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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thoughts?

(CLICK THE IMAGE – NOT AN EMBED!)

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In terms of Alexa rankings, it’s one of the biggest stand-alone social networks on the web after Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and Flickr. The total registered users is also nothing to sniffed at, with over 50,000,000 members and rising.

By far the biggest and most interesting of all the improvements to the LinkedIn platform is LinkedIn Groups. Ostensibly a place for like-minded professionals to come together over a subject or interest, it can be a powerful tool for driving traffic to your website and online marketing if you know how to use it.

LinkedIn Marketing: How and Why?

Groups has some startling similarities to Facebook’s Pages functionality: members can become ‘fans’, group sections are sorted along the top of the screen in tabs, updates can be sent out to members of the group via e-mail, etc. As is also the case with Facebook, a group on LinkedIn gives you the ability to import RSS feeds, meaning that all updates for a given feed can be distributed inside a group, broadening the reach of your content to influential and like-minded people.

Of course, the above actions will only work if you’ve got a lot of members in your group. If you don’t feel like setting up your own group or don’t have many group members, you can always join one set up by someone else. The concept works in much the same way: join a group, join in discussions with other people and link them to your content (remember: hard sell is doomed to fail nine times out of ten in the context of Social Media – if you can’t add anything worthwhile to a discussion then it’s best not to bother.)

LinkedIn Polls also offers a way to perform quick and easy market research. Polls within your network (i.e. your connections only) are free. However, should you want to ask a different group of professionals (such as small business owners, software engineers, etc.) that you can target by industry, a pricing option of $50 (minimum) per response comes into play. In a similar vein, LinkedIn Answers works in much the same way as Yahoo! Answers, except the subject matter and responses are actually useful.

They key advantage of LinkedIn for the above activities as opposed to, say, Facebook Pages is the audience type. LinkedIn is targeted towards a more professional, business-minded user base, therefore reaching individuals with the same goals and interests on a professional level is far easier than on Facebook, despite the platforms being equally as ‘closed’ as one another.

Joining The Dots: LinkedIn Integration

It’s important to note that LinkedIn should be used in tandem with your existing Social Media content and marketing set-up. As useful as the various services such as Groups are, LinkedIn could never hope to replace the immediacy or openness of Twitter or the sheer size and popularity of Facebook.

In terms of platforms, Twitter and LinkedIn are currently the most friendly with each other, offering synchronisation between the two: if you make an update on LinkedIn, you’ll be presented with the opportunity to tweet it, and if you tweet using the #li or #in hashtags your tweet will appear in LinkedIn. There are also numerous apps available for Facebook, offering similar integration.

You can also integrate your WordPress blog with LinkedIn. By installing a couple of free plugins (the WordPress app on LinkedIn and the GD LinkedIn Badge or LinkedIn Resume on your WordPress install) you can pull through your most recent blog posts onto your LinkedIn profile, and display a badge to your LinkedIn profile or small feed of your CV on your WordPress blog. Other blog platforms can be imported using the RSS feed feature.

What are your experiences with LinkedIn? Have you found it a useful platform to work with for promoting your business or content? Feel free to leave a comment on this article and let us know all about it. If you’re a regular reader of our blog, we’d love you to join our very own LinkedIn Group, Pals of C&M.

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?

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 : )

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.

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.)

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!

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 campaign goal is to reach a non-Top Gear / car geek audience with a more accessible set of content to help UK drivers stay on the road this winter. Working with Continental’s web design team at Periscope, we’ve delivered a spot of content planning, Social SEO and site optimisation, as well as a healthy dose of Online PR to spread the message to the wider web.

What’s it all about? Well, here’s a hint: tread depth is crucial. What Top Gear didn’t tell you is that a 20p piece can work wonders. Place it in your tyre grooves and if you can see the outer edge of the coin then it means it’s time to visit Kwik Fit.

Fiona explains more here:

And, if you’re planning a road trip, you can get the rest of Continental’s advice here:

All very useful stuff, particularly with the festive slogs up and down the M1 fast approaching….

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

Native Facebook Tools

Though they don’t tend to shout about them, some of the most handy Facebook tools are within Facebook itself…

Researching for Facebook Campaigns with Lexicon

A useful stats tool for Facebook, Lexicon gives you trending information on words and phrases used on people’s walls. For example, this graph shows how mentions of “red wine” in wall posts have slowly decreased in the last two years. This kind of information is useful when choosing which keywords to use in a Social Media campaign and indeed whether Facebook is the best platform for any given subject.

The new version of Lexicon, currently in preview mode, will also reveal a more detailed breakdown of keyword stats, such as how many people have used a term (as opposed to how many times the word or phrase has been used) as well as gender and age demographics.

Promoting Your Page/Event/Competition with Facebook Ads

The closed nature of Facebook makes it difficult to find and interact with people unless they are already your friends. One of the best and most time/cost effective way of shouting about your page and building followers is using Facebook Ads.

These can be highly targeted to people with relevant keywords in their profiles, or of a certain demographic. Easy to set up and manage, you can also set daily/weekly budgets for Facebook Ads and specify a maximum cost per click.

Discover How Well Your Facebook Page is Doing with Facebook Insights

Anyone who’s managing a Facebook Page should be all over Facebook Insights (accessible from within the Pages Admin section of your account). It’s another analytics tool that shows how your followings are developing and gives context for interactions on your Page, including wall posts, likes and comments. As Facebook explains it:

“ Your Post Quality shows you how engaging your posts are to your fans, and your star rating compares your Post Quality to other pages of similar size. Your Fans Over Time graph now lets you track when users decide to unsubscribe from your posts in their News Feed. And we now provide statistics on where your fan base is located and which languages they speak.”

External Facebook Tools

Keep Facebook Updated with Sendible

A cross platform scheduling tool, Sendible lets you queue up Facebook Page updates to release at a certain time (much in the way that Twuffer and HootSuite do for Twitter). If you are going to be away on holiday or too busy to update your Facebook Page, this is a great way to keep it populated with regular content – though of course should not be a replacement for daily interactions. It also works for Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn, Plurk, Tumblr and Flickr among other services.

Monitor, Post and Schedule Facebook Activity from HootSuite

If you read my recent post about web-based Twitter client HootSuite, you’ll already know that I’m a big fan, especially since all the recent changes which integrated Facebook and LinkedIn. While some other Twitter clients now let you post to your personal Facebook profile and even Facebook Pages, HootSuite is the only one that also has an in-built scheduling tool which you can use to queue up future Facebook Page wall posts (as with Sendible). Unfortunately HootSuite has yet to incorporate Facebook posts into its link-tracking stats package – though I am sure this will come in time.

Facebook Pages on HootSuite

…and what they look like on Facebook

There are of course many other Facebook tools and apps out there, but these five make a good basic toolkit for beginners looking to enhance their Social Media marketing experience. We’re already planning a post on how to jazz up your Facebook Page, so watch this space for more Facebook tips coming soon…

Here’s the view from my 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…

As such, for those brands not yet up and running on Social Media, the most sensible way to establish value and ROI are via existing programs. i.e. it’s sensible (and simple) to ask what Social Media can do to help you rank on Google, build marketing ‘lists’, run more effective events, do acquisition campaigns, create better content, etc, etc. If done well, this ought to build the case for going Social across a wider front.

In my experience, many of the barriers to using Social Media sit within an organisation. Social requires more of a focus on content and much more integration across marketing disciplines. There may not be a magic wand to bring all of this together immediately (it’s a big ask for many Marketers to push this kind of thing upstream).

So next year I’d encourage all newbies to focus on what’s at hand and take practical strides to establishing a bigger, bolder business case… rather than looking to a new, all-encompassing, shiny new measurement rubric that will justify the effort before setting sail.

Here’s that in a couple of charts, plus a simple ‘Cut Out & Keep’ measurement diagram to stick on the wall.

NB: I don’t mean to call VPs of Marketing ‘Old Dogs’ (most of them are lovely). I’m talking about the aims.

PS: There are probably a bunch of other metrics to consider for other aims. ‘Support’ probably is the new marketing. But that’s another story…

PPS: I am an old dog. Have spent many an hour creating uber-plans for bold, new-fangled, seemingly world-changing projects as an employee in (very) large organisations. Only one or two of them ever saw the light of day.

Further Reading:

…via MeasurementCamp – an excellent communal effort to make sense of these things, run via Social folks NixonMcInnes.

Check out what it’s all about via the G-Monster’s rather (untypical) slick and sexy video:

Cool stuff, huh?

In essence, this new feature is both incredibly simple and incredibly powerful. Alongside our normal, time-honoured, static-ranked web pages, news pieces, vids and pix, we’ll now be presented with a ‘real time’ ticker of live Interweb updates in relation to our search queries. These will be fed via blogs and Social microblogging and status-update services like Twitter, Facebook, etc, etc.

Some of these results have been slowly creeping into the margins of Google’s SERPs over the past weeks, but now we are to be blessed with a slick interface to house it all – something that sets the ‘real time’ stuff aside from all the rest.

What does it mean to you? Social SEO

Well, this bit’s simple too. If you want to be omnipresent, then the general rule needs to be ‘Always Be Optimising.’ To appear in the live search results, you need to be thinking about staying on message (keyword) throughout all of your other activity on the Social web. In other words – you need a little Social SEO. One keyword plan, many channels… that sort of thing.

What does it mean to the Interweb at large?

If the goal is to stay on page one of the SERPs all of the time via this new feature, then no doubt we’ll see a raft of real-time-content-optimisation-update-bots that happily spew out a stream of SPAM via any Social Media profile you may care for… but to go this route would be short sighted.

Twitter et al are all about building followings, relationships and conversations and then doing smart things with these connections – and the surest way to nuke these brilliant new assets is to SHOUT, SHOUT, SHOUT lots of the same thing, most of the time (just try it – you’ll get un-followed in an instant).

Good ‘real time’ or Social SEO needs to be smarter than that. Optimisation should compliment the message, not rule it. We shall see…

The flip-side, of course is that everybody’s Tweets, rants and raves will now show up for any given search term – good, bad and indifferent. To this extent, any effort to be omnipresent is likely to be futile.

Context / try it!

This notion of ‘real time search’ is nothing new – the geeks among us have been using Twitter Search, Addictomatic, etc, as proper discovery / search engines for a while now. But this is different: this is Google. And everyone’s on it.

Meantime – hot damn, look here (that’s this post at the bottom of the list – I had to move quickly!)…. And click here (or the image) to see the thing in (real) action.

So, tell us your thoughts? What gives? Who’s off to build a new Twitter spamming app? (Oh, hang on – didn’t someone do that already…?)

PS: anyone remember Pointcast? Darn that 56k dial-up! Only 17 years too early….