In February’s Admap magazine, Molly Flatt writes about how social media is forcing marketers to change the way they work:

Businesses are used to time on their terms: time as a method of control – a clearly compartmentalised commodity measured out in the ping of Outlook meeting alerts.  They’re not used to other people’s timescales dictating their schedules, especially when these people refuse to confine their conversations to nine to five on weekdays.

For businesses, slowness means safety: time to plan; time to check legal red tape, facts and logistics; time to cover up the mistakes before they spread.  Social media demands qualities of flexibility, spontaneity and speed that are alien and risky to image-makers versed in composition, rather than conversation.

So slow equals safe, but social media insists on fast.  You can start to see why the traditional Monday-Friday for both clients and marketing agencies is fast becoming a thing of the past in a two-way society where dealing with the latest fallout on twitter just won’t wait ‘til Monday morning.  

The traditional crisis PR approach of taking home with you the ‘in the event of a client emergency dial…’ mobile phone isn’t really going to cut it anymore.  I can see a lot of shift working, two full time people covering one role and weekends in the office in the future for online PR professionals – and their clients.

posted by gemmaT

If social networks are about friends sharing information about their lives, then the next evolution of social networks is for them to have a purpose - social shopping.

From communicating and aggregating information about products, prices and deals to  friend/peer recommendations and even team buying (where buyers group together online to haggle with a retailer on price), social shopping sites utilise the wisdom and experience of a group of likeminded people to result in a better shopping outcome.

We know that individuals trust ‘people like me’, and that they are influenced heavily by people with whom they feel a shared interest or connection. With social shopping, you can find out not only what people who may have bought one particular product have also bought (a la Amazon), but what people with whom you feel an affinity have bought. When this is backed up by community content like forum posts, photos and profile information, social shopping allows like minded consumers to come together and share not only a mutual interest but their opinions and retail experiences too.

In the UK ASOS Life (the social shopping site for fans of fashion retailer ASOS.com) leads the way, combining a vibrant online fashionista community with an insider’s look at fashion, covering behind the scenes at ASOS HQ, beauty tips, competitions and careers advice. 

Even direct mail giant Shop Direct has got in on the act with very.co.uk’s very Network, complete with celebrity forum members and even access to very’s fashion buyers.

Of course, it all helps to shift handbags and gladrags : - )

posted by gemmaT

Social Media Week (#smw) is in full swing and some interesting and insightful blog posts have appeared on its site. One of these is by Dani Klein (@YeahThatsKosher) – a guest blogger who has taken snippets of information and video content from PR professionals in order to understand their role within social media, all of which is aggregated under the #SMPR tag (for those who want to follow the thread).

We all know that the opportunities for PR are wide reaching and the emergence of digital/online PR has made it even more so. It’s a very exciting time yet one quote particularly stood out for me from Keith Trivit, an AE at a NY PR agency who said “Social Media takes time, work, and effort to implement; Clients want to jump right into Social Media … important to slow things down”. I couldn’t agree more – you need to take a step back from the fast-paced nature of Social Media (initially!) and go back to the brand/campaign objectives.

The CIPR defines Social Media as ‘an evolving area of PR practice and its profile continues to grow’, which is very exciting and will mean that brands are interested in dipping their toe in Social Media – fantastic, but take it slow to start off with. It’s very much in a PR’s nature to approach things with caution, to always be one step ahead and thinking about how actions (posts, responses, tweets) can and will be perceived. This is something that’s drilled into us from day one, so although Social Media is very exciting, it’s worth getting a PR viewpoint before jumping head first into it. That way you can find out what we think is achievable, how it should be approached, and how to prepare for two-way engagement….then you can start. Need I remind you about what happened to Habitat or Neal’s Yard Remedies? I think you get the picture J.

Posted by Charlotte Brophy

Social Media Starfish. Image courtesy of DBarefoot (Robert Scoble)

Marketing Sherpa’s Popular Media Study, reporting on their study of social media use by US consumers, looks at a group they’re calling Max Connectors - people with more than 500 social connections.

Max Connectors are especially valuable targets for online marketing activity because they can spread a positive brand or product experience so widely.  A great example of a Max Connector is blogger and technical evangelist Robert Scoble, who has over 111,000 followers on twitter.  Not bad for a self proclaimed geek.

Persuading these Connectors to engage with brands and companies through social media channels means giving them something for their trouble, something that they can in turn share with their own connections.  This might mean exclusive access, perhaps in terms of online content, sneak peaks at new features or products or the opportunity to contribute to product or service development.

A while ago I contributed to Neil Perkin’s excellent ‘a presentation about the community, by the community’ crowdsourced presentation.  Neil suggests that every online community has Super Users; high authority, highly active people (Max Connectors by another name).  But my point was that community has layers – and you should respect them all:

Although Super Users or Max Connectors are undoubtedly valuable targets for social media activity, the Sidekicks, who might write niche blogs with limited reach or have a smaller circle of connections can be really important if you want to access their particular specialist niche target audience (like, say, anesthetists).  So size isn’t everything!

posted by gemmaT

I read a really interesting post last week in SmartBlog on Lego’s transformation from a company to consumer centric culture.

Lego now embraces its adult enthusiasts.  Pic courtesy of MasterChief1.

It makes a great case study for a number of reasons:

1.  It demonstrates that shifting the way you view your products can positively affect sales

2. It shows that truly understanding your customers can open up new possibilities for business growth

3. It acknowledges that embracing social media in an organisation can often take time and patience

Jake McKee,  Global Community Relations Specialist at the Lego Group explains the steps they had to take:

• There was not much boardroom activity.
• The company Jake and his team learned slowly, achieving “success by 1000 papercuts.” They did the smallest things they could get away with, then turned those results into a case study, and those case studies grew over time.
• Tenacity was essential.

Which goes to show even an organisation as celebrated in social media circles as Lego had to take it’s time.  I constantly see companies being criticised for not ‘doing’ social media right and there seems to be nothing more the Twitterati and social media experts (there are over 15,000 on Twitter) love to do than hunt down social media ‘FAILS’.  All well and good but sometimes I get a sense that there is little appreciation for how large organisations operate.  The fact is embracing social media doesn’t (and shouldn’t) happen overnight.  Everything has to be tested and clearly thought through, business cases have to be developed and compliance has to be considered.  Social media is a journey, not a race.  Like Lego, take your time to get it right.

Posted by Deborah Copeland.

@DeborahCopeland

It looks like 2010 is going to be the year when ‘digital’ stops being seen as an optional channel for communications activity and starts becoming an integrated, inescapable part of any communications campaign.

Because the internet is not simply about websites, facebook campaigns or emails, it’s about the framework within which we are increasingly living our lives.  When was the last time you called Directory Enquiries?  Popped a photo in the post to a friend?  Looked something up in an encyclopaedia? 

But I bet you use the internet for the majority of your news and weather, arranging nights out, keeping in touch with friends and family, planning and booking travel…the list goes on.  The internet is now such a fundamental part of our everyday lives that to ignore digital channels (and by digital I mean to include gaming, mobile services and so on) in any communications campaign would be negligent – because they have simply become part of how we live our lives.

In the Digital Natives, entering adulthood right now, we are seeing the first generation to grow up with the internet and global communication as a fundamental part of their everyday lives.  They’re used to being on control and doing things across multiple platforms and expect brands to participate in two-way communication with them on their own terms.

It seems inevitable that as older Digital Immigrants continue to embrace connected communication, anyone who sees The Internet as merely a communications channel like radio or TV will be left behind.  The world has changed – so must we.

posted by gemmaT

Econsultancy’s Social Media and Online PR report is out now and makes interesting reading.

It suggests that in-house PR teams in particular are guilty of ignoring the importance of online reputation monitoring.  Nearly half of respondents to the survey (of 1,100 client-side marketers, PR professionals and digital agencies) said they did not use reputation or buzz monitoring tools to understand what was being said about their brand on the web – and only 17 per cent were using technology to analyse sentiment.

At OnVisible we are big fans of reputation monitoring, utilising a mix of free tools, bought in technology and bespoke solutions.  After all, online reputation building and engagement is all about conversations – and it gets a bit one sided if you aren’t listening to what everyone else is saying.

posted by gemmaT

Originally, Twitter was set up to answer one simple question: what are you doing?  But now it seems that it’s remit extends to:

• Customer service
• Sales
• News
• Celebrity gossip
• Lifestyle advice

Twitter is of course enjoying an enormous surge in popularity, helped by the fact it is incredibly easy to set up to and use.  But recent research by Purewire indicates that 40% of Twitter users have not tweeted since their first day on Twitter.

The same research points out that over 1/3rd of Twitter users haven’t posted a single tweet, and nearly 80% of users have fewer than 10 tweets, suggesting that a large number of users are there to consume or find content like in the list above, not to create it.

Will Twitter go the way of Second Life as a high profile site that became more of a niche community (albeit one hampered by millions of dormant accounts)?  Or will it evolve into a ‘to go’ version of the internet?

posted by gemmaT

A social media campaign might produce measurable results in a relatively short space of time, but it’s important brands recognise that hosting a blog, twitter account or facebook group is a longer term commitment to populate it with content.

We are already starting to see virtual graveyards filled with dormant tweets, blogs and youtube channels, attached to campaigns long forgotten or where corporate enthusiasm to tweet has faded away.

The temptation to pull down dormant material has to be balanced against the value of relevant content that still drives traffic and rankings.  The challenge is to clearly tag this kind of content as dormant and to provide signposts to more up to date material, for example: ‘Thanks for visiting.  This blog was created to share our progress developing Project X, which launched in June 2008.   For more recent news on AcmeBrand and Project X, visit our website at…’

posted by gemmaT

LinkedIn celebrated its 6th birthday last week with 40 million members worldwide, including 2 ¼ million in the UK.  The site added 250,000 new UK members in the last 2 months alone.

With redundancies on the up, it seems that job hunters are tapping into the someone-who-knows-someone network of LinkedIn as a preferable alternative to joining the thousands of CVs on job sites like monster.com.

Job hunters are having to use online reputation building, PR and SEO tools and techniques (like creating a LinkedIn profile) to create ways for jobs to come to them, rather than the other way round.  Whether this is by actively managing their online reputation, making their personal brand more visible on the web, getting their personal brand talked about by the right people, in the right places or creating new opportunities to engage with potential employers, the challenges are remarkably similar.

When the economic upturn finally arrives, we will have a much more web savvy workforce if nothing else.

posted by gemmaT