A picture tells a thousand words

There's a ton of different free tools available to us to monitor how our brands are being talked about/represented on the web, and figuring out which ones work best against specific tasks requires some trial and effort and often some lateral thinking.

Yesterday I tripped over yet another one, but it has a slightly different, more visual take: It's called Spezify and it gives you a nice very visual / image based overview of how your brand is appearing on the web, drawing from Flickr, Yahoo, MSN, Twitter, Amazon & eBay.

Who needs moodboards anymore when a big screengrab from this site printed out in colour can make the point in a much more dynamic and arresting fashion? It's warm in London today and warm weather and Pimms go together like hand and glove for me, so I decided to use that for my example...

If nothing else hopefully it will re-inforce the point that consumers talk about brands in all manner of every day contexts, and in normal language that isn't about USP's. It might also serve as a reminder that properly tagging image and video content should not be an after-thought if a brand wants to make sure its' official face is properly represented.

Food for thought.

Social Media: Brands really can't afford to ignore it for much longer

I came across the presentation below on Slideshare (a great resource for the curious, as in the spirit of Generation G (that's genorosity, remember?) there's all sorts of presentations and thought pieces being shared far and wide). If you are a sensitive type, then be warned the F word is used a fair bit, but get over it and watch anyway, this is about the real world, and the way that consumers are embracing social media. It's not going to go away, however far you stick your head in the sand, so smell the coffee and start to work out how your brand could be participating. The rules may not be hard and fast, but if you need help, ask!

Some of the stats are slightly out of date (for example they quote 13 hours of videos uploaded to YouTube a minute, whereas the last stat I saw said 20 hours), but let's face it the accuracy of the numbers is somewhat irrelevant, because the web is changing every second of every day, and all you need to take out is that the number is a LOT.

What the F**K is Social Media: One Year Later

View more documents from Marta Kagan.

Let the people create the content and let the brand reap the benefit

It's no secret that I am a huge fan of Spotify. I'm also a fan of many things Italian. So happiness is when I see the two put together in a way that brightens my day and in all probability will brighten many many days to come too.

Bravo Fiat! They're running a multi-media campaign for their Fiat 500C (c for cabriolet), which has ticked lots of boxes for me in the world of smart use of the digital space. Ok, the summer may not be living up to it's name, but we all like the idea of wind in our hair and soft top cars. Apparently the UK has the greatest penetration of cabriolet cars in Europe. Yet arguably one of the most variable climates.

So what have they done? Created a campaign that harnesses the power of music to make us feel good, with a platform that facilitates participation via the creation of playlists / songs on demand & then got the consumer involved in an easy-to-engage fashion to create content that the brand derives benefit from. Brilliant.



So far, in the 5 days the campaign has been running, 1926 tracks have been submitted, and there've been numerous people commenting via Twitter. The smart thing about this campaign is that not only do I get to feel involved because my track has been included in the playlist with minimal effort involved in contributing, (so I feel part of the 500c Spotify community), but because in a time pressured, information overloaded world I now have a ready made playlist to listen to full of tracks that make people smile. Better still is the fact that I now have an easy default option of something jolly to listen to when I can't be bothered to make an active decision. I regularly default back to playlists I've been sent as long ago as February when I first started using Spotify.

So for Fiat, they stand a pretty good chance of remaining on my radar for months to come, and bringing a smile to my face time after time. Good for them. And they didn't even have to create the content, just facilitate its creation, which for me is a good illustration of a brand that has understood the social media space. It's part of that letting go of control thing that brands are having a hard time grasping. You don't always have to be in control to reap the benefit.

So cheer up your Friday, listen to what the people say make them smile (You'll need to have downloaded the Spotify app first, then doublc click on link /500c playlist icon that appears on LHS of the Spotify window). It's eclectic but that's part of the fun. Open the sun roof this weekend, crank up the stereo, and pretend you are nipping around Rome in a soft top Fiat 500c. It doesn't take much imagination for that combination to conjure up a smile.

Making insurance interesting...

I've worked on insurance brands. It's hard work. Insurance is a really low-interest category - something we all need for one thing or another, begrudge paying through the nose for and hope we never need to use. It's a chore. Apathy rules because there's a bewildering jungle of policies and terms to choose from. Clicks count a lot in the insurance market which is increasingly dominated by online direct sales, and where price comparison sites fight for your patience filling in quote forms.

So full marks and rounds of applause to UK insurance comparison site Compare the Market who have done a brilliant job of creating personality for a brand in a dull sector, demonstrating joined up media thinking and understanding the power of social media. For anyone outside the UK, the gist is this: CTM created a puppet meerkat (pun on typo of market), who became their figurehead and alongside his sidekick Sergei, starred in their ads which ran across a range of media platforms including TV, radio, press and online.



Then they took it one step further by creating a Facebook profile for their meerkat character, whose name is Aleksandr Orlov. He currently has just over 500k fans. People who've CHOSEN to befriend an insurance company! That's engagement for you. CTM have done a great job of illustrating how you can use social networking platforms for brand advantage. If you spend some time understanding how people use it, you can then interact in a meaningful and relevant fashion.

Aleksandr behaves just like any of your other friends, regularly publishing status updates, that are short, amusing, regularly topical or just the type of random soundbites we all share daily. He posts photos, video content just as we all do and every action is shared with his many fans.


I am more than happy to be his friend just because his humourous in-character status updates make me smile, and that's worth a lot. Linking positive sentiment with your brand has to be one of the best ways to engender engagement and long term consideration and recall.

They've understood that they can use the power of all those fans to propogate their message and increase their reach in an influential manner as any of his fans interacting with him will have that interaction broadcast out to the rest of their friends. Smart. They've recognised the value of creating seemingly specific content for the platform - last week Aleksandr was talking about his forthcoming new video bloopers content following the release of a recent tv ad (also teased via his staus updates), creating anticipation and driving many views/comments when it was eventually published some days later. It's all good.

And if online success needed offline ratification to be taken seriously (it doesn't in my opinion), what more proof do you need than my friend Aleksandr securing a masthead position in the Metro (free London morning paper), and most of page 3 to himself last week.


Be his friend. Even if you don't live in the UK or ever buy insurance. He'll make you smile and that counts for a lot in my book. This is one of the best examples I have come across of brands making social media work for them really well, without it feeling clumsy or contrived.

If it can be done for insurance, surely the field of opportunity is wide open?

Brands need to learn to freewheel a little...

Brands have spent years and millions of $/£/€ carefully crafting their brand image. Brands help us make choices.Brands naturally form part of the fabric of the many conversations we all have everyday.

Brands have been loved, praised, reviled and denigrated at conversations around dinner tables, in the pub, in bars, on the telephone for years and years. But whilst the brand owners really knew these conversations were happening they couldn't really measure or tap into them. So a head in the sand approach was fine unless a particularly determined consumer was persistent enough to deal with horrible customer service freephone number queues and listening to 15 rounds of Vivaldi's spring allegro to really make their feelings known.

Then what has become known as Web 2.0 occured. Consumers suddenly got a voice (albeit generally a written one) via IM, email, blogs, Twitter, status feeds on Facebook, all manner of places where all of a sudden their voices could reach far further than just the people around the dinner table. Suddenly, the brands couldn't ignore the conversations anymore. Thoughts were being shared far and wide, right there in black and white or green or blue or pink. Yesterday 112k new blogs were created, the day before it was 123k. That's a lot of personal publishing platforms, whether they reach 14 ,44 ,400 or 40k people.

Brands are no longer controlling the conversation. Shock! Horror! I was sent a link to this presentation recently that illustrates the journey for many brand owners quite nicely.

It astounds me that so many brands who would never dream of giving up their old world daily "press clippings" service still haven't got around to implementing any serious form of buzz monitoring. Yet the word is on the web now not in newspapers in the same way that it was once upon a time. There arebuzz monitoring tools a plenty. Some you pay for, some are free, but these days there's no excuse for not listening even if it's only on an ad hoc dip basis.

I particularly like the "Big Buzz" feature of Ice Rocket for giving me a snapshot of what's happening in different spaces. Check it out.

Someone also shared with me yesterday this cool desktop social monitoring app called Social Seek. I've been playing with it this morning, having selected "Starbucks" and "London" as my keyword and location, and it's been burbling away happily all morning revealing all sorts of things...For me, these tools, provide great insight into how consumers reallly talk about brands, rather than the way brand managers think consumers talk about their brands. Armed with this understanding, we can then create content and experiences that are relevant to the consumer and help harness those conversations for brand advantage, using the influential connections between consumers to get our brand into places our ad $ just can't buy. Ignore at peril.

Interactive video fun

A while back YouTube started allowing you to tag videos with interactive links, and people have been playing with the many different ways you can link content together to create interesting multi-media web experiences. Kicking around for a while now has been the Boone Oakley agency "non-website" made entirely of connected videos hosted on YouTube, but I'm happy to plug them for pushing boundaries.

Remember those books you used to get as a kid where you could choose what happened next by deciding whether you wanted to jump to page 36 or page 64??

Well this morning I tripped over this YouTube interactive version and I'm sure it's the start of many more sophisticated stories told in the same way as people's preferences are increasingly for multi-media information consumption over text. Have a play..




Whilst I'm on the subject of YouTube, if you haven't already, check out YouTube XL - the rather AdobeAir inspired YouTube interface designed for those accessing YT on a big screen (e.g a TV) via a gaming platform or home media server or similar. I like it, it looks nice with it's dark surround, and the navigation is clear and simple.

Banging on about Bing...

I know, I know, I've talked about search and Bing a LOT recently but it's important. Competition in the market is healthy.

I have a Gmail account, I use the Google reader for RSS feeds, this blog is written on a Google owned platform, I upload to YouTube (owned by Google), and I am enormously excited about the scope and potential of the Google Wave (a new communication and collaboration platform/approach coming soon) so I'm far from entirely disloyal. But it's important to share my love too.

I am enjoying playing with Bing not just for the way it processes queries and displays results, but for the small moment of happiness I get from the stunning pictures they have on the homepage everyday. Yesterday it was Angkor Wat in Cambodia, and the day before a stunning image of a turtle which made me think about a great holiday in the Whitsunday's last year. I engage with it. I play guessing games with myself as a result of the image I see. And clearly I am not alone and Bing have twigged that too as in the last week they've taken to adding clues under the image.

This morning I logged in and spent a few moments trying to work out where I recognised that skyline from. After a quick memory scan, and even before I looked at the clues, I realised it was the Yarra river and Melbourne, a city I love but haven't been back to for a few years now. But the fact that I go back to see the picture every day and I've been telling lots of my colleagues to do the same too, suggests they've got something right.

In an earlier post I talked about how smart it was for Bing to have launched a homepage photocontest via Facebook. I logged into Facebook this morning to find a status feed item reminding me that voting for the photocompetition closes on August 3rd, and encouraging me to go a vote (which I duly did). I'd encourage you to do the same. Why not? It's easy to do and easy on the eye. Well done, Bing, I think you are doing a good job. You are demonstrating that you are understanding your consumer and what is motivating (some) of them to use your decision making engine, and, how social media spaces can work hard for you: you don't have to drag people out of an environment that they are in anyway to make them consider and engage with your brand.
It will take a long time to shift people's behaviour from using Google as default, as there's many more of us using search than the was when the big shift from Yahoo search to Google happened in the late 1990's, but I feel compelled to encourage people to explore the search options available too us. There's more to search than the big G.

Time Savers...

I had an extraordinarily busy week last week with limited time to keep up with the new developments in the wired world (ironic really given that I was delivering an intensive 3 day course on digital marketing), but one thing I did trip over was:

BingTweets - an interesting mash-up of Bing (the search / decision-making engine) and Twitter. Run a search. Try it with something topical. Why a time saver and why do I like this? Because it gives me search results plus a notion of real time and what's being said about that topic right now, without me having to use multiple tools. As I said to a friend last week, it would be an interesting exercise to do live with clients to make them realise the real context in which people naturally talk about their brands, rather than the version they prefer to believe.

Not so new, but a service I love and find incredibly useful when I've been away from my inbox for a few days is an email "snooze" button provided by a site called Hit me later. Basically you can forward an email to a given email address and specify when you want it back (i.e 4 hours, 24 hours etc and it'll send it back to you at the designated time, meaning it appears at the top of the email pile, which I find incredibly handy as a means of prioritising / not forgetting important emails when you have a full inbox and lots of FYI's / junk to clear out before you can actually deal with the important stuff.