The role will report direct to the MD, and responsibilities will include:

• Managing relationships with our landlord and other important service organisations

• Managing building maintenance, alarm systems, waste disposal, recycling and office cleaning

• Driving a hard bargain with all office suppliers and handling all office services and supplies procurement

• Keeping a lid on the company Amex (whilst allowing enough flexibility for 5pm G&Ts on Fridays)

• Maintenance and communication of all internal systems, policies and documentation

• Support to MD for running agency HR program

• Event management for all internal and client bashes

• ‘Front of house’ services management – meetings, post, phones, etc

• Support for basic IT services

• Management of Health and Safety and environmental processes and policy

• PA assistance to the MD

• Maintenance of internal office/staff performance reports

• Maintaining office harmony via procurement of key strategic goods such as cakes, flowers, chocolate and fine teas

If this is you – and if you’re up for taking a key role with one of the hottest properties since the toaster – then drop us a line using the form below…

We’re based in Lewes, East Sussex – 10 minutes from Brighton and one of the finest places to eat, drink and be merry on the planet. (Boy, life is good here!) We work with a bunch of great clients and partner agencies, helping one and all to win new friends and influence people.

Salary: £17-22k depending on experience.

See this page here for further information about our Online PR agency…

As our original ad for the role specified, Paul’s job is to be more Mad Men than IM (and Twitter, Foursquare and the rest). His job is to talk to all of our clients – preferably at a distance of three paces – and to get the Martinis in whenever they’re needed. Oh, and to always have a glowing report to hand.

Paul will also be dedicating a large part of his time facilitating discussions amongst the team here at C&M, to help us work more even more effectively. We’ll be positively sizzling.

You can reach Paul on Twitter via @holdgate. Please say hello.

Paul joins us from Search Marketing leaders iCrossing, where he had a variety of responsibilities as a key Account Manager for big brand clients – from Natural Search (SEO), Paid Search, Creative, Web Design and Usability, to Content and Social Media. Paul was a central figure in the development of Spannerworks/iCrossing as they grew from tens of staff to hundreds over the past four years.

We’re delighted that Paul’s chosen to bring the benefit of his skills and experience to C&M and look forward to discovering what tricks he’s got up his sleeve. For more on Paul and his pre C&M history, check out his LinkedIn profile.

The good news for our clients is that not all of Paul’s project time will be billable, just the ‘production’ elements – plans, strategy docs, reports, training and whatnot. Our clients won’t be billed for general catch ups and internal chit chats – which is our way of ensuring that client relationships are seen as investments rather than pound notes, and that Paul never feels deterred from picking up the phone or meeting for a coffee.

Finally, a big thank you to our client Pure360 (the email marketing software folks) who helped us interview Paul for the role when we decided that our clients would be a better judge of a Head of Accounts than we could ever be. So we ditched the ‘deliver a presentation on the future of Social Go Beans’ approach and had them talk to him for an hour instead.

Which is to say Paul, you’re in a good spot. We have superb client relationships. Now go make them even better.

It could use a transcript, but the pictures are nice. And so are the majority of the statements it makes. Have a read.

For more on the same theme, see here, here and here.

Lots of Social Media projects fail. Here’s my opinion on the subject.

In C&M’s experience, failure to deliver value on Social Media projects is 95.769% down to the lack of an initial plan. (In other words, lots of things don’t succeed just because people haven’t thought ahead to what success ought to (or might) look like.)

Why? Because 95.6579% of the time Social Media is seen as free (as in free beer). Free to implement (on Facebook, Twitter, etc) and ostensibly free to run (Dave in marketing, Stephanie in PR, and John in Customer Services… they’ve all been twiddling for six months now but, heck, we’re struggling to make an ROI statement).

(NB: this is the basis of a common brief for us and one that we love – ‘We’ve been experimenting – with and without agency help, can you please help us fix it with an integrated plan…?’)

Plans usually happen because something costs money. If the boss needs persuading, then a list of objectives (aka a ‘business case’) is probably going to get created early on in the piece. And some research. And a plan. And perhaps some management meetings in-between.

Web sites, PR campaigns and lead generation activities succeed when they are well planned, budgeted and executed. If it cost £50,000 to create a Facebook page, most Facebook campaigns would also succeed …because they would need to come with a plan and a rough idea of cost and returns – and all of these things would be held to close scrutiny and consistent measurement by the right people.

So, create some objectives, produce a budget and then an accompanying brief (or – better – a plan). This way you’ll be 95.87645% more likely to succeed.

(NB: things may be a bit more nuanced than this but, hey, it’s a good start.)

Thoughts?

(CLICK THE IMAGE – NOT AN EMBED!)

I’ve been stalking him researching his work for some time now. I can highly recommend it. He strikes a lovely balance between the exciting promise of tech and Social Media and its cultural limitations.

Check the highlight version of his presentation for a quick two minute roundup of why Social Media ‘truths’ can be good and bad news… (And think about what this means to your brand – the search for your inner truth, mission, value proposition, etc, bla, bla will never be defined by you, but by everyone else: a random ragtag bunch of customers who discuss your brand online.)

And check the full version for a wonderfully funny account of Social Media, content aggregation, important world events and what it is to be an Indian in America.

(For more of his stuff, see here. He’s brilliant. Tune in.)

In a single hit, everyone’s favourite media baron Rupert has stuck two fingers up at Google and those of us who are too tight to pay for his newspaper content.  Nobody can access his stuff anymore, unless they pay for it.

It’s a big move. The standard web marketing and Social Media handbook tells us to give it all away for free – in the name of better indexing, bookmarking, word of mouth, distribution and other good things.

This approach is proven but deeply troubling for most publishers.  Unlike Tescos, Sainsburys and ASOS – who publish free(ish) ‘value-added’ content (magazines, emails, style guides, recipe cards, wotnot) in order to get us moving with more zeal around their freezer sections and web sites – the only thing that traditional publishers have to sell is (by and large) their content.  The concept of ‘free’ does not sit well with them.

Likewise, ‘free’ is a bane for those traditionally responsible for creating content.  Writers, editors, musicians, games developers, etc.  Where goes the pay check?

Yet we’re stuck in a space race for ‘free’ content.  If you’re not currently doing it then you probably soon will be because your competitors are – right now – offering a variety of free and juicy value-added social networking widgets, reviews services, hints and tips and other content-based merchandise for anyone willing to part with a nano second of their attention on the Interwebs.

This movement and its consequences have been already been described by better people than me.  See here for Jaron Lanier on Digital Maoism.  And our good pal Ian Delaney on Valuing Content.

I’m torn.  At heart, C&M is a content marketing outfit.  We know that the best way to generate a righteous storm of fans, followings, and traffic is to create great content – and then to give it all away for free.  Most of our clients are, however, more than a little hesitant when we begin this discussion.  Content is, after all, their IP – whether they’re a content business or not.  It takes time to plan and produce.

So why give it away if it’s good?

The Times – and News Corp – has the answer.

Free content in the context of an iPhone > iPad > iSofa scenario isn’t ‘free’ as we might know it.  Our relationship with content is changing fast, and – subsequently – so is content’s relationship with our wallets.

News is now free.  This is old news.  Check the classic Clay Shirky for this one (The price of information has fallen…). Other forms of content, however, don’t need to be all free, all of the time.  Here’s how the Times Online’s strategy is unfolding….

Firstly, they’re part of a network. News Corp does (Sky) sports, Caitlin Moran (on Saturdays), and lots of other bits and pieces.  News Corp describes the Times Online brand proposition as follows:

Essentially, this is a (customised) chocolate box approach.  I love lots of News Corp ‘properties’: Ms Moran, Mike Atheton and Soccer AM; but I find the Times Weekend glossy magazines kind of obnoxious.  In other words, I have a relationship with bits and pieces, but I’m not a big fan of the mothership brand and I won’t pay for it.  But, hey, I’ll happily pick and mix if Rupert is kind enough to carve it up for me.  I’ll also pay for some parts of it – so long as I can avoid paying a ‘one size fits all’ bill and the coconut creams at the back.

If you subscribe to the new Times Online, this is what you see on the other side of the wall…

A variety of subscriptions, apps and services ready for use.  Access to some will depend on your subscription level – e.g. I can (soon) get the Sunday Times on my iPad if I go for the super-sized rate.  Some will be free ‘value-adds,’ others will be one-off paid for events and activities.

My hope is that I’ll soon be able to subscribe to Soccer AM (perhaps paid-for).  And a widget for the Soccer AM YouTube channel and Boston Goals (free).  Or a podcast from just one of the Boston Goals commentary team (free, probably).  This kind of thing is happening now.

When News Corp starts to understand my content patterns and usage preferences (and when they start to cut up their content assets accordingly), they have my attention and my wallet.  Call it narrowcasting, personalisation or whatever you like, the progression is logical.  New content channels and consumption experiences are here to stay – iPad > YouTube > Twitter > TEN SNEAKY MINUTES ON THE SOFA WATCHING EASTENDERS BUT HECK THE WIFE ISN’T WATCHING > WOW FREEEEEBEEEES > SOME PAID BITS > UH, WELL, OK > BAM! ……so let’s divvy up our content catalogue (and our brand assets) to match.  Some free, some paid for, but all mixed up into different versions, formats and channels.

The same is happening in TV and broadcasting.  Anyone for a spot of Project Canvas?

The value of content is shifting

In both TV and newsprint, the value of content – and our relationship with it – is shifting from the network provider to the individual asset (the Caitlin Moran column is more appealing to me than the Times on Saturday / the News Corp brand) or the author / producer (Caitlin Moran)… and prices are moving around in step.  Smaller payments for smaller slices.  This I like.  And I’ll probably end up spending more.

The challenge for publishers (and other brands that now publish) is to figure out where the most valuable pieces are in their catalogues and how to make money from them.  Bits need to be distributed for free (in the name of Google, ‘findability’ and great (Social) marketing) and bits need to be kept closer to hand and charged for (in the shape of £ pound notes and/or email addresses).

This I also like. It’s my business to help brands figure out what content goes where and how. In fact C&M has been doing a rather good job of this for brands such as Hackett for some time now.  Same challenge (get me noticed, get me distribution, drive traffic / revenue, but don’t give away the crown jewels), only with different content collateral (branded content, not ‘media’ content).

Beyond content serving, the challenge for the Times Online is, of course, acquisition.  They now have a catalogue and a set of services that speak to the Google generation (iPad in hand on sofa).  But fully appeasing Google will be hard because they are hiding a lot of their stash.  Social Media represents an opportunity to do acquisition and awareness effectively – but they don’t seem to be really embracing it right now.  (See here for a list of Times columnists that they’re hawking on Twitter.  A step in the right direction, I feel – get me access to the bits that I like best, and quickly.)

Having mentioned her a few times, I’ll let Caitlin Moran sign off.  She summed things up quite nicely in her column last week (yes, behind the paywall!):

“I don’t think journalism should be free, because, tbh, bitch got to make rent. I’ve spent 20 years clawing my way out of a council house in Wolverhampton to reach a point where I can now afford a Nigella Lawson breadbin. If I have to start blogging everything for free, I am simply going to have to fall back on Plan B, and go and hang about in a red-light district somewhere. Meanwhile, the only journalists left will be posh people who can afford to do it as a hobby, in between skiing or renovating a folly. This column would be written by Lady Helen “Melons” Windsor or George Osborne [….] As a society, we now charge for essential dental work, but somehow found a way to throw in HD spit-roasts for free. What does that say about us? And when someone works out what that says about us, will they get paid for explaining it?”

(She likes paywalls, by the way. She also has a huge Twitter following for lots of mini slices of Caitlin Moran content …every day, for FREE.)

Further Reading

Check out Chris Applegate’s review of the new Times Online service.  Soup to nuts good stuff – including a great commentary on design and user experience.

Check out this book – Information Rules – by Carl Shapiro. He called all of this before the last Interweb bubble popped in 1998. (And I’ll be forever grateful to my mate Doug Kessler for making me read it.)

The first is from Antony Mayfield‘s Me and My Web Shadow (buy here now). The second is from Brian Solis’ Engage (buy here now). Both extracts describe aspects of Twitter (the ability to answer to ‘What’s the point of Twitter?’ being a common requirement for most digital folks nowadays).

Here’s Antony:

Here’s Brian:

There’s plenty to admire in Antony’s book. It’s pithy. It states the real, obvious and tangible. It’s written for the guy on the street, but – word for word – it’s a super primer for any brand manager. What applies to the individual applies to the corporate as well. And, most importantly for me, it passes Einstein’s good old ‘explain it to a six year old‘ maxim. There’s enough information to get to grips with the subject and move forward.

Meantime, Brian appears to have been up on a Pro Plus all-nighter to finish his manuscript. And his editor has clearly gone AWOL.

We’re all guilty of this kind of prose. The Social Media generation – thirty something, greying slightly, inclined to wear Camper shoes – grew up feeding on some very abstract ideas on campus: various kinds of post-isms and futurologies. That’s you, me and all the others.

In an age of austerity – when budgets are being cut, mixed around and passed on to others – this style of thinking, writing and talking looks increasingly out of place. And I have to say it irks me because the more time we spend filling people’s heads with hot air, the harder it is to get down to earth and do some proper work. (And, yes, hard as I try, I’m also sometimes guilty as charged.)

So I think, in a meeting situation sat opposite a brand manager, we should make like Mayfield. Save the philosophy for the pub, be more pragmatic and just move things forward.

Or maybe I’m just being a grumpy old pedant? You tell me.

You may currently be:

• Worried about the general health of the PR / Ad industry; or
• Bored with life in the general PR / Ad industry; or
• Fascinated by Social Media (and Google and Rupert Murdoch’s ‘Paywall’ strategy) but lacking opportunities to translate this into meaningful things; or
• Wondering what the hell your boss has been doing with his future-o-meter over the past three years; or
• Already doing what you want to do in our line of work, but just in need of some better Motion; or
• A young, digitally progressive, marketing gun who is looking for a bigger slice of the action
• (NB: you will definitely not be a recruitment consultant)

If any of these things are you, then get in touch. Seriously. Get in touch right now.

We’re hiring a super-talented individual to help us run our client relationships. Job title: Head of Accounts.

Here’s a really quick overview of the role:

• Accounts pro (in the Mad Men sense of the word)
• x3 years agency experience
• Has a proven track record in running client programs
• £35k+ salary, depending on experience

Here’s a more detailed overview:

• Throws 100% of their energies into growing accounts, making the team sing and delivering unbelievable client service
• Knows what it takes to deliver unbelievable client service and a happy, happy team
• Is obsessed with delivering unbelievable client service and running a happy, productive team (obsessed!)
• Can take a project from the point of sale through to execution without a glitch

• Has a bag of creative implementation ideas to throw into the campaign mix

• Is driven, driven, driven by results
• Is also driven by the occasional Martini lunch

• …etc, etc

If this is you – and if you’re up for getting in with one of the hottest properties since the toaster – then drop us a line using the form below…

We’re based in Lewes, East Sussex – 10 minutes from Brighton and one of the finest places to eat, drink and be merry on the planet. (Boy, life is good here!) We work with a bunch of great clients and agencies, helping one and all to win new friends and influence people. (See here for a round up of who we work with.)

You’ll be working directly with MD Roger Warner as a key part of his immediate team. We’d guess you’ll have three or more years of agency experience doing the kind of things mentioned above. We’d assume you’re also extremely ambitious and are up for growing a new team within a real pocket rocket of a new-fangled web marketing firm.

See this page here for further information about our Online PR agency…

Apply NOW!

If you’ve read this far then we’d love to hear from you. Just use the handy form below…

“All our group competitors are going with Facebook. So we’re throwing everything into attack. We feel the lads LinkedIn, YouTube, Flickr and Slideshare also have lots to offer going forward, and Foursquare is shaping up nicely on the left. At the end of the day we have no actual plans. But we’re keen for first-mover advantage. We need to be active and we’re desperate for maximum coverage.”

Any remaining doubts over Ledley King were also banished by the boss. The only defender in Eriksson’s preliminary squad announced his formal retirement from the game at yesterday’s news conference, having suffered for decades with no knees.

“Ledley’s a smashing lad. All the boys are gutted for him. I’ve asked him to stay on with us for the tournament. His experience in Social Media will be invaluable. He’s had a Facebook page for a few weeks now and is already up to 200 fans. He’s also been working with my backroom staff on penalties, Twitter and crisis management.”

Meantime, Eriksson confirmed that there was no place in his team for other defenders, midfielders, strategies or tactics.

“We’re a small team and this is a recession,” he said. “Resources are limited and this is a new competition for us. I back the lads. I’ve told them to go out there and to get engaged and reach out as much as they can. Drop a few hand grenades. What comes will come. Right now my Powerpoint is looking awesome. We have to be strong, work together and take it one game at a time.”

A variety of industry pundits have already condemned Eriksson’s plans as failing to ‘get‘ the ‘complex, non-mainstream, non-linear ecosystem of the Social Media matrix. One source stated that Eriksson was ‘dangerously close to missing a tipping point for the wider network and leveraging his own brand reputation.’ Another warned him to ‘beware of the long channel ball.’

Goalkeeper David James refused to comment.

In the England All Star XI camp, Terry Fenwick is looking forward to a new challenge on the left wing. “It’s my last chance to nail any Argentinian that drifts in from the flank,” he said in an upbeat 1:1 with reporters on Wednesday. “I’ll be ready this time….”

His manager Bobby Robson refused to comment.

GOOOOOOOOOAL!!!!!

C&M has its collective fingers, toes and eyes crossed for our boys in South Africa.

We’ll be thinking of them back home.  With Fabio (the scariest manager since Bill ‘More Than Life Itself’ Shankly’) at the helm, we’re confident.  Sven Goran ‘see what sticks’ Eriksson can take his chances elsewhere. Good luck to him.  Our feeling is that if you want success (in any sphere) then a little bit of research and planning – combined with a balanced attack (and a spot of luck), goes a long way.

EAT THAT!!!!!  :   )

Do all brands want to sell to all people, all of the time? A can of Diet Coke is different to a Maserati. Price is positioning and all that…

This is the type of question we all ought to be asking right now. Why Social?

The promise of Social Media often gets mixed up, regardless of the brand. Do you need Social Media at all? Is it something for service and support? If for marketing, is it an SEO thing or a PR thing or an acquisition thing or a DM thing, etc? This context is crucial – it’s important not to get too strung out on possibilities and concepts.

Which leads me loosely on to this brilliant video about marketing and sales from ex-Dragon @DougRichard via his School for Startups:

This is marketing’s relationship with sales. So what’s the role of Social in marketing? Can it fulfil the promise of a mega love-in with all of your marketplace, all of the time? Probably not, unless you’re planning to hire a stack more Twitter-friendly sales/support/service/marketing people on Monday. Besides, if Social is to work for you, then who do you want to do the talking? Should talking via Social even be an aim? Is the aim of good marketing to talk or not to talk? Why are you using Twitter/Facebook? Who’s doing talking do for you? You or your customers? How does this scale? Are you B2B or B2C? What should you be aiming for…?

There’s a tension between Social Media expectations and reality here. Marketing is generally about not talking to people (in the physical sense). Talking is usually the job of the sales department, and ‘Sales’ is expensive. Marketing is an operational cost. Good marketing reduces the amount of £ spent on sales people and sales processes by encouraging other people/environments to do the selling and the talking for you (as per Doug’s video).

Right now, lots of marketing departments see Social Media as a must have. Near term this may not be the case – unless they can prove that it helps ‘Marketing’ to do better marketing – without having to invest in all the talking… And these discussions don’t have a great deal to do with the value of a retweet.

My guess is that during this time you were tuned in to more important things like hot political debate or back episodes of Entourage.

So here’s a digest for you….

The Key Announcement: Facebook Open Graph

Open Graph is a “platform that allows sites and apps to share information about users in order to tailor offers, features and services to each one’s interests and tastes.”

In a nut, Facebook has ‘opened’ itself up to unveil a big old personalisation / recommendation engine for the Interweb (more on ‘open’ later). Functionally this is familiar ground – we’re used to being punted ‘stuff we might like’ via Amazon or iTunes, but Open Graph is altogether different in scope.

iTunes and Amazon both serve us content based on our user profiles and prior purchasing / navigational patterns – but neither system is portable / each is proprietary.  (In other words, what goes on in iTunes stays in iTunes… and Amazon will never learn from our activity on this platform.)

By contrast, the general thrust of Facebook Open Graph is to enable any web service / content provider to learn from our activity on sites other than Facebook, and to serve us content (ads, widgets, services, wotnot) based on this intelligence.

The Whizzy Bit: ‘Like’ Buttons

For brands on Facebook, out goes the concept of ‘Fan.’  In comes the ‘Like.’ (See here – if you’re not down with Hackett London on Facebook yet, you’ll see a ‘Like’ button top of the screen, above the tabs. Click it and you’ll become what used to be known as a ‘Fan’… and you’ll start to receive the brand’s updates, etc, in your news feed.)

So far, so much the same, huh?

The really smart new ‘Open Graph’ change is also kind of simple… Facebook has made this same ‘Like’ functionality available to anyone who publishes a web site.  See the base of this post for example. So long as you’re logged in to Facebook, you can show your love of our content right off of the page.

In principle, this is nothing new.  We’re very used to sharing our likes and opinions by these kinds of buttons/widgets: we can Tweet Now, bookmark, share on Facebook, etc, wherever a site has implemented this kind of functionality.

The new bit is this:  When you click the button, the Web page is shared with your friends on Facebook.  What’s more, every “Like” you submit ensures Facebook (and its partner sites) can deliver a more personalized experience to you.

i.e. rather than simply sharing stuff with friends, Facebook’s implementation of ‘Like’ via Open Graph captures this information in its big old profiling engine and makes it available to other web content / service providers.  So, unlike the iTunes or Amazon experience, when you’re signed on to Facebook, participating websites like CNN.com can now display information, goods and services tailored specifically to your interests — without requiring you to sign in at that website or provide it with any information.

At the same time, this neat little widget allows me to get a better picture of what all of my friends are into… Giving me a new way to access new content. Check out this interesting app for starters.

At face value this, then, is very cool indeed.  Facebook is bigger than a very big thing.  We love it in growing numbers.  It holds an awful lot of user data.  It’s now making all of this information available to the wider web (and our friends), with our consent…

The Mandatory Facebook Privacy Question

Or is it?  Consent gets a bit fuzzy here.

This seemingly simple functionality change has some far reaching privacy implications.  I’ll leave the explanations to the San Jose Mercury News:  ”A Facebook user who indicates she likes a movie on IMDb.com by clicking on the Facebook “Like” or “Recommend” button embedded in the site, for example, creates a public record, available to advertisers using Facebook and visible to anyone on the social network — even if the user has a “Friends Only” privacy setting on their account…“

…and this issue is set to get lots of people hot under the collar for a while to come. “They’ve created here, inadvertently, a gold mine of data for unsolicited ads, spam and even scammers“ says somebody at the US Sentate.

(See the base of this post here for a succinct view on the subject from the fellas at We Are Social. I’m tending to agree… The concept of privacy isn’t working as we’ve previously wanted it to.  We’re increasingly willing to share everything, all of the time… So what do we need to keep private now?  PS:  I don’t know the answer… but I do know it’s different from what we wanted yesterday and it’s changing fast.)

For those worried about such things, I recommend you stop Liking things immediately.  For everyone else…

Wow! Cool!  Will the Web Now Understand Me..?

In one smooth hit, Facebook has apparently solved a big fat problem that’s been floating around the Interweb for ten years or more – profile portability.

iTunes and Amazon will continue not to share my personal information, and I’ll continue to get wildly different product recommendations from both one of them.  Meantime, there’s a chance that other content and services providers will start to get to know me a whole lot more.  I’ll give freely to the system – sharing my likes, dislikes, etc – and in return I’ll hope to receive a more personalised experience from those progressive destinations that are using sensible implementations of Open Graph.

Facebook, in other words, is seizing an opportunity to become the web’s ‘meta’ profile engine… and in the absence of anything better, they’re likely to score big time because they already own all of our faces.  Check the footnote from Mashable:  ”They’ve helped to advance efforts around the semantic web. Rivals will try to fight back with a truly open solution, but without the correct incentive (lots of traffic for publishers), how can they compete?“

Footnotes

• The privacy issue is obviously important: Facebook’s usage policy is, as ever, fuzzy.  Time will tell how this stuff gets used/abused, and negative reactions will help to keep the juggernaut in check

• Openness is also a question – this is ultimately a Facebook platform play.  They own it, they own us and they own brand and advertiser relations… and they’ll want it to stay this way.  But other, more open, implementations are unlikely to win out as they have no user base.  So it looks to me like Facebook will be the immediate answer to all of our wildest personalisation dreams

• Content management system (CMS) vendors must be spinning.  They make a lot of money selling the promise of ‘real time CRM’ and personalisation.  I think this is all to the good.  They were never very good at it anyway – and my guess is that Facebook has a far better chance of delivering a meaningful system to power content serving than a hairy old software module and three guys in the basement at Acme Corp Media International.

Your thoughts….?  Evil, good, bad, or should we just ask Nick Clegg to sort it all out for us….?

It’s been a while, but I’m glad I spent the time. (Generally, I find the content-related thinking that flows from these kinds of sources a lot richer and more direct than the stuff found on ‘Social’ consultant-style blogs…)

Anyways, I was drawn to this post about Content Mills.

What’s a Content Mill? I hear you say… Well, an SEO definition is as follows – something very relevant to those looking to Social Media as the next brand publishing frontier:

“A content mill is a site that publishes cheap content. The content is either user-contributed, paid, or a mix of the two. The term content mill is obviously pejorative, the implication being that the content is only published to pump content into search engines, and is typically of low value in terms of quality.”

A related idea is Social Media Optimisation – the mass production and publication of Social content to help improve rankings.

Both techniques work in varying degrees.  Google (and Social) can be gamed, and – when viewed purely as a volume-based activity – content for content’s sake can make a lot of sense (as SEO Book points out, content is a resource overhead… and these types of mass-content programs can in some cases prove cost effective in terms of buying some visibility – on Google, Twitter, whatever).

More interesting perhaps is the question of brand values and quality. A ‘Content Mill’ approach might create a footprint purely via persistence, but if the content sucks then who’s going to care (click, share, discuss, bookmark, Tweet)…?

So here’s a handy concept to keep your content strategy in shape: Information Quality. (Thanks again to SEO Book).

I recommend you have a browse. When it comes to quality, key things to keep in mind include:

• Authority
• Objectivity
• Comprehensiveness
• Validity
• Uniqueness
• Timeliness
• …and other things that ‘Content Mills’ (or any other low rent content strategies) are not very good at.

Quality matters. Stay faithful to this kind of stuff and you’ll probably do the right thing by your brand, Google, and Twitter, etc …and – most importantly – your audience will value your efforts in turn.

In short, advertisers will soon be able to pay for ‘Promoted Tweets’ to appear within search and conversation strands.

• Phase one will enable brands to promote their Tweets in relation to keywords within a Twitter users’ search activity (like Google PPC ads, they will appear at the top of a Twitter search ‘result’ – presumably via third party apps like Tweetdeck as well as Twitter search).

• Phase two will integrate these ‘Promoted Tweets’ directly within Twitter streams (again, on a keyword basis… although it’s not clear how exactly these Tweets will be presented – sensibly Twitter seems to be waiting to see how phase one plays out before making any commitments on this score).

Will it work?

Well, from a user and an advertiser perspective, it’s all going to depend on how well ‘Promoted’ content is presented and the intelligence behind the system. Relevancy is obviously going to be important… but more so than with Google ads. Twitter is a conversational medium – so recency and lots of other softer values are also key – after all there’s nothing worse than an ill-timed punchline.

This aspect will be an interesting creative/copy challenge for us all. (I can already see the Habitat comms machine in overdrive… Iran > Elections > SOFAS!!! : ) Advertisers, meantime, will need a bunch of great tools to make it easy to use, simple to analyse and buy-able.

And What About the Agency?

From an agency (and particularly a PR agency) perspective, it could be really interesting. Up until now agency ‘Twitter campaigns’ tend to have been founded on notions of magical networks and influencers (see also here for more of the same – WTF is an Influencer?). i.e. find/build a network/influencer sympathetic to a message and then watch it move around. Targeting in this sense has been people-based and – let’s face it – shrouded in mystery (and plenty of guesswork) no matter how many pretty network diagrams are flung around.

Conversely, targeting for Promoted Tweets will be all about language, keywords and Tweet volumes – which is well established and understood by brands and digital agencies alike via lengthy experiences running SEO and Google paid for campaigns.

With a decent ad serving system in place there’ll be no real need for any Twitter campaign ‘secret sauce’. Some aspects of Twitter will become as simple as Google PPC …leaving some PR agencies with a headache: how to charge for ‘Twitter campaigns’?? The display ad model and the services that surround it are very different to PR-like services of many traditional PR-focused agencies. When you take away the ‘influencer’ (relationships with the mythical Twitter-bod, the editor, the power broker) and mechanise it, then a layer of billing opportunity disappears.

In a Nut…

The basis for Twitter campaign planning will soon be all about the numbers and the tool sets. And I say bring it on.

At the same time, I don’t think that users aren’t about to leave in herds because of ‘profiled’ Tweets – the network and the connections that everyday users have built are too valuable/strong. The challenge will be how Twitter handles presentation and how compelling this is – from a user (click now! reTweet now!) perspective and an administration perspective. (i.e. Twitter needs some good tech and design to power the presentation, and a bunch of super-duper tools behind it to prove value, do analytics, sell it fast, etc.)

Meanwhile, I think some PR agency Twitter models are about to change…

For other web’ish discussion and comment on the subject, see:

• Tweetmeme – a roundup of the Promoted Tweets chatter and patter…

• TheNextWeb – It will be interesting to see whether Twitter is able to keep the user experience the same, while still promoting a rollout of a product this large…

• Mashable – It’s a bit like Digg…

• Pocket Lint – Can this save Twitter? Or will it be hamstrung by the fact that it’s only available to big corporations and only appears in search results, not regular tweet-streams?

• Our Social Times – Will ‘Promoted Tweets Ruin Twitter’?

• Drew Benvie – Will the invasion of adverts inside conversations turn people off (and on to the next thing)?

Postscript…

None of the above assumes that good old fashioned Twitter/ing might disappear… Brands will just have different ways to use it. Conversation will still count, and a lack of charisma will be fatal. Promoted Tweets looks like it will give you two ways of running things – a PPC-style flavour and an ‘organic’ flavour if you like …and I can see it being extremely powerful if implemented well.

We work with mainstream brands such as Hackett, IBM, Rightmove, and Continental Tyres, plus a range of super smart industry players in the world of film, technology, travel and consumer services.

We really need a shiny, dynamic, Online PR intern – someone who:

• Takes Twitter to bed
• Loves LinkedIn and FaceBorg
• Gets turned on by stats and infographics
• Writes a great headline (and sub-head, and body)
• Argues about this stuff at the pub on a Friday
• Wants a leg-up into the new-fangled world of digital marketing

If this is you – and if you’re up for getting a bunch of real experience with one of the hottest properties since the toaster – then drop us a line using the form below…

We’re based in Lewes, East Sussex – 10 minutes from Brighton and one of the finest places to eat, drink and be merry on the planet. (Boy, life is good here!) We work with a bunch of great clients and partner agencies, helping one and all to win new friends and influence people.

We’d guess you’ll be fast approaching a good degree at a great university. We’d also assume you’re extremely ambitious and are up for making an impact within a real pocket rocket of a web marketing firm.

This opportunity will provide you with a cracking hands-on role that will give you front line (i.e. client-based) experience in:

• Creative campaign planning
• Campaign management and execution
• Social media and web research and analytics
• Copywriting
• Online PR and community management
• Client and account management

NB: we don’t own a photocopier : )

See this page here for further information about our Online PR agency…

Apply NOW!

If you’ve read this far then we’d love to hear from you. Just use the handy form below…

• “…trying to find the big influencer with big audience is really just old mass marketing in a cheap dress. Old mass marketing (go with the largest numbers … and breasts) isn’t economical; neither, it turns out, is marketing to just one or a few powerful people — the mythical influencer.“

and…

• “Is there more influence in the tail than in the head? If you talk to 100k people who talk to 10 people each, do you get more bang than talking to one person who has 1m followers?“

This line of enquiry asks all the right questions. The hunt for a mythical Social influencer is likely to be a) time-consuming and uneconomical (there’s a lot of effort/expense in trying to do broad marketing on a 1:1 basis); b) unscientific (no matter how many network-y flow charts and scatter patterns that get thrown around, this plan of attack will always be based on hunch-work); and c) a waste of time in the context of anything/everything else that you might be doing instead…

Yes, the hunt for the influencer (or a gaggle of them) really is another mis-guided quasi-targeting exercise by Marketeers passing themselves off as Quants (in a cheap dress).

It sounds superb: who resist doubt the pull of a Twitterer who has 35 zillion followers? But is the hunt really worth it and what’s attainable? I say this having sat through numerous identi-kit whiteboard sessions seeking to create programs around ideal user targets, their online social activity, media diets, favourite colours and inside leg measurements…. all of which tend to lead to a (financially large) exercise in designing a ‘user-centric’ web marketing experience (or, in common parlance – another goddam microsite, a fluffy PR stunt and/or another all-singing and dancing brand-based Facebook page/group).

This, frankly, is crap. The hunt for mythical Social influence is more often an excuse to build new stuff than to acquire new customers. In my book, when it comes to acquisition and awareness, our time and money would be better spent on attacking wider audiences via content- and conversation-based programs …i.e. simply rolling up our sleeves and diving in with good old fashioned content, and dealing with the dialogue once we’ve struck a chord.

My bet is that one analyst locked in a room could take your brief and target your market in less than a day based purely on an analysis of LANGUAGE and CONTENT and search and Social discussion trends.

Think about it. Chasing ‘influencers’ is (as Buzzmachine says) like hunting snipe – elusive and abstract to say the least. Identifying audience behaviours and creating a program around content trends is, by contrast, a rather exact science. Our most effective analytics tools help us to identify language, not people. Armed with a keyword (or hashtag) or five I can tell you exactly what and where your potential audience is, what content they care for and what you will need to do to engage with them…

A content-based approach leads to programs that can be implemented quickly and directly. Identify content trends/patterns > create content > strike! This is our method. Tell me if you know a more direct and measurable one. And good luck with the ‘influencer’ / snipe hunt meantime…

The Econsultancy piece deconstructs things nicely…. Essentially Gawker is making a deeper analysis of the traffic that either hits their sites directly (without the aid of search engine or other referral sources – i.e. by keying in www.gizmodo.com to start a browsing session) or uses branded search terms to navigate their way to their sites (i.e. taps ‘gizmodo’ into Google and goes from there).

Clearly this ‘branded traffic‘ is motivated. From a publisher/advertiser perspective it’s also more valuable. It sticks around on Gawker sites longer than the average bear. (In Pettigrew’s words “Branded traffic visitors spend more time on our properties (1 minute and 31 seconds more than average) and view more pages of our content (nearly 4 pages per visit at mutiple visits per day).)

The goal here is to create a new metric for selling display ads to advertisers. Gawker knows that a proportion of its traffic is very motivated to stick around and devour its content – therefore page impressions become easier to sell. This is good thinking – common sense and easy to grasp. I’ll buy it. But I’m also really interested in this statement from Pettigrew:

“While distributing content across the web is essential for attracting the interest of Internet passersby, courting these wanderers, massaging them into occasional visitors, and finally gaining their affection as daily readers is far more important. This core audience — borne of a compounding of word of mouth, search referrals, article recommendations, and successive enjoyed visits that result in regular readership — drives our rich site cultures and premium advertising products.”

This is in many ways an anti-Social (Media) play. When more brands fling their ad budgets at Social (dropping classic micro site / display ad combos in favour of ‘distributing content across the web’), publishers need to work harder for their ad dollar.

Meantime, Social Media generally struggles for a hands-down (meaningful) ROI metric that sets it aside from ad measurements – in order to better woo an advertising spend.

I’m struck by the fact that this is all becoming one large soup… A circular power play for metrics, ownership and budgets. Ultimately, every brand wants what Gawker talks of: successive visits (or at least visits that have people do the things they want them to…. read, buy, sign up, discuss, etc.) Publishers will deliver these types of visits by giving brands access to their ‘core audience’ via display ads / impressions – but data shows that this is happening in dwindling numbers. Social Media will deliver them via different (brand-owned) channels – such as dialogues on other platforms like Facebook.

Brands and publishers are now competing on the same terms for the same people. We’re all publishers now. We’re (mostly) aware of the need to ‘attract the interest of passersby’ through syndicated content and services. And naturally we all want to ‘gain affection’ and drive successive visits.

Alongside new metrics for audience engagement, I see situations where publishers give up some of their display-ad-cash-cows in order to work harder with brands on co-created content… because a brand’s Interweb destinations are everywhere – and they’re owned by lots of different folks…. the brand, the publisher, Facebook, me (the blogger), wotnot. Consequently, what brands really need right now is better content – across every property within their ‘traffic acquisition portfolio.’

In the meantime, though, ‘branded traffic’ makes sense – we should all be thinking about the difference between a motivated audience and the great (random) unwashed that might StumbleUpon us in a lunch break…

In a nut, we’re winning. In a bigger nut, we’re winning together in a tough, competitive business environment (property!).

Here’s what we did, why we did it and what we achieved as a result…

If you like what you see, then do let us know. We’re mighty proud of this one. And thanks meantime to the team at EOG – a superb client to work with… plus the team at Catch Digital, who are responsible for all elements of web design and implementation – again, a super talented team.

Meantime, here’s what they’ve been up to lately…

This is another way of asking the ‘why bother building another micro site?’ question – but from a different perspective. Micro sites can be great. They can allow brands to do wonderful acquisition/relationship/SEO/etc things. To my mind, we don’t necessarily need to stop building them, we just need to build them differently so that they can be more productive in the context of any given campaign effort.

In a nut, as we all know, the value is not usually in the property itself but in the things it allows you/your customers to do… and the starting point for realising this value is getting people to turn up in the first place. So, to this end, dear Mr/Ms Brand Manager, here’s some questions to ask… If the agency who builds your micro site is also responsible for the engagement/PR/etc part of the job, then…

• Would you build your own social network to service it or use someone else’s (e.g. Facebook)?

• Would you host and serve the video yourself or would you use another platform (e.g. YouTube)?

• Would you deliver your own functional services (e.g. maps) or use a public platform (e.g. Google Maps)

…and so on.

Another way of looking at this is to ask ‘whose fee is it?’ and where do I need to spend the money in order to make this brave new property connect with the world.

My general advice is to use public (Social) services wherever you can – this will help your initial acquisition / awareness / distribution efforts …and then save some cash to spend on content and engagement.

What do you say? This probably moves somebody’s cheese/fees….

(NB: it’s a year or so old… and we’re still, collectively, light years from realising what it really means and putting it into practice.)

Points I like:

• Search and find is everything / free is normal, right? (Slide 24)
• “…once we’ve realised the important thing is our content and not where it’s consumed, we should find it easier to let go.” (Slide 54)
• On the web our whole emotional attachment to content changes – it gets reduced. Content is easier to find, we pay/work less to get it. Therefore our relationship with it shifts to other dimensions. (Utility more than brand? Free-ness and immediacy more than accuracy? TBD : ) (Slide 25)

And for those who don’t agree with ‘free,’ a footnote:

We no longer own our collective content archive. In fact we haven’t for a long time. Google does. And anyone that values SEO (ie, all of us) has forgone the right of ownership, for all the right reasons. When it comes to search and discovery, it’s Google who makes your brand ‘presentation’ choices, not you. Google is one big old custodian of your brand. If you don’t like the fact that Google presents content A instead of content B to your hard fought customers, then tough – you just need to create different (better?) content. And If you want ownership back, then say goodbye to Google (as Mr Murdoch may well choose to do).

Oh, and ditto for our good friend Social Media – only now it’s other people who own the presentation of your brand, the circulation of your content (and the choices therein), rather than you.

So… best to just get with the program and let it all hang out. Your job is to ensure that all of your content is brilliant, all of the time – so that even that old blog post from the 2007 can be remembered and re-read lovingly.

Anyways – your thoughts? If you’re in the business of publishing like Mr M, then you probably see things a little different. (And you’re probably a bit miffed with the rest of the world becoming publishers too….)

You can check out more of our work with Plain Lazy here.

(This last link is worth a look if you want to see how good my Parkour skills are. Hint: I’m hot / they’re good.)

And, I recommend you follow Larry (pictured above), Plain Lazy’s super-slack (meaning very, very good) Marketing Honcho on Twitter via @lazbash. He’s an interesting chap. Designer, creative and tip top marketeer rolled into one.

A more balanced view of what I’m driving at comes from our very own @rowstar. Says she in a comment on the original post:

I’m not sure I entirely agree that there is no place for beard stroking in all of this. The idea of running analytics in a vacuum and leaving creative until last worries me. I’d like to see a marriage of data and instinct – beard-strokers and number-crunchers working together from the start to come up with meaningful, apposite and intelligence-informed strategies. I agree that lightbulb campaigns are outmoded, but as I said in this blog post last year, the more brains involved, the better. Get the analysts doing their thing, but give the creatives a chance to lend their instincts to that stage of the process, too. I think both camps could learn a lot from each other – everyone hold hands with everyone else, in other words.

Today, sat in a client meeting, Rowan coined the exact phrase I was searching for. We need to do work based on…

Informed Creativity

As opposed to…

Creative Twaddle

Thank you Rowan. Smart call : )

For those not present, here’s that thought in a simple slide deck…

The alternate view is that all of this data and new-fangled toolset-ness is making the birth of brilliant ideas impossible. Here’s a super opinion on the role of the creative via the Ad Contrarian (great blog – check it out… as recommended by @lazbash)…

Put a straightforward idea like this into the hands of today’s advertising professional, however, and he will quickly turn it into a dog’s breakfast. You’ll wind up with planners and analysts and strategists and managers and global chief something-or-others of all types.

He believes that we are living in the…

Age of the Complicator

So – what do you think? Are analysts in or out? Are they essential in the world of Social Media?

Or, have we simply all become a slave to…

Twankernomics

For the record, my point is that Social Media is simply different to traditional marketing/advertising. I’m not saying we don’t need creatives, I’m saying that our creatives need to understand Social Media if their ideas are to work effectively. This means using people with sound experience in this field and great creative ideas, backed up by some proper analysis that makes a case for setting sail.

Having said that – better a ‘Creative’ than a Twanker : )