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…
, Associate Director-social media, Tamar
Brand Building Through Search Guide
Recent announcements from Twitter on its decision to base its new sponsored-tweet model on results returned through search highlight the growing relationship between search and social media. At the same time, Google and Facebook have made big changes recently that blur the line between ‘search’ and ‘social’. These changes- real-time search results in Google SERPs, Google Labs ‘social graph’ experiment, expansion of the ‘universal’ results being returned to users and so on – are focused on giving people more relevant results.
This has always been Google’s defining vision but Twitter and other services are fast becoming searchers’ first port of call when looking for emotional or opinion-based answers to their queries.
Keep updated on changes to well publicised sites like Twitter and Google, you also have to keep one eye on smaller, up-and-coming sites like Topsy and Collecta. Real-time dedicated search engines that crawl the social space for live opinion and news on any topic you could think of.
Here are our top-tips on how to keep yourself ahead of your competitors when it comes to social search:
• Find and utilise a social monitoring platform/tool that suits your needs and use it regularly. One-off reports and 500-page dossiers aren’t going to help you in the fast-paced new world we live in.
• As well as using sites like Twitter for your business, use them personally to keep your eye on industry news. Following tweeters like Mashable, AlleyInsider and, of course, the IAB will ensure you always know the new sites and services before the mainstream do.
• Apply SEO techniques and strategy to your social objects as you would do with your classic site. Keywords in titles, optimised tags and site-specific meta data will help your content get found in all the search engines, no matter how they decide rankings.
• Be everywhere. You have to make sure that when people are doing searches that are relevant to you, your brand is dominating as much of that search real estate as possible – whatever engine they choose to use.
The Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) –has partnered with search and social conversion agency Tamar to educate marketers about the importance of using search to build brands, with a step-by-step guide to putting the discipline at the heart of online strategies.
The full guide is available for download from the IAB site here or to request a copy please contact .
For more information on how you can contribute/sponsor one of the upcoming handbooks in the brand building series (Brand Building Through Integration, Brand Building Through Creativity and Brand Building Through Relationships) contact
By Amy Kean, senior PR and marketing manager, IAB.
Last week some of the IAB Social Media Council hot-footed over to Barcelona to host a session at IAB Europe’s Interact Conference. Featuring , Tom Smith, , and , our job was to take some serious social media stats and decent case studies to cut through all the waffle surrounding social media, and present stuff with substance. We were given the brief to talk about ‘social media and brand-building’ and this delivered, from Brad’s latest research results with Facebook to Tom’s Skinny Cow case study and Robin’s work for Marmite.
I won’t go into too much detail about the presentations because they’re all available to download from the website, but what struck me as most interesting were the questions upon questions that followed the case studies shown during the session, largely from other agency folk:
“What was your ROI to the nearest decimal place?”
“How does the amount of friends correlate to the amount of products sold in the month of June last year, before the campaign ran?”
“That may have worked for your brand of washing powder, but there’s no conversation about my brand of washing powder, so where do I even begin?”
“What the hell would you have done if someone said something rude on Twitter?”*
*not the actual questions asked, but you get the picture.
Part of my role requires me to attend social media events on a regular basis and I can confirm that these were not exceptional circumstances. Social media case studies are subject to a type of scrutiny that I haven’t quite seen in the rest of digital, which is perhaps why you see so few of them of the public eye. I think there’s 4 reasons why this happens. Read more…
