[ Photo credit: Tony Kinlan]

We at Mission were very sad to hear about the death of the talented singer, Amy Winehouse.

Mission’s Board Director and go-to-guy for anything music related, Nick Godwyn, was Amy’s first manager who helped and nurtured the singer through her first album, ‘Frank’.

Tomorrow in the Saturday Times, look out for an article about Amy, written by Nick Godwyn.

R.I.P Amy Winehouse

Facebook are finally rolling out Deals across five EU countries today after an apparently successful few of months live in the US. (more…)

[via Mashable]

Social media has come along way over the past 30 years, wouldn’t you agree?

The infographic above shows the journey of social media from 70′s right up till the late 90′s.

Can you remember when you first opened an social online account?

Which form of social media do you enjoy using the most and why?

News Corp.’s much-anticipated iPad newspaper, known as The Daily, has been rumoured to be unveiled by owner Rupert Murdoch and chief executive at Apple, Steve Jobs, this month at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The launch date is said to be January 19th, although this has not been officially confirmed.

Rupert Murdoch is said to have put in $30m for this project which has already hired a number of top-notch journalists from media outlets such as the New Yorker, the Daily Beast, Forbes, and AOL. New York Post’s Jesse Angelo left his role to run The Daily.

[Image via reidreport.com]

StumbleUpon, the web discovery service, has just overtaken Facebook as the #1 source for social media traffic in the US., according to analytics site Statcounter.

Even though StumbleUpon has a much smaller number of users than Facebook – 13 million to Facebook’s 500 million – it’s amazing that the web discovery service garners more traffic. On January 1st StumbleUpon accounted for just over 43% of America’s social media traffic whilst Facebook accounted for nearly 38%.

The news was announced by StumbleUpon’s founder and chief Garrett Camp via his Twitter account.

On Tuesday, 12^th of October, the blogger, Bangs And A Bun, published a formal letter of complaint about Mission’s conduct towards her and her involvement in a campaign.

The post was picked up very quickly by her audience and rapidly spread across the social web as an example of bad practice for PR/blogger engagement.

Mission apologised wholeheartedly for the frustration and distress we caused Muireann by telephone and in writing.

In an effort to demonstrate how seriously we have taken this error internally and how we are keen to learn from this unfortunate experience humbly and transparently, below is our formal written response to Muireann.

We are very grateful that Muireann has written an update post to her community this morning,

Dear Muireann,

Following on from my call this morning I wanted to send a further written response outside of our posts today. I apologise again that our efforts to resolve your concerns last week were insufficient.

I would like to state, from the outset, that Mission would never have approached you in the first instance had we not thought that your reach and influence was significant enough to benefit this campaign. Hopefully this in itself demonstrates how seriously we take Social Media. I would like to re-iterate, given the conversations online today that we do not differentiate between traditional journalists and bloggers and have successfully worked with both. This particular situation is a result of bad communication on Mission’s part and is not a demonstration of how we feel about the importance of the social web.

What happened over recent months was a certain set of circumstances whereby Mission ended up not fulfilling its obligations to you as agreed. Problems of this nature arise in all organisations from time to time as a result of human error and whilst the end result was far from desirable none of it was intentional. No one individual is to blame and as head of the agency I take full responsibility for the distress that has been caused to you personally.

On receiving your email on Thursday alerting us to the fact that there were shortcomings in our organisation, JD the director on this business, worked swiftly to rectify them. At no time were your expenses at risk, it was always our intention to honor the expenses and not to back track on our initial agreement.

As you said in your final comments and what the conversation surrounding your post has highlighted, is that there is still a learning curve for both sides of our industry. Whilst traditional journalists and traditional PR companies do not always get along, we have learnt to co-exist over the years and whilst I regret that Mission has been held up as an example of how not to work with bloggers today, I do hope that PR agencies and bloggers will learn from our mistakes and will continue to improve their relationship despite the very public ramifications of getting it wrong.

Kind regards

Nicola Stephenson



Mobile Youth TV have done a pretty good round up explaining the value of earned media over paid media. Earned media, being a relatively young phenomenon in which brands are creating assets that our interactive, web-engrossed, ultra-connected youth markets want to share and disseminate themselves, is playing a bigger and bigger role in public relations.

I could repute any number of their examples, like Levi ‘scratching their heads’ as to what to do with their youth market after they’ve just run an incredible grass-roots influence to ATL campaign with the coolest of London’s East End Cool. But I won’t – instead, I’m going to share my opinion on the very near future of brand communication and leave you to make up your minds. (more…)

In case any of our readers hadn’t heard already, Twitter has launched a far more advanced right-hand column. The new additions makes the entire website more like one of the many applications built on the Twitter API (Application Programming Interface) that a… well, website! (more…)