Social Marketing & Digital Agency

Unless you have living under a rock for the last week, you will know all about Facebook’s new design. It’s a gorgeous design; I have it and I love it, yet it is a stalker’s dream, with stuff you thought had long fallen away (in fact, HAD long fallen away) suddenly up front and easily accessible to anyone you allow to view your profile.

In addition there are the ‘patterns’ that Facebook has been very upfront about admitting was one of the main components of its redesign, and which make it far easier to track your behaviour so it’s easier to sell stuff to you that you might want to buy. Which I don’t personally have a problem with as I don’t mind being targeted for ads; in fact I would prefer to have targeted ads than any other sort, and would prefer them to paying for social media if I am honest.

So this isn’t written to scare you off Facebook, or indeed Google+, Tumblr, YouTube, Twitter, or any other place you connect socially online, because the truth is that they are so ingrained now that the you simply can’t close Pandora’s Box, and nor would many of us want to because they give us and society too many benefits. This article is just to remind you that these sites are free for a reason. And that is because it gives them access to demographics and data, which when taken all together makes the Magna Carta and every census in every country look like a bit of graffiti in the park, of the “I wuz ere” variety, because it’s by selling that information to businesses that they make their living.

However, what I do object to is people I don’t know and aren’t providing me with a service, or paying those that are, having access to personal data including, though not exclusive to, where I live, where I am going, and if I am away from home. I also don’t want to think that my children’s faces are making a paedophile happy, that a stalker could target them easily, or that they open themselves out to identity theft or online phishing. I also don’t want them to regret anything later in life – I actually suspect that that digital transparency will be the norm when they are grown up, and that anyone who doesn’t have a full online digital profile will be regarded with suspicion (Where have you been? Who are your friends? Who ARE you?!), and that quite a bit of silly youthfulness will be taken as given, but still… I don’t want them to be caught out later because my theory turns out to be wrong!

So here are some points for you to remember – and to teach to your kids:

1. Everyone is now a Celebrity
Google indexes your Facebook feeds, your Tumblr blogs and your tweets and lots of other things you forget about 5 minutes after you post them. And sticks. You are a celebrity, or a brand if you prefer, which is a great thing for raising your personal profile if you do it right, and will obviously be a bad thing if you post swear words, drunk pictures and stupid comments etc etc.

2. People are watching.
That creepy guy you remember from primary school?

He’s found you online, he’s connected to people you know, and he can read everything about you on your Facebook page.

The Ex you wish you never met?
She can Google you and get your up to date life story in a flash, not to mention where you are going tonight. And with whom.

Your future employer
Let’s hope she or he is liking what they see.

3. Online Behaviour Creates a Digital Tattoo
It’s there, and once it’s there it’s indelible and since it is now officially OK for people to do social media background checks, that means that unless you have set your privacy consistently across every network and been careful about what you post, everything is accessible if people want to search for it. And maybe they won’t – but if you are looking for a mortgage or applying for a job that you’ve been dreaming about forever, people COULD be searching about you on your social media  profiles… so let’s hope what is there makes them feel inclined to say yes once they have found you.

4. Everything Makes Patterns
Everything you do online is really just you, and you are a creature of habit, like all humans, and so everything you do makes lovely interesting patterns. Which not only makes it easy to target you with advertising and to market stuff to you, which is why Facebook are so into monitoring everyone’s patterns and why businesses are so interested in the data.

However, it also makes it easier for criminals to learn what you like doing, where you go, where you hang out, and who you hang out with, which can make it easier for them to steal your identity, for example, and to set you up. Say you always watch a certain programme and they review stuff you might want to buy there and then? And so you go online on your phone or laptop and buy it. But in fact you didn’t buy it because it wasn’t the real page you ‘bought’ it from but one created by fraudsters to look like the real page because they know you – and lots of people like you – will be watching and will want to buy or donate, and so they set up a replica and so harvest your credit card details. This is known as ‘Google Poisoning’ by those in the know and is currently one of the biggest online problem currently identified by Norton.

Being aware is the key, whether you are the consumer or the brand doing the selling – establishing that a site is safe and trustworthy is as important as it’s ever been, and avoidance is easy enough by setting up internet security on your computer.

5 Everyone Knows Where You Are
Social Location can be really helpful and is brilliant for businesses … and yet flipping dangerous at other times. What if, for example, you have just checked into a hotel in Italy and your privacy ISN’T set and then a potential burglar sees it…?

So, just be mindful of how much personal stuff you put up online and who can see it, and then don’t panic about all the scare stories in the media and continue to enjoy social media for what it is meant to be – the perfect way to connect socially online, and how consumers can easily and directly interact with and influence brands and businesses, and how they can easily connect with people and give them the products and services they desire.

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And if you want to talk to us about securing your online presence or building your online reputation, mail us on hello@themediamarketingco.com.

Facebook cartoon campaign leads to unexpected profits for NSPCC

Facebook is one of the hardest social sites to leverage for business profit, yet the NSPCC raised £100,000 in just 48 hours after a Facebook campaign, in which it played no part and did not instigate, called on supporters to help the charity stop child abuse.

The campaign asked supporters to ‘change your profile picture to a cartoon’ by 6 December so there are ‘no human faces on Facebook but an invasion of memories,’ according to its Facebook page. ‘This is for eliminating violence against children.’

More than 22,000 fans changed their profile pictures to those of their favourite cartoon characters, including the Wombles, the Clangers, Penelope Pitstop, Mutley, Tigger, Aristocats, Spongebob, Bagpuss, and more obscure ones, such as Noggin the Nog and Littlenose.

The NSPCC was not behind the campaign, or involved in any way, but gained than 50,000 new supporters to their Facebook page, from 118,000 fans, and 200,000 hits, up 500 per cent, to its websites. Thousands more supporters set up JustGiving pages to raise money for NSPCC.

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.

Social networking sites such as Facebook received the most web visits in May 2010 surpassing search engines for the first time in the UK.

Wednesday, 9 June 2010

According to Experian Hitwise, social media sites accounted for 11.8 per cent of web traffic, while search engines enjoyed 11.33 per cent.

Facebook was the most popular social networking site and had 55 per cent of all social media traffic – almost three times more than its closest rival YouTube.

Google is still the most popular site overall and accounted for 90 per cent of search engine traffic.

Robin Goad, research director for Experian Hitwise, said: “The majority of online marketing spend is currently diverted towards search, and this is likely to remain the case in the short to medium term.”

He added that search still remains the primary source of internet traffic as many marketers have not grasped the full potential of social media sites.

Twitter is now the third most popular social media site, overtaking Bebo and MySpace in May.

On June 2nd, Facebook revealed that the number of groups advertising on its site had quadrupled since the beginning of last year.

Leading money-saving website www.discountvouchers.co.uk
has launched a Facebook campaign to help raise funds for Sport Relief, with the company offering to donate 10p for every new Facebook fan signed up by midnight 21st March 2010 – up to a maximum of £50,000.

Anyone can become a Facebook fan by going to the DiscountVouchers.co.uk
Facebook page  and will then receive news on the latest money-saving offers
and vouchers from DiscountVouchers.co.uk, which offers deals on a wide
range of companies, including lastminute.com, Tesco, Marks & Spencer, Sky,
Argos, First Choice and many more.

Simon Terry, Managing Director of DiscountVouchers.co.uk, says: “Sport
Relief is a fantastic cause and we are willing to donate up to £50,000 to
aid the charity. However, it is up to the public how much we spend – the
more people who become fans, the money we will donate!

“Becoming a Facebook fan now has a double incentive, with anyone
registered being amongst the first to receive news of the latest
money-saving offers, plus up until midnight on Sunday, registering ensures
that we will donate even more money to Sport Relief.”

Anyone wanting to become a Facebook fan can do so by visiting
http://www.facebook.com/DiscVisc?v=wall&ref=ts#!/DiscVisc?v=wall&ref=ts.

According to Hitwise, Facebook was visited more times than Google in the week ending 13th March 2010.  This the first time that Facebook have outweighed Google in terms of visitor numbers for a whole week, and certainly is a feather in Facebook’s cap.

Hitwise reports that in the week ending 13th March 2010, 7.07% of all US internet visitors went to Facebook, this was compared to 7.03% who visited Google over the same week.

With over 400 million members, Facebook is on target to generate a revenue of over $1 billion in 2010.  As we have already seen, Facebook ads now receive more interest than Google adwords, if Facebook continue with this strength it will create a serious dent in Google’s advertising revenue and find itself becoming King of the internet.

Having a murder attributed to your business must be a bit of a blow, but to have two in one week can only be described as a catastrophe.

What’s worse is that Facebook is getting lots of bad press for apparently not helping people, juveniles in particular, if they do fear that they are being ‘groomed’.

All this bad press follows hot on the heels of the fuss about the changes in privacy settings.  Which is a shame, because Facebook is fab – it’s great for personal things and a powerful tool for business.  But Facebook can’t seem to help blundering into these media quagmires (although it is fair to say that they can’t be held responsible for the psychotic tendencies of some of its members!)

What they could do however, is be more supportive when there are problems of abuse and bullying.  We’ve been approached by Facebook members and their parents who are having problems themselves and need our assistance as they have found Facebook to be spectacularly unhelpful.  And these aren’t trivial problems – they are cases of groups of people systematically picking on individuals in a fairly major way – serious enough for the Police to take notice, but not apparently for Facebook to do anything about.

So, Facebook, please try to be more helpful in helping your members, especially your younger ones, and then maybe the tabloids won’t give you such a hard time.

Twitter is the most popular of the leading social community networks (SCNs) and interactive sites for online PR, according to a new survey of 107 PR professionals.

It narrowly beats YouTube, in second place, and Facebook, in third, as a
preferred online PR tool.

But the survey, conducted by New Venture Publishing for its new Perfect
Online PR Masterclass, finds that no SCNs or interactive sites are yet
rated as very important for PR use.

On a scale of one (not important) to five (very important) the PR pros
rated top-ranking Twitter at an average of only 2.96.

YouTube scored 2.88 and Facebook 2.73. LinkedIn was on 2.4, Flickr on 2.1,
MySpace on 1.76, Bebo on 1.67 and MSN Messenger on 1.59. Ecademy on 1.53
and Xanga on 1.47 brought up the rear.

Overall, the PR pros rated “making use of social community networks” as
only thirteenth out of fourteen possible online PR priorities for the
future. It came behind front-ranking issues such as “integrating online
with other PR activity” and “developing online PR expertise
in-house”.