Social Media, Digital Marketing & PR Agency

In a week dominated by the ongoing financial crisis and the Leveson enquiry into badly behaved journalists, we take our usual spin around the online business world.

Superfly has launched a more personal way for regular flyers searching for the most cost effective flights, by taking into account their loyalty rewards.

Amazon announced this week that, for the first time since they started selling books online, its digital books have outsold its paper books this year. Interestingly student text books have been lagging behind generally, but have finally taken a big leap digital-side, with sales of textbooks widely reported as doubling this semester on last Spring.

Hello wallet is the newest iPhone app launched for consumers to make it easier to keep track of what they are spending and whether they can afford the purchase or not. This launch reflects the growing trend of the mobile wallet, which is definitely the next big thing for businesses to be aware of, with Paypal, Google, Visa and American Express all jumping on board so far.

Brand-wise, Domino’s has found a new way to utilise the digital space, with a new app that allows customers to create a pizza on their iPads before ordering it in reality. Meanwhile, struggling high street retailer HMV has announced a new online rental service as it continues to try and get to grips with digital retailing. Users will be able to choose from hundreds of movies from more than 30 distributors, with rentals costing £3.75, though with YouTube and Google already in the space, plus Freeview and LoveFilm, we predict it’s going to be a tough battle.

Old Spice is at it again, merging creativity on online brand promotion in a very tongue-in-cheek video release of a ‘bear holder’ for Old Spice deodorant (yes, you CAN buy it apparently), which has already got over 43 thousand views on YouTube, while Unilever’s Lynx brand has had a double ban for their separate outdoor and internet campaigns after the advertising watchdog upheld complaints that they objectified women and were inappropriately located where they could be seen by children. Shame, because we ADORED their augmented angel reality campaign, which is perhaps the most creative integrated social campaign of 2011.

On Facebook, Nivea is launching a social Christmas campaign this week to encourage people to send personalised gifts to their Facebook friends, Thorntons have launched a Christmas app, offering fans facts, fun and the chance to win a Christmas Hamper, and Baileys are running a personalised Cup Cake giveaway … all nice to have, and we are noticing that retail brands are embracing the digital relationship with their customers much more enthusiastically and with a surer touch than they did in 2010.

Over on Twitter, Samsung ran a gloriously simple yet effective campaign this week to show off the capabilities of their new Galaxy Note handset. Called Create My Tweet the brand asked Twitter users to suggest ideas for artwork by tweeting @samsungmobile with their 140 character message and the hashtag #createmytweet.

Renowned illustrators Steven Wilson, Rose Stallard, Danny Sangra and Natasha Law will then turn some of their requests into real artwork using the design applications on the Galaxy Note – we’re waiting to see if any of ours get chosen! For more information and inspiration for your own campaign, see their Facebook page.

And finally… there’s a new action figure on the block… yes it’s Mashable’s very own founder, Pete Cashmore! And while he may not be ending up in any of our Christmas stockings, it does go show you what immense reward might await you if you ever choose to start a blog for business…

Big, serious stories dominate the digital news this week and none more so than the ‘scary SOPA bill’   SOPA is the Stop Online Piracy Act and along with the Protect IP Act, they are trying to prevent piracy and copyright infringement.  The problem is though, that it is widely felt that they will also endanger innovation and will allow the entertainment industry to censor sites they feel “engage in, enable or facilitate” infringement.

There are fears that it could be so restrictive that it could change the whole nature of the internet, and you know it must be serious if Google and Facebook bury the hatchet and join forces to oppose it.  This is definitely a story that we will be talking about again.

And there’s lots of Google news again this week, following on from the launch of the Google + pages aimed at businesses last week.   This time, they have had a bit razzmatazz launch of their music service which is going to be pitched against iTunes.  But it’s received a bit of a muted reception with some feeling that it is a missed opportunity.  However, there are all those lovely Android phones for it to be used on, so we won’t write it off just yet.  Although a new survey out from Experian Hitwise says that Google + is beginning to perform better in the US but in the UK, Britons seem confused by it.

It’s still early days though and none of these stats include mobile usage and differentiate between accounts opened and actual usage.  With many marketers looking to Google + as another way to promote brands, this is another story that we will be keeping our beady eye on.

Blackberry has also been in ‘music launch’ mode this week with them offering a music sharing service via their proprietary BBM messaging service, so beloved of the ‘yoof’.  Whilst analysts are still busy sucking their teeth about Blackberry and announcing that the end of the world is nigh, Blackberry has hit back with some new product launches and some impressive expansion figures since last year.  Ah, but that was before the outage wasn’t it….we shall see.

There’s a lot of interesting news out this week about ‘millennials’,that generation of people coming through who seem to have slightly different attitudes to social sharing to their parents.  Whilst there is evidence that  some people are getting weary of handing over their data, millennials are happy to do so if they feel engaged in a relationship with the brand.  More to come on this in a blog – fascinating stuff about the future

Taking a quick spin round the other news:  there has been a sharp rise in the number of Britons who are now online (where have you been) but that’s good news for us marketers as it means there is an ever growing audience to market at; Paypal has launched a Facebook app which allows you to send money and e-cards to FB friends without charge – very interesting we feel, and another area that has great potential  for the future; scientists have come with a way of waterproofing smartphones which is fantastic as a staggering number of phones are dropped down toilets and into cups of coffee each year, creating complete chaos; and big leaps are being made in battery technology with them due to be charged much quicker and last for much longer which is brilliant news as  we are asking our smartphones to do so much, and with M-commerce being one of the fastest growing areas of tech, we feel that this is a very important development; if you were in receipt of explicit spam this week via Facebook then it was your browser to blame, and not Facebook, apparently..

And to round off this week, we had to mention the splendid 89 year old Baroness Trumpington who became a bit of a sensation on Twitter after making a rude hand gesture to a colleague in the House of Lords.

Happy weekends everyone!

Children at the Sari Weaving village. http://www.flickr.com/photos/scadcharity/5937335156/in/set-72157627113902397

Flickr is a great resource and is very useful for visually rich businesses, which charities tend to be, whether that is because of their subject matter or what people are doing to raise money to help.

As such it should be treated as an integral part of your social good organisation’s social media strategy and activity, helping to inform, educate and drive the emotional responses that lead to donations or involvement. As an additional extra, adding it in to the mix will help your search rankings if done correctly.

Like everything, however, it has to be used correctly to get the maximum benefit online, whether for business, charities, or Social Enterprise organisations.

Here are a few top tips to help you leverage the potential of Flickr for your business, social enterprise, charity or not for profits organisation:

1. Content – Use original content that are relevant to your message and goals, achievements and organisation, such as photos of what you are achieving, charitable activities, behind-the-scenes images and historical photos.

2. Tag it – Make sure that every image or video is properly titled, with descriptions and metatags, for maximum SEO potential. Flickr makes it easy to edit this information for a batch of photos as well as allowing you to doing it singly. Just unloading the image and leaving on the camera’s image name eg IMG_0001.jpg is wasting an opportunity to improve your organisation’s online profile and also looks very unprofessional.

3. Do More With Less – Don’t have more than one Flickr account for your organisation unless there is a really compelling reason to do so, as it dilutes the search potential and well increasing confusion, but do file your images and videos in Groups within that one account complete with a description that incorporates your keywords.

4. Groups – Share your images or videos in relevant Flickr Groups, and get involved in Group discussions as well as outreaching to other Group members’ shared images and video. If you want to create your own group that reflects your organisations interests Flickr allows you to create official Sponsored Groups, such as Kellogg’s Moments of Motherhood Group where users share motherhood-related images: http://www.flickr.com/groups/momentsofmotherhood/

5. Relationships – Just as in any other social network, building relationships is important. Outreach to other Flickr members in your sphere by favouriting their content and/or commenting on their pictures or video. This helps build links and a community around your shared purpose or interest.

6. Go Pro – a Pro account increases the amount of content you can upload per month, and gives you access to increased analytics, which is always helpful. Posting smaller sized images will also help you retain control of how and where they are used.

7. Share – Regularly share your Flickr content on other social networks, such as Tumblr, Facebook and Twitter to maximise the social links surrounding your organisation/brand online.

8. Be Savvy – Don’t just use Flickr for your photographs as it is open source; do think about only uploading minimal sized images so that their reuse is restricted; make sure the ones you do upload there are actually hosted elsewhere, such as on your company’s website, as Flickr’s terms and conditions state: “pages on other web sites that display content hosted on flickr.com must provide a link from each photo or video back to its page on Flickr. This provides a way to get more information about the content and the photographer.”

At The Media Marketing Co we work with many Social Enterprises, Charities and Not for Profits Organisations to help them raise their profiles and increase donations. If you would like further information contact claire@themediamarketingco.com.

So with another week dominated by the financial crisis it’s no surprise that ‘Italy 10’ became a trending topic on Twitter. And interestingly for brands who target families and/or the mums market, Twitter has been announced as a leading brand with families, whizzing 10 place up the charts with Facebook falling a little out of favour and dropping down 16 places.

In a ‘Digital Life’s survey of 72,000 people in 60 countries, Britons have said that they want brands to stay off social media as most did not listen to what consumers want. However the same number said that they liked to engage when they were offered promotions and discounts, which sends a strong message to brands to get their act together and engage with consumers via social media properly, rather than just fiddling around or acting without a proper strategy, which “risks alienating customers and impacting business growth” according to Stephen Yap, Group Director, Technology, TNS UK.

Mobile usage and M Commerce are becoming the most rapidly emerging trend for businesses to take note of, and a cross-industry group of retailers, network operators and trade bodies, led by eBay, has just called on the government to aid consumer take-up of m-commerce by prioritising network improvements in a ‘Mobile Manifesto’.

In other mobile news, the mobile phone market is booming in Africa;  Apple have come up with a rapid fix for their new operating system which was attracting lots of negative press last week; the UK is going to have the best broadband in Europe (allegedly) within the next few years; Blackberry makers RIM have suffered a huge loss in subscribers after their recent outage disaster and LinkedIn has launched a dashboard for groups which will make things a lot easier to cope with.

There’s a lot ‘silver surfer’ activity this week including news that older mobile users are switching to smartphones and this age group is one of the fastest growing users of the devices. And with the recent news that Google is thinking of moving into TV, and tablet technology allowing ‘Pad Dads’ to watch more and more TV on a mobile device content producers should take heed of this new survey which says that a huge proportion of older people can’t hear what is being said because of recording techniques.

There’s been a fair amount of Google + news this week, with the announcement that you can set up Google + pages for businesses.  We have set up ours  but were rather surprised to see just how unintuitive it is and that you can’t have multiple admins – it seems their senior executive was right after all saying that Google + was not a ‘social’ network, even though it’s what they told us it was a few months ago… We have suspected all along Google+ is more of a search network, and so are advising all our clients that they need to be in the space as it is likely to prove more businessy than the other social networks – see Specsavers ‘hangout’ with Gok Wan for an early example of how brands might use it in the future.

And at the risk of this column becoming like Groundhog Day, we have another Facebook privacy story today, this time with Facebook probably having to agree with privacy regulators to regular audits.

Lest we forget, it is Armistice Day and this event has been marked by Twitter with its own Remembrance Day Service. What a lovely move by Twitter and a fabulous example of how technology can be used for the greater good.

Have a nice weekend.

Well it’s the end of another interesting week, what with all the EU/Greek shenanigans and all, and here is our spin around digital land, which as been a bit “calm before the Christmas storm of launches-ish”.

Facebook privacy  is once again making the headlines as apparently Facebook users are struggling with the privacy changes  which is maybe not surprising as they have changed them eight times in two years.

And there was also the rather disturbing news that a whopping 600,000 Facebook accounts are hacked every day.

Over on Planet Apple, there have been a few grumblings about the battery life on the new iPhone 4S and Apple have had to fess up this week that there is actually a bug. In fact, anyone who has upgraded their existing iPhone to iOS 5 could be experiencing a problem, and while they are obviously going to fix this, it might take a few weeks… While in a report out this week it was revealed that Android phones are more likely to break (that is a hardware failure) than Apple or Blackberry.

There has been a slew of positive Google news this week headed up by ‘do a barrel roll’  trending on Twitter, which is a clever trick which people have had fun using, and best enjoyed on Firefox and Chrome apparently, and those lovely folks over at Mashable have revealed a whole host of other Google goodies that you can play with in a dull moment.

More seriously, Google are contemplating offering  paid cable-TV services to consumers, a move that could unleash a new wave of competition within the traditional TV business.  This is a very interesting development and one which we will be watching in the coming months.

So rounding off this week with a couple of lighthearted stories:  hackers accidentally broke into a French rugby club website, when their intended target was actually the German Stock Exchange. The website, which usually only gets 700 hits each day was visited 80,000 times as a result of the attack. And some bright spark at Vsauce, a YouTube channel, has worked out that the weight of all the electrons in motion that make up the internet at any one moment is equivalent to 50 grams which is apparently the weight of a strawberry (although rather a large one we feel!)

So on that mind-boggling note, here’s wishing you a lovely weekend, complete with lots of fireworks!

Cision recognised for establishing ROI from digital communications as well as its social publishing technology.

One of our favourite clients, Cision, who are the leading provider of PR software, services and tools for the marketing and public relations industry, collected awards for the “Best evaluation process” and the “Best multimedia press release” for its client, Husqvarna, at Communicate Magazine’s Digital Impact Awards, October 2011.

For evaluation, Cision uses four different platforms including advanced web analytics, CRM functionality and two of its own systems, CisionPoint and Cision Social Media, to measure the effectiveness of its extensive digital activities. The silver award – the highest received in the category – recognised the programme’s concrete results: within six months, sales, marketing and client support had established and met internal social media SLAs; weekly CRM reporting provided KPIs toward real return-on-investment; and monthly in-depth reports attributed that ROI to discrete communications channels and activities. Cision showed how the evaluation process provided both immediate monetary results and insight that has informed planning across a range of business functions.

With the digital multimedia release, Gardena, a brand of the Husqvarna Group, were aiming to reach a world-wide audience as part of their “Become an activist on Earth Day: Save water with Gardena” campaign. Cision, together with their partner Eklips Digital Advisors, worked with Husqvarna to create a social media release. Cision’s social media publishing tools were used to disseminate the release as well as sending text versions through traditional wire and email channels. Images and video material on the topic featured within the campaign. As add-on media these were ideal for targeting not only printed media, but also blogs and social media. The release also included the options to share via numerous social media channels. The release was viewed over 10,000 times in its first 24 hours and significant interest continued over the following week. An English version of the release is available to view here: http://www.publishrelease.com/gardena/1105-become-an-activist-on-earth-day-save-water-with-gardena/

Yann Blandy, CEO of Cision Europe said, “As a supplier of software to PR and marketing professionals, Cision has some very “digitally aware” stakeholders, most prominently the communicators themselves, agency and in-house, and “the media”. To have been awarded “Best evaluation process” in recognition of our work is particularly pleasing, as we have shown how our systems can be used to establish ROI, which is a very topical subject  in our industry. Using this process we have been able to make best use of our budgets and inform our strategy.” Blandy also added, “With the “Best multimedia press release” award, Husqvarna has through the Gardena brand illustrated how our clients can use our software to leverage maximum exposure. By integrating social media channels into our database, multimedia press releases can reach a much wider audience. It represents the shift we’re seeing in the market place and how going beyond the traditional press release can make a real impact.”

Andrew Thomas, Publisher of Communicate magazine and organiser of the Digital Impact Awards, commented, “This year we saw twice as many entries, but more importantly the judges were impressed by the incredible calibre of those entries too. Therefore to reach the shortlist and to walk away with a trophy is a remarkable achievement.”

About Cision
Cision is the leading provider of software, services, and tools to the public relations and marketing communications industry. PR and marketing professionals use our products to help manage all aspects of a campaign – from identifying key media and influencers to connecting with audiences, monitoring traditional and social media, and analysing outcomes. Journalists, bloggers and other influencers use Cision’s tools to research story ideas, track trends and maintain their public profiles. Cision AB has offices in Europe, North America and Asia, partners in 125 countries and is quoted on the Nordic Exchange with revenue of SEK 1.1 billion in 2010. For more information, visit uk.cision.com.

lucy.griffin@cision.com