“Hello, can you hear me?”

“You’re on mute”

“Can everyone see my screen?”

Yep, you got it, it’s video conference call bingo! And it’s not only work video conference calls we’re on, you may also have family catchups or quizzes with friends. Zoom has been a go-to platform for many despite the security and privacy concerns, but the big tech firms have finally arrived with their products to take on Zoom.

Google has just launched Google Meet; it’s free and currently has no time limit, you just need a Google account to access. The Metro gives it the once over and walks you through the set-up. Meanwhile, Facebook is launching Messenger Rooms where you can chat in groups of up to 50. Here’s the story on BBC News, where Facebook also talks about preventing ‘zoombombing’.

And that’s not all Facebook has been up to. It’s also acquired Giphy – a popular site for making and sharing animated images – which it plans to integrate with Instagram. Read more about it on Reuters.

Another social site in the headlines this month is Twitter after CEO Jack Dorsey announced that all employees could work from home forever. He made a statement in The Guardian that he may have been one of the first to start companywide working from home, but he does not anticipate being one of the first to go back to the office.

While we adjust to socialising-from-home more, entertainment tech firms have our back. Spotify plans to roll out its ‘Group Sessions’ feature which mean people can queue tracks from their individual phones. The Independent has the full story. Meanwhile, the BBC is following in Netflix’s footsteps by adding co-watching functionality. CityAM has a write up of the new service, currently on trial via Taster, the online platform the BBC uses to test new technologies.

Well, well, well, can the internet handle all these video calls, working from home and co-entertainment? Ofcom says yes! In a new report, the regulator found that home broadband speed rose by 18% last year. Read more on BBC News.

Capturing a moment is done in so many ways these days – through an Insta story, a quick snap on an SLR, even by using a retro polaroid camera. But have you done it through an instant doodle camera?

Noticing we were missing having instant doodles in our lives, a clever man named Dan Macnish decided to build an AI-powered camera that creates a cartoon-like drawing, rather than a photograph. Dan used Google’s Quick, Draw! Project from 2016 to create a dataset of doodles, then the camera, which is powered by Raspberry Pi and uses object recognition software, produces the picture.

So, it does mean that you only get a doodle from the Google library of 345 drawings, but you could also get a curious interpretation of what you’re looking at. Dan writes in his blog, “The result is always a surprise. A food selfie of a healthy salad might turn into an enormous hotdog, or a photo with friends might be photobombed by a goat.”

This is just Dan’s DIY project for now, so who knows if he’ll make cameras to sell. I would definitely want one out of sheer curiosity!

The evidence is right there. Virtual assistants are here to stay.

The last time you spoke to Alexa, Cortana, Siri or Google, it may have felt a little strange, but tech companies are pouring money into developing voice technology and placing their bets on the major impact it’ll have on our daily lives. Innovation in virtual assistants is all about making them as human as possible – Amazon’s Alexa recently announced how it rewards children who say ‘please’, whilst Match launched chatbot Lorna on Google Home, making ‘Lorna’ a source for dating advice, as well as your friends and family. It may seem a little surreal today, but the more intuitive and easy-to-use the technology becomes, the more likely we are to fully embrace it.

As voice technology develops, marketers must prepare themselves and start to think about how to optimise PR and marketing content for voice search. Wondering why exactly?

Much like search marketing changed the value of PR, so will voice. As a reader of Firefly blogs, you’ll know that for some time now we have put a large emphasis on optimising PR for search, given the changes in search algorithms from both Google and Bing. Essentially, PR brings SEO value when you target the right media sites with the right content, and get that sought-after link to your website. It’s not just about awareness and share of voice, improving SEO is a legitimate PR measure too.

Of course, voice search is a completely different beast. For starters, the way you type something into search engines and the way you speak to a virtual assistant are completely different. We’ve adapted to speak to Google in a way that we get the information we want as quickly as possible – ‘burritos Farringdon’, for example, if you’re on the hunt for some Mexican for lunch. Whereas virtual assistants we expect more, and we don’t naturally speak like that, we’re more likely to say, ‘where can I get a burrito near here?’

Then there is the number of devices and voice technology applications – it’s not just a case of monitoring search engines’ changes in algorithms. Here is an extract from our latest whitepaper on PR in the age of voice search which highlights this complexity:

 When Alexa is asked who the CEO of Facebook is, she gets the answer correct – Mark Zuckerberg, of course. When she is asked where she got that information from, she says that ‘that’s tough to explain’.

 Different devices use different applications to source information. With Siri for instance, the same Facebook CEO question pulls up the answer on ‘Knowledge’, through Cortana the answer is pulled up on Bing and with Google Home, unsurprisingly it comes through Google search.

 A location-based question like ‘where is the nearest Italian restaurant?’ will use a maps application to give you various options.

 The market is also in a state of growth and development, and it is not clear yet which virtual assistant will maintain dominance. In 2017, Amazon and Microsoft announced a partnership in order to strengthen Cortana and Alexa by combining both virtual assistants. Essentially, within Alexa you’ll be able to open Cortana and vice versa. The idea is that people can use the functionality in both assistants like sending an email in Cortana or using an Alexa skill to order a pizza.

With some of the virtual assistants like Siri and Cortana, your search marketing efforts will already put you in a strong position. Asking a question such as ‘Who are the top entrepreneurs in the UK?’, Siri and Cortana will refer you to the top web results. However, with devices like Amazon Echo and Google Home being ‘screenless’, there is added pressure to be THE answer that is read out. And you thought being on page one of Google was tough!

Though the market is still in a state of flux, key players are emerging and there are ways you can prepare today – all included in our whitepaper, of course.

As search marketing evolves, the most important thing is to be ‘found’ by people genuinely looking for you. There are so many ‘secret’ quick wins with voice search, much like online search, but you have to build and maintain your profile so that when the opportunity arises, you reach your customers.

Want to know more? Download our whitepaper on PR in the age of voice search here.

Building chatbots is all the rage, but if you don’t have the time to learn code, there’s now a bot that will develop your bot for you! Check out BotBot if this takes your fancy: Simply select your template from answer bot, food bot, fitness bot, delivery tracking bot or shopping bot, and the bot will integrate with other common services, such as fitness class booking systems or food delivery services and automate the process.

At the moment, there are only five templates, but we’re certain that more will be added before too long. And of course, it can’t be long before there’s another service that creates bot-creating services like this on demand so that you can offer even more complex and recursive services…

Are you artistically inept? Can you barely draw a stick person? Well look no further, we have found the perfect platform for you – Autodraw.

Google’s Autodraw allows even the most artistically challenged to turn their drawings into beautiful pieces of art.

The drawing tool allows you to scribble some shapes on a blank canvas and, through machine learning, it will guess what you’re trying to draw by replacing your original drawing with a significantly better one. The platform uses drawings from talented artists to help you create anything you fancy and it provides some ‘best guesses’, allowing you to pick your favourite templated picture and pass it off as your own.

It works on desktops, laptops, smartphones and tablets and it’s completely free.

So, go and draw some weird lines and shaky shapes and see how Autodraw can turn your basic drawings into a masterpiece.

All brands want to score highly in search rankings and Google’s latest move changes the goalposts again –but in our view, this time it’s for the better. According to the latest update to Google’s search algorithm Panda, web pages will now be judged by content quality, as well as links, mobile-friendliness and a host of other metrics.

And why is this important for us PR folk? Well, not only will most PR agencies have written web copy, blogs and white papers at some point, but press coverage itself can also (sometimes) contain links back to a website which can drive your brand further up the search rankings. Furthermore, publishers themselves will almost certainly start to scrutinise which articles contributed by brands and PR agencies are performing best and this in turn will have an impact on which articles and news are accepted in future.

This is no pie-in-the-sky: for a while, Forbes paid its freelancers a lump sum for stories, but then a certain amount per hit on the story, encouraging the creation of stories with a long lifespan. Perversely, this frequently encouraged clickbait-style headlines to drive traffic and keep the money flowing to the freelancers.

The good news is that old content isn’t necessarily going to rank lower – which shows PR folk that Google’s search is getting far closer to a ‘human’ way of thinking. It’s analogous to how we think about classic books – the fact that Pride and Prejudice is over 200 years old doesn’t detract from its biting social commentary, pacey plotting and tight characterisation.

But in Google’s mind, what is quality? And what constitutes ‘old’? Well, whilst Google’s AI might be able to beat a European board game champion, it’s not Skynet yet. At the moment, the ranking is determined by ‘satisfying user queries’. So if a page is getting a lot of traffic for goldfish feeding techniques, you’d better make sure you’re providing information on exactly this because higher bounce rates will mean low relevance and consequently, a low score. As for what ‘old’ means, there’s no hard and fast answer. Content over a year old will certainly be judged more harshly than week-old content, but we’ve seen posts from Google execs admitting that age is generally less important than quality.

There are a few other interesting developments from the Panda update, both along the same vein. For example, comments and user-generated content on-site will now also be judged by the same criteria. Whilst comments give a benchmark of content quality – like a book review, reverting to my Pride and Prejudice metaphor – spammy comments will also detract from page quality, so keep moderating or using CAPTCHA codes.

So without further ado, here are some of our recommendations for dealing with Google’s Panda:

Know what you stand for:

Having a pragmatic understanding of what you sell, stand for and why people buy from you or visit your website is an absolute must to informing your content strategy

Make sure everyone is ‘singing from the same hymn sheet’:

If your website talks in a different way to your Twitter feed, and that’s different to how your chief exec speaks in public, then you’ve got problems. Consistency helps Google – and by extension, you

No clickbait:

It’s rarely relevant, people are getting sick of it and now, tenuously linking your brand to Cara Delevingne or Khloe Kardashian will get you penalised in the long-run

Focus on unique, quality content:

This will help your general online influence; developing content which appeals to your audience, can’t be found anywhere else and has lasting power may be more intensive, but it’ll pay dividends in the long run

Don’t worry about age … but keep it fresh:

Fresh content will always score more highly in Google, so you can’t just create a raft of content, post it and expect high search rankings. Old, good quality posts are your allies, but you will constantly need to create new content to stay high up in search rankings

Overall, Google’s Panda update is great news for communications practitioners – and terrifying news for others. Poor-quality, ‘spammy’ content which shuffles around your website like a sci-fi zombie frequently gives the industry a bad name. But unlike Pride and Prejudice, adding zombies is never a good thing – and with Google’s update, perhaps we’ll start to see this ‘undead’ content gradually put to rest.

We have all heard people saying that PR has been “turned upside down” by social media or that traditional PR is dead. But, is it?

Since the very beginning, the aim of Public Relations has been to manage reputation of an individual or an organisation. Has the goal changed? No, it is still very much the same.

That said, one thing has indeed changed: the tools. It is just like how PR has evolved with new technologies; when the telephone became widely spread, when the fax arrived in every office or when computers and email quickened the exchange of information (do you remember the time when PRs would hand write envelopes to send press releases?). This is why, today, any PR professional has to integrate social media into its portfolio of tools – just like they did for all the previous technologies – and decide whether or not it is the right communication channel for their tactics.

Yes, social media has transformed reputation management. The influence hubs have shifted away from traditional media and the information lifecycle is shorter than ever. Take, for example, the speed at which Google’s leaked financial results were commented on this week. This is now a real-time process and this is where PR consultants can have their say, especially as the core of their skills is handling the media.

So, what does that mean for agencies today? Tune in, turn on or drop out! Accept that technology changes, but keep on doing the same job – managing the perception consumers have of their clients, as we have done for almost two centuries.