Social Media, Digital Marketing & PR Agency

Silver found on the surface of the moon

In a week that has been dominated by money and cuts, it’s good to hear that Google are joining in too and have managed to cut its tax bill by a whopping $3.1 billion this year by shuttling their earnings around the globe – a technique used by other massive tech firms. All right for some innit?

Fortunately, those of you in rural Britain will survive the cuts, which is just as well as a new survey says that shoppers who are not online pay $2.7billion a year too much.

While we’re (still) on the subject of money, the domain sex.com has just been sold for a whopping $13million, and some bright spark in the US has worked out that the general mood among Twitter users can predict the rise and fall of the stock market almost a week in advance.  The computer scientist in the US has discovered that the correlation between the Dow Jones and the collective public mood was almost 90 per cent accurate. Amazing stuff – we’ll never look at Twitter the same way again!

However, if you are already an aspiring social media entrepreneur awash with dosh, those nice folks at Facebook, Kleiner Perkins, Zynga and Amazon have set up a $250 million sFund to help you if you are looking for investment – they’ve even written a poem about it.

Aside from them stumping up a lot of money for sFund, Facebook have another mixed bag on the news front: they have been rumbled again on their (lack of) security announced this week with evidence that users’ details, even those with the highest privacy settings, are having their data given out to third parties via apps such as Farmville and others – oops. On the plus side, they are continuing to add lots of lovely functionality to the images part of the site, with a new drag-and-drop-photos feature – nice.

Google have have continued their good week with the launch of Leanback, which is part of their move to merge internet and TV – interesting stuff, which we look forward to watching, but not as much as we are looking forward to seeing the Dead Sea Scrolls, among the world’s most important and tightly restricted archaeological treasures, which Google are going to scan. Once they are up, anyone will be able to peruse exact copies of the original scrolls as well as an English translation of the text on their computer – for free. Officials said the collection, expected to be available within months, will feature sections that have been made more legible thanks to hi-tech infrared technology. Fantastic stuff.

Have a fab weekend and our great picture this week is, obviously, of our very own moon, which this week has been in the news as scientists have just discovered it’s not made of cheese, but silver… though luckily not enough for silver mining to be viable, phew!

Commonwealth Games opening ceremony

It was a case of mistaken identity after the sad demise of Sean376 when Andrew from Communicate Magazine asked me “what the email I had written to Sean had been about”, thinking I was the @funkymonkshit (AKA Scarlet Pimpernel) on Twitter that Sean had referred to…. no not me Gov, I am @funkyangelclair and don’t go in for cloak and dagger stuff, far too busy even if I had the inclination! Talking of Communicate Magazine it’s their Brand Transform Conference next week, so it’ll be interesting to see what news that triggers.

It’s been a bit quiet this week on the gadget front for a change, although the latest announcement from Apple about the iPad’s hook up with Verizon was probably enough awesomeness in one week for any girl…iPad parties here we come, especially if they are accompanied by this little bit of £5 million bling.

Talking of iPads, seems they are responsible for slowing PC sales, although that may change now Skype and Facebook have launched their new partnership as it’s only available on PCs at the moment… us Mac passionistas are just going to have to wait a little longer it seems.

Virgin and Spotify have agreed a partnership deal after Virgin’s failed attempts to get all four major record labels to sign up and play nicely, which has got to be good for Spotify and very silly of the record labels, who still do not ‘get’ digital it would appear.

Perhaps they should all be forced to watch The Social Network movie  or follow the police on Twitter to get a real time feel for how social and digital media are changing the world as we know it on a pretty much daily basis.

A round of applause, then, for Gap, who do seem to get it and actually crowdsourced their new logo. Shame no one seems to like it.

However, it would appear from the debacle that was of Nokia and Mission’s (mis)handling of one blogger prompted us to write a blog about blogging and the relationship agencies have – and should have – with them as it simply confirmed to us yet again that many of the big agencies and brands are still operating in the 20th century and view digital and social as ‘nice to have’ instead of seeing them as they really are ie at the core of how the 21st century world now works… proven once again as every person, it seemed, on the planet tuned in via to watch the Chilean miners being rescued in real time, to a resounding – worldwide -cheer.

Our gorgeous picture of the week is from the Commonwealth Games, which has been trending on Twitter pretty much continuously, although perhaps our favourite picture as to be the one of the Chilean miners looking like extras from the Blues Brothers…

… and why brands and PR Pros should treat them properly.

1. Blogging is dead. NOT TRUE.
   Facebook and Twitter might be what people are talking about but don’t write off blogs just yet. According to estimates in a study published by eMarketer, half of the US Internet population reads blogs at least monthly, and they are predicting it will rise to 60% by 2014.  Don’t ignore them – blogs are the springboard from which much of social media sharing emanates.
2. ‘Everyone’ has a blog. NOT TRUE.
   There may be a large number of blogs, but the number of people actually writing and updating a blog monthly is just under 12% of the US population. If you are looking for niche exposure, do your research and pinpoint those that are hot, not ones that are stone cold and lacking a pulse.
3. Bloggers aren’t proper writers. NOT TRUE.
   The majority of blogs are written  – even the company blogs and especially the good ones and the ones that are updated frequently – by people who can write, like to write and are very good at writing. Blogging, like all writing, is an art form and, like all creative endeavours, only some of us can actually do it – the rest just make a hash of it or simply don’t try and just read what we say and comment.
4. Blogging is easy. Sometimes True… if they are just keeping an online diary, but utterly NOT TRUE for business blogs or any kind of information or professional blogs.
   Finding a voice, getting inspiration, writing an attention grabbling headline, getting all the links right, fact checking – it’s the same amount of work as writing an article for a newspaper or magazine. I should know, I do both.
5. Bloggers will write anything we tell them to, especially if they think they’ll get something for free. NOT TRUE.
   If they are writing a sponsored blog they need to declare an interest, so you should always know what is their own voice and what is company inspired. Bloggers are independent thinkers and – more to the point – build their reputation and following by saying it how it is, even if that is painful. Many earn a decent living from the advertising they attract as a result of that traffic. Why on earth would they compromise that for you and your clients just because you are dangling a freebie (or not as the case may be)? If you want advertorial, pay for it like everyone else.
6. Bloggers are all the same, so sending them mass emails is fine. NOT TRUE.
   The beauty of bloggers is their individuality as they usually are passionate about what they write and rarely have company guidelines to follow, which makes for very interesting and honest writing.

So if, and this is especially true for PR pros, you want to get a blogger to cover a story about your brand or company, spend some time reading what they write and what they are passionate about. Clue into their interests and specialities. Address them by name and correct gender (one Dad blogger was sent an email mailer addressing him as Mrs… needless to say it was deleted immediately).

Take a leaf out if the journalist ‘PR pros complaint’s book’ and… don’t patronise, don’t bribe, be upfront about what you want and what you’ll do in return, stick to the agreement, and certainly don’t ignore or mistreat them, because it will backfire badly, as Nokia and their PR agency Mission have found to their cost this month with the embarrassing debacle of Bangs and a Bun’s marathon race.

It is a testimony to the level of reach that a blogger like Bangs and a Bun has, that she has had over 140 replies to her post, one of which was Anna Shipley, Head of Communications at Nokia, who had been previously been unaware of the situation.

Digital IS Communications, and includes all the disciplines that communications entails, and the sooner traditional agencies stop treating it like it’s an interesting ‘add on’, the better it will be for all concerned.

And so we can only say, well done Mission and Nokia for showing the PR and Corp Comms world how NOT to treat bloggers or handle social media or enhance digital reputation.

Nice work.

And contact us on hello@themediamarketinco.com or give us a ring if you would like to enhance your digital reputation, connect with bloggers properly, or indeed integrate social media and all things digital into your marketing and PR.

Alex Gomille Butterflies from The Veolia Environnement Wildlife Photographer of the Year Competition

Welcome to our weekly spin around the digital world, which this week is devoid of product launches although the recent rash of new gizmos has been replaced by a whole load of news and surveys – we are trying to leave off on the Christmas stuff for a wee bit longer – you can thank us later. So here we go…

Our friends over at Twitter are updating its search function – well, thank goodness for that, as the old one was so bad it was virtually useless, while the folks over at Yahoo are rolling out a new ‘search experience’, making its web search more streamlined and visual, improving its mobile search and adding a list of hot search topics to the Yahoo front page.

So that’s good then.

Lots of money things have also been in the news this week. New Zealand bank ASB has taken Internet banking one step further, with the world’s first Virtual Branch on Facebook. The service has been launched on a trial basis to gauge customer interest, under the slogan: ‘Most banks talk at you. We’re here to chat with you. We’re here to listen to you.’ We look forward to seeing how that one pans out.

Apparently we are all spending more money this year than last, regardless of the economic challenges, so it’s just as well that the banks have started to lend again. All of which has to be A Good Thing for brands, especially those with a strong online presence as, according to Yahoo, women are increasingly using the internet as their main source of shopping and mostly with an eye for a bargain. Does make you wonder what will happen to retail.

On that note, Groupon is hot property and the site’s phenomenal growth has ushered in a new way of marketing products online ie socially – and as nothing stays new for long in cyberspace, AOL are about to give it a go by launching a clone, though our opinion is that it is an ‘Amazon’ or ‘Facebook’ kind of  one off and is therefore going to be hard to emulate.

Not just marketing that’s changing when mixed with social, it’s also customer service – the latest is Premier Inn announcing that they will be having concierges on Twitter. If you want to make use of the service, tweet @PremierInn #concierge to ask for their local tips.

Innovative as that is, they still have a way to go to reach the dizzy heights of boutique wine site, Naked Wines, who combine elements of Groupon’s social marketing with innovative preemptive customer service. Hardly surprising then that they walked away with the digital customer services award at Corp Comms Magazine’s Digi Awards (I was very impressed with them when I judged it and very happy we were sponsoring their category so I could present it to them!) in addition to the IWC Innovator of the Year award, which they won a couple of weeks ago!

Well done Naked Wines, you are on fire this year!

And on to the younger generation, apparently 92% of toddlers have a digital presence, with a lot of them having some sort of profile before birth. It is amazing how the parenting/children’s market has changed in recent years – soon we will be seeing research on how to market to newborns at this rate!

Once they pop out and start getting a bit computer savvy and playing games, you’ll be needing to monitor what they’re doing when you aren’t looking, and yes, obviously there’s (always) an app for that, including the latest from Facebook, which monitors children’s gaming activities.

Talking about gaming, the rise of Farmville and family online gaming on a Friday night (not to mention gaming specialist agency Matmi winning Corp Comms Magazine’s Specialist Digital Agency Award last week) have all been in the news recently, and it’s interesting to actually see where gaming actually fits in a map of the overall social media landscape - i.e. bigger than Twitter… which has got to be food for thought for innovative product managers I should think.

Map of online communities 2010, by XKCD.com.

That’s all folks for this weekend. Our lovely slider image is ‘Butterflies by Alex Gomille’ taken from the Veolia Environnement Wildlife Photographer of the Year, the winners of which will be published this month and tickets to view the gallery are available from The Natural History Museum’s site. See you all next Friday – TTFN x

As another week hurtles by and we lurch ever nearer Christmas (lots of Christmas stuff starting from next week, no complaining from the back…! We’ve been getting Christmas press releases since June, so we’ve been very restrained by holding off mentioning the C word until October), we have gathered together those juicy snippets of digital news that you may have missed during your frantic week.

Google's 12th birthday - and look how far they have come!

Let’s kick off with the happy news that we celebrated Google’s 12^th Birthday this week – who can imagine a world without Google now? Can there be another brand that has such a massive impact on so many facets of life on a global basis in such a short space of time?

Well now you mention it, Facebook are doing a pretty good job as a global brand and they who have been all over the news this week for lots of (good) reasons.  They have announced a whole slew of upgrades to the way that photos can be displayed and edited meaning that they are now a real threat to those other niche photo sites like Flickr. And there is word on the street that Facebook are due to announce a major ‘deal’ with Skype imminently. We are great Skype fans and the possibilities of those two platforms getting together are endless.

And in more good news for Facebook, nearly a quarter of US and UK consumers would prefer to receive news from a brand via Facebook rather than from an official website. The study also analyses the reasons why consumers follow companies on social networking sites. Most would like to receive discounts (50%) while a third do so just for the love of the product… but more importantly 60% of consumers changed their minds about a product after reading a negative opinion on social media outlets, so a good social media orientated customer strategy is essential for all businesses in this connected age – contact us if you haven’t got yours in place yet, especially with Christmas just over the horizon!

Which means it’s just as well Facebook has just launched its Page Browser feature that allows you to discover Pages that you might like (depending on the ones that you already like) as well as see which of your friends is most similar to you. Meanwhile, Facebook Places launched in Canada after launching in the UK last week.

This week has been a bit of epic one for ‘pads’:  Apple are promising their new iPad to be thinner than the original one, which has become hugely dominant… although @indiaknight was assuring her twitter friends that a Kindle is better to curl up in bed with or whip out on the tube… Blackberry has launched their new version it has received pleasant reviews, but as we haven’t actually seen one, we can’t really say, although if RIM would like us to review one, they know where we are! Dell too are leaping on the bandwagon with news that they will have a pad/tablet within the year, which is not really surprising as mobile is widely predicted to take over desktop in the next few years…

In other news, celebrities are not that influential according to a research led at Northwestern University, Illinois. You might be called Lady Gaga and top the charts in terms of followers but those who get retweeted the most are actually people who are specialists in their own fields. That’ll be us then. And you too… now, isn’t that nice to know?

American Express are the latest brand to delve into the realm of social media by creating a new way to connect with potential customers. The famous credit card company has hired various money experts and writers to launch their new financial services community called Currency. The new scheme is specifically aimed at helping new graduates manage their incomes better. In conjunction with this activity, Amex are launching an iPhone app called Social Currency built on the Foursquare platform. It allows you to check in to stores and create wish lists with pictures and price tags. Another step towards financial transparency it would seem.

And finally CorpComms Monster Digirati party at The View, Battersea Power Station, was just as glam as we expected. Regrettably Cision didn’t win their category, losing out narrowly to 3′s blog, but many other great campaigns and businesses did, with special kudos to Walkers and The Met Police.

Interactive wall from Lumacoustics at The Digi Awards. Credit: http://benjaminellis.org/