Will 2011 be the year of the social media fail

I recently penned an article for The Drum Magazine in their Knowledge Bank section, which uses the collective knowledge of professionals to deliver key insights into running effective marketing campaigns. I’ve reproduced it below:

A recent report by Gartner, an IT analyst firm, predicts that as many as 70 per cent of social media campaigns will fail in 2011. Whether their predictions turn out to be accurate or not, I think it’s an exciting discussion point.

Why do so many brands make the brave foray into this unpredictable, uncontrollable but ultimately rewarding world, only to fall flat on their faces? Another report by eMarketer documented that social media spend is on the rise significantly. Brands are more willing than ever to invest, but businesses are spending money for all the wrong reasons.

My theory is that it’s a lack of strategic direction, rather than a dearth in quality creative ideas, that’s driving this alarming statistic.

Let’s address the root of the problem…

The last couple of years have seen huge advances in business to consumer interaction. The traditional campaign model has largely given way to the brand as a permanent touch point, a virtual location at which consumers can get their daily dose of news, offers, social interaction, and increasingly, entertainment.

While some brands are inherently more talkable than others, less likely candidates are reaping the rewards of a social presence in other ways; by giving their brand a personality, by streamlining their customer service or by recruiting brand ambassadors to do the talking for them.

Huge numbers of brands are vying for this competitive space. Much like traditional media, social media is becoming saturated with commercial messaging and, for consumers, the novelty factor is wearing off. Brand managers are recognising this and realising that they need a knock out idea to achieve cut through at all.

Herein lies the reason behind the rise of the social media fail. There is no shortage of creative, innovative ideas, but more often than not, they have no grounding in insight and strategy.

To paraphrase Martin Thomas, co-author of Crowdsurfing and a good friend of the business, there is no such thing as a social media strategy, only a communications strategy extended across the social web. I wholeheartedly agree, but there are a number of strategic steps you can take to make sure your ideas don’t end up in the social media junkyard.

What are you looking to achieve?

First, consider your objectives and prepare to evaluate your activity against these. Are you looking to raise awareness, improve your reputation, boost sales or increase consumer engagement with your brand?

Conduct a social media audit

Are conversations already happening about your brand? If not, then you need to create something for people to talk about. If they are, then where are they happening? If there are genuine complaints, think about how you can respond sensitively and more importantly how you can take action to appease them. If people are saying nice things, think about how you can harness this positivity and give them the power to spread the love for you.

Identify common themes

Analyse the existing conversations around your brand to identify central themes to base your content around. There may be real-life problems that you could help solve, or perhaps you could harness and maximise something consumers particularly like about your brand.

Consider your audience’s behaviour

Your audience’s behaviour will inform the mechanics of your campaign. Online consumers can be classified in terms of a number of overlapping behavioural profiles. Spectators, for instance, read blogs, reviews and forums posts without engaging in conversations; Joiners maintain social networking profiles and browse other people’s; and Content Creators publish blogs, build websites and produce their own videos.

Develop compelling content

The holy grail is creating an idea that will travel, either through developing branded content that people will read, watch, talk about and pass on to their peers, or through inspiring consumers to create that content for you.

After The Drum reported that we had picked up a social media brief from household appliance brand Morphy Richards last year, one reader posted the following comment: “Just boiled some water in the new Morphy Richard kettle. Really fast. LOL.”

Why would anyone want to talk about routine tasks online? You’d be surprised: I see it every day on Twitter; I hear it down the pub without even noticing it; everyday problems need everyday solutions.

Our execution was firmly grounded in the strategic insight we had gained through our research. After identifying disparate conversations about the brand and about household issues, we developed a strategy to unite them in one location. Within the brand’s target audience, we uncovered a number of niche tribes within specialist needs – such as allergy sufferers and coeliacs – and developed content around these areas to help make people’s lives easier and more enjoyable. Finally, we recruited high-profile influencers and encouraged them to do the talking for us by letting them in on the latest product releases, sparking large numbers of positive conversations across the web.

If brands are to flourish and grow in the social media environment, they need to grow up and think in terms of addressing real life, consumer issues rather than shoehorning ideas onto the latest technological trends. Let’s hope our industries heed this call and make 2011 the year that social media comes of age, rather than proving the naysayers correct.

Life in a Day: the most ambitious crowdsourced project ever

My love for slow paced, creative cinema is well known and I’m a sucker for anything that highlights the seemingly unimportant, mundane details in people’s lives and brings out the beauty in them.

So I was intrigued to read about Life in a Day, a groundbreaking new documentary that brings together slice-of-life YouTube footage from 120 different countries on a single day.

YouTube invited people from all over the world to submit footage of what they were doing on July 24, 2010. They received over 80,000 videos (over 2,500 hours of amateur footage) and a team lead by producer Ridley Scott and director Kevin McDonald edited the choicest cuts into a 90 minute feature.

The concept (or the gimmick, depending on which way you look at it) that the film is built around is impressive enough alone for it to be worth a look.

Crowdsourcing is nothing new – whether it’s an ad, a music video or a piece of visual art – but to my knowledge, nothing has been done on this scale. This is a collaborative work of art on a truly global scale, and the sheer amount of work that went into the editing process is mindblowing.

Having not seen the film (it premiered at Sundance last week) I can’t give my own verdict, but from what I’ve read, the editing team has managed to hash together something truly spectacular, focusing the disperate subject matter around a number of key themes and emotions such as love, heartbreak, marriage and war.

Below are a couple of teaser clips that have been released, but you may have to wait for the theatrical release to see the whole thing.

Three trends from Insight Eleven

I was priviledged enough to attend the recent (Don’t Panic) Insight Eleven event at The Studio, The Hive, in Manchester, a half day seminar in which the North West’s finest came together to discuss the industry trends for 2011.

To quote a passage from the event’s website:

The event examined potential opportunities and challenges for 2011 and featured leading industry speakers from the digital, marketing and communication arenas sharing their insights on trends they believe these sectors will see in the coming year.

Among the talent on offer was Tony Fogett from Code Computerlove, Nicky Unsworth from BJL, Paul Fabretti of Origin Creative and Richard Gregory of Latitude – all of whom served up their fair share of insightful predictions and analyses.

Below I’ve outlined the trends that particularly stuck with me…

Group buying gets big

People have always negotiated group deals, or at least deals based on buying large volumes of a product or service, but we’re seeing a rise in online services built around the concept of bringing people together.

Groupon, a website that encourages friends to group together to buy a product or service at a discounted rate, was valued at a cool $1 billion last year, and we can expect to hear more from similar services like Living Social in the future.

The interesting thing about the group buying phenomenon is that it harnesses the much championed ideas of community and collaboration and creates a situation which is beneficial to both the consumer and the product or service provider. Groups of bargain hungry customers negotiate great discounts (as long as a critical mass is reached) and brands have a mechanic for attracting large numbers of people.

At the moment it exists primarily within standalone services, but in time I expect it to be seemlessly woven into the fabric of existing brand communities on platforms like Facebook, location based services like Foursquare and on brand websites in the near future.

We’re used to social networks bringing us together to share thoughts, opinions and experiences, and it seems the next logical step is deals.

Who would have thought?

Social and F-commerce becomes a reality

We’ve seen brands set up shop on Facebook to varying degrees of success (check out Levi’s and Pampers for a couple of nice examples). People can buy stuff and tell their friends at the same time. Great! Instant sales-driven word of mouth! And all the better if your product is in any way in any way trendy or aspirational as it taps into people’s desire to be seen with the latest hot ticket item.

But that’s not where the story ends…the introduction of Facebook credits will mean that the environment will become inherently tranactional. Right now, peeps can use credits to buy virtual items within games and apps, but the system will soon enough become a trusted currency to buy apps, videos, games, and tangible goods. And Zuckerberg will take a cut of it all!

Transmedia storytelling

The act of telling stories across various mediums is becoming more and more commonplace. In the transmedia environment, traditional narrative structures are  fragmented to create further opportunities to entertain and engage with audiences.

For example a campaign may tell paint a picture in various parts through television, print, social media and interactive elements, taking you on a journey that requires you to engage with each part to complete the story.

Gaining popularity through ubiquitous TV brands such as The Matrix and LOST, we’ve seen this strategy permeate the marketing world in various guises.

Audi’s Art of the Heist alternate reality game is perhaps the most complete example of this, blending a clever backstory with  live staged events and an online code cracking element to create a fully emmersive tall tail.

More recently we’ve had Coke’s Happiness Factory, in which they combined a TV ad featuring bizarre creatures living in a vending machine with an interactive website and a song featuring Cee-loo Green and co.

Are we are seeing conversation being supplemented by entertainment as the primary motivation for brand engagement? It’s certainly moving in that direction for big brands. But the broader  theme in all this is that social and other forms of digital media are interconnecting with and augmenting traditional forms of media rather than replacing them.

So those were few a few big trends that I digged. What’s caught your attention?

Return of the mack

It’s been a long time since I posted anything on this blog – almost a year and a half – and since then I’ve gone from being lowly postgrad studo to PR wonderkid (I jest…I’m still very much a novice).

You’d think I’d have a lot more to say for myself, and I guess I do…

I’ve given the blog a makeover in terms of looks and I’ll be diversifying my subject matter. The lines are so blurred these days between PR, Digital, Social, Advertising, Word of Mouth, that it doesn’t really matter. And to be honest I’m equally (if not more) interested in visual art, music, and the social context in which all this fits in, so there’ll be bits of that thrown in for good measure.

In that case I should probably think about changing the title too…

Reflecting on the value of a PR Masters Degree

For the past week or so I’ve been basking in the afterglow of a fulfilling and well spent year, but I’m more than ready to move on. As yet another birthday passes me by I’m finally done with education – I’ve drawn it out as much as I possibly can (financially and mentally).

The course has literally flown by – particularly the summer, most of which I spent square-eyed and in a trance-like state, obsessing over the role of PR agencies in managing online word of mouth.

So after a much deserved fortnight of maxing and relaxing, I’m now offering my services (free of charge of course) to Finn Communications, where I hope to spend some quality time developing my skills. It’s my first day on the job so I can’t report much, but I feel more than welcome already.

This time off has given me time to reflect. And the question I’ve posed to myself is whether completing a PR masters degree was worth a year of my time and £3,500 , or whether I would I have been just as well off with my English Language degree and some work experience; will it help me in applying for a job and, perhaps more importantly, will I see the benefits once I’ve started work?

Every year their seems to be a debate around the value of PR degrees, and this year is no different. Despite universities churning out PR graduates by the hundreds, this years poll found that around a third of agency bosses found PR graduates less attractive candidates than those with degrees in other subjects (it’s just as well I’ve covered both bases then).

Although I’m a little late to the table, I’d like to add to my thoughts by looking back on my time at Leeds Met and the skills I’ve developed over the last year.

One of the main arguments that employers make against PR degrees is that 1) many of the skills can be learned on the job or during work experience and that 2) traditional acedemic subjects – English, History, Economics etc. – are more academicially rigorous.

I’d have to agree that essential PR entry level skills such as writing good copy, selling-in and relationship building can and should be learned in a job environment, but I’d like to echo Trevor Morris’ point made in PR Week that knowledge gained though a PR degree will be of more use in a strategic role, maybe 2-3 years down the line.

For example becoming familiar with the various stages of the strategic planning process (see Steven Davies’ precis of Anne Gregory’s infamous model) may not seem particularly useful for wide-eyed PR newcomer, but may give them a head start when they start to generate ideas rather than just implement them.

Likewise subjects such as ethics, professionalism or critical musings on the societal role the profession may seem even less likely reference points, but it never hurts to take a step back from your work every once and a while to consider the wider implications.

And that brings me to the main point – all this is geared at providing a context in which to operate as a professional. It’s all well and good being a fantastic writer and having an eye for a news angle but if you can’t relate this to your business objectives then you’re not going to go far.

I say all this but I wouldn’t go as far as to say PR degrees are necessary or better for those entering the profession. What I will say is that personally, I feel infinitely more confident at going into the industry with a conbination of experience and academic knowledge. A year ago, I  had barely scratched the surface of what public relations was.

Social media revolution video

Here’s the latest video doing the rounds, decrying the cultural importance of social media. In keeping with the revolution theme, It’s suitably dramatic.

I’m suffering from lazy blogger syndrome

Admittedly I’ve been struggling to keep the pace with this blog recently.

I’d like to say it’s because I’ve been too busy, and although my dissertation has been taking up lots of of time, I’ve come to the conclusion that I like to think I’m busier than I actually am.

For all my dilligence, I somehow still find time to indulge my fair shair of fruitless activities, such as lying in bed till mid morning, devouring bottles of red wine, eating curry and watching 3 hour foreign films.

I suspect the real reason for my comparative lack of enthusiasm concerns a declining readership.  As any resonably sane person will tell you, It’s no fun speak to yourself – although in cognitive terms it’s pretty much essential – and it’s the same with blogging.

I first started this blog as part of the ‘PR and New media’ module on my MA and, with everyone posting / commenting weekly, it became a bit of blogging community. As far as I know – and I’m sorry if I’m mistaken – I’m the only one who has continued to blog, the upshot of which being that my posts are now only attracting sporadic random comments and spam.

Being heard amongst the cacaphony of blogs and tweets is perhaps the most difficult task facing most content creators in the online environment and it’s one that I’ve yet to master.

But excuses aside, I formally pledge to post and comment more frequently than I have been doing.

Two weeks from now, I can forget about education for the time being and devote more time to my next task; persuading someone to give me a job in a progressive, digitally minded PR consultancy. And to my knowledge, a well written blog is the most powerful tool in an unemployed PR graduates armoury.

Following Chris Norton’s advice, I’m going to give my blog a facelift and host it myself because frankly, despite my best efforts to make the best of the limited wordpress.com platform, it still looks rubbish.

Anyway, watch this space.

More PR’s exposed as fakers on the web: the lastest astroturfing scandal

When will the PR profession learn that ethics matter more than ever on the web?

And we’re not talking Kantian ideals here, just plain old honesty and transparency. Since I started studying PR last september, I’ve consistently heard how we are moving away from the nefarious practices of spin and outright lying that have put the profession to shame in the past, towards a new era of honest and open communication.

That’s the promise of social media, or so we’re told.

I say the PR profession, but we’d all like to think it’s only a small assortment of crooked individuals (and in this case an army of eager-to-please interns) that operate on, or over, this ethical borderline. But unfortunatlely those are the cases that often stick in the minds of the public.

The lastest case concerns a PR agency that has been having an unprecidented amount of success on behalf of its iPhone App clients.  Evidently the agency has been using a dedicated team of impressionable interns to parade as legitimate reviewers, posting positive reviews on iTunes and community forums (see the full report on mobile crunch here)

This is the interesting  part – effectively a confession – that was forwarded to Mobile Crunch by an insider informer. It’s from a Reverb company document:

Reverb employs a small team of interns who are focused on managing online message boards, writing influential game reviews, and keeping a gauge on the online communities. Reverb uses the interns as a sounding board to understand the new mediums where consumers are learning about products, hearing about hot new games and listen to the thoughts of our targeted audience. Reverb will use these interns on Developer Y products to post game reviews (written by Reverb staff members) ensuring the majority of the reviews will have the key messaging and talking points developed by the Reverb PR/marketing team.

Of course the company attempts to rebut the the claims in a statement, claiming that their interns often purchase the apps and review them based on their own merrits.

I’ll say no more, since I’m not an investigative journalist and my views are based on another article, but I’ll suffice to say than even if their claims were the case, the employees posting reviews should at the very least be fully transparent about their affiliation with the apps.

It makes me wonder how common this practice is. As a number of commenters on the Mobile Crunch article note, this sort of thing is old news; It’s been going on for some time and will continue to do so in the future as long as it’s successful.

In the meantime I hope the online community continues to be vigilant in identifying such unsavoury tactics that  continue to tar the profession with a filthy brush. It’s not PR, it’s not Marketing… it’s just cheating.

Social media and the youth of today: my two cents

I’ve been following the recent web discussion over teenagers’ consumption of media over the last however many weeks with interest, and with some amusement. There’s something rather curious about middle aged media types and city analysts foaming at the mouth over scientific (or otherwise) reports on youth behavior, in anticipation of their future commercial endevours.

It started with Morgan Stanley’s overly excited research report written by 15 year old intern Matthew Robson, which was based on his own personal observations rather than any statistically relevant data. The report was lapped up by a the largely uncritical media and interest spiralled from there.

At first glance much of the report seems intuitive, for example:

• Teenagers don’t want to pay for music
• The aren’t regular listeners of radio, but prefer streaming services like Last.fm
• They eschew advertising (doesn’t everybodythese days?)
• They generally don’t read newspapers, they prefer it summarised on television.

As a case study of the habits and opnions of a teenage boy and his friends, the report is insightful and provides ample food for thought, but to take it as anything more than the subjective opinion of an individual, albeit an insider, is ridiculous.

My view is that young Matthew never intended it to be paraded as a statistically relevant research report, and neither did the Morgan Stanley executives. “No one I know reads a newspaper” he says; It’s a self consciously personal perspective.

Irrespective, it was a powerful piece of PR and that was quite possibly the motivation behind it. It gained exposure in the Telegraph, Guardian and Financial Times among others, and created some a wealth of discussion in the social media sphere.

Outside the world of investment banking and the mainstream press, the report has attracted criticism from those decrying its limited worth.

The social media community has rightly picked up on the apparently empty conviction that teenagers don’t use twitter because 1) they have to pay to text the service, money which they would rather spend on texting friends and 2) once they realsise no one is viewing their tweets, the service is rendered pointless.

The first point is pretty ignorant, as most tweets are posted on the web or third party applications, but the second point makes more sense. I suspect the picture is a more complex one however.

One of the most enjoyable posts I read was ironically by another teenage intern, Adam Bernstein, over at social media consultancy We Are Social‘s blog (find it here). He systematically picks apart the the inconsistancies in the report and provides some interesting counter arguments. Essentially though, they are the isolated views of yet another teenager.

Recently, statistical analysis by Neilson has confirmed that yes, young people generally don’t tweet, and not just teens. Only 16% of twitter users are under 25. Now that’s more suprising. But the question posed by Mashable today, is why?

I would suggest the reasons are manifold:

• Twitter is an open network and many people are attracted to it in order to widen their personal networks, promote something, share resources or at least connect with people they don’t know in the real world.
• Use is often connected to a profession, a hobby or a cause. Those that don’t have these are more suited to general chatter on other networks, which are at first glance more dynamic social environments.
• Like Adam writes in his post, young people already populate Facebook, Myspace and Bebo, which are much more suited to connecting with existing social groups.

Anyway, I’m just adding further speculation. Ill let you make your own mind up…

Research Log 1: Is PR the word-of-mouth discipline?

As the concluding part of my masters degree, I’m undertaking research about ‘the use of social media in aiding the spread of word of mouth communication in the public relations industry’, and, to get this blog firing on all cylinders again (I’ve neglected it of late), I am going to document some of the process over the coming weeks.

My interest in word-of-mouth arose  before I decided to embark on the PR career path, through reading ‘the tipping point’, Gladwell‘s insightful treatise on social epidemics and, through Richard Darwkins and Dan Dennett, learning about ‘memes’, units of human cultural transmission.

After studying PR for a year, I have come to believe that it should be the discipline for word-of-mouth generation, due to its focus on influencers and personal relationships. Social media has provided new platforms for word-of-mouth to spread more quickly and widely, albeit often without the validity afforded by ‘real-world’ conversations with peers.

Despite this, there seems to be very little discussion in the industry and virtually none in the PR academic world. It is most commonly described as a marketing discipline which, to me, implies consumer-to-consumer (transactional) relationships, but shouldn’t word-of-mouth be encouraged between different stakeholders at the organisational level as well?

Anyway, my aim is to find out where online word of outh fit’s in with the public relations agenda, and I’m in the process of interviewing practitioners about it at the moment. I’ll make sure to post some of my, and their, thoughts in the next week.