It’s been an, ummm, interesting three years plying my trade as a freelance social media bod. The first year I found my feet, and the income slowly and steadily rose, until at one point I was seriously considering taking on people to help me out. Then it suddenly all went downhill, and I found the work taking more out of me than it was putting in.

Curiously, since I made the decision to go back to permanent employment, things started picking up again. But I’d made my decision.

It’s not just the work, it’s the freelance life that started to pall. You tend to find that when you’re working, you’re not hunting, so a large spike in earnings one month becomes a drop the next, when you’re looking for work. And despite winning over 30 clients in the past three years – nearly one a month – I never really managed to arbitrate for that lumpy demand. And it’s lonely. And you tend to find you’re eating more biscuits than is strictly necessary.

Plus, whenever I visited clients in London, I realised how much I missed it. I used to think it would be great to be able to get on with work, without being disturbed by people, with a cat asleep next to the monitor and Radio 4 in the background. At first, it was. Then I realised I was talking to the cat, and it wasn’t even listening, even when it wasn’t sleeping. I missed the buzz of the city, and the stimulation of being around people.

And I also realised that freelance doesn’t lend itself well to truly strategic thinking. You’re regarded as a stopgap, and while you can kickstart programmes and train people, you don’t get to sink your teeth into something long-term. I really missed that. I think I’m more of a builder than a starter. Adfonic will give me the opportunity to build.

So a brave new world awaits. Adfonic is a very interesting global mobile advertising company that matches publishers and developers who want to monetise their wares, to advertisers who want maximum exposure. I’ll be producing  a ton of written material for them and looking after their social media presence and I just can’t wait. Strangely, it’s almost exactly what I did at Sharepages.com and its parent company KTS, except social media didn’t exist then. And when I look back, that’s the environment in which I felt I most belonged. I’m hoping the same happens at Adfonic.

My feelings about social media? Well, I’ve learned a lot over the past three years. I’ve learned that social media simply does not, cannot and should not stand alone. It absolutely needs to be complemented by other communications programmes including PR (‘earned’ exposure), advertising (‘paid’) and a company’s own efforts (its ‘owned’ channels). I’ve also learned that there’s a lot of variation in approaches to comms generally, from  ‘seat of the pants’ activity with little planning and lots of gut feeling, through to people who really do want to figure out replicable, objective ways of getting the most out of a programme through strategy. My money’s most definitely on the latter, but it seems most people can muddle through well enough.

I knew there was hype around social media. I do give credence to the Gartner Hype Cycle, and I think I’ve lived through the peak and the trough. We’re probably nearing the productive plateau. But I also think a lot of companies are now thinking “Well, we never did start that blog or YouTube channel or Facebook page, and we’re still here and doing ok”, and they’re right. But they probably could be doing better. Still, it’s not a wasted opportunity if you never took it, right? If you’re doing well enough, then that’s, well, enough.

So I’m looking forward to Monday. Today I visited the same bench, high up in the Chilterns, where I sat on the day I handed in my notice and decided to go freelance. Then, I sat for a while and wondered what on earth I’d done. This time, I sat for a while and thought about the ups and downs I’d been through over the past three years. The view, I’m sure you’ll agree, helps you get a good perspective.

As for my subscribers, well, I’m not really sure what’s going to happen with this blog. I’ve been toying with the idea of taking the Netvibes Pro option, setting up a dashboard under the brendancooper.com domain, and using that more to curate content, including whatever I’ll decide to write about, alongside other snippets I pick up along the way. Or I might start writing about my Triumph Spitfire or Concorde the Tortoise. We’ll see.

Meanwhile, I’d like to thank the following clients for their help over the past three years: Abacus Marketing, Brightpath Technology, Consolidated PR, Edelman, Flashlight Marketing, Fleishman Hillard, Ideas4All, Jason Deign Associates, Kwittken London, License to PR, Maillot Jaune, Metrica, Neesham PR, Noble Meleka, Nobull Communications, PointBeyond, Ranieri Communications, Synesis Digital, Social Media Academy, and Superior Catering.

Onward and upward!

No valuable insights or deep analysis today. Just a cartoon that someone sent me. I can see that I’m going to use the phrase “I can’t get past the ridiculousness of it all” quite often from now on…

“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.

And I’m 7th on the list. Sorry, 8th. Sorry, 9th already. They’re popping out of the woodwork as I type.

A quick backstory to the Ad Age Power150 (as far as my memory serves). It was originally Todd Andrlik‘s Power150, which I came across quite a while ago and thought it was a neat way to ‘measure’ blogs. Take of the publicly available metrics such as Technorati Authority (remember that?), normalise them out of ten, add them up, and you get a list of influencers. So I took that, applied it to the list of 100 PR bloggers that I followed at the time, and created my own list.

Naturally Todd wasn’t too happy that I’d copied his idea, so I put an attribution at the bottom, and in later versions of what became the PR Friendly Index I adapted a more graphical approach (that would appear to be broken on this new template), without normalising, which gave me something of a USP.

Along the way Sally Whittle also asked me for some help with her top secret project, which begat the Tots 100, and Jonny Bentwood also started his list of analysts along similar lines.

The PR Friendly Index got me a lot of attention and in fact I’d say it’s the main reason I appear on lists nowadays. Many people linked to me, not least because I provided little badges for them complete with code that included the links. But it just became too tedious to maintain – which, in a neat circular kind of way, is what Todd found, which is why he gave it, or sold it (I know not which) to Ad Age.

So it’s probably fitting that it all comes back to Ad Age, which is where the Gorkana list comes from (actually it’s a list from 10 Yetis, but Gorkana are shouting and pointing at it, as if it’s news which, just to be clear, it is not).

However, Ad Age really is just bean counting. Which brings me to the title of this post: I’m not influential. Look, Drew Benvie is below me. Drew is UK MD of the group that includes Hotwire, Skywrite and 33 Digital. Steve Waddington co-runs Speed, which I visited the other week. Metrica is an entire company of measurement professionals (whose competition entries I wrote two years back so I know them quite well too). These people are all much more influential than I am. It just happens to be that I got more scores via various metrics once upon a time because I had some good ideas occasionally. Honestly.

So I really wouldn’t go by the figures. I don’t really think Andy Barr, head of 10 Yetis, has had a very inspirational idea in peeling out the UK PR people from the Ad Age Power150 (it’s been done before). I’d find out who these people are first, and then take a punt.

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.

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…