How socially active are you?

My lovely buddies over at Global Web Index have recently shared this nifty Slideshare deck looking at social behaviours - who's active where and what are they up to - very pertinent in a world where there is no shortage of platforms to choose from, and where clients too often default to Facebook without really thinking about what the real barriers they want social engagement to help them to overcome, where the communities they want to engage with play and what content they need to serve them.  Enjoy.

Facebook Beyond the Hype - GlobalWebIndex july 2012 from GlobalWebIndex

Then as a variant on the socially active theme, I struck social listening gold this morning (well bronze at least): I found a tool that appears at least to be a useful start point (wearing my training hat) to get people to think about how language rather than geographical borders define the word on the web.  I seem to have stood on that particular soap box rather a lot on the last month for one reason or another.

Tweeting Earth is a data visualisation of who is tweeting about the topic you specified where across the globe... here's one I did for the Olympics early this morning, bearing in mind I'm in London and as host city and with the Games starting this weekend, there's lots of marketing activity live, travel chaos warnings rife etc...

Then here's another taken just now (late afternoon UK time now, and the US is well and truly awake east to west), predictably it looks rather different to when I found the tool this morning given a broader perspective on interest around the Olympics elsewhere. For me, the key indicators are the number of tweets and the content angle if you look closely (Click to enlarge the images). 

I can't find any technical details so I presume it's just an API scraper at a given moment but nonetheless potentially interesting as a discussion igniter around listening. Have a play.

Masses go mad for Meerkat author....

A month ago, in yet another spot-on-the-money execution in this now long running campaign, Compare the Meerkat's Aleksandr Orlov launched his new book. Ad character turns DJ (podcasts), turns movie star (3 long form pseudo-movie releases), turns author, what will the meerkat entrepreneur do next?

(Be-warned long post, but my blog is also my car park for useful stuff remember!).

As one has come to expect from this aristocratic meerkat, this was not just another book launch:

First came the Facebook updates talking about a forthcoming book (16th Sept),  and linking to Amazon:

 Then emails from Amazon (as well as CTM)  inviting pre-order in what was clearly a smart piece of targeting.

In the run up to the launch Facebook posts enticed and teased, and pushed to YouTube:

Then a series of Facebook posts / tweets went on to moot a publishing launch in what proved to be a very much a la mode for 2 days only Pop-up shop on London's Regent Street.

Followed by an event (again showing how smartly the team behind this campaign are at mirroring general Facebook users behaviour with Aleksandr's), which no doubt helped them gauge the number of copies they needed to stock.

As ever with this incredibly smart campaign, the shop itself was executed beautifully, as was the surrounding communication which covered Facebook, Twitter, emails and of course the comparethemeerkat.com website.

The shop, on the edge of an arcade was beautifully on-theme & full when I dashed in after work one evening:

Downstairs was a "life and times" of Aleksandr and his family taking a museum theme,

...whilst upstairs was decked out mini-cinema style, showing his longer form mini-movies and of course selling his "signed" books.

The PR machine was as ever well oiled too, and I spotted pieces in the Evening Standard on the day of the shop launch:

And with the book topping the Amazon topsellers too, this article in the literary section of The Independent:

Three days after the launch (29th October), Aleksandr's book was at no 2 in the Amazon Topsellers list:

A week later (4th Nov), Aleksandr told his 769.5k Facebook fans, & 42k Twitter followers of the audiobook launch on iTunes: (It's also available on Audible.co.uk, so multi-platforms covered off).

3 weeks later still and how do things stand?

Well today (26th November), less than a month before Christmas,  a quick dig around some of the e-stores revealed this picture:

Aleksandr Orlov: A Simples Life stands at:

#3 in the Amazon most wished for book charts
#2 in the Amazon most gifted book charts
#3 in the Amazon best sellers (now with 66 days in the top 100 (incl. prelaunch))

Nor is it just an Amazon/iTunes distribution deal...
#2 in the Play.com bestsellers & today featured as editor's choice on the books homepage

#4 in the W H Smith books best sellers list

#16 in the Waterstones best sellers list, #36 in Tesco.com and #30 in iTunes audiobook chart.

Not bad for a meerkat of Russian shopkeeping origins!

And there was I about to hit "post" when the following tweet burbled onto my screen inviting Aleksandr's fans to vote via Facebook for which TV execution they should run at Christmas.

Spot on again, engage, invite participation, listen to what the people say.

And yes obviously I bought a signed copy of the book ;-)

Another (updated) internet trends video, but worth a watch

Here's an updated version of the socialnomics trends video from last year. 

Sadly they are still using Right Here, Right Now by Fat Boy Slim as the backing track.

Not very right here, right now at all, it was recorded in 1999.  Surely there's something  someone could come up with from this decade?

Musicians, artists of the world, I plea to you, come up with a new pacey track about real time!?

However, fast as the stats in these things go out of date by the time they've done half a lap of the interweb, probably worth a few minutes of your time.

Clever video on marketing in todays socially hyperconnected world

Badging yourself with social media

Badges. Patches. Pins. Whatever you'd like to call them.

(Image courtesy of www.koolbadges.co.uk/)

Real or virtual they exist in many forms.

We all use them to make statements about ourselves, about things we like, things we dislike, things we like to associate with or be associated with: CND, Against Animal Testing, I [heart] NYC, bands, brands, causes, smiley faces. We use them to define status, prefect, sports captain, club ties, cufflinks etc.

As a teenager it was about badges on school bags or jackets, then there was that period which saw many of us wearing a rubber bangle, white for Make Poverty History or yellow for Lance Armstrong's LiveStrong campaign.

With most of us having at least one virtual identity these days in one or more digital spaces, be it Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter, our badges are more and more likely to be digital ones, all saying different things about us to a given audience subject to the role of the space. (LinkedIn = primarily professional, Facebook = mostly personal connections/friends etc etc).  In fact, I  think the first digital badge I got (or in fact was awarded) several years ago now was a "1st million members" badge on LinkedIn.

We join groups in LinkedIn for multiple reasons, amongst them to add credibility to our professional profile; or, we choose to become fans of pages on Facebook or other social spaces for all manner of motivations. On Facebook in particular most of us do this to make a statement, serious, ironic or just downright silly, or to follow the crowd / our friends and virtually re-inforce our connections/feel part of the gang, just as we did in the playground at school.  Frequently, these actions are short term and a mere gesture, a click and a newsfeed item today, forgotten next week. Periodically I go back and do some housekeeping of the groups / pages I am a fan of: things I joined because they were relevant at a given time / context but no longer resonate get deleted.  Which is a fair analogy of where most brands sit in my life. Intermittent interactions based on need or context, some more frequent than others.

Yet most brands trying to get their heads around social media haven't figured that out yet. I am not obsessed by coffee/chocolate/shampoo/flight operators/gadgets or cars all day everyday.  Nor have brands (in the main) found the balance between being relevant and present in my digital life on a regular basis without all communication having to be product-feature based.  That's one of the reasons I like the Compare the Meerkat campaign so much. It entertains me regularly, subtly underpining the role of Compare the market in the insurance aggregator playing fields but without talking about premiums and excesses.

We can even makes statements via badging our Twitter icons via Twibbon, and as I posted about last year, the number of Twitter-ers sporting a poppy for remembrance day was an impressive 22k. I'm currently sporting an RNLI flag, as a cause dear to my heart.

People collect digital badges too - you often see them on blogs, re-assurance of credibility or belonging to a virtual community.  I just discovered an enormous collection of digital badges associated with my Twitter account via Osnapz.  Very pretty! In reality just another more attractive way of displaying data. But so often a picture tells a thousand words, much more interesting to see badges showing which countries I have followers in than for me to write a list....

So next time you go to join a group on LinkedIn or become a fan of something on Facebook think about what's motivating you to do it? Status? Tribalism?  Is it just click and run or do you intend to contribute and engage in a large or small way?  Then think about those answers when you are thinking about the role of social media for your brands.

Social media spaces are all about conversation and relationships. Deep and meaningful or one click stands. Your call.  Think about what you are seeking to achieve. Just numbers? XXX number of fans?  Lovely, if that's what helps you justify ROI, but is that really what you should be aiming for?  I'd rather have a meaningful, engaging ongoing relationship, even if at times when it's not relevant it's a relatively passive one. Sometimes less is more.

Challenging old notions of value via social media

I hate the phrase social media.  I'd rather think about people.  People represent OTT  (opportunities to talk)  if we have to get back into media & evaluations terms. Conversations. Recommendations. Sharing. Suggestions.  Hugely influential.

There's lots of people like me scratching their heads and trying to crack a definitive measurement / value model for digital interactions with consumers in the digital space.  There's lots of things we can measure, and some we can't (yet) but one of the biggest challenges is relating direct cause and effect of money spent on initiatives in social spaces and sales uplift.  It's a tricky one. How do you qualify and quantify social influence to a client that's used to seeing x# TVR's (tv ratings) = y% sales uplift, and, rarely (and rightly) is digital / social media activity conducted in a vacuum.

Half the battle is getting clients to think about the longer term and get out of a campaign led mentality that only sees value in ££ and 6 week windows. Value in my mind means relationships, interactions, contributions, permission to engage in dialogue, reviews, all of which contribute to brand / product consideration sets and eventually sales. Maybe today, maybe tomorrow, maybe in 3 or 6 months.  That's why the Aleksandr Orlov/Compare the Meerkat campaign is so brilliant. There are always people in the market for one insurance product or another. Stick to campaign phasing to raise awareness and you'll only ever capture the active prospects for that 4 week window of activity. Yet by being regularly visible and releant via social media you can achieve ongoing top of mind awareness.

Marketers also need to recognise that consumers will only talk about things when it's relevant to them and their lives. So your brand might have done something interesting, & engaged someone's attention but the glowing recommendation to a friend might not occur for 6 months. In my books that doesn't make it less valuable at all. Just harder to correlate and prove,  because the recommendation will no doubt have come about because of multiple stimuli that may have occurred on or offline.

There are a few "social media" success stories being touted around(apart from my meerkat mate), and I've just tripped over this round up of some of them. Take them for what they are, often supposition, and not spelled out, nor with details of what the objectives were but to stimulate thought it would be 4 minutes of your day well spent.  Then go and think about whether you are setting the right real objectives for your digital activities and therefore the right metrics.

The out-take is so often open to interpretation

I'm genuinely not feeling deliberately argumentative this afternoon but when I read articles that interpret data and don't really think beyond the obvious I do furrow my brow. So I'm going to throw in my own point of view on this one.

The headline this chart was taken from was "Loyal visitors but small share from social sites", and the conclusion being that whilst the number of visitors to a site coming from a social networking site was small they were likely to visit several times (good!), whereas search engines are still overwhelmingly driving the lions share of traffic, but not traffic that returns.

Now admittedly I've not read the whole of Chitika research piece or deconstructed the methodology, but for me whilst it's great that social network sites can help drive traffic if that's what you are trying to use them for, there appears to be a key point that hasn't been brought to the table:

Half the point of having a brand page or group on Facebook or similar is so that people can interact with your brand / experience / event  IN AN ENVIRONMENT THEY ARE IN ANYWAY. So trying to distract a consumer from what they were there to do (interact with their friends) and drag them off to your site is a bit like picking someone up by the scruff of the neck and dragging them against their will to somewhere they don't necessarily want to be.

You wouldn't like it if someone did it to you now would you??  I read something recently that said something along the lines of "a marketer wouldn't dream of interrupting a phone conversation, but they keep wanting to interrupt in social media environments".  You need to make your brand part of the conversation not irritatingly interrupt it. That's just bad manners, and yes it might get you talked about but maybe not for the right reasons.

As ever it comes down to making sure that the metrics you set for activity are the right ones, and click through isn't the only option in the digital measurement toolbox.

Useful Social Media Case Study Round Up list

I'm not saying they are all good, and it's certainly heavily US-skewed, but it's a good starting point if you have the patience to sift through it and are short of inspiration.

http://wiki.beingpeterkim.com/wiki/Main_Page

For me, BlendTec, BrawnyMan and Compare the Meerkat are in my top 3.

Cyberstalking - an amusing how to for parents

I've spent many years of my life working in America or with Americans (bless them) who for the most part have had a very under-developed sense of humour, or grasp on irony and sarcasm. I have been to Bentonville. 'Nuff said.

Luckily I also have a LOT of super-smart and well travelled US friends and colleagues so I know that there are plenty of people that buck the trend. I will forever thank them for having introduced me many many many years ago to The Onion. The Onion is a US satirical publication which I've been reading online fairly frequently since 1998. How's that for loyalty? Moving with the times it is doing more and more video content that frequently has me in stitches.

So as it's back to school/college/university season, they've done a take on cyberstalking for parents AKA idiots guide to social networks for the digitally uninitiated. In its own way I think it makes an interesting point about the importance for parents to join the digital revolution so that they can help their kids realise the potential consequences of sharing too much information.

Personal brand management is more important than ever.

Enjoy.


Facebook, Twitter Revolutionizing How Parents Stalk Their College-Aged Kids

Nice thought: advertising=fireworks, social media = bonfires

A great Guy Fawkes party needs both!

Advertising Fireworks, Social Bonfires

Social Media: Have you embraced it yet?

Here's an update of a previous video on the evolution of technology, how it's changing our world, and how we interact with each other. This version has a social media bias, and is well worth spending 4 minutes with. Make a cup of tea and watch this:



Then sit back and ask yourself if you or your brand are doing enough to engage with the consumer the way they want to engage or are you still shouting AT them?

I love Hugh MacLeod's cartoon...



There's some interesting stats about the social media landscape here too.

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.