Social media, mobile advertising, copywriting, and everything in between » socialmedia

Me, Friends Reunited, and Radio 4

Brendan — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 12:14:46 +0000

So out of the blue I got a call from BBC Radio 4 to go in and talk about the recent relaunch of Friends Reunited on the You and Yours programme.

“Friends Reunited has relaunched?” thought I. Fortunately I managed to pull enough from my dusty memory banks sufficiently quickly to convince the assistant producer I was their man.

Two days later and I was outside Broadcasting House, having fairly thoroughly researched the topic. That was fortunate, because the questions they asked me – live, on air, in front of millions of listeners – weren’t actually the questions they told me they were going to ask.

I knew all about its history (set up by Julie and Steve Pankhurst in 2000, 3,000 users after one year, 2.5 million after two, 15 million by 2005 then sold to ITV for blah blah blah). I’d even figured out why some networks succeed and others fail (combination of luck and basically just being better), and why some major acquisitions hadn’t worked out (mostly the same reasons). This is because the assistant producer told me that’s what they were going to ask me.

Imagine, then, my surprise when Julian Worricker turned to me and asked my opinion of the site having played around with it. Fortunately, I had played around with it, for about an hour, without actually getting anywhere with it. Unfortunately, I had to be frank and say so, sitting right next to Chris van der Kuyl, CEO of BrightSolid, the company behind the Friends Reunited relaunch. He didn’t seem to mind: he was very well media trained and put up a good fight, I thought. For what it’s worth I thought he was an extremely nice chap and we had a very good chat before the programme.

Julian also asked my take on the name. Again, I wasn’t entirely positive. But I tried to get some conciliatory stuff in, such as Friends Reunited’s brand recognition and the way that focusing on nostalgia is potentially effective (although, I fear, in reality, not very).

Anyway, you can listen to the clip here. I’m probably not supposed to host it but heck, I pay my license fee and if the BBC wants me to take it down, I will. I was frankly surprised when a BBC radio journo friend of mine asked whether they were going to taxi me in. “No”, I replied, “But I’m interested to find out that’s the kind of thing my license fee is paying for.”

If they do use a sledgehammer to crack a nut, then I will graciously crack, in which case you can (at the time of writing) listen to the programme here.

So, I’ve had my fifteen minutes of fame. I just wish it hadn’t started with me coughing and saying ‘Excuse me’. How terribly British of me.

Filed under: socialmedia Tagged: BBC, friendsreunited

Tracking the KPIs of Social Media | SEOmoz

Brendan — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 13:39:37 +0000

via seomoz.org

Over the past year or so I’ve become fairly convinced that measurement through solid, universal frameworks of understanding is the key to success. However, often what I find is that clients either don’t really care about it, or that, if they do, they only really care about the ‘good’ metrics such as ‘Friends of friends’ in Facebook, which is akin to the alchemy of AVE.

The Conversion funnel is as good a place as any to start. Believe me, I’ve presented this to entire roomfuls of so-called marketing types who have never heard of it which frankly astonishes me (and did astonish me at the time – I really did have to stop my jaw from dropping). It’s been around for a long time, it’s simple, and, I believe, it works. Just take each segment of the funnel and figure out what you’re trying to achieve with it, and from that figure out how you’re going to measure what you’re trying to achieve, to see if you’re achieving it.

I’ve used AIDA in the past, which may be a bit simplistic because it doesn’t take into account repurchase. I’ve used a much more complicated version of the funnel which left people looking mystified. But this one is the Goldilocks funnel, I think. It’s just right.

And, praise be, the entire blog post is pretty good. I’m not sure it quite manages to bridge the gap between online activity and conversion (ie “Did we manage to sell stuff?”) but that’s something we’re all trying to do, and it probably falls into the space between your website and your ecommerce platform. Right?

Anyway, as I always do when I ‘repurpose’ (ie steal) other people’s content, don’t just sit here reading this, go over to SEOMoz and check out the full piece. I like.

Filed under: marketing, measurement, socialmedia

Who’s Using Google +? / Flowtown (@flowtown)

Brendan — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 15:11:49 +0000

via flowtown.com

Nice infographic from Flowtown here.

Google+ is a strange beast. On the one hand, I see it every day because my home page is set to Google, and I’m always logged in, so I see it whenever I fire up my browser. So, you could say it’s won the homepage war, mainly because it’s been around longer than Facebook (and because I want to search for things quickly rather than wait for Facebook to fire up).

On the other hand, apart from playing around with it a bit, there is VERY little activity there. Flowtown shows that only 17% of users are active, and while I don’t have comparable figures for Twitter or Facebook, it doesn’t sound that great to me.

And while Facebook is a true platform, in that people can build their own apps and deliver them to this richly connected environment, Google+ resolutely is not. Everyone is helping Facebook to grow, while only Google is growing Google+.

As is often the case, only time will tell. I recently came across a study I did from a couple of years back in which ‘some’ of the brands were on Twitter. Today, they all are. So perhaps this will happen with Google+. In the meantime, Flowtown tells us that 61% of the top 100 brands have Google+ pages. Maybe B2B is where Google can establish a social media foothold. But going head-to-head with Facebook could be picking a fight it cannot win..

Filed under: google+, socialmedia

What’s the ROI of “Merry Christmas?”: Measuring the Effectiveness of Holiday Cards – The Measurement Standard: Blog Edition

Brendan — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 17:05:56 +0000

As I deleted my 100^th electronic Christmas card, all I felt was annoyance – rather than merry or joyous or whatever it was supposed to make me feel. A good 50% of these mostly cold and soulless emails were from PR firms I’d never heard of. I assume they got my name from Klout or Cision or Vocus or any of the other list peddlers that bring as much joy and relevance to the season as Jacob Marley did. Which got me thinking…

Does anyone measure the effectiveness of these silly things?

via kdpaine.blogs.com

KD Paine – ‘The Queen of Measurement’ – writes a lovely piece about ROI.

I wish I had her brain. She’s so good at picking out the important bits, putting them together in interesting ways, and showing real value. And I have a sneaking suspicion that, when she tells us that her clients often say “I’ve been meaning to get in touch…” on receipt of her cards, it’s more to do with her being damned good at what she does than the beauty of the cards. She could probably send a blank sheet of paper through and get a similar response. Now *that* would be an even higher ROI!

Anyway, one other point to mention is that I sometimes get guilt when I use snippets of other people’s posts on my blog. I know I’m giving them free publicity, plus a link, but part of me feels I should comment on their post instead. So, why don’t you jump across to Katie’s blog for me, read what she has to say, and respond?

Filed under: measurement, socialmedia

30 Social Media Predictions for 2012 From the Pros | Social Media Examiner

Brendan — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 13:55:12 +0000

How will social media impact businesses in 2012?

We sought expert opinions from a wide range of pros you’re likely familiar with.

We are grateful for the dozens of social media professionals who have written over 600 articles for us since we started Social Media Examiner in October 2009.

To give you a glimpse of what we can expect in the next 12 months, we decided to tap their knowledge and expertise. Here are their predictions of where social media is headed in the next 12 months.

via socialmediaexaminer.com

I was going to add Part Two to my social media predictions, really I was. But I just read this and thought, well, they’ve done such a good job, I may as well throw it your way. It seems to boil down to media, strategy and mobile.

Of course, everyone’s saying ‘this is the year of social media’ but then again they would (and have been for quite some time!)

Filed under: socialmedia

2012 social media predictions: Part One

Brendan — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 16:44:12 +0000

No, that doesn’t mean I’m going to list over two thousand predictions for social media. If I did, however, I would be almost certain to get some of it right.

Instead, I’m going to list my predictions for the year ahead. Which means I’ll probably get most of it wrong.

However, just to lend some semblance of order to this post, I’m going to do it in three sections. These are: part one, in which I look at what I pretty much randomly said about social media last year with a cat sitting on my lap, and decide whether or not I was right or wrong (probably wrong, right?); part two, in which I also look back at the aggregated post I did last year, in which I looked across several predictions to see what the consensus was this time last year, and again see how they panned out (or not); and part three, in which, with a cat sitting on my lap, I give you my potted view on what the year ahead holds.

So, onward and downward…

Part One: What I Said About This Time Last Year With A Cat Sitting On My Lap

Here’s what I said, in brief, and my take on whether or not it happened…

Confidence

What I Said Then:

How can you invest time and effort, how can you plan, when you don’t know what’s going to happen over the next few months, let alone the next year?

What I Think Now: I’ve seen quite large developments over the past year, such as continued Facebook changes, the temporary disappearance of SocialMention and the seemingly permanent disappearance of TweetCloud. However, not all of these have been bad, so for example Delicious has been revived, and Google+ has offered a good, new, stable channel (albeit not a platform).

And actually, I don’t think confidence has gone down. Perhaps we’re just reaching Gartner’s plateau of productivity, in which we’ve figured out how to use this stuff, and are going ahead and just using it, with our expectations more realistic than they were last year.

Monetisation

What I Said Then:

Yahoo owns the biggest bookmarking service around, and it cannot make money off it. Twitter, as far as I’m aware, still doesn’t have a monetisation strategy. I don’t quite understand how Mark Zuckerberg can be so rich off the back of Facebook.

What I Think Now: I think monetisation is still an issue, but not a problem. This is because people are conveniently forgetting about it. (Here, I’m referring to the value companies place on their social media efforts rather than valuations of Facebook etc).

If you asked someone today how much value their website creates, and they weren’t running an ecommerce operation, they very probably would have no idea. But, at the outset of last year, I felt fairly sure people would be asking about this more and more for social media because they were all strapped for cash.

Twelve months later and the economic situation is probably even worse, but I think social media could be becoming one of those things you just ‘do’, like websites.

This is actually probably not a good thing because it means companies will be even more lax with their pennies. As an aside, I have to say, the way comms are run by the vast majority of companies out there makes my jaw drop, and this is why monetisation probably isn’t a problem, because people just don’t measure it. This benefits the people running the comms because they conveniently sidestep the difficult issues. But it just ain’t right, surely…

PR

What I Said Then:

I still feel my temples throb when I meet up with digital colleagues at PR agencies, who recount phrases they continue to come across such as “Let’s do some blogging stuff” or “Maybe we should send some tweets out.”

What I Think Now: There are actually some clued-up agencies who are walking the walk as well as talking the talk.

It tends to be one or two individuals in a team who really ‘get it’, and who I sit down with and take them through it all. That, plus training for an entire group, seems to work well.

But yes, on the whole, I think PR is getting its act together. It’s doing this by bringing in specialists, or developing its own in-house resource, or working with digital agencies. Which makes it harder for freelancers…

Freelancers

What I Said Then:

I admit I haven’t found the past year easy by any means.

What I Think Now: It’s still tough out there. I’ve been successful in winning new business, but find retaining it very difficult.

As a freelancer/contractor, what you tend to find is that you get involved with individual projects without any real, long-term, strategic involvement. People are not interested in integrating across platforms, so you might get a Facebook gig that has no input from a web team or Twitter channel, which kind of defeats the purpose of social media.

Last year, I did wonder whether I would continue with this work. I’m actually astonished I made it through this year without going utterly insane. Some would say I didn’t.

Digital agencies

What I Said Then:

While I find PR people don’t ‘get’ digital, I do find digital ‘gets’ PR. My prediction here is that, far from PR subsuming digital, it will eventually be the other way around.

What I Think Now: I haven’t seen any evidence that this has happened. We still have dedicated digital operations such as We Are Social, 1000Heads, Razorfish and so on, alongside PR agencies that have their digital teams.

I guess that, if anything, what I’ve noticed is that a lot more companies, whether PR, comms or client-side, have their own in-house capabilities now. Which does make my job harder, it has to be said. See previous point.

Effectiveness

What I Said Then:

15-minute YouTube clips are cheaper to disseminate but 135,000 views is NOTHING compared to 2 million viewers – regardless of trendy notions of ‘engagement’, ‘dialogue’ or ‘the network effect’.

What I Think Now: This is related to the monetisation issue. People simply don’t seem to think about the money. So, they aren’t disappointed. It’s a bit like the smoker who read so much about the damage smoking causes, that she stopped reading.

I think people are probably not as disappointed with social media now because they realise it’s not going to make everyone stupidly, instantly rich, popular, or influential. This is a good thing because it means we’re a bit more realistic. But it’s bad because I’m basically just in it for the money and fame.

Facebook

What I Said Then:

Facebook is a juggernaut and it’s not going to slow down any time soon.

What I Think Now: Facebook is a juggernaut and it’s not going to slow down any time soon.

This is even with the advent of Google+. The critical difference between the two networks is that Facebook is a platform on which other people can build their apps, whereas Google tries to second-guess what people want by giving them apps to play with. So Facebook has long legs and Google+ has little tiny stumps. Facebook will continue to dominate.

Dashboarding and curating

What I Said Then:

I truly believe that every company should be monitoring what people are saying about it, its issues and its competitors, on a daily basis.

What I Think Now: I’ve had a lot of success demonstrating this to people, because they really have understood how important this is.

I would say this time last year, hardly anyone really took dashboarding seriously. I just could not convince them. A year later however, by taking some time to demonstrate how quickly and effectively you can set up a dashboard, I’ve now helped several clients with this and they are very well informed about what’s being said about their clients online. I actually think it’s wilfully negligent not to know this nowadays, and any agency that does not know this will, sooner or later, be very embarrassed indeed.

Success

What I Said Then:

Social media only works when it scales up. If you don’t have enough followers/members/contacts, it won’t work.

What I Think Now: Again, this ties into the monetisation issue. It depends on what you mean by ‘work’.

There was a brief period during the year where everyone was gassing on about ROI for social media. That noise seems to be distant and quiet now. I think this is because people are thinking that social media is something they just need to do. But this is a pity because if they take an integrated, strategic view, with everything joined up and working together, then you really can work along the chain sequence and figure out how it all contributes to real, monetary value. So maybe that’s where companies should be going, says the social media strategist.

So this ends part one. This post actually turned out to be a lot longer than I expected, so I’ll do part two in a bit…

Filed under: socialmedia Tagged: forecasts, predictions, prognostications, soothsaying

If Your Team Hates Blogging, You Need A New Team

Brendan — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 16:56:01 +0000

My friend Steve Farnsworth recently shared a link to some tips from Matt Ceniceros at Applied Materials about how to encourage blog posts from team members who hate blogging.

Something about that concept got me thinking. It wasn’t encouraging team members to blog, as that’s critical for all organizations seeking to embrace the notion that every company is a media company. It was the point about team members who “hate blogging.”

They don’t really hate blogging. They hate their job: and that’s a problem beyond the fact that you can’t get them to blog.

via thefuturebuzz.com

Love this.

One thing I never really ‘got’ about social media, and blogging in particular, was why other people didn’t really want to do it. I think this post has given me at least part of the answer: it’s because they don’t really like their jobs!

It’s a broad brush and a hard line (are these mixed metaphors?) but I like it. It accounts for why I so seldom see comms people who actually read the papers, or read business publications, or listen to podcasts, or actually do anything outside of their immediate work that is even slightly work-related.

The way I’ve approached this topic before has been “Your job just changed. Tough.” But from now on, I might change it to “You don’t like your job. Tough.”

Anyway, hop on over to thefuturebuzz.com for the full piece…

Filed under: blogging, socialmedia

3 Ways to Improve Your Company’s Social Media Architecture

Brendan — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 10:02:06 +0000

via mashable.com

This is pretty good, from my ex-employer Fleishman Hillard.

Everyone likes graphics because they (usually) make things clearer. In this one, anything big and green in the centre is good, because it’s a nice, living social media presence. Anything red is bad, because it’s dead. The FH solution is simply to delete the dead stuff, but also they talk about envisioning your social media as one big distributed web. This is neat thinking, and powerfully puts across the concept of each social media presence being ‘for’ something, alongside other presences, rather than approaching them as separate, siloed presences with no real reason for existing. Pop over to Mashable and read the full article.

Filed under: socialmedia

Facebook’s F8 changes: a slight case of oversharing? | Econsultancy

Brendan — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 09:00:53 +0000

Facebook is renowned for rolling out new platform changes at a moment’s notice, but if early buzz is to be believed, this Thursday’s F8 developer conference will offer something a little bit special.

Major changes are expected that could fundamentally reshape the way content is found and shared on the world’s largest social network.

Will it be the dawn of a new social era, or is Facebook about to follow Myspace into the pit of abandoned platforms?

via econsultancy.com

I really like Econsultancy. I don’t know anything about their training but I do know they have an excellent publishing operation going. This is just one of their well written, insightful pieces and it comes at a very important time for Facebook. Don’t just sit there, hop on over to Econsultancy and read the full article.

Filed under: socialmedia

Gamers solve puzzle in 3 weeks that stumped scientists for a decade

Brendan — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 21:48:10 +0000

This is only the first time that online gamers have figured out the solution to a complex scientific problem. Foldit co-creator Seth Cooper said that their spatial reasoning skills allowed gamers to succeed where powerful computers had failed before and expressed hope that their game, and others like it, would lead to many such accomplishments in the future.

via thenextweb.com

Ah well, just goes to show, if you have a great idea, someone else has usually had it before you. In this case, gaming for ‘real’ problem solving. As someone whose spare PC in the loft is helping cure cancer and find aliens, I’ve long held the view that it would be great to create a game that enabled people to have fun while helping solve problems. I also figured that whatever humans could do in this area, computers could probably do better. Quite possibly however, I felt that maybe we could win at spatial or verbal reasoning. And it looks like we have our answer. Nip over the thenextweb.com for the full piece, but in summary it looks like gaming could have a future beyond smashing cars and killing people.

Filed under: socialmedia