As the world’s favourite online video sharing site, YouTube is under constant pressure to keep up with the ever more ambitious demands and needs of its users. The latest major development was announced last Friday at VidCon2010 when YouTube revealed that it would be supporting videos shot in 4k. This is good news for the more serious filmmakers out there, as it means videos hosted on YouTube can be viewed on much larger screens without loss of quality.

This playlist demonstrates the power of 4K (select ‘original’ in the video quality dropdown menu), but beware, you’ll need ultra-fast broadband to watch them at full quality. YouTube’s official blog post on the new announcement was also quick to point out that this development won’t really affect your average YouTube user, due to the cost and size of the equipment needed to film in 4K.

You are the Weakest Ad, Goodbye

In an effort to boost its advertising revenues, YouTube is planning to introduce skippable ads later this year. A recent article in The Telegraph revealed that “the new system will permit users to skip the pre-roll adverts that are embedded in videos. Advertisers will not be charged for any adverts which are skipped.” This move will put pressure on advertisers and creative agencies to come up with more appealing and better quality ads in order survive the screening process, which can only be a good thing.

Potential advertisers may also be interested to know that Google is now offering campaign insights for YouTube, making it easier to track their effectiveness with more powerful data beyond the usual click-through and impressions stats. Here’s a little video explaining how it works:

We’ll Make You a Star

In other news, YouTube has announced a grant programme for its partners, which aims to “act as a catalyst by infusing additional funds into the production budgets of a small group of YouTube partners who are at the forefront of innovation”. This could prove fruitful for companies wanting to use YouTube for creative Social Media campaigns. But you’ll need to already be something of a video whizz to qualify; partners are selected on current video views, subscribers, growth rate, audience engagement and production expertise. 

YouTube in the Palm of Your Hand

Three years after launching YouTube Mobile, the online video giant has risen to the growing demands of the iPhone generation for mobile-friendly Social Media with a series of improvements to its mobile platform. These include increased speed, an enhanced user-interface geared towards touchscreen mobile devices, plus additional interactive features such as creating playlists and favouriting videos direct from your device.

Sing with Susan

And if all that juicy YouTube news hasn’t got you rushing to hit the record button on your Flip, this is guaranteed to do the job. Britain’s Got Talent diva Susan Boyle last week launched a YouTube-based talent search, giving one lucky person the chance to record a duet with her on the next album. All you have to do to enter is hit the ‘Audition Now’ on the dedicated Susan’s Search YouTube page and upload a video of you singing Silent Night. Go on, you know you want to.

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.

IBM have tackled this issue in an innovative way with their Blog Muse tool, described recently on Gigaom as:

“…a kind of social recommendation system for blog posts in which users say what they want to read about, other users then vote on those suggestions, and the most popular topics get distributed to those most likely to want to write about them…”

Sadly this tool is currently only available to IBM bloggers via an internal system, but with the wealth of analytics and trending tools available, there’s nothing to stop any company or individual blogger putting a similar process in place to inform their blogging schedule.

If you read Roger’s recent post on Informed Creativity, you’ll have seen our Social Media Planning slidedeck, which outlines C&M’s approach to content planning. And as far as blogging is concerned, it’s not a million miles away from IBM’s technique.

From my point of view, as the person who drives the creative side of content planning, it helps to pinpoint more general content themes for each client, around which to write specific blog posts. This not only gives a focus for the analytics that drive topic ideas and keywords, but helps to ensure a good balance of content on an ongoing basis.

These themes are obviously different for every client and industry, but here are some of the recurring ones as a guide:

• PRACTICAL: Deconstruct industry practices, offer advice/recommendations
• EVENTS: Identify and write about key industry events/conferences. Live tweeting from events can also be made into post-event blog posts
• CASE STUDIES: Interviews with key customers/clients – this could be via an embedded video or podcast, or a plain old-fashioned written piece
• CHALLENGES: Respond to common industry problems, encourage customers/potential customers to interact
• NEWS: Staying on the pulse of related online content and commenting on high profile news pieces/articles, adding your own thoughts on a subject via blog posts/tweets
• SURVEYS: Encourage customers and general public to participate in area/event/topic focused online surveys and use the results to create blog posts and stimulate conversation
• STAFF: Individual blog posts by employees with more personality (i.e. ‘The team recommends’, opinion pieces, fun stuff)

There are plenty more I could include, but you get the picture. Once this content framework is in place, we use our analytics and trending tools to identify the best subjects to blog about at any given time and the best keywords to focus on within those broad themes.

Our blogging guide tells you more about this content planning process, as well as lots of other useful tips on blogging in general – including what to write about and how to get your blog noticed once it’s up and running.

Remember that a good post doesn’t have to equal a long blog post, in fact short and sweet is often the best way to ensure that the whole post gets read and isn’t dismissed as ‘TLDR’ (thanks, @Jake_Doran, for that gem). Many blog posts these days simply consist of a Social embed (Flickr slideshow, YouTube video) with a little bit of an intro – and there’s nothing wrong with that, as long as it’s useful, relevant and interesting to your readership.

And whether you decide to blog daily, weekly or monthly – stick to a consistent publishing schedule so that your regular readers will know what to expect and you will know exactly how much content you need to be producing in your planning cycle.

If you follow these simple principles, you should never find yourself asking “what shall I blog about today?” or plucking random subjects out of the air.

The thumbnail that accompanies this post was adapted from a photograph by FarleyJ on Flickr.

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.

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?

But of course, so can everyone else and people can shout right back at you. Sometimes it’s friendly, sometimes it’s not; often it’s useful and constructive, and a lot of the time it’s a link to a video of a surprised kitten.

But whatever people are saying, they’re taking the time to say it. And that means they care, because otherwise, why would they bother? Which is why it’s important to keep track of what the web is saying to or about you. Because, as C&M’s very own MD likes to remind us, ‘only the paranoid survive‘.

As usual, we’re here to help and are on hand with some useful tips to help you with your social media planning. There are a mass of things you could be keeping track of across different platforms and apps – but we’ve compiled all of the basic, essential stuff that you should be doing into a simple, handy checklist.

So, if you monitor nothing else, you should at least follow our…

Social Media Planning Checklist

What you should be monitoring with Twitter

DMs and @s

A simple one to start with. You should be checking these all the time, via your Twitter client of choice, as these are messages directly to you. If it’s relevant, reply. This is supposed to be a conversation.

Backtweets

Using Backtweets, you can search for any link on Twitter, including shortened ones. The beauty of Backtweets is that you can find what people have been saying about you, even if they haven’t DMd you or sent you an @ reply. Here’s an example.

Competitor Tweets

It’s not industrial espionage if they tweet about it. It’s generally a good idea to keep a list of your competitors and keep up with what they’re doing online, if they’re doing it well and how you can do it better. If a conversation starts between them and a follower, get involved an throw in your 2 cents worth (and start following all the interesting people that the enemy is).

Twitter Search on Keywords and Brand Terms

You can do a blanket search on Twitter to see who’s talking about your brand and your keyword categories.

What you should be monitoring with blogs and ‘Social’ content

Your Blog Comments

You should be checking these daily as well – they’re really important, as the people who have commented here are directly reading and engaging with whatever you’ve got to say. To save you time, you can always set up an RSS feed and plug it in to whichever RSS service you use.

Other People’s Blog Comments

Using tools like Backtype, it’s easy to check out what people are saying about you and your keyword categories on other people’s blogs. (Backtype is sort of like a Google index of all of the blog comments that are out there being generated in random corners of the Interwebs.) This is particularly useful for tracking what the competition is up to – for understanding their reading trends and spheres of influence. (Did I tell you the boss is paranoid!?)

Competitor Blog Posts

Keep an eye on what your competitors are talking about and who is talking to them through their comments.

Blog Search on Keywords and Brand Terms

Using Google Blog Search or Technorati you can search blogs for key terms relevant to whatever you do and your brand.

Google Image and Video Search

These are worth searching every now and then with your keywords and brand terms to see what sort of image and video activity there is around them.

What you should be monitoring with Social Networks

LinkedIn Group Alerts

This’ll keep your up to date on any activity within your LinkedIn groups and is worth keeping an eye on to see who’s doing what in your industry network.

LinkedIn Status Updates

See who’s working where, who’s looking for a new job and thus, who you should hire next.

Facebook Comments

If your brand has a Facebook page (and if you don’t, maybe you should?) do a daily check on any comments on there. It’s one of the easiest ways for someone to interact with or get in touch with you. Regularly replying will help you to look like a real human, rather than a faceless corporation.

Automating it all…

All of that sounds like a lot doesn’t it? Never fear! There are ways of streamlining the whole process.

For the comments/blogs/Twitter type monitoring, you can simply grab an RSS feed from each source and plug it into something like Netvibes or iGoogle and make yourself a dashboard so that all these feeds are in the same place.

For search based monitoring, like Google Blog Search you can set up alerts which will ‘alert’ you to new hits for that search term, either by RSS or email.

Another useful little tool is the Google Custom Search. It’s just like a normal Google search, only you decide which sites results are pulled from. That means, if there is a list of blogs that write about whatever you do, you can use Custom Search to find any mentions of your brand name in those specific sites.

Using these tools, you should be able to have access to all this information in one place that you can check regularly to see what the web is saying about you. Let’s hope it’s all good…

Here’s a sneak peek at the results of our recent #CGWhiz Social Media campaign with leading CG and VFX Academy, Escape Studios.

(Campaign devised by us and delivered with some help from Escape Studios’ PR agency, Brands2Life – who handled media relations, video production, the competition draw and other day-to-day aspects of comms).

The project was a barnstorming success. YouTube, Twitter and Facebook were used to promote the brand and enable participants to win a free course at Escape (which is a HUGE ticket for young VFX heads), as well as a work placement at industry leading Visual Effects studio, The Mill (the guys who do all the visual effects for blockbusters like Gladiator, and ads for mega-brands like Adidas).

Granted, with an offer and a cast like this we’d all be fools to screw it up. But, all in all, we’re rather proud of the results. In a nut:

• Overall site registration/conversion goals increased by 63.36% month on month
• Contact requests increased by 35.16%
• Purchases increased by 209.09%
• …and e-Learning service subscriptions increased by 107.62%

Check out the PPT below – a bit of a ‘How To’ guide, explaining tactics, goals set and results gained.

…and please do tell us what you think of it all!

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

It is a common quandary among clients who have built large Group memberships whether to ditch their Group in favour of Pages – which offer more functionality including custom tabs and wall posts that appear in members’ news streams. The trouble is that Facebook has never offered a simple way to migrate a Group across to a Page and the only option is a manual switch, meaning that some members may get left behind.

Here are a couple of examples from clients:

A Facebook Page for Escape Studios (just launched!) and The Argento Wine Club Group

While the new style Groups have a similar look and feel to Pages, they have yet to incorporate many of the more sophisticated features. Apart from the aesthetic changes, the only practical difference is that activity will now appear in news feeds and users will be able to able to comment directly from their own home page stream.

Many people are asking “why bother keeping both?” when it would seem logical to merge the two, give everyone the same functionality and save the confusion over which to choose. Facebook’s take is that Groups are for societies, causes and fan clubs, whereas Pages are expressly corporate.

It will be interesting to see how the Groups vs Pages debate evolves in light of these changes. Do let us know your thoughts on the subject.

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.

If you’re looking to hire a Social Media Agency, here’s some things to consider:

• DO NOT PANIC – DESPITE WHAT AN AVERAGE SOCIAL MEDIA AGENCY MAY SAY
• THERE IS NO NEW WITCHCRAFT (DON’T LISTEN TO AN AVERAGE SOCIAL MEDIA AGENCY!)
• THERE IS NOTHING TO FEAR. GOT IT? YOU CAN RELAX NOW
• (…THERE ARE, HOWEVER, A BUNCH OF NEW TOOLS AND SKILLS TO GEN UP ON)

Meantime, to help you in your quest, here’s a bunch of thoughts and some free best practice ‘Social Media Agency’ white papers and ‘Social Media Agency’ resources to make your life a little easier…

For the record, we feel that:

1: Social isn’t media (there’s no such thing as a ‘Social Media Agency’)

(You can read why here…. It’s a blog post that talks A LOT about the dangers of getting fixated on the Social Media channel and not the message. An old one but a gold one – and a view we very much still stand by.)

2: Forget the labels: Social Media Agency / Online PR Agency / Wotnot

(Read why this idea is very important here…. It’s a post that talks about the relative importance – and limitations – of the labels that we all apply to ourselves. If you want yourself some Facebook, then read on. You might need a Social Media Agency. You might equally need an Online PR Agency. But don’t get wigged out by the label – you probably just need some specialist help from people who have done good work in this domain before.)

3: Trad PR is dead meat (err, you may need a ‘Social Media Agency’)

(Read why this is the case here… It examines why, in the current economic climate, not many traditional PR agencies are taking the necessary steps to build skills, processes and services offerings to deliver great work in the Social / Online sphere – whereas your average specialist Social Media Agency / Onine PR Agency is …and so you’re probably better off working with them instead.)

4: Measurement rules. You need smart Social Media Agency thinking

(Read why here… It’s a post that describes why the search for a Holy Social Media Measurement Grail can be a dangerous diversion: it can become a veritable fire hose of data p0rn. What you need is an approach to measurement that’s driven by objectives – and this requires a different kind of Social Media Agency mindset.)

5: Social Media Agency ROI should be measured qualitatively

(Read why here… A post that looks at how you can establish Social Media Agency ROI in some essential – but very different – ways. Importantly, all this new-fangled Social Media-ness may just be helping you to buy your Corporate identity back. Forget outsourcing all those fancy Dan creative ideas and get on the content wagon yourself…)

6: Not Rocket Surgery. Run from the Social Media Agency that says it is

(Read how simple the principles are here… In it we describe that 99% of what we do revolves around good old fashioned content marketing. The difference is that we’re trying to help our clients to do (better) content with a small ‘c’, not a capital ‘C’… Oh, and it also talks about how we’re trying to wean them off of building new things. Because there’s more traffic acquisition headaches in them there microsites.)

Meantime, here’s some of our free best practice ‘Social Media Agency’ papers

We hope you enjoyed the rants. If you did, and if you’re in the mood for some DIY, then fill your boots. Here’s what a decent Social Media Agency does Mondays through Fridays…

C&M Guide to Social Media Agency Campaigns

C&M Shut Up Listen and Spin 5 Step Guide to Online PR and Social Media Agency Work

C&M Party Harder 5 Basic Theories of Online PR and Social Media Agency Work

…And here’s some free best practice ‘Social Media Agency’ resources

Still curious? Good – so you should be… We feel the following should be pretty helpful. It’s a collation of thoughts, guides, presentations and other curios from the darkest corners of the mind of a ‘Social Media Agency’.

C&M Social Media Agency Content Strategy Map

…And here’s some pretty sweet ‘Social Media Agency’ case studies

Still with us? Great. That means you’re probably wanting to know how this stuff comes together in practice. So here you go…

C&M IBM VFC Social Media Agency Campaign

C&M Case Study Online PR Agency

C&M Social Media Case Study Hotels.com

That’s all Folks

That’s it. Free-thing-fest and general rant over. Do tell us what you think…

And, if you’d like some help from a ‘Social Media Agency’ then please do get in touch….

*NB: this stuff isn’t rocket science.

We put together this diagram in response to a common request from our clients: HELP!

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 content, 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.

Here’s the supporting blurb…

First Principles of Social Media and Online PR

Doing Social Media is not an objective in and of itself. Doing Twitter is not a plan. Customer interaction and retention around a theme is. So, the next time some bright spark suggests a Facebook page, take a deep breath and think it through – no matter how exciting it might seem.

Health Warning: ‘Build it and They Will Come’ is Broken

Communications in this new-fangled Social Interweb era is all about building followings, creating conversations and putting your content in the places it’s most likely to be seen. Nine times out of ten this won’t be in and around your own web site. The trick is to extend the value of what you’re doing to other people’s platforms, networks and services (or ‘go with the flow,’ as they say…)

Have a Plan for Social Media

Broadly speaking, you should think of Social Media as a channel: something to use for publishing stuff and/or talking with people (i.e. like the telephone, in the hands of a salesperson or a consultant).

As such, use it to support your bigger sales and/or marketing objectives. Twitter can help improve awareness levels, but only if you have something sensible to pin it on. Likewise, Facebook can be a killer community tool, but only if you have something that warrants a group interest.

Content is Elvis

If Social Media’s for you, then content is the next thought. Do you have any? Are you already making some? Can this be remixed in more valuable, useful and Social ways? If Social Media is to add value, then it shouldn’t be done in a vacuum.

Look for opportunities to spin off your standard content assets in new ways, so that they’re capable of playing out on Social Media channels as well as doing all the other things that you normally ask them to do. For example, video and images can be re-thunk so that they work just as well on YouTube and Flickr as they do on your web site and on your trade show exhibition stands.

Think Integration: Social Media Content

Whatever the case is, make sure that you publish your content assets ‘home and away’ – both on your web site and on other Social Media channels. This enhances people’s opportunities to see your stuff on their turf.

Your Social Media profiles need to become a core part of your thinking here. That Slideshare channel shouldn’t be sitting in outer space, it should be part of an integrated publishing plan, supporting everything else that you’ve got on your truck.

For example, a seminar can be composed of delegates, speakers, presentations, videos, Tweets and photos. Publishing these assets using Social Media channels can become part and parcel of your activity before, during and after the event.

Think Aggregation

When you’re done, look for ways to aggregate your Social Media content so that it becomes more useful to your audiences. For example, if you’re running grandstand events or conferences, then a Facebook event page could be a great place to bring together your stock of images and videos, so that Facebook users everywhere can find it easily and in one place.

If you’re promoting information-based services, then a subject-specific Ning can be a very useful route into your main site. And customer support apps like Get Satisfaction can also be a great outlet for all of those brochures and manuals that have been collecting dust on the shelf.

Partner content should also be factored in. What opportunities do you have for re-purposing third party blogs, Tweets, images, etc. in your own Social Media content services? These things can add real value to your overall story (and help Google to love you a little more).

Go Social: Party Hard

Once your Social Media content is published and you’ve found useful ways of aggregating it, it’s time to party hard and start sparking up the right kind of conversations in the right kind of places. We’ve written a lot about this elsewhere, but for now the key thought is being relevant, useful and entertaining.

Go comment on other people’s blogs. Follow them on Twitter and exchange ideas about all the good things you have in common. Add value to forums and discussion boards based on your stock of Social Media content, and encourage people to share all of your content, all of the time.

Footnote: If You Do This Then Google Will Also Love You!

Google loves content. Especially keyword-rich content. If you can build the type of publishing disciplines outlined above into your core marketing and content programs, then good linkage and great SEO will follow (we’d also say that Social Media is the new SEO, but that’s another story…)

Any Takers?

Granted, this is an uber-quick overview of the principles of Social Media content strategies, but it’s a sound one. If you agree/disagree or have something else to add, then please do let me know!

Meantime, here’s the chart again, via Slideshare:

How to Win Friends and Influence People With Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and the Blogosphere.

Overview

This short paper gives you a ‘101’ view on how to research and implement a basic Online PR / Social Media Campaign.  Specifically, it offers some best practise advice on how to use Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and the Blogsphere for successfully seeding campaign ideas.  (If you’re a Facebook or LinkedIn addict don’t worry:  we’ll be writing a separate paper about Online PR in Social Networks very soon!)

Part 1: Social Media Campaign Philosophy

“The skills required in the Online world are very different to those practised in traditional Media Relations.”
Roger Warner, MD of C&M

It may have been said before, but I’m going to say it again: Online PR is putting the ‘public’ back into ‘public relations’. Gone are the days when us PR people have to rely on a third party (i.e. the mass media) to get a message ‘out there’, because Social Media has opened up a wealth of opportunities for talking directly with your customers. And for this we use a Social tool set and a more human approach.

But this also means that we assume direct responsibility for what is said, and are liable to take the flack if we say something offensive or inappropriate. The phrase ‘outreach’ has been banded about a lot in relation to Social Media and Online PR campaigns lately – but we try to avoid it here at C&M. ‘Outreach’ seems to imply a one-way, outbound transaction with external parties (it’s a term often associated with the disenfranchised – homeless people, drug users, etc.), whereas our best work is all about give and take on a very intimate level. Talking to Joe Public is an entirely different ballgame to media schmoozing, and should always be approached as a conversation rather than a pitch.

Social Media Campaigns – Just like a face-to-face chat, but online.

Once you get your head round these essential differences, Social Media campaigns can be a huge amount of fun and massively rewarding – in a much more personal, direct and measurable way than, say, seeing an article placed in a magazine. It’s not about firing off press releases, sucking up to journalists and counting the column inches, it’s about starting a dialogue, that should – if you do it right – take on a life of its own,  distribute your message, and drive warm blooded web traffic.

Part 2: Social Media Campaign Research

“True friendship consists not in the multitude of friends, but in their worth and value.” Ben Jonson

The best conversations in life are those we have with like-minded, interested, interesting people who are good at listening as well as talking. The same goes for Social Media conversations, so don’t waste your time and energy on someone who really isn’t bothered about what you’ve got to say.

In most cases, the quality and relevance of your followers/friends/contacts is more important than the quantity. It may look impressive to have a 1000+ Twitter following, but how many of them are actually contributing anything to your cause? And who they are and where they come from is often less important than how they can help you.  In Online PR terms, your media can be a customer, a partner, a consultant, a member of staff or a reporter – the important thing is that they care for you and are able to extend the conversation around your brand.

Identifying the right audience is the first step to good Online PR practice, and there are hundreds of tools out there to help you do it. Here are just a few of our favourite research tools for Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and the blogsphere, plus some general notes on monitoring and managing potential contacts.

Part 3: Social Media Research Tools for Online PR Campaigns

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.” Marcel Proust

Twitter

• Twellow is a really useful directory of Twitter users, because it lets you search people’s bios as well as their names. So for a UK-specific campaign that’s promoting new web design technology, you could type in “Web Designer UK” to get a list of relevant users.
• Tweetbeep is a bit like Google Alerts for Twitter. It allows you to set up keyword specific searches that can be turned into alerts or RSS feeds so you can receive alerts whenever someone is Tweeting about a specific subject. The tool’s advanced search also letsyou can also specify a location: for example ‘500 miles from London’ would show you any tweets on your chosen subject sent within that radius.
• Twitter Karma is particularly handy if you’re taking on an existing Twitter account that needs some TLC or if your current profile is in need of a follower overhaul. It shows you who is following you back and which of your followers you are also following. The main advantage of Twitter Karma over FriendorFollow (another popular Twitter housekeeping tool) is that you can speed up this process by bulk following and unfollowing.
• When deciding whether to follow someone on Twitter, we also take into account the velocity, sociability and lucidity of their tweets, as well as the obvious number of followers and weight of second-order followers. Twinfluence is a good tool for measuring most of these things.

Flickr

• The most straightforward way of searching for suitable Flickr contacts is within Flickr itself. The ‘search for members’ function allows you to find people by their interests, which makes it easy to target relevant people. Of course, users may not put all of their passions into their bios, so another way to approach it is by tracking down photos on a certain subject and tracing them back to their creator.
• For a photography competition we’re currently running with Plain Lazy, I used Compfight to find pictures of skaters, surfers and other relevant communities. It shows you a big page of thumbnails on your chosen search query – and this is much easier and less time consuming to browse than Flickr’s own search engine.

YouTube

As with Flickr, it’s often easiest to search for photos rather than users, and for this I recommend using Google’s advanced video search, which gives you more options than YouTube’s own search engine. (Note – I’m suggesting that you leave the YouTube environment to conduct YouTube searches here.) This also allows you to turn your searches into RSS feeds, so that you can monitor new content via your RSS reader app without needing to go back and do new searches each time.

Blogs

To identify relevant blogs, we use a combination of Google blog search and Technorati, and then rate their influence manually using sites such as delicious and by counting the level of backlinkage and extent of connectivity within blogger communities. We also use Linkdiagnosis.com to validate the quality and relevance of the backlinks.

Another Great Multi-Purpose Tool

For an all-round handy tool, Social Mention is a Social search engine that pulls content from across all Social Media. This is especially useful if you don’t have time to search each platform individually.

The Influencer Monitoring Dashboard

Once we’ve identified the users and communities to target, anything with an RSS feed gets plugged into our campaign Influencer Monitoring Dashboard (we use Netvibes, but any RSS aggregator would work), so that we can keep tabs on new activity in real time. The Influencer Monitoring Dashboard is also where we collate all our keyword searches for blogs, news sites and any other relevant online communities. (If you’re interested about how we do this and what a Dashboard looks like, then just email us or tweet us at @contentmotion and we can share some examples with you.)

The C&M Influencer Monitoring Dashboard

Part 4: Social Media Campaign Implementation

“A conversation is a dialogue, not a monologue. That’s why there are so few good conversations: due to scarcity, two intelligent talkers seldom meet.” Truman Capote 

Once we’ve identified the communities and individuals to target for a campaign, it’s time to start talking. There’s no secret formula or etiquette Bible for getting this right – we just rely on our instinct and approach it as we would any sensible conversation. You wouldn’t burst into the middle of a club you had just joined and start shouting about yourself without getting to know people first, and the same rule goes for online communications. 

Our advice here is to just be friendly and polite, contribute to existing conversations and be up front about why you are there. If you’ve done your job right in the identification process, it shouldn’t be too hard to get people listening.  Another key thought here is utility.  People are more likely to listen to you if you have something useful to contribute to a discussion – which in practice means servicing their agenda in the first instance and not yours.  In this context, a blog comment or a forum post will address a need – it won’t be an advertisement.

Social Media Campaigns in Action

Here are some examples of recent Social Media Campaigns that have worked well for us, and some tips as to how we implemented them.

Twitter

A recent campaign we worked on with IBM proved that Twitter can be a real force in Online PR, especially for niche campaigns directed at tight-knit communities. The aim of the campaign was to drive sign-up to a virtual event inside IBM’s Virtual Forbidden City and for our Twitter activity we took a two-pronged attack: enlisting the help of IBM staff and brand influencers to spread the word on our behalf, as well as targeting potential event attendees directly. We didn’t need a massive following to create a buzz because having a small but well-connected and active community was just as effective.

As well as talking about the event, we did our best to make our Tweets interesting by sharing news stories, replying to relevant questions and generally interacting. The campaign was a success, with the majority of traffic to the main site coming from Twitter.  (You can check out the full case study here.)

Flickr

We’re currently working on a photography competition with Plain Lazy, that’s using Flickr as the host platform. To get things going, we started leaving invitations on relevant pictures, asking the photographers to add them to our competition pool and explaining the campaign incentives (great prizes, etc). We mostly chose pictures that already had a number of comments, so that the note would also be seen by the previous commenters in their Flickr activity feed. After a few days, the campaign took on a life of its own and photos started appearing in the Flickr pool without being directly invited.

YouTube

In much the same vein as Flickr, YouTube is all about the comment box – although the main disadvantage is that web links are disabled in YouTube, and comments tend to be less friendly and constructive than in Flickr. In other words, it’s less of a conversational environment than Flickr, making For an upcoming competition with Hotels.co.uk, we’re getting around this by making a promotional video that will be hosted on a dedicated Hotels.co.uk channel, and can also be posted underneath relevant videos as a ‘video response’.

Blogs

Perhaps the biggest minefield of all Social Media interactions, blogs also have the biggest potential for reaching a large audience, and coverage tends to be longer-lived and carry more weight than most flash-in-the-pan Twitter stories because of the backlinkage they carry and their general permanence. But how to talk to bloggers without being perceived as a self-promoting PR menace?

For the IBM Virtual Forbidden City event, we used our Influencer Monitoring Dashboard to monitor activity on the blogs we’d identified as relevant and influential in our initial research and analysis. Whenever a related post came up, we’d then leave a (relevant, appropriate) response, along with a link to the event site – or we’d alert our IBM team to do likewise). This not only helped drive traffic to the site and signups, but it also resulted in follow up blog posts, comments and Tweets about the event.
 

Conclusion: Social Media Campaigns, Sorted

So, with a few handy tools, a bit of imagination and a willingness to research the playing field and get stuck in, there’s really nothing that scary about running Social Media campaigns. Think of it like blind-dating: find someone with similar interests and hobbies, work out a suitable place to meet up, remember your Ps and Qs, and don’t spend all night talking about yourself. If all goes to plan, you’ll be engaged before you know it…

“The Virtual Forbidden City SOA campaign was a pioneering piece of work and is being held up internally within IBM as an example of best practice in integrated social media campaigning. Text 100 and C&M brought social media into the fabric of a core marketing programme and showed how to use new tools in a B2B sales environment.”

Delphine Remy-Boutang, Worldwide Social Media Marketing Manager, IBM Software Group
(You can follow Delph on Twitter via @DelphRB….)

Social Media Campaign Background

C&M and our PR Agency partners Text100 have been busy since the start of 2009 as the Online brains behind IBM Software Group’s Social Media action.

In our first project together we were charged with helping IBM to showcase all of the development smarts behind their Virtual Forbidden City, a breathtaking Second Life-like representation of a Chinese world from five hundred years ago.

IBM has more than a decade’s experience in creating successful cultural heritage projects, including the Vatican Library, the Pietà, Hermitage Museum, Eternal Egypt, and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.

The creation of the Forbidden City as a Virtual World is designed to show how IBM can flex its software, hardware and consulting expertise to deliver large scale Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) that are capable of serving a variety of B2B and B2C application interests. In this example, IBM’s technology is being used to provide lasting cultural experiences that preserve learning and have a real social impact.

Social Media Campaign Challenge

As IBM’s Social Media Agency task force our challenge was two-fold:

• Help IBM to reach out to new (Online) audiences and educate them about IBM’s capabilities in the SOA arena
• Make this message – and the work done on the Virtual Forbidden City – relevant to a B2B audience

The Social Media space is relatively new for IBM. The over-riding project goal was to prove that Social Media could be a relevant channel in terms of lead generation and awareness campaigns. Under this brief, we devised a simple series of ‘Executive Briefings’ inside the VFC – and our challenge was to persuade people who normally dress in suits (and sandals) to create an avatar and let themselves loose for an afternoon in the virtual company of IBM’s development team.

Further information about the event and how it was positioned for prospective attendees can be viewed HERE!

Social Media Campaign Planning

From the outset the campaign plan was 100% Social and based on sound Online PR tactics. We used Social Media channels to build relationships with core IBM influencers who would be capable of helping us to spread the campaign message to the farthest (but most relevant) parts of the Web.

Tactically, we wanted Influential bloggers, Twitterers and groups/communities to learn about the event, get excited and communicate it to a wider audience on our behalf.

These tactics were straight out of the PR and ‘Acquisition’ handbook. We needed to raise awareness, drive traffic and have people sign up. Since our targets were extremely niche (IT Architects with a proven interest in SOA and enterprise Virtual Worlds environments), our strategy was to identify our influencer targets on a one-to-one basis, talk to them up front, and prove the value of what we were trying to do in a way that was meaningful to them – so that they in turn felt compelled to spread the word to their own audiences.

Social Media Campaign Research

Research and analysis was essential to the success of the campaign. Whilst we had an excellent platform for our work (an online, virtual version of one of the world’s most popular tourist sites) the boundaries for engagement were narrow.

With this in mind, and in line with our standard campaign approach, the first part of the project involved a large amount of ‘Influencer Research’ and target planning. Using our full Online PR kit bag, we establish which blogs, forums, Social Network groups, and Twitterers would be most fruitful in terms of our initial engagement.

These broke down neatly into two camps: ‘IBM Evangelists’ and ‘Technocrats.’ Our research provided a platform and a series of target lists for both, which ended up as extensive Excel spreadsheets that ranked each type of target by relative ‘Influence’ value to our campaign. As with all our work, the emphasis was on the person’s ability to spread our messages effectively. In PageRank-fashion, we produced a series of ‘top 20’ lists of influential IBM employees, partners, customers, pundits, groups and communities, and Online media.

The next stage was to plug all of this information into our (bespoke) Online Influencer Monitoring and Engagement Dashboard (see below for a screenshot).

The Dashboard – which is an essential tool in every one of our Online PR Campaigns – became the basis for our implementation work with IBMVFC. It gave us a real-time view of all of the relevant conversations in which we needed to participate, as well as an immediate view on what our key targets were talking about at any given moment in time.

Social Media Campaign Execution: Twitter Central in Five Weeks

Once the campaign web pages (and registration process) were launched, we were ready to go. (Incidentally, we created all of the creative content and Online properties for the campaign.)

We had five weeks between launch and event.

Twitter was chosen as the central tool for communicating the campaign to Influencers and prospective attendees because it gave us the quickest way to establish relationships and build a following around the event activity. You can check out the campaign Twitter profile here.

Alongside the campaign registration pages and our Twitter profile, we built a variety of Social Media channels to enable people to take our content and repurpose it for their own uses. These included a YouTube video channel with event previews, and a Flickr profile to share images of the VFC environment.

We also used a Twitter hashtag (#IBMVFC) to enable us to ‘stream’ any conversations around the event. This was applied liberally throughout the campaign by us, and all attendees and Influencers were encouraged to do likewise whenever they were Tweeting about it.

Once these properties had been established, we went into hardcore ‘implementation’ mode.

The campaign Dashboard was the primary tool for monitoring and listening to our Influencers and all of the Online conversations around the VFC and SOA-related themes. Whenever we found something relevant, we got involved, providing helpful or interesting contributions to the discussion rather than simply promoting our own ends or ‘spamming’. We responded to forum posts, blog comment threads, Tweets and re-Tweets. Our goal was to raise awareness of the event – particularly amongst our target influencer community – and to create conversations about the event which would drive traffic to the sign up pages.

A key part of our execution work involved working with the IBM client team to help them use the same tool sets (especially the Dashboard) and join in with the engagement / conversation work. We also relied on a variety of traditional marketing channels such as IBM’s internal comms network for Intranet posts about the event, internal newsletters, sales team mailings, and good old fashioned media relations. All of this helped us to create buzz and excitement amongst the wider IBM network and our target influencers.

Social Media Campaign Results

As part of the project, we presented full campaign metrics back to the global IBM Social Media Marketing team and also to our Social Media Agency community via a Measurement Camp meetup in May. You can check out the slides we produced for Measurement Camp below (they contain full campaign results data)…

IBM VFC Social Media Campaign Measurement      

View more OpenOffice presentations from Roger Warner.

We aced our registration target by a factor of two, and we narrowly missed our attendee numbers. A host of blue chip prospects attended the event.

Along the way, we also…

• Drove 4,000+ visitors to our campaign pages (we doubled our target)
• Generated 20+ blog posts about the event
• Established a Twitter following of over 350 (very) niche followers
• Drove 700+ views of our campaign YouTube videos
• Drove 200+ views of our campaign Flickr images

Did we deliver on our objectives? Yes, but there were lessons learned. See the Slideshare PPT for more on this score.

Our campaign categorically proved that Social Media is ripe for niche, B2B, special interest communications activity. We delivered a bunch of relevant, warm leads with whom IBM is now in discussion in high ticket solution areas. What’s more, at the end of the process, we handed over a whole kit bag of assets that can be reused for future Social Media work: a living Influencer Dashboard, a stack of Influencer target lists and a live Twitter following packed with people that really care for IBM solutions.