Social Media, Digital Marketing & PR Agency

If there is one thing that gets our goat (as this blog has a farmyard feel about it) it’s companies who get a work experience student (or interns as we now call them, which sounds a lot more important) or a temp or a VA to ‘do a bit of twittering’.

Those folks over at www.spinsucks.com feel just the same, and you can read their take on it here  http://www.spinsucks.com/spin/should-interns-run-your-social-media-program/

We would like to nick the Chinese proverb that they quoted  “It takes years to take an egg and grow a chicken and an instant to make chicken dung.”

Why would you trust a wholly inexperienced person to write things about your brand? Brands are valuable commodities and companies spend years and usually an awful lot of money nurturing them and making sure that the brand is working for them because, hey, brands are big business. So we continue to be stunned that so many organisations still do not understand the significance of social media – neither the huge amount of positive things that it can do for them if used properly in an integrated campaign nor the terrible and costly damage that can be wreaked in inexperienced hands.

We’ve said it before, and we’ll say again, social media must be treated in the same way as traditional media i.e. handled in-house by skilled marketing people and senior executives and/or outsourced to a specialist agency.

Just because a bright young thing has loads of mates on Facebook, it doesn’t mean that they are the best person to be your business’s ‘social face’ – after all, what do they know about corporate messaging and brand management, let alone crisis management when the s**t hits the fan?

Social media is not a standalone exercise – to be used to its greatest effect it must be integrated with the existing traditional sales, marketing and PR activities, not to mention HR and customer services, all things that your even your brightest intern will have little knowledge of, let alone expertise.

We have to confess that none of us are exactly spring chickens here at TMMC towers, but all of us have more than 20 years experience in not only Comms, Marketing, PR, Media etc, in all their various guises, but also Business and the Corporate world, not to be mention having been at the cutting edge of the 2.0 version ever since it hatched (sorry). Which means we really do know what we’re clucking on about (sorry sorry).

So if you are serious about taking advantage of the undoubted benefits that social media can offer as an integrated part of your marketing and PR strategy, drop us an email on hello@themediamarketingco.com or give us a ring on 0845 862 0017.

5 reasons social media marketing #fails

Social media marketing is finally growing up it seems. Facebook’s world domination continues apace, with their 500 millioneth member joining last week, a ‘recommendation’ partnership with Amazon in the offing, and a nifty ‘fit any website’ Facebook ‘like’ button now available.

Twitter have confirmed that they will be adding multimedia to their streams in the near future (you can already send audio tweets), while mega brand Barbie joined Foursquare on 20th July and will apparently be using the service to fashion location-based scavenger hunts as she travels across the US, using Twitter to tweet out text, photo and video clues.

Simultaneously we have had the glorious Old Spice social campaign, which has helped sales of Old Spice body wash increase by a whopping 107% in the past month, plus the announcement that Ben and Jerry’s are going wholly social (and ditching email marketing) a mere two years after they first dabbled in social marketing.

Despite all this, there are still a lot of businesses under-utilizing social marketing and far too often we see companies half heartedly doing ‘a bit’ of social media, or even enthusiastically doing ‘a LOT’ of social media, and then get disappointed when it fails to deliver the goods.

However, not getting a return on social marketing means you really have worked hard at failing, because as Forrester has recently found, the brand benefits are enormous, even when you can’t measure them. So if you have yet to find social success for your business or brand, it is likely to be because of one, or more likely all, of the reasons below:

1. Lack of integrated strategy – just jumping in and hoping for the best is unlikely to win you any prizes, fans or good sales leads, but is likely to occupy far more of your time and budget than you bargained for. If you really want to make social marketing work for you, get yourself a digital strategist on side and commit for the long term. This is not a short term, quick buck environment and a pro who knows what she or he is doing and can tell you where your potentials hang out and enable you to engage with them while implementing and interpreting all the necessary analytics and measurements… well, that’s pure brand gold.

2. Lack of cohesive branding and brand management – your brand is a living entity and just bunging it online without thinking it through will guarantee a fragmented brand experience across the different platforms. Take the time to identify your core values and find out how your brand is perceived from outside your organisation, and be committed to creating a unified brand presence. Ditto for the people doing your social marketing – the person who sets up a Facebook or LinkedIn business page, for example, has the control – and that’s permanent unless they officially pass the baton, so make sure your social brand doesn’t leave the building with your temp (you laugh, it’s happened!), for example, and be sure everyone who is allowed to represent you in social media land is completely on message, has your social media staff plan engraved on their forehead, and knows exactly what you are trying to achieve.

3. Lack of knowledge and expertise The medium is new(ish). The sociology and arena are not. Get educated about what is and isn’t possible, and remember this is really just ‘business as normal’ – ie  it’s all about meeting people, albeit in a different environment and building a relationship so hopefully they decide to buy from you. And don’t just hire the cheapest option because yes, there are still peeps out there selling themselves as social media ‘gurus’ or ‘experts’ with little or no knowledge of how an integrated marketing, PR and social campaign should work and how it must be set up across platforms to provide the highest potential visibility, positioning and therefore returns. The rule of thumb is that no VA, temp or office junior is ever going to do your business any good with ‘a bit of Twittering’. If you are serious about adding social to your marketing mix – and you should be – get real experts in to do it professionally or risk looking as much as a dope as Vodafone did earlier in the year.

4. Lack of knowledge about your audience – I know this might come as a bit of a shock to you, but your clients and potential clients are not sitting there waiting for pearls of wisdom and information to be issued from your corporate HQ. Most are just getting on with their lives, and what with all the information flying around, most have the online-attention span of a fly – they have to or else they wouldn’t get any work done or have a life to lead! And even those who are fully engaged with the brand, as Ben and Jerrys’ fans seem to be, do so for the entertainment factor as much as for the pleasure of consuming the product. Rule of thumb here – find them, understand what they like and how they like it served, make content interesting and to their tastes, and place it carefully under their noses repeatedly in as many different way as you can until they engage, being careful not to blast them or p*ss them off, because they can disengage at the click of a mouse… Note: this is not advertising, you are NOT telling them what to do, you are inviting them to have a relationship.

5. Lack of consistency and commitment – you start, you get busy or bored, you stop. And any interest you may have built up in your brand online dies. Social media land is littered with the debris of abandoned profiles, and how does that look if, for example, you search for a company and it brings up a Twitter account and the last entry was 8 months ago and that was, say, a promo (ie own advert) or worse still, a ‘what I am having for lunch’ kind of tweet. Lame is probably the best you can say, and the worse case scenerio is that the company looks uber dodgy.

Truly #epicfail

And if you want to do it properly for your brand or business we would be delighted to help. We specialize in helping B2B companies, particularly software, IT, gadgets and technology, publishing, media, travel, women’s interests, mums and parents, recruitment, finance and food. We do comprehensive audits that tell you exactly how your website/brand are performing online and what needs to be done to improve your brand profile and reputation, or if you prefer to talk, please contact us today on 0845 862 0017.

Lolita to go on Kindle

If you like to curl up of an evening with a good book, you will be able to read both of these classic titles soon in e-book format exclusively from Amazon’s Kindle store.

Needless to say this is ruffling feathers in the publishing world as the traditional publishers who produce the hard copy versions can see their world being threatened.  As e-books didn’t exist when contracts for classic books were drawn up, the whole area of electronic versions of older titles is a very murky one.

Mashable have the full story here http://mashable.com/2010/07/23/amazon-deal-threatens-ebook-market/ but it looks clear that the new technologies will ensure that there is some jostling for position between agents and publishers for quite a while yet.  And in the meantime the consumer may find that they may not be able to read certain titles in e-book format if, for example, they have bought a Sony e-reader rather than a Kindle.

In the long-term though we think that the e-books will find a comfy home amongst the plethora of online reading material as well as the hard copy stuff.  As lovely as e-books are, few readers can resist the lure of a good bookshop (assuming that they can figure out a way to stay in business that long that is!)

It’s just another facet of these fascinating e-times that we live in.

Talking publishing, our very own Claire is in the middle of writing her forthcoming book about using social media in an integrated way for b2b, which is being published traditionally and on kindle, and we are also about to update our  ‘WTF can social media do your business?’ e-book to take in the changes in the online world during 2010. If you would like us to produce an ebook (or white paper or seo content) for your company or business, or would like to know more, email us on hello@themediamarketingco.com

Paying for Online Content - The Times take a big hit

After much umming and ahhing at TMMC Towers, we decided to pay our monthly subs in order to read The Times and The Sunday Times (£1 for the first month and £2 per week thereafter).

We came to this conclusion because, much as we love loads of the papers and mags we read (and we read tons of ‘em), we couldn’t bring ourselves to give up on some of our favourite journos like @IndiaKnight. All in all, we feel that The Times stable gives a really good breadth and depth of information, educates us and makes us laugh.

It would appear though that not so many of you agree – since the paywall was introduced a few weeks ago, the readership has halved and lots of people who could look at it online (like the people who subscribe to the paper copy) aren’t bothering to register.

Which brings up the whole debate of who pays?  As generators of content ourselves, we know how much knowledge and skill is required to produce top quality pieces, and The Times crew really don’t get much better.  Whilst we all have access to vast acres of stuff which appears relentlessly via the social media channels each day, a lot of it, is, well, not very good nor very interesting.

It is the big question of our digital age, and it’s going to roll and roll.  We look forward to hearing what Mr Murdoch and Son are going to do next.  Meanwhile we will continue to enjoy reading India on a Sunday morning.

Measuring the ROI of Social Media - Forrester's Report gives a different perspective

A fabulous report has come out from those lovely folk at Forrester, who so eloquently put what we try to explain to clients and prospects on a regular basis – social media ROI isn’t just about money and the bottom line.

You can read an excerpt from Augie Ray’s report here, but basically, he says that companies must look at social media in a holistic way, and while a great deal of activity can be tracked and evaluated, some of it just can’t.

This doesn’t mean that it’s a black art that gives agencies carte blanche to charge large fees with no accountability. What it does mean is that social media can make a significant contribution to a business’s status, influence and brand perception even though these and other positives can’t be measured by strict metrics, financial or otherwise.

If you still have a boss who thinks that social media is a ‘bit of fun for the youngsters’ (yes, there are still people who think that), maybe you could get him to read the report and see how seriously an organization like Forrester takes social media these days.

Happy reading folks, and if you want to know how social media could make a hugely positive impact for your company as part of your marketing and PR initiatives, please get in touch today – we’d love to help!

Old Spice Man = Social Media Campaign Genius

I wish this had been done in time to be entered in the Corp Comms’ Digi Awards for best Digital Campaign because it was pure and utter genius. No idea what I am talking about? Saw it in the paper and haven’t seen the videos, or just caught a glimpse on Twitter earlier in the week and didn’t stop to check?

Or maybe you are one of the 5,776,595 peeps who have already viewed The Shirtless Old Spice Man channel on YouTube, where the gorgeous Isaiah Mustafa, a muscular actor and former professional football player/restaurateur who first came to notice in February with a Wieden+Kennedy-produced video commercial, “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like”, became Social Media Man of the Moment this week with a series of hilarious and deadpan video answers to celebrity and ordinary tweeters.

All with his shirt off.

Have I got the voicemail? God yes, who wouldn’t?!

And you can too because the inspired Reddit community joined forces to build a tool that will (in seconds) let anyone take snippets of the original audio to create your own voicemail message.

There are many more brilliant video answers on Old Spice’s YouTube channel, and the huge and worldwide ‘feelgood’ response is very important as a lesson in how a PR and social media marketing campaign SHOULD be done.

What made this campaign so successful?

The campaign was feelgood and interactive, and didn’t ask anything in return.

1. Old Spice got an gorgeous actor to talk into the camera all day without his shirt on. It did it for me.
2. He did a video answer to a few celebrities, who Tweeted it out to their followers, which meant other celebrities starting lining up to get in on the act, and each of them told their millions of Twitter followers all about it. And then everyone started tweeting. Utter genius.
3. The videos were dead-dead funny, and short – under a minute in length – key to successful use of YouTube.
4. The agency did their homework and targeted major Twitter players, and then just let it grow organically through those key influencers – there were no press releases or conferences.

Wieden+Kennedy the PR firm that put together this campaign quote the following stats for the first day of the campaign:

So, all power to The Old Spice Guy. Come back soon, and bring a few awards for  Wieden+Kennedy in those gorgeous arms of yours.

…and so do privacy implications

•    39 percent of mobile device users use location-tracking applications on their mobile devices
•    Over half (55 percent) worry over loss of privacy incurred from using geolocation
•    11 percent of  UK social network users indicated to deleting one of their social network accounts due to concerns over privacy settings

More and more people are revealing their exact location on the Internet or being tracked via geolocation
applications installed onto their mobile devices, increasing their chances of being targeted by Internet security attacks, according to new research commissioned by Webroot, a leading provider of Internet security software for the consumer, enterprise and SMB markets.

Surveying more than 1,500 social network users who own geolocation-ready mobile devices, Webroot found that 39 percent indicated to using geolocation on their mobile devices and 73 percent of those use a geo-tracking application to do so.  Among those, more than a quarter used location-based services to
share their whereabouts with strangers, and 14 percent use one to meet new people.

Of the UK respondents, Google Latitude (32 percent) was the most commonly used geo-location tool, followed by Yahoo’s Flickr (25 percent), Google Buzz (20 percent) and Twitter Location (18 percent). Other rapidly growing location-based services such as Foursquare and Gowalla encourage users to share their current locations by ’checking-in’, and in return they are rewarded by earning points or they receive discounts offered by nearby retailers.

Jeff Horne, Director of Threat Research, Webroot, said “as location-based applications continue to gain popularity, we should all be increasingly aware of what cyber-criminals can do with the huge amount of personal data that is being shared by everyone on the Web.

“People often get excited about the new features available on social networks and forget about the power of the Internet and the amount of valuable information they give away through the simple act of updating their status and ‘checking-in’ at their current location.”

Judging the Digi Awards for Corp Comms Magazine today is going to be tough.

Going through the usb stick full of entries over the weekend (what dedication to the cause when I could have been sunbathing, or indeed sailing in the Solent!) I was struck at the diverse and innovative approach businesses and agencies are taking in the application and use of digital media to increase sales, engage with customers and help boost brand reputation.

I am directly judging five categories – Best use of digital media in customer services; Best use of Twitter; Best digital campaign; Best integrated campaign; and Best agency – and I have to say I am deeply impressed by the calibre of entries that Corp Comms Magazine have attracted for this their first Digi Awards. Best use of Twitter is going to be particularly hard one to decide on – I anticipate a fight, actually, they are all that good!

While I can’t allude or comment on any of the individual entries until the final decisions are made with my fellow judges and then announced in September at the Monster Digirati Party, what I can say is that you are in for a treat – and if you haven’t booked to come and join the fun, then get on it immediately, there’s the most amazing digital treats planned and the entries themselves have been superb.