Posts in Social Media

Caliber heads to TBU!

April 19, 2012

This annual gathering of the best and brightest in the travel blogging industry is taking place in lovely Umbria, where pizza, pasta and Peroni await. We’ll be there to listen, learn and meet some new faces while also contributing a few nuggets with presentations of our own. (more…)

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Happy Birthday, Twitter!

March 21, 2012

Yes it’s Larry the Bird’s birthday today (shame on you for forgetting). On this day six years ago, Jack Dorsey, co-found of Twitter, tweeted the now famous phrase ‘just setting up my twttr’ – the original codename for the social networking site back in those days. What followed next was a worldwide success with over 500 million users all embracing the 140 character social network. Fast forward to 2012, and now you can’t go anywhere without hearing the word ‘trending’ or seeing ‘hashtags’ plastered all over newspapers, magazines or your television screens. It’s safe to say, Twitter is a part of all our lives (whether you like it or not).

In celebration of the micro-blogging six candles, here are five key facts.

1. Alexa ranks Twitter as the 9^th most popular website worldwide with over 5 and a half million sites linking to it
2. The musical superstar known as Lady Gaga is the most popular person on Twitter with over 21 million followers
3. Twitter is valued at around $8.4 billion dollars and recently received a $300 million investment from the Saudi Prince listed as the 26^th richest person in the world
4. Super Bowl XLVI set the record for the most tweets  received during a sporting event, with an overage of 10,000 tweets sent per second during the final minutes of the match between New York Giants and the New England Patriots
5. Charlie Sheen holds the record for the fastest time taken to reach 1 million followers at approximately 25 hours and 17 minutes in March 2011

So there you have it; some facts and figures that define Twitter.

Happy birthday Larry. Try not to eat too much cake. We’ll see you this time next year!

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4 Reasons You Need Killer Content

March 14, 2012

Internet marketing isn’t all search engine algorithms, email lists and targeted on-page advertising. If you’ve taken much of a look into the subject recently you will no doubt have been overwhelmed by the amount of attention being paid to content marketing. This sudden increase in coverage of the subject underlines the importance of content in a changing digital marketing environment and highlights exactly why you should prioritise it in your online offering. Content marketing covers everything from the copy on a website, to podcasts, advertising videos and blogs, infographics and white papers, and everything in between. Each facet of this chameleonic marketing discipline can have a different effect on your business. Four of these effects are laid out below, as well as some examples of a piece of stellar content marketing that has fulfilled these objectives.

SEO

As a leader in SEO we’d be remiss not to mention the benefits that excellent content marketing can have for SEO: simply creating targeted, search engine friendly copy for your sales pages can be a huge boost to your website’s visibility, but there’s much more content can do for you. Dating websites such as OKCupid and Zoosk create dozens of inbound links to their websites by putting out well-timed infographics that relate to current events, including the Oscars and the Super Bowl, while Basecamp creator 37signal’s corporate blog drives a lot of traffic and links their way.

Exposure and Branding

Dollar Shave Club launched in April 2011, but noise around the start-up soon fizzled out. To drive interest, Mike Dubin, CEO of Dollar Shave Club, put together the following advert that cost a measly $4,500 to produce. The effects were staggering; Dollar Shave Club managed to net 5,000 subscribers on the video’s launch date, despite the website becoming unavailable for large swathes of the day as it struggled to cope with the additional traffic. That number is now in excess of 12,000, with the company’s social networks seeing a similar overnight boost. The success in both sales figures and brand recognition has drawn comparison with the hugely popular ‘Old Spice Guy’ adverts.

Community Building and Management

There is no better example of what content marketing can do for your community than Lady Gaga. This megastar is more than just one of the most marketable celebrities on the planet, she’s also a social media powerhouse. With more than 20 million followers on Twitter and a billion views on Youtube, Lady Gaga has built her following up through creating engaging content for fans both old and new and also by engaging with fan created content. Gaga regularly reposts “fan art” created by her fans and creates her own content in response to input from her fans. By “giving the people what they want”, Gaga has built up a loyal and extremely responsive community.

Sales and Investment

At the beginning of February Tim Schafer, founder of Double Fine Productions and creator of some of the world’s most enduring and popular video games, launched a project through crowdfunding platform Kickstarter aimed at creating a new adventure game – a genre seen as commercially risky to most investors and publishers. Initially seeking to raise $400,000 over the course of a month to fund both the development of the game and a documentary detailing its creation, the project reached this goal in just nine hours thanks to Schafer’s cleverly crafted content marketing strategy that included videos and minigames, as well as the enthusiasm of fans. After 24 hours the fund had netted more than a million dollars and by the time the project closed on Tuesday the total had rocketed to three million dollars, making it the most successful Kickstarter project in history.

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New Facebook Page Timeline: What’s Really New?

March 2, 2012

Stop the press! Facebook has finally announced the launch date of the hotly debated Timeline for Facebook Pages. On March 30^th, Timeline will roll out to all Facebook Pages, whether you like it or not. Much like with Profiles, Pages will now benefit from large cover images (ideal for Branding) enhanced picture and video content and key milestone moments – the date your company was formed, the date you landed your first big client and so on. While some fear the worst, others are welcoming the change as step in the right direction for better engagement between companies and fans.

Here’s the video that Facebook recently launched:

So what’s new?

With the Timeline only a month away and counting, here’s a quick look at what you can expect from the new Facebook Pages:

• Custom default landing pages will now be a thing of the past, with only fan gating left. Furthermore tabs are now 810px wide. However, Facebook might change its mind and offer an option for companies to setup a welcome tab again – who knows.

• ‘Likes’, photos and apps will operate at the top of the page under the cover image. Brands will be now allowed a maximum of 12 apps with the ability to rearrange them in order of importance.

Conclusion

With introducing Timeline across the board, Facebook has gone about remodelling its look and feel in an attempt to stem the tide of rival social networks and remain the undisputed king of the social jungle. In addition, by preventing brands from using call to actions in their cover images, Facebook has shrewdly increased the value of their Sponsored Stories and Advertisements, as Brands will now have to pay Mark Zuckerberg and co if they intend to continue advertising on the site.

Although there are noticeable negatives, namely the elimination of landing pages, Timeline for Pages will ultimately create an overall rise in engagement and fan interaction (fans will now be advised to send in their enquiries and queries via private message), as well as, an eruption of unique cover images and content once Brands, particularly small to medium sized one, get accustom to the re-design.

Wait for our next post about Facebook changes and how marketers can smoothly adapt to it.

Now tell us, what you really think about this new chapter for business on Facebook?

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Build Communities Not Campaigns – Hosted by Comufy Social On Media Week London 2012

February 17, 2012

This week, social media came into the spotlight with a series of events throughout London and major cities around the world. It has been a week of highlighting the impact, improvement and importance of social media within business and the emerging markets.  During the course of the last seven days, there have been several engaging and diverse events ranging from workshops to in-depth seminars and presentations; all with the aim of providing a platform for social media professionals (and enthusiasts) to discuss ideas, share success stories and of course network.

One of the events was Build Communities Not Campaigns hosted by Comufy. Organised in a lovely restaurant, in-between Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Circus, Build Communities Not Campaigns was a panel event which included top professional speakers from leading PR and social media agencies.  Taking centre stage was Ying Wong, Head of Digital at RLM Finsbury, Blaise Grim Viort, Head of Community & Social Media at EModeration, Neil Hallmark, Head of Digital at Kaizo and Rob Horsfield, Managing Partner at Brass Agency.

As the name suggests, the aim of the panel was to highlight the importance of brand communities over campaigns; how to build communities (with your brand advocates), and how to sustain engagement and interest within a community.  In the hour long event, each speaker took turns to share their social media wisdom and answer questions from the event mediator, as well as the audience. Below are some of the key points from each professional:

Ying Wong

• Part of the preparation is focusing on knowing who the influential people are – make them feel special and they will be your advocates when negative comments are posted
• Seed content and get people talking to one another – talking to community members offline will get them talking more online
• Getting a select number of people who comment and engage within the community is just as important as a million people who ‘like’ a page and bounce off
• Facebook ‘Likes’ don’t always mean a lot
• ROI is not that simple when measuring sentiment – look at share price and how much positive/ negative coverage over a period of time

Blaise Grim Viort

• Focus on people’s sense of belonging and influence, as well as monitoring if their needs are being met. From a community perspective,  engagement is essential, then you should look at engagement between members
• Keep things simple by asking communities for their feedback on products out now, not in the future
• Work with the 3 P’s – People talking about the brand – get a relationship going, make sure they are Passionate and then build a Process around them
• Make it clear to people that certain discussions will not be appropriate – alternatively, run a live social media crisis situation with fake social account, imagine a dispute and go through the steps of how to deal with the problem
• ROI depends on client objectives – is it to build and create engagement or is it to click through and buy

Neil Hallmark

• Communities are a group of people with shared influence (brand advocates) – the community will direct where the conversations go
• Within a community you can drive campaigns, but how can you start a community without a campaign
• Asked Unilever communities about the brands they love to give incentives e.g. designing packaging or giving a sneak peek of a new product – people love the fact that Unilever is listening to them
• Used Facebook for a Unilever campaign as this is where half the UK population is
• It’s all about content – what activities will you be doing with the community once you have them on board

Rob Horsfield

• Use campaigns to produce a readymade community – alternatively, use word of mouth (tell community members to ask their friends), mailing lists, customer database
• Set out expectations with terms and conditions to inform community members,  however, communities do tend to police themselves – don’t underestimate the power communities have to sniff out a disgruntled comment
• It’s not always about creating communities – there are lots of forums that already exist – it’s about finding them, accessing them and extracting the information you’re looking for
• How do we keep members interested – respect, good content and cash incentives
• If communication members fall out, find new member to replace them – sometimes people who join communities aren’t advocates

Key findings

The main conclusion to take away from the event was that the needs of the community members must always be met. Whatever the community, its members should always be respected, listened to and thought of first when planning, implementing and analysing community and campaign strategies. The other major point was that engagement is must successful through great content. For community members to participate and spread a brand name, engaging content has to be seeded to get people responding and talking to one another. This can be achieved by offering good incentives for communication such as sneak peeks, designing upcoming product packaging and cash prices.

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Simplifying Community Management – Social Media Tool Battle (Part 2)

December 30, 2011

Continuing in the Social Media Tool Battle Series, now that I have shared my top 3 favourite tools for Managing your Twitter Community, I would like to continue talking about efficient Twitter tools, this time using  a more analytical approach.

Analysing and Improving Your Account 

Measuring and analysing statistics and data from your account can be a key element in the decision making process of your strategy.

As much as you can make your community grow by managing your friends and followers, in order to keep them interested and engaged, you have to take into consideration their expectations of you and the content that you share. To help you do that, I recommend using tools that will analyse your Twitter activity and enhance what is working best (or not working so well) for your community.

Here are some of my favourites. (more…)

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Is the #NewNewTwitter Redesign A Step Forward or Back?

December 23, 2011

In the past month or so there have been big changes in the social world in terms of website layouts and functionality. Several big fish including YouTube, StumbleUpon and Delicious have all revamped their designs. However, the site that is getting the most attention is Twitter – yes, we were kind of shocked too. The welcome changes come as Twitter tries to increase their usability and relevancy with the year coming to a close and the first quarter of 2012 set to commence.

On December 8^th, the über popular microblogging site released their first redesign in a staggering five years with 21 global companies. Dubbed the ‘new new Twitter’, the changes were made with the intention of making the social platform more user friendly and a ‘compelling destination’ for brands – an attempt to try and tackle Facebook’s Pages. The changes brought in a new tabbed style layout where all the Twitter functions were spilt into separate island boxes to make everything easily accessible. (more…)

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Facebook’s Timeline from A Business Perspective

December 21, 2011

In a few short weeks, something will happen and it will impact the lives of over 800 million people worldwide. The event in question will be the worldwide roll-out of Facebook’s new interactive Timeline. To the general public, Facebook Timeline will be a cool feature which will transport them through time, allowing them to see all their memorable events, status updates, uploaded/tagged photos and friend lists from when they first joined Facebook. Timeline will also provide a host of commercial benefits that will bring a smile to the faces of marketers and business folk everywhere. (more…)

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Simplifying Community Management – Social Media Tool Battle (Part 1)

December 14, 2011

If you are a Social Media Community Manager (like me) you’ll already know that there are hundreds of add-on tools available to help us manage our Twitter accounts more efficiently. However, with new tools and apps being launched every week, it can often be difficult to stay up-to-date with the tools that enable you to get the most out of your account.

The objective of this series of posts is to share some of my favourite Twitter tools; the ones I use on a daily basis and that really make a difference when I need to track and analyse account activity, measure sentiment and manage friends and followers to help improve Social Media strategies.

Oh, and the good news is that these are completely free tools – although most offer upgraded plans if you wish to use advanced features. Why not experiment with all of them to decide which you like best and which are most helpful for you and your community management team? (more…)

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A Kloutless Guide to Social Influence

December 6, 2011

You may remember my blog about Klout and social influence metrics from a few weeks back. One of my primary talking points was how the way these metrics work can fly in the face of good social media behaviour to the degree that users are actively dissuaded from interacting with anyone besides influencers and are penalised for high levels of engagement.

In my view as a consequence of this these tools don’t always get it right when it comes to how truly influential a social media account actually is. Even though your social influence score can be important, what’s most important is engaging with your audience in a meaningful way. Achieve this and you’ll be on your way to being a top social media influencer in no time, even if your Klout score doesn’t say so.

With that in mind, here are the six main behaviours I think that a true influencer displays: (more…)

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