ blog post)

It’s been almost a week since the end of Social Media Junction 2 and this has given me some time to digest that tricky conundrum of equating social media with a return in investment.

Business being business before investing considerable time and resource into social media I can imagine that a lot of senior executives will want to know what this will do to their bottom line, but the thing about social media ROI is that there is no hard and fast answer on what impact it will have on sales. For a start, not everyone is engaging in the social media space the right way. For example, posting tid-bits of information about your products and services on Facebook is unlikely to win you many friends (or their influence) and may even impact negatively on your business… because no one wants to associate with a tin of spam, hey? Read the rest of this entry »

Effective media relations strategy; what it can and can’t do

Last week I delivered a workshop at the Annual Media Relations conference in Wellington which, among other things, stressed the need to synchronise communications throughout the organisation; internally, externally, online and offline. There was much discussion, most notably on the surprisingly diverse ways in which organisations measure the effectiveness of their media relation strategies.  More on this later…

I reminded delegates however that media relations cannot eliminate negative publicity, nor control the media or their message; bad news is bad news, and media relations is not a quick fix. While effective media relations gives you some ability to manage your own reputation, it does not ensure that your competition is squeezed out of media coverage.

On the plus side, building an effective media relations strategy develops credibility in what you do; improves the external, and internal knowledge and perceptions of your company. It also provides depth and breadth to your communications strategy, increasing the frequency of your message.

United Airlines and online reputation - responding to Sons of Maxwell ‘United breaks guitars’

Check out this YouTube effort by Canadian band Sons of Maxwell who have been fighting United Airlines since March 2008 over compensation for damaged guitars while touring. Clearly, the band felt they weren’t getting a satisfactory response from the airline, so after a frustrating 12 months or so, they finally took matters into their own hands. The  video was loaded onto the Sons of Maxwell YouTube channel on Monday, and after only three days it’s already had 640,000 views!! It’s certainly not doing any harm to the band’s reputation at the moment, with loads of coverage both online and offline. Read the rest of this entry »

Spreading the message via Twitter - provoking re-tweets of great content

When the National Business Review interviewed me recently on the role of Twitter, I told marketing reporter Hazel Phillips that those companies contemplating Twitter shouldn’t get too distracted by the early adopters who may appear to dominate the conversations with endless updates of banal goings-on. The fact remains that there is a remarkably high level of serious communication taking place on Twitter and, more significantly, much of this is exclusively taking place on Twitter. So my first comment to our clients is: if you are not there in the first place, how can you take part? Read the rest of this entry »

Avoiding identity hijacking online

The latest Aladdin Annual Threat Report warns that the boom in online social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, Bebo, MySpace etc could very easily turn into an “online nightmare” with the rise of identity hijacking rather than identity theft damaging both personal and corporate reputations. Read the rest of this entry »

Judge Harvey’s attempt to thwart the internet is doomed to fail

There’s a lot of debate out there in the blogosphere over yesterday’s decision by New Zealand District Court Judge David Harvey to prevent the online publication of the names and images of two men charged with the murder of teen John Hapeta.

It’s a curious one. As the likes of Bernard Hickey point out, this guy is no internet ignoramus; he’s actually one of our foremost authorities on cyber-law in New Zealand. If that’s the case, then he must surely recognise the impracticalities of his ruling. Name suppression orders are imposed on a regular basis in New Zealand, which makes this particular half-measure all the more curious. If it is Judge Harvey’s intention to restrict access to this information in order to prevent potential jurors being influenced during a future trial, why allow their names to be released in the first place at this stage in proceedings?

The judge states that he is “concerned with the viral effects of digital publication” - is he not similarly concerned with the viral effects of conversation around the water-cooler, in the pub, on the phone? Surely Judge Harvey is not so na?ve as to perceive the Internet as some sort of conduit for disrupting and influencing the judicial process? One can see what he is driving at, in wanting to restrict future access to the information, but the idea is just too full of holes to be practical.

At the end of the day, it’s a moot argument - the names are already out there should you care to google them. Even if they weren’t, the information is now public record, and can be accessed in future by anyone who can be bothered to track it down. While news websites may adhere to the ruling for fear of the legal ramifications, information online has a life of its own, and is no respecter of the law. As of 4.40pm on 26 August, there are 133 hits for the two names, and that will only grow exponentially. So what exactly was the point? It will be interesting to see where this precedent leads, as there is already interest internationally in Judge Harvey’s landmark ruling.