by Rob Salmon, Director of Digital Marketing at Torchbox
In a very little while I’d like to look at Facebook’s new communications system which was announced on Monday 15 November, its key features and what it could mean for organisations using Facebook. If you’ve not read up on this I’d suggest taking a view of this video to start of with.
First up though, three quick ways I’ve used Facebook to communicate in the past week.
Last Saturday, I tried to fix our dishwasher. I am not like Bob The Builder. He can fix things. I didn’t even have the right screwdriver. So I put an appeal out to my Facebook friends. Within minutes I had had a few sarcastic comments and a few offers of help. Read more…
By Dhiren Shingadia, Market Sentinel
Back in July I quickly punched together a blog post about earned media planning. My thoughts were originally inspired by Daniel Goodall, from Nokia, and I wanted to put together some sort of framework which outlined the key areas, or considerations, that a planner may need to take into account.
The nice chaps at MediaPro found my post quite interesting, so they asked me to expand on my thoughts at the MediaPro conference that recently passed. The entire event focused on the “the future of integrated communications” so there were some very useful seminars about content, moderation and community management.
I definitely recommend popping down next year.
My deck can be found below:
By Shona Ghosh, RMM
What’s the best way to supercharge a brand online?
Social media, naturally. At least, that’s what RMM and Skive had to convince a panel of digital ‘dragons’ to think at IAB’s Engage 2010 – against pitchers for in-game advertising, target marketing and performance marketing. You can see the presentation from Tom Ollerton and Iain MacMillan in full below.
They argued word-of-mouth is key when it comes to consumers making decisions about what to buy. I bought my Canon Ixus entirely on the basis of six recommendations from friends on Facebook and it seems I’m not alone – Nielson stats show that 90% of consumers trust recommendations from people they know. Advocacy from friends is evidently a persuasive message.
But unlike clickthroughs, advocacy can be difficult for a brand to manufacture or monitor directly – or is it? Social media, at its heart, is public breeding ground for opinion. These are the platforms which encourage sharing, recommending, the exchange of information, and chatting – and that will revolve around brands and products as much as anything else.
Social media lets brands find, enter and facilitate these conversations to fuel advocacy and answer complaints. A prime example is Dell creating a community for its users, encouraging customers to turn potential complaints into ideas for improvement. Having implemented 425 of their users’ ideas, the company claims to have seen a 30% decrease in negative commentary online.
Our message was simple, but won over the dragons and IAB voters -social media supercharges your brand because, for marketers, it is the best way to drive advocacy.
By Amy Kean, head of the IAB social media council, .
You may remember back in September, the ASA announced the formal extension of its remit to the non paid-for space… This, inevitably, will include many areas of social media activity – most notably pages on social networking and microblogging sites where many brands now have a presence.
In the IAB’s view this is a welcome development, further reinforcing the integrity of social media and promoting the ideology that all branded communications should be ‘legal, decent, honest and truthful’, as laid out within the CAP Code. After all, shouldn’t we all strive to achieve these things, and interact with consumers without intentionally misleading them? Our friends at We Are Social articulated this perfectly over here.
The commentary surrounding the initial announcement sparked a certain amount of debate about what exactly constitutes ’social media’ and the implications for the PR industry. We spoke to the ASA’s CEO, Guy Parker, to ask some questions on behalf of the IAB membership and obtain further clarification on the perceived ‘grey area’ between social media and public relations. Enjoy!
By Alison Readings, Renegade Media
The second half of the day saw us treated to several more supercharged and uplifting speakers. I particularly liked the presentation by Bruce Daisley from YouTube who discussed the way the brain works and the impact this has when creating video content for a brand.
It was very interesting to see how creating emotional content, which appeals to the right side of the brain works better than purely factual content typically associated with the left hand side.
I can sympathise with this as when I see a video online that I like I automatically share it, be it by posting a link to my Facebook page, Twitter or even posting a blog entry about it. This is exactly the purpose of video content and as video is most likely to bring a brand’s page to the top of the Google search results, you’re bound to see it. Read more…
By Alison Readings, Renegade Media
The afternoon keynote saw a feisty talk from Roisin Donnelly, corporate marketing director and head of marketing Proctor and Gamble, who last spoke at the IAB Engage in 2007, and today themed her speech around “the consumer is boss”.
“The focus of every brand should be the consumer”, she said. Sounds simple I thought, but the more she went into detail about the deep and extensive relationships Proctor & Gamble builds with their consumers the more I thought about brands I have encountered which aren’t as forward thinking. Read more…
By Alison Readings, Renegade Media
As the day progresses our speakers have made some pertinant points that have really supercharged my mind. Carol Bartz, CEO of Yahoo! talked to us about creative display advertising and its importance. Whilst listening to the case studies of successful and creative campaigns that Yahoo! has run, it struck me that creative display advertising is actually ‘social’advertising.
Each of the campaigns Carol discussed, including those for Shell and Nestle each had an element of social networking. Making the most of the creative canvas online Carol says, is about linking with people’s emotions.
Empowering people, no matter how they’re connected to engage with the information and ultimately to share it, via social media or to coin another term ‘social recommendation optimisation’. This rings true with the point Aleks Krotoski made that 43% of hits on CNN was through social networks Facebook etc. If people feel emotionally attached enough, they will engage with and share the information they want. I definitely agree, I do it often enough. Read more…
By Alison Readings, Renegade Media
Today, we welcome a host of speakers to the Mermaid Exhibition and Conference Centre in Blackfriars for Engage 2010 who will share their thoughts on 2010’s theme, “Supercharge Your Brand online”.
Once CEO Guy Philipson had powered down his jet pack he welcomed opening speaker, researcher and journalist, Dr Aleks Krotoski. Aleks shared herscientific view of the social space versus what the web was originally built for, starting with telling us we are all breaking it by using social media. Of course what she means is that the web’s pioneers started it because we are all lazy and we needed a lazy form of communication. However, the more content we produce she believes, the more we break it. Read more…
By Andy Pilkington, WaveMetrix,
We’re all familiar with particular examples of great social media campaigns, but many of us are still in the dark as to what makes these campaigns so successful. To address this problem, WaveMetrix have just released their latest quarterly summary, which details exactly what made Q3 campaigns successful, or not so successful.
The latest Social Media Quarterly from WaveMetrix attempts to pinpoint exactly what made social media campaigns successful or effective during Q3. By taking a look into some of the most interesting campaigns during the last few months, the report concludes that successful Q3 campaigns hinged around the following factors
• Relevance – successful campaigns were always relevant both to what the brand wanted to achieve and to the consumers it tried to reach
• Loyalty – good campaigns leveraged existing loyalty bases to build engagement in their target market
• Targeting – effective social media content often reached out to specific target audiences, even on mainstream sites
• Cultural consideration – brands who failed to take into account cultural norms tended to achieve unexpected reactions, whereas those who properly considered foreign markets tended to resonate with consumers more effectively
• Timely response – brands who averted potential crises responded in a timely and appropriate manner to social media problems and issues Read more…
