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….

No one, that is, until now…

Facebook added to real-time results

Along with the likes of Twitter and news articles, Google has now added Facebook and MySpace status updates to its real-time search results, so that now we can be treated to this sort of thing popping up in our search results:

Time will tell how useful this will prove to be.

More reading on this here:
TechCrunch
Readwriteweb

Star your favourite pages

Google already allows you to ‘promote’ websites in its results pages, which effectively umps them straight to number one on the page. They have now announced that they’re also adding ‘stars’ to results as well. This means that ‘starred’ results will appear in a special list at the top of the page whenever you perform a certain search.

Custom Location Search

If you’re a Google.com user (read: American) and are searching for a real, physical thing in meatspace, you can now refine your search by location through the search options.

This means that you can search for ‘bacon explosion’ and find somewhere that you can eat one near you, or find writing about it from a publication local to you.

These are the recent developments in Google. Did I miss anything? Can I go back to sleep now?

(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.

The best strategy to take is one of simple planning. Begin by breaking down the various platforms you use into groups, and work out what needs to be done in simple increments: daily, weekly and monthly. Here are some examples using common Social Media platforms and actions:

Daily Social Media Content Actions

• Tweet/respond to tweets/retweets
• Check Facebook profiles, pages and groups
• Respond to blog comments on your own blog(s)
• Add bookmarks to your Delicious account
• Check your RSS feeds for items of interest and have a good read

The quickest and most straightforward of the Social Media content actions on this list are the daily updates. These are also the actions that need daily attention due to their fast-moving nature. Twitter is probably the fastest moving of all Social Media content channels, but staying on top of your tweets can be a lot easier if you use tools such as TweetDeck or HootSuite to manage your profile(s). Netvibes is also a great time-saving tool for managing your RSS feeds.

Weekly Social Media Content Actions

• Write a new blog post and get it circulating
• Engage with relevant bloggers on their blogs
• Check LinkedIn groups for new items of interest
• Search for and add relevant new people to follower on Twitter using a service such as Twellow
• Make new Twitter lists, or spend some time curating your existing ones

Weekly Social Media content actions are more ‘bulky’ than their daily counterparts. Spreading these over a week will enable you to put more time into researching and actioning the larger bits, such as a new blog post and finding new Twitter users to follow. Twitter lists are a useful tool for grouping together Twitter users of interest, as previously covered in a blog post by Roger.

Monthly Social Media Content Actions

• Produce a new video and distribute it using TubeMogul
• Upload a batch of new Flickr photos
• Post new PDFs to Scribd
• Post new presentations to Slideshare
• Host and distribute Social Media bulletins and news releases using a service like PitchEngine

Monthly Social Media content actions are a mix of items larger again than weekly actions – such as producing and distributing videos – and items that require less-frequent checking and updating. TubeMogul is an excellent service for distributing video content to the biggest video hosting sites on the web. For Social Media bulletins, PitchEngine is a great service, allowing you to embed written copy, video, images and links in one handy pack for easy distribution.

Here’s a handy cut-out-and-keep version of the above actions for you to print out and glue to your monitor, desk or front door. Click the image for a bigger version:

Remember, this is only a guide for some of the most common things you might be doing with Social Media. Feel free to add your own tips or suggestions to our Social Media content guide in the comments section below.

Regardless, I reckon the campaign was a pretty big success. It was ingenious in its simplicity. So much so that it seems like, after the initial idea, there was no work involved in maintaining it: no real effort needed to be applied over time because the creativity was baked in to the implementation. All the content displayed on the site was created by people who meant what they said. They were people who consumed and enjoyed the product – thus, Skittles avoided any outbreaks of horrible marketing speak, or cases of middle aged ad-men writing copy that cringingly tries to ‘get down with the kids’ as so often happens with these youth-orientated brands.

It also worked on the very simple conceit that people will be more likely to tweet something knowing that it’ll appear on the site. Because it’s like being internet famous, innit?

So after this bold, innovative campaign what do Skittles do next?

This:

They’ve gone completely the other way and turned the site into an unending roll of wacky pictures with Social sharing buttons next to them. It seems like they’ve heard about ‘memes’ and thought ‘Hey, we can do that, all we have to do is post a funny picture and tell someone to share it’. (Otherwise known as the ‘Forced Meme’.) It’s not creative, it’s lazy. And it shows what happens when you approach Social Media like it’s advertising.

The previous campaign’s Twitter feed worked because it used Social Media as the underlying mechanic, rather than trying to tack Social Media onto a misguided creative idea. It capitalised on existing customer sentiment, taking comments that you previously had to be following someone on Twitter to be able to see, and showed them to everyone. It was social, easy to get involved with and had the added fame incentive.

The new site requests more effort on the part of the user. We’re expected to find these pictures funny and want to share them with our friends. And what if we do? It doesn’t really say anything about Skittles does it? Nor does it reward us in any way for doing so. And even so, if we choose to share something by clicking the email button, the default message we get is this:

See what I mean about getting down with the kids?

With this new campaign, Skittles are putting words in the mouth of the person sharing the content. With the Twitter campaign, the words were those of the user, not of the marketing department.

Maybe I’m being a bit too hard on them. Clearly Skittles are a great brand and they’re experimenting with their online PR campaigns. So well done them – we applaud that. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.

But there’s a lesson here.  We shouldn’t be applying this sort of ‘let’s make it go viral!’ thinking to Social Media. Bearing in mind that 50% of Social Media campaigns fail, launching a campaign that is based on a hope that people will find something funny and want to share it is a very risky strategy. As Roger has been saying recently, campaigns that are based entirely on creative thinking are high-risk.

Social Media campaigns only work if there is a reason to get involved and share something – which means that either the content has to be useful, or that there is some incentive to share it. Or ideally, both.

Tell us what you think. Does it matter that there was no filter for the Twitter campaign? That anyone could say anything? Do Skittles give you cancer?

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 : )

Social updates within email is not a new concept – Yahoo has been running Yahoo Updates since 2008, Microsoft mail offers integration with other services and even AOL just announced a similar service that unlike Google Buzz also includes Facebook integration. All these other email services currently have more users than Gmail, so why would people suddenly turn to Google for their online socialising, especially when Twitter and Facebook (with its 400 million users) are already doing such a great job?

As Mashable rightly puts it: “Facebook is threatening Google, but Google isn’t threatening Facebook because it doesn’t offer any features so great that they incentivize people to leave behind their existing networks or spend their time updating and following yet another one when their friends are already all on Facebook or Twitter.

One place where Google Buzz could really take off, though, is with smartphone users. The mobile version of Buzz will allow users to see posts from in their vicinity using geo-location technology. Gizmodo agrees: “Google Buzz is slightly more insane on Android phones and iPhone than the desktop: There’s a revamped, Buzzier Google homepage; you can post entirely using your voice; and a new version of Google Maps eats Yelp’s lunch.”

Despite its opinion that Google is suffering from “Facebook envy”, Gigaom was swift to highlight some of Google Buzz’s useful features: “It borrows the best elements of sites like Twitter (status updates, following), Flickr (a nice photo viewer), Friendfeed (condensed real-time information), Tumblr (encouraging commenting on followed friends), …Oh, and Facebook (private and public sharing controls, in-line media, etc., etc.).

The trouble is that we already have tools for all of that elsewhere. Perhaps a better functionality from Google would be to offer aggregation of all our existing networks and tools in one place – outbound updates from us, and inbound – those of our friends.

The Official Google Buzz launch video

One area where Google could potentially score over Twitter, at least from a business persecptive, is advertising. Twitter has yet to monetise their network, but Google won’t have such qualms, and they have the ad system in place to do smart things with it immediately. This will make it a more appealing platform for brands, but perhaps less so for users, who appreciate Twitter being an ad-free haven.

As with any major Social Media developments, the launch of Google Buzz caused something of a debate here in the C&M office. When asked for his initial reactions, our resident whippersnapper, Jake, said “I think it’s harder to build a social network into an email client, than it is to do it the other way round like Facebook, who are in a much stronger position. That said, I think Buzz may be the incentive to connect socially via Gmail, something that I only really use for admin stuff. It would be pretty useful for me, as I heavily use other Google apps like Reader and Picasa.”

Whereas Claire – like me an early Twitter adopter – had a slightly different take: “I see Buzz as competing more with Twitter, but why? Twitter’s great, it allows me to connect with people I find interesting but don’t necessarily have a personal relationship with. I like that. I don’t want to only connect with my existing friends (I have Facebook for that) or invite people I don’t know into my personal email (which is why I like Twitter). Conundrum.”

She has a valid point. As someone who uses Yahoo as my main personal email service, and has very few friends currently using Gmail, I can’t see Google Buzz taking off for me any time soon, either. The general feeling is that to become a serious contender to the Facebooks and Twitters of this world, Google Buzz would have to offer something completely new that would revolutionise the way we talk to each other, in the way that Facebook squashed MySpace with its advanced networking features.

No sign of such a revolution just yet, but I will be interested to see how it pans out – and would certainly like to hear your thoughts on the subject.

For the complete lowdown on Google Buzz, visit the official Google blog.

This article posted last year on Read Write Web found that use of RSS feeds declined last year.

The answer to why this is is probably the same as the answer to probably 60% of questions asked over the last 6 months: Twitter.

A quick glance at my TweetDeck shows that a large proportion of my friends’ tweets are links to blogs or news stories that they find interesting. Now, most of these people I’ve chosen to follow because I find them interesting (some because they’re my boss), and as such, their selection of news and blog posts will probably interest me too. And it does; the system works, without Twitter, I never would have heard about this.

It’s all part of news becoming more social. We share the news stories we find interesting, and sometimes cut out the middleman and create the reports ourselves. So clearly, Social Media is changing the way we get news.

A Challenger Appears!

There’s been a recent post on Facebook’s blog suggesting that they too, want to enter the arena of social news. It’s here. What they suggest is using Facebook as a feed reader. This makes a lot of sense as a lot of news providers already have pages on Facebook, Facebook already has a feed structure that is inherent to the site and a pre-existing social aspect that RSS services such as Google Reader would have to build from scratch.

What Facebook is suggesting is using their ‘list’ feature to create yourself a little news feed. I made one and it looks like this:

It’s a nice idea, and one with quite a bit of potential as Facebook’s user figures are estimated at around 250 million active users, compared to Twitter’s 20 million. At the moment, there are only a few news providers who are actually active on Facebook, and most of those are US focused. The Guardian has a page, but is using its updates to post news about itself, rather than actual stories.

For this to really take off news providers will have to take Facebook seriously and publish their content in edited headline form to encourage click through to the main article. Unlike RSS, no one wants whole chunks of text appearing in their Facebook feed. The best example of how to do it properly is from the New York Times:

Another obvious benefit of this is the social aspect of Facebook. With commenting functionality built in, users can engage with one another and discuss news stories. Of course, Facebook being Facebook, most of these comments will inevitably be as lucid and informed as these ones:

The effect of commenting on posts is a key part of why this could be such a good idea. In a similar way to how I get news on Twitter, when people comment on a news post, they’re essentially sharing it. Regardless of whether or not I’m ‘subscribed’ to a news page, if one of my friends comments on a post, it has a chance of appearing in my normal Facebook feed, thus spreading the story.

Of course, this is something that we’ve known for a long time, and is why we encourage brands to set up their own Facebook pages in order to spread their message in exactly the same way. Most of the methods used by news agencies trying to break into social media can be applied to wider fields. Think of it as spreading different types of stories in the same way.

What do you think? Will this sort of thing end up replacing RSS feeds?

A virus is an illness – much like a Social Media plan without a stack of analytics to back it up and a deep understanding of how Social tools actually work and why people use them.

Your goal ought to be to gain strong, low-friction distribution of your messages (i.e. lots of ‘impressions,’ ‘interactions’ and ‘referrals’ – i.e. discussions, comments, Tweets, bookmarks, etc). To get there, strong tactics are far more important than ‘creative’ (i.e. fun, whacky, humorous) ideas. Research is essential. Sitting around in a brainstorm session with dry wipe markers and anecdotal evidence from ‘my cousin Sarah who’s really into YouTube’ isn’t.

My beef is this… Much advertising agency-led Social Media consulting is a step back in time to 1980-something. Don’t buy me? Check this out:

In the 80s, advertising was hot, hot, hot. Everyone was in on it. Noel Edmonds was on payola for Austin Rover. And Ridley Scott was winning Nobel Peace prizes for deranged hallucinations like this and this. The standard rubric was: find a hot subject (i.e. a viral, a meme) and do a spot of ‘brand association.’ Hence, Abbey National becomes synonymous with motor racing, Maltesers get a Flash Dance makeover, Rover gets the golfer/Noel Edmonds treatment and Chanel allows people in housing estates to live life like the cast of Dynasty. All in all pretty naff.

Social Media Consulting Gone Very Wrong

Today, we have bright sparks aligning Habitat with Iran on Twitter, and Toyota suggesting that everyone should go create a YouTube video about its products in return for very little at all. We get it: Social is hot… but just because it is doesn’t mean a whacky punt of an idea on Social Media channel X is going to get you any traction. This is 80s thinking. If you’re with it, then go find that DeLorean and go home.

Social Media Consulting Done Right

To do this stuff well, you need:

• A strong understanding of the target channels: Twitter, etc
• A strong understanding of publishing platforms: Wordpress, Disqus, tubemogul. etc
• A strong understanding of our audience targets and their ‘Social’ behaviour (i.e. how they use these things)
• A strong understanding of content, topics, formats and trends

None of the above is particularly ‘creative’ in a beard-stroking way.

In fact, experience tells us that the kind of campaigns that work well on Social Media have more to do with ‘utility’ than ‘creativity.’ For example, everyone’s fave, Dell:

In this respect, good ‘Social Media consulting‘ isn’t Marketing at all. Or, more to the point, the campaigns and content that work best aren’t Marketing with a capital ‘M.’ They’re support pieces, tools, widgets, and direct conversations with customers – things that genuinely HELP people or provide interest other than ‘Oh WOW, isn’t that wonderful / funny / creative / thought provoking’.

Not much of this list requires a man in a black roll neck to figure it out. It does, however, require an understanding of how and why people are using Social Media in the first place… and then baking it in to some other business or marketing / communications processes.

In other words, Social isn’t real Marketing / Advertising – but it becomes marketing / advertising once it’s out there in the public domain on the big bad web. (An ‘@’ reply on Twitter may not be a Marketing-driven thought, but it’s definitely a Branding result.)

My feeling is that the next time you sit down to do some Social Media consulting / planning / Online PR / whatnot, then STOP. Go call for an analyst. Ask him/her to get deep into some trending tools and your site analytics and then come back to you with recommendations on where to start. Next, give this research to someone who knows how your customers are using Social Media, and ask them to suggest some tactical plans. Then get the ‘Creatives’ in.

Social Media Consulting for ad agencies/brands, in a Nut

If nothing else, just remember this: don’t go do an ‘ad’ and expect it to go ‘viral’ just because you shove it on YouTube.

Your thoughts…?

He doesn’t personally have any sway over the future of said profile, but was interested in my opinion, from a Social Media consultant perspective, as to what I would do with it if tasked – which I was more than happy to provide in return for a rather large portion of raspberry and white chocolate ice cream.

The issue at hand is that the BBC has dozens, if not hundreds, of Twitter profiles for its many different departments, programmes and publications – from @bbchealth to @r4today to @BBCHistoryMag and goodness only knows what else. But there is no catch-all ‘voice of the BBC’ profile bringing the myriad aspects of the corporation together.

Clearly the @BBC profile – which already boasts over 19,000 followers and has been listed 864 times despite never having said a thing – would be the natural home for an over-arching BBC profile, but how on earth to meaningfully squeeze so much output into a single Twitter stream?

There must be other large companies out there in a similar situation, so I thought I’d share our over-dinner musings and my suggested solutions in the hope that they may be of use, or at least provoke some further debate on the subject.

The Twitter Overlord Option

One way to collate ‘the best of the BBC’ on Twitter would be to give someone the job of wading through all the various BBC Twitter streams on a daily basis, re-tweeting or syndicating the highlights as they happened. To cover the global timezones and evening/weekend tweets, it would really need to be more than one person and whoever you employed would have to have a pretty comprehensive understanding of the BBC in order to make informed choices about what content to publish. This is possibly the most high-maintenance way to go and not necessarily the most appealing job position in the world either.

The Intrepid Reporter Option

This version would involve a person, or team of people, being responsible for reporting news and views from inside the BBC via Twitter, but not necessarily using content from its other Twitter profiles. Although a less labour-intensive option, you would invariably end up losing a lot of the individual personality that would shine through from utilising a wider bank of tweeters’ content.

The Personal Recommender Option

Another alternative would be to set the editors of the individual profiles up on a multiple account enabled Twitter client such as HootSuite or TweetDeck, from which they could opt to publish the best of their output to @BBC as well as their own profile. This would require a fair amount of set-up and administration in getting all those people on board and suitably briefed, not to mention a reliance on those individuals’ discretion to provide the best content and not abuse their publishing privileges. There would clearly need to be an overall editor to monitor content and reply to relevant interactions, which could become a fairly mammoth task in itself. You could simplify things by choosing only the most popular Twitter profiles, or those considered to be most emblematic of the BBC – but again this is fairly subjective.

The Randomiser Option

This is my personal favourite, partly because it’s the least time-consuming and also because it removes the potentially partisan influence of curators/editors and would instead present a ‘lucky dip’ style snapshot of what’s going on across the BBC. There would be a little bit of development involved in setting up a random content generator fed by all the different Twitter streams, but once it had been set up the profile could virtually run itself. The potential drawbacks are that you would end up with a one-way soapbox style Twitter stream void of any conversational aspect (but then many of the other active BBC Twitter profiles are also guilty of this) and may miss really important news.

I’m sure there are other ways around this problem and I’ll certainly be mulling on it further (we’d be interested to know your thoughts too – especially if you work for the BBC), but these seemed to me the most practically viable and creatively appealing when put on the spot about it. Whatever the BBC decides to do with its @BBC Twitter profile, I really hope they hurry up and do it soon – because the current tumbleweed situation doesn’t look good. Needless to say we’d be delighted to get on board and help the BBC resolve their Twitter quandary, especially if there is ice cream involved.

In light of Google’s increasing focus on Rich Snippets, I thought I’d revisit the topic.

Why are Rich Snippets used and what can they do?

When Google is crawling the web and comes to indexing a page, it can’t tell the difference between, for instance, someone’s name and just a standard bit of HTML.

In other words, it can’t understand context.

So, on a search for ‘Brazil’, Google can’t completely tell the difference between Brazil (the place) and Brazil (the kaleidoscopic Terry Gilliam film). With the ‘rich snippet’ tags that Google supports, webmasters can tag pages with this contextual information.

This cleverness is achieved through RDFa tags and microformats, which are little-bits-of-simple-code that tell Google about the context of the words.

Using these tags tells Google that sections of your site have context to one of the pre-defined ‘rich snippets’ (an event, place, person, or review). Which means that in the search results page, Google will know to show this sort of thing if required. As below.

Examples: Google and Bing

Let’s look at results for the same term on two different engines, Google and Bing.

If we do a search for our business and spiritual dictator leader, Roger Warner, on Bing, we get this for his LinkedIn profile:

If we do the same search on Google, this result pops-up:

Notice the difference? In the Google results we get tantalising little shards of information about who Roger is. That’s because LinkedIn now automatically adds rich snippet ‘hcard’ tags to profiles, so that Google can distinguish Roger’s name from any other bit of text

If we try another search for a restaurant in London, we get a similar results.

Here’s Bing:

And here’s Google:

If your site is the only one on a results page with this extra data, it instantly stands out and  should encourage more click throughs than the others. A nice bit of white-hat SEO.

Rich snippets also offer a real opportunity to connect SEO and Social Media. Content that is produced or inspired through socially activity and presence, can then be used to add rich snippets to your page. This content can then encourage users to click-through to your page or content. A virtuous circle.

While, at the moment, these is no guarantee that Google will show your Rich Snippets on its results page – they are still selected through proprietary algorithms – it certainly can’t hurt to include the tags in your site code to be ready when Google roll this out across their results pages more widely.

If you’ve access, you can add and test rich snippets using Google Webmaster Tools’ new ‘Rich Snippet Testing Facility’

We’ll be adding some of our own shortly.

Yours,
Richard Snippets BSc

It’s written by New Media consultant Monica O’Brien, who produces a blog called Social Pollination which is usually chock full of good insights.

So here it is. If you want to understand the difference between old media and new – and how to pitch blogs and generate love and respect, then, um, THINK LIKE A BLOGGER. Says Monica: “Old media writes because they love to and get a paycheck for their efforts. New media writes because they love to, and get an ego-boost for their efforts.”

(Note to PR peeps – if you’re good, you think this way – i.e. about other people’s wants/needs – most of the time; if you’re not then you usually just spray and pray…)

Thanks for setting us straight Monica.

(Photo courtesy of Nilson, via Flickr.)

Still, Google has recently jumped on the bandwagon by adding sentiment analysis to Google Map reviews. But does the industry-leading search engine perform any better than a spaced-out terrier? Is sentiment measured with any reasonable level of accuracy?

Let’s find out. Let’s find out now. And let’s stick to the dog theme.

There were no sentiment analysis reports on kennels; most reviews are of restaurants and hotels. So, I’ve tenuously chosen to analyse the sentiment reports of  ‘GreyStoke House’, a pet-friendly hotel situated in the idylls of the Lake District.

Before looking at the comments, it’s worth explaining that Google seems to pick out categories based on keywords within comments and reviews. Therefore, if a high proportion of reviews mention the word ‘hosts’ (as below), this becomes a category that reviews are extrapolated from.

These reviews are also chosen from a seemingly consistent and authoritative database of sites. TripAdvisor – one of the most respected travel communities on the web – features in most review listings, and most of the others sites are similarly respected and recurrent.

Moving on to the reviews, clearly the breakfast in this place is spectacular. Just look at the comments:

This many mentions of ‘breakfast’ has created a unique category. We can see that this morning meal is clearly life-changing, but what does Google think?

Superficially, the analysis is good. Most comments are positive (apart from the last if you’re a dog or dog-owner) and the sentiment gauge is accurate. So far, so good.

Second example: The ‘Dog House Hotel’ in Oxfordshire, “looks nice” but there’s a stunning caveat – “don’t expect to feel full after a meal”. The sentiment analysis reveals a shakier system than the first example.

For instance, the sentiment gauge for the ‘dining’ category is full despite the presence of some negative comments. One, regarding a cheesecake, is savage:

“The cheese cake desert was still half frozen, and the coffee cold.”

There are a few other interesting patterns to note. While some comments are ambiguously judged, others – like the enigmatically psychedelic comments below – are explicitly marked with sentiment.

1. “Negative: Room 7. Think should be put out of use.” – booking.com
2. “Positive: The wood effect surrounds of the room.” – booking.com

It’s also unclear whether the comments are being analysed in isolation, or the within the context of the overarching reviews. There’s little comment from Google on this, so inferences have to be made. This lack of transparency makes analysis difficult. There’s very little information beyond vague cryptic comments.

For me, the overall insight is in Google’s general approach. There are a few main strands to consider here. Google has achieved:

a) A decent grasp and understanding of which sites are authoritative in their field
b) The ability to determine what constitutes a review or subjective piece of commentary
c) The ability to (quite accurately) group comments semantically, based on keyword mentions
d) A basic grasp of sentiment

Conclusion

These insights speak volumes. The keyword-worshipping Google of old is evolving: interpreting conversations, analysing sentiment, collecting subjective information, and (potentially) assimilating this information into results.

The pretentious dandy!

Actually, why not? It makes sense. This information has to be included to produce better results.

The future will reveal how accurate this interpretation can be.

Google has analysed what people have said about this particular restaurant and collated the overall sentiment so that we can see – at a glance – what the consensus is about various aspects of the establishment.

This is all well and good when the sentiments expressed are simple and earnest, like the example above: “Service and wait staff were very good”. The robots at Google should be able to understand this statement just fine.

Of course, as we all know from watching Terminator 2 and The Matrix, robot-human communication can be a little rocky at times. Machines can’t understand human love or sarcasm. Now, while there is little we can do about love at the moment, an enterprising company from America has aimed a little lower with a tool to help robots understand that other mystery: sarcasm.

Their logic is that there is already a punctuation mark for many parts of speech such as the question mark and exclamation mark, so why not a sarcasm mark or ‘SarcMark’? Here it is:

You’re supposed to put this at the end of a sarcastic comment to flag the sarcasm up to people and let them know that you’re not being serious.

While this could solve the problem of sentiment analysis algorithms misreading ‘I loved this restaurant like I loved having shingles’ as a positive statement, the chances of it taking off among living, breathing people is slimmer. Least of all because they’re charging $2 to use it, which you don’t have to do with the question or exclamation mark.

The main problem with this is that people are really quite good at reading context. The suggested uses on the SarcMark website reveal how much they underestimate people’s comprehension ability. Would you have difficulty understanding the intention behind any of these?

• Because that intersection needs more traffic.
• It must be tough being perfect.
• I need that like I need a hole in my head.
• The SarcMark is really useful.

Social Media Insights (and Social SEO)

The age-old debate (well, relatively) on Social Media, Social SEO, Social Media Agencies, and our own social media ‘how to’ guides – the meaning of life may also be answered here:

• Social Media Agency: C&M is a ‘Social Media Agency.’ We’re also an ‘Online PR Agency’ and a ‘Social SEO’ firm …which is to say that we do great PR, acquisition, retention and SEO through the use of Social Media tools, platforms, channels, communities and so on. Confused? Yes, it’s all a bit mangled isn’t it? We figure this is to be expected in this brave new world of ‘Social Media’. So much noise, so many claims and – let’s be honest – so little substance. Our intention here is to share some learning with you. We’ve been around the block a few times with folks like IBM, Hackett and Expedia/Hotels.co.uk and we have Social scars and Social medals to prove it. Read post

• Online PR and Social Media Content Strategy Map (A New Cut Out & Keep…): Having dabbled with Facebook and made forays with Twitter, many brands are now stuck wondering how the hell to get any decent ‘play’ out of their Social Media assets and profiles. Oftentimes this is down to two basic things: i) a desire to crack on and experiment and ii) a lack of time. And this dilemma (particularly in a large, multi-brand or multi-business unit organisation) usually leads to a mild form of Social Media schizophrenia and diminishing returns. In other words, when you’re rushing to pilot stuff with a lack of time it can be incredibly hard to execute in an integrated fashion… which is why the chart above might help. Read post

• Social SEO: 10 Reasons Why Being Social can be SEO (Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Chaaaanges!): Kasabian are the new Oasis, with a psychedelic twist. A board of organic crumpets, olives, with a selection of cured hams, is the new all day breakfast. According to an audacious poster campaign – dreamt up by mentalists – Chichester is the new Copenhagen. Patrick Swayze and Richard Gere are the same person. This is unarguable and final. But is ‘Social SEO’ – connecting ‘Social Media’ approaches and SEO thinking – the new approach to doing SEO? How, and why, should Social channels be used? Where are the similarities, cross-overs, and (brace) synergies between SEO and Social Media? Here are 10 thoughts on the matter… Read post

• Social SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) Through Clever Content Creation: Creating optimised ‘Social’ content to rank for key terms isn’t a new idea but the search results are becoming more eclectic. With that fact in mind, we’d like to briefly run through which content types regularly appear and how to use this content to clamber through the sweaty throng of competing pages. Read post

• Beginner’s Social Media Guide – Free, Easy and Good to Go…: How to Win Friends and Influence People With Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and the Blogosphere. Here’s our simple four step plan for doing effective, results-driven Social Media and Online PR work… Read post

• More Free Social Media, Content Optimisation and Online PR Agency Papers from C&M: Here’s a roundup of some of our recent white papers, think pieces and case studies …all in a highly desirable, super sharable, PDF format. Read post

Social Media Measurement and ROI

This is an old topic, but an important one. Here’s our take on the issue:

• Social Media Measurement & ROI: New Tricks for Old Dogs, But Still the Same Old Dogs: We’ve had a bunch of really interesting meetings lately, many of which focused on the good old question of Social Media measurement. Here’s the view from our seat… Social Media is not the ‘new marketing’ per se. It’s just a different (exciting, potentially more valuable) way of doing things. The aims remain the largely same in marketing land. In other words, when it comes to measurement and ROI, teach the Old Dogs new tricks, techniques, metrics, etc. But they’re still the same Old Dogs – acquisition, interactions, awareness, SEO, etc. Read post

• Social Media Measurement – Some Thoughts from the C&M Online PR Stable: Everybody’s talking about Social Media and how to harness its potential for business – indeed you can hardly have failed to notice the almost daily Twitter/Facebook/NextBigSocialMediaThing stories appearing all over the news. From Daily Mail health warnings to academic controversy, there’s an awful lot of spin surrounding the subject, making it a real can of worms for companies looking to play the Social Media Game (and who isn’t?) Read post

• Social Media ROI: The Return of Identity and the Hackett Story: We met with the good folks at Hackett London recently to discuss Social Media and Online PR plans for the coming months. Much of the conversation centred around creative ideas and the role of key people within the organisation in content production. Which leads us to think that there’s a key value to all of this Social stuff which many of you may be missing – the Return of Identity (a different, but essential form of ROI)… Read post

New Tools and Technology

We love to noodle with new technology, and there’s a lot to noodle with. Here’s our take on a few that we found particularly interesting:

• Google Wave: First Impressions and Buzz Round-up: It seems the web has gone slightly bonkers over Google Wave. With invites being offered (rather duplicitously in most cases, I might add) across the Twittersphere, and enterprising/mercenary individuals putting them up for sale for as much as $50 each on eBay, what could possibly justify this incredible amount of interest? Read post

• Twitter Tools for the Masses: Fact: the Interweb is huge. A quick Google search for “Twitter Tools” gives 83 MILLION results. We’re constantly looking at new tools, so that you don’t have to… So here’s a few essential Twitter gizmos for you, along with a spot of explanatory text for each. Read post

So looking forward to 2010, we’re certain there’ll be many more learnings, insights and digital debating happening on this blog in the coming year. Stay tuned!

Google has long used synonyms to gather more accurate search results. For instance, on a search for ‘Brighton, United Kingdom’, Google will return results that include the term ‘UK’ as well as ‘United Kingdom’ as the words in bold in the results page below show.

So far, it seems that Google has only used this technique for simple searches like place names and abbreviations, but It looks as though Google will expand the use of synonyms into wider search queries, having recently filed a new patent on the matter.

For example, If you perform a search and have a hard time finding results, Google could look at previous searches (made by other users) that produced similar results and show these pages alongside what was originally searched for. This makes sense, if two queries produce a correlated outcome then they’re probably semantically related.

For example, if you searched for ‘plant information’, Google might also return results for the term ‘botany’, as it brings up similar results.

Interesting stuff, which points to Google’s increasingly ‘intelligent’ behaviour, based on user behaviour and clicks.

This isn’t, however, a major part of Google’s algorithm just yet but there is a little-known Google shortcut that can be used to get the same results.

If, for instance, you were trying to find out what the word “synonym” meant and wanted to find similar words, you could search for a simple definition using the command definition: (e.g. define:synonym). However, you can use a tilde (one of these squiggly chaps: ~) before your search term. This will tell Google to bring back results for similar words.

In this case, Google has helpfully directed us to a thesaurus.

If Google roll-out this technology for normal searches, chances are you probably won’t notice unless you’re performing either a very specific search that brings back very few results, or have entered a very long and vague search term. Time will tell.

To read Google’s patent in detail go here,

Apps can help your page stand out from the crowd, as well as providing extra functionality for your page and fresh ways to connect with your Facebook audience. All the apps featured in our list are free and most require no technical knowledge to install or use.

• Notes – Think of the Notes app as a way of blogging on your Facebook page. With the ability to embed images and publish to the page wall, Notes is a simple way to communicate with your fans, and being an official Facebook app it’s (relatively) bug free, too
• Social RSS – On the other hand, if you’ve got a pre-existing blog hosted on an external site, you can pull an RSS feed of entries through onto a page tab with this app
• YouTube Box – This handy app offers a lot of functionality when it comes to handling YouTube videos. Videos can have custom descriptions and titles independent from the source video, and there’s even a handy analytics package built in so you can monitor how popular your videos are
• Social Tweet – Get your Twitter updates pulled through onto a tab on your page with this great app. You can also tweet directly from the app and select which tweets to be posted to your status
• FlickrTab – Perhaps the most fully-functioned Flickr app for Facebook, this app gives you a choice of several different page layouts, providing you with a variety of options when it comes to displaying your Flickr content
• Static FBML – As basic or powerful as you need it to be, the Static FBML app allows you to create custom FBML (Facebook Mark-up Language) or HTML boxes/tabs on your fan page. There are many useful tutorials out there on how to get started, as it can be a little confusing to begin with, but it’s worth persevering with as you can achieve some great results
• Extended Info – This app gives you the ability to add extra fields to the Info tab on your page including FBML, custom categories, videos, images, tags, bulleted/numbered lists and more

The catalogue of apps available for Facebook is constantly growing, so if any particularly great new ones emerge, we’ll update this list and let you know. If you’ve got your own suggestions for any top apps that you use, feel free to add them in the comments section below.

The Rickshaw Run is a (slightly mad) two week ‘un-route’ / race through India involving over 70 teams from around the world – starting from Nepal in the north and ending in Goa in the South …without much guidance or support inbetween. Having seen the guys’ practising on the smoothly paved streets of Lewes, we’re expecting to see them again sometime in late Feb…

The Street Child World Cup is the first event of its kind. It takes place in Durban in March 2010, ahead of the World Cup finals proper. Street kids from eight countries will take part – giving them a platform for showing their skills and telling the world their stories. It’s a such a superb idea.

Garth Hewitt of event organisers Amos Trust talks about the event here…

And you can see the event trailer here…

So what are you waiting for?

DONATE NOW!

Every penny you contribute towards the Plain Lazy Rickshaw Run campaign will help with the Indian Street Child World Cup effort.

In the meantime, you can follow all the latest ‘tour updates’ from the Plain Lazy Rickshaw Run via their dedicated (and rather funky) micro site. They’ll be posting updates at each stop on the map… Expect some mishaps.

You can also tune into their progress via Twitter, at @PlnLzy…. and you can find the event Twitter hashtag at #RickshawRun (the chatter’s already hotting up…).

Again, it all starts on January 1st. And, God willing, the boys will be back in Blighty sometime after the 14th.

Larry, Mark – good on you. We wish you all the best. May the wind be always at your backs and not in your bellies…

In Consultancy World this is an excuse for blog-list-mania. 50 Interweb trends for the next 10 years, that sort of thing. Well, you’ll be glad to know that this end of decade post isn’t fueled by a crystal ball. Instead, I thought it’d be more valuable to reflect on what C&M learned last year…

In a nut, the experiences of the past 12 months suggest that most of us marketeers could use a spot of re-wiring.

Here’s the view:

Marcoms teams need re-wiring. Social Media requires working practices and colleague relationships to be more social (small ‘s’) – particularly if you’re in the B2C space. It helps if a brand’s PR team is programmed to talk to its customer service team (and its ad team, its digital marketing team, its Social Media agency, and its CEO) – particularly when things go wrong.

Campaign planning needs re-wiring. Those Social Media campaigns that ‘fly by wire’ on their own, without a sensible level of integration with other marcoms activities – and without the backing of some senior agenda-setters within a brand – are likely to either fail, fall short or blow up …which is a great shame. We ought to be looking for sensible, methodical ways of establishing integrated value in Social Media, across a range of marketing disciplines – not dreaming up ill-researched, hair-brained schemes for demonstrating how easy it is to be ignored on YouTube and Facebook.

Production efforts need re-wiring. Good use of Social Media creates a different kind of marketing asset to the norm: direct customer relationships (via Twitter, Facebook, etc). By and large this is something that brands need to own, not lease. This means more internal resourcing and less outsourcing to partners …and agencies need to adapt to fit this model – because it’s cheaper and more valuable and effective for brands to be tweeting and managing Social communities themselves.

Measurement needs re-wiring. The quest for a magic Social Media metric is a red herring. We should be measuring our work within the context of more established and meaningful data sets than re-Tweets and ‘favouriting’. A set of tried and tested metrics for acquisition, PR/awareness, SEO, lead generation, etc, provides a better canvas for telling Social Media ROI stories and earning the right to do more integrated, sophisticated marketing work.

Our tool sets need re-wiring. If your Social Media goal is content/message distribution and the creation of conversations around your brand, then you need to look more closely at your technical platform. With some effort, a web site, a blog, a Twitter profile and a Facebook page can become connected over time, but the real aim ought to be creating a seamless presence on other people’s Interwebs – their Twitter, their Facebook, their LinkedIn, etc. The most direct, effective way of doing this is via technology. For example, widgets like Disqus help us to directly connect our content to the Social web. There are lots of them around, and the majority of them are free… but they need to be baked in at source (intelligently!).

Agencies need re-wiring. Being a good digital / PR agency in this context is less about traditional services like distribution, ‘pitching’, building branded microsites, bog standard link-building and display ads and more about providing a focus on good, solid training and enablement, research and planning, great (creative) content and strategic implementation. Essential skills are analytics and a thorough understanding of the mechanics of Social Media properties – i.e. proven experience of what will make any given strategy fly or die. We also need to be better business consultants if we’re to help brands execute some of the ideas outlined above in a measured, integrated fashion. (i.e. we either need to help our clients convince their bosses to do things differently, or we need to convince the bosses themselves.)

Finally, I think our brains also need a little re-wiring. To deliver smarter work we need to step away from the coalface, take stock, count to 10, and perhaps even sleep on things now and again …before commenting, tweeting, forming opinions, baking plans and setting sail.

Less haste, less waste, more integration, more quality output. Now, there’s some solid new year’s targets for you…