, senior PR and marketing manager and head of social media council, IAB
This week we launched the IAB framework for social media measurement. Hopefully you’ve seen some of the coverage and the full presentation with all the details, but I thought I’d take some time just to give you a bit more background about why we came up with it, and what we hope having such a framework will achieve.
Why the IAB framework?
First and foremost the strength of the framework lies in its simplicity and memorability – a deliberate tactic to encourage wider adoption within the industry. Of course a lot of experienced practitioners have robust methodologies already in place to measure social, and we fully recognise that these are making a lot of clients very happy the world over! Our aim has never been to suggest the industry is measuring it in the wrong way, but rather in an inconsistent way across the board, which makes it difficult to compare or for the industry to grow as a whole. Read more…
By , Head of Digital Media, Royal Opera House
Pretty much every UK arts organisation now has a full-set of social-media cards: YouTube channel? Check. ? Yes indeed. Obligatory ? Why, yes of course. These combine with Flickr and Audioboo, blogs and wikis, podcasts and video channels to create a new kind of cultural landscape in which an audience member might never need to enter a gallery or auditorium to feel like they’ve seen the show.
But why are we doing it? Just like consumer brands, cultural organisations want to spend more quality time with people who care, or might grow to care, about them. The majority also need to cultivate customer loyalty and develop new, paying audiences. There are also traditional customer-service objectives to fulfil, and aspirations for brand building and international profile. But there are other motivations that make the challenge of creating a cultural social-media strategy more complex to execute, and success more difficult to measure. Read more…
Another month, another ‘Rising Voice in Social Media’ session, this time based around the concept of earned social media.
, commercial director at Unruly Media, took us through how to use viral to drive word of mouth citing case study examples from Durex, Nike and The Sun. Catch the presentation below.
, Managing Director of Diffusion provided insights on reputation management, how the PR industry has been turned on its head due to social media, and how to successfully protect your brand online whilst remaining approachable. Daljit’s slides are available below.
Reputation Management
, managing director of We are Social spoke on social media and customer service, including the trials and tribulations that come with using social media as a customer service channel with some great examples of how to do it right.
By , communications executive, IAB
Last Wednesday saw the IAB’s biggest mobile event to date – IAB Mobile Engage – which promised a whole day of mobile marketing ‘without the hype’. Some 350 delegates filled the newly refurbished conference room at the Millbank Media and Cinema Centre, a majority of whom were UK brands, eager to escape the waffle surrounding the industry and just get simple, straightforward advice on how to do it.
The bulk of the programme was, as you’d probably expect, about mobile, but one presentation in particular really stood out for me, on Creativity in Mobile, presented by Mark Freeman, creative partner at Movement. During his presentation, Mark said something that really resonated with me, and made me realise how ’social’ creativity is in general nowadays, that ‘little actions lead to big results’. Read more…
Mark runs us through the process of how brands traditionally targeted their consumers before the days of digital. He talks about how social media can drive this consumer identification method for brands in a easier more precise way through the art of conversation.
, digital social media director at Markettiers4DC, discusses how best to use broadcast within social media and how interactive video can add to your social activity. He talks about the most effective online methods when seeding content and once it’s out there, the best ways to get your consumers to interact with it. Russell also quashes the myth that all B2B brands are dull and therefore produce less interesting work, providing some great case studies along the way.
By Amy Kean, senior PR and marketing manager, IAB. .
Sorry for the slightly inappropriate headline, but it’s based on , written in defense of the new fancy Uniqlo exercise, which appears to have received mixed reviews. Not from the general public, obviously (I doubt they care that much) but from us folks who work in digital, or more specifically social media.
In case you haven’t seen it, you enter your Twitter name into the snazzy red and white page and it provides you with a Tweet Show, displaying all your recent tweets and replies in time to a piece of rather odd music. , it’s nothing groundbreaking, but for what it’s worth having watched the show until the end I think it’s pretty and am more aware of Uniqlo and their new range of tshirts than before. I’m even thinking about buying one. What’s your view? Do you like it? Does there need to be an element of stickyness to keep you coming back? Does that even matter?
Read more…
by Harriet Clarke, communications executive, IAB
Tony Effik
is chief strategy officer at Publics Modem, and became chair of the social media council in November 2009 taking over from Lloyd Salmon, founder of Outside Line. I interviewed Tony to find out his future plans for the council, his feelings on its biggest achievements and his thoughts on the social media industry at the moment.
Why do you think the social media council is so important for the industry?
The social media industry can be a bit like Wild West terrain at times, with new comers occasionally entering into the industry under false pretence of a world full of ‘gold and riches’. Because of this misunderstood perception of the industry it can sometimes attract the wrong type of person. I think it is important for the SMC to work towards demystifying the discipline and achieving transparency, making it easier for new starters. I think this is crucial to maintain growth within the business.
What are your major aims and achievements for the next 12 months?
I am now a quarter of the way through my time as chair and in the first 3 months we have built a solid working structure for the council through establishing clear working groups and appointing ambassadors to manage these groups. Alongside this, we have also completed research into social media budgets which gives us a clearer understanding of where things need to go next and what needs to be done to achieve this. We have also finalised the framework of the practitioner course, a 2 hour session every 5 months aimed at new comers to nurture new talent.
Where would you like to see the council in the next 6-9 months?
Ideally it would be great if in the next 6-9 months the council could substantially aid transparency within the industry. It would be good if the knowledge and the brain power we have amongst us could get shared throughout the business, so more cross industry collaborations could occur. It would also be great to release a standard model that had been created by the SMC.
Why do you feel there was a need to create ambassadors for separate topics?
Social Media is so big, there is no way one person can be an expert at everything. Each individual council member has specialist skills in separate social media areas, and therefore I thought it would be best to unleash this expertise, it is also a good way of giving other members of the council recognition for the investment they make in the council.
How do you plan to further publicise the SMC within the industry?
We need to get the ambassadors out there. Talking, commenting, presenting, writing, and being interviewed. We need to do this in media that moves us out of our comfort zone. That means concentrating on building relationships with a wider range of media, and maintaining current relationships.
What is the council’s biggest achievement so far?
I think it would have to be the release of our recent research study which was conducted by research agency Opinion Matters. It showed the need for clarification over the role of social media and where it should fit within general business models, in order to make the most of the discipline. This research received a substantial amount of coverage within a lot of the major trade titles and online news sites, and was of real use to social media practitioners across the country. We hope to do this every year, and use it as a barometer of social media progress in the UK.
How do you feel the council can help the social media industry grow even further?
I think this can be achieved through creating a shared framework for the industry, promoting best practice and simplifying social media, making it easier to understand and less of a ‘scary’ prospect for those who are less experienced.
We need to create tools, and frameworks that become universal, and become standards. The more standards we create, and the more discipline we engender, the less of a Wild West frontier this all becomes. That will create growth.
by , senior PR and marketing manager, IAB
Following on from Henry’s blog post about Moira and Pam (which I swear to God is true, a friend of a friend who works at the BBC told me) we’re all about the #searchandsocialmedia at the moment. It’s becoming increasingly apparent when brands don’t have any control over (or knowledge of) what people are saying about them online, because it has an inevitable impact on their profile within the search listings.
In fact, in acknowledgment of this occasional short-sightedness, some brands can be quite quick to hop into their competitors search results pages. I feel bad for kicking them when they’re down, but Nestle have fallen victim to this with Greenpeace buying their name on Google (not Bing though, keep up guys!) because it’s a hot social media topic and search volumes have inevitably risen. Their PPC has the search result headline ‘Take a Break’ with the description “Which chocolate company destroys rainforests for palm oil?” Read more…
, new business manager of skive was interviewed by the IAB’s senior PR and marketing manager about creativity within social media and all its touch points. He was asked various questions around this topic, his first being whether he thought social media was more platform or technology based, he addresses this question by mentioning the knowledge gaps within the industry, particularly agency side and that when you are immersed within the industry it is easy to overlook the fact that not everyone has the same level of knowledge about the subject area. He says that brands in general are doing the basics, the well publicised social media platforms such as twitter and facebook are the platforms that brands utilise the most as these are the ones they know most about even though they may not be the greatest channel to talk to their consumers.
Ollerton discusses the need to have a strong marketing strategy in place to make the best use of the social media platforms available in order to generate the best results for the brand. Amy also asks questions regarding social media budgets and whether or not a lack of money has constraints on the campaign, he squashes this comment and says that it is all down to the creativity and that the simplest cheapest ideas can be the most effective ones. Ollerton talks about which brand campaign he thinks is the most creative and how the use of crowd sourcing can sometimes be regarded as lazy marketing however when used well and for the correct brand it can have outstanding results and achieve brand objectives.
Watch the below video to see the full interview…
