I doubt that most consumers of digital media are even aware of this phenomenon. The political implications are massive.

It has significant implications for the PR and marketing industries. My first thought is that it steers marketers to advertising, which would add up given that this is the primary revenue stream for the sites in question.

http://m.democracynow.org/stories/11898

You can click on the cover page to get stuck in.

It’s been a busy few months – not only did I become a dad but I also launched a new PR agency in Sydney under the brand Encoder Public Relations.  The feedback so far has been really positive.

Our approach is to provide clients with a distinctive range of PR services. These services are designed to help clients navigate the changing media landscape, understand their audience and communicate in a way that is relevant and effective in the digital age.  We’re focused on delivering audience insights and executing through visual and rich media communication. We sit under the WPP Australia banner and are based in North Sydney.

A lot of people – marketing media included – have intepreted the new offering as a digital agency, this isn’t quite right.  We’re digitally-led but we’re very much focused on integrated strategy and execution across traditional media and events.  When we talk about media in Encoder PR terms, we’re talking about the broadest possible definition – traditional, digital, social etc.  We belive that clients need to challenge their assumptions about their audiences and media consumption, it’s all very well to talk about engagement and social media but we need to drill a bit deeper than this.

We have set up a group blog on the website, which will provide us with an opportunity to share news, insights and clients updates/case studies.

I am really keen to meet with any interested parties in Australia with a view to form partnerships (we’re referring to ‘collaborators‘) and as a chance for me to explain what Encoder PR is all about and gather feedback.

I will still blog here.  I’ve added the Encoder PR web link to the blog roll.

I won't abide it Jess!

Organisations need to spread their social media function across their business and stop thinking about it purely as a ‘task’ to be ‘managed’ by the marketing department.

That’s my reaction to Nina Hendy’s story in the SMH this week on the question of whether its appropriate for brands to outsource their social media programs to agency partners.

Outsourcing social media is ghost posting.  As voters, we don’t accept it from politicians and as consumers we shouldn’t accept it from business. As advisors to brands we should push back against it.

I don’t blame marketers that look to agencies to help them engage in social media.  In most cases, those outside of the marketing department are failing to ‘get’ the role of social media in business and an even smaller number are prepared (or they’re unable) to provide resources (human or $) in support of social media programs.  Social media has no mandate in many organisations, despite everyone’s general sense ‘that they should be doing something’.

‘It’s the marketing department’s problem’

In an ideal world (which is a place I hope we’ll eventually get to at least in the context of this issue) the responsibility for brand engagement within social media is insourced, its shared amongst multiple departments within an organisation i.e. customer service, product development, sales, product management etc.  These  customer facing functions or specific individuals within them would represent the organisation in accordance with a set of social media policies.

Responsibility for social media engagement is built into job descriptions.  The organisation is demonstrably open and communicative, it has a scalable engagement strategy that doesn’t come to a screaming halt because the marketing manager is on holiday or the agency has used up its retainer for the month!

It’s authentic. Employees learn directly from customers.  The list of advantages goes on.

In fact, I’d argue that the marketing team shouldn’t be engaging in social media as brand representatives.  Consumers want to hear from specialists in their field with the authority to take action and provide information, in the same way that media and analysts don’t want to speak to marketing people.

The role of the marketing team in this best practice scenario is to create the strategies and the policies, oversee the process, advise on issues, create content, track results and design and deliver training content. 

And the role of the agency?

The agency (probably PR agency):

• Supports the marketing team by providing advice, creative ideas and scalability across each of these areas
• Plays a key role as an advisor in the event of a reputational issue or crisis.
• Is responsible for managing the social media monitoring program, including benchmarketing
• Provides the client with advice on strategy as the program evolves
• Provides direction and inspiration in the form of campaigns that supplement day to day engagement
• Creates content for the program
• Delivers training and advises on trends and developments in social media

Simples!

This is best practice (if you ask me).

Fundamentally, I believe that employees should be representing organisations in social media, not agencies.

Not only is it more authentic and credible, it will also provide your customers with a more valuable experience and most importantly, its sustainable.  Even better, if managed in the right way it can become a strategy for employee engagement.

Social media provides the opportunity to bring brands to life online by directly engaging with individual consumers – this is a whole-of-business function, which cannot be dependant on the unpredictable and often transient relationships that exist between client and agency.

Marketing people should be advocating this approach and they should be knocking on their CEOs door to make it happen.  For a case study, look at Ford Motor Company in the US, which has a goal to get 1% of its global workforce (2,000 people) active in social media sharing their own perspectives, experiences, thoughts and knowledge as Ford employees.

]]> http://justanother24hours.com/social-media/brands-should-tighten-grip-on-social-media-by-beginning-to-take-it-seriously/feed/ 0 http://justanother24hours.com/social-media/twitter-is-one-social-media-platform-is-it-right-for-your-business/ http://justanother24hours.com/social-media/twitter-is-one-social-media-platform-is-it-right-for-your-business/#comments Sat, 28 Aug 2010 13:08:46 +0000 Daniel Young http://justanother24hours.com/?p=1225

A recent research project by Edelman and Brandtology identified Twitter as the top channel for technology brand mentions in Australia.  The Whirlpool and Overclockers forums ranked in second and third place respectively.  I believe that these findings are reflective of a mature social media environment for technology brands in Australia.

Google, Apple and Microsoft ranked as the most talked about technology brands in the study which uncovered more than 154,000 mentions of 60 major technology brands across 581 influential online channels between April and June 2010.

The survey found that 27 of the 60 technology brands researched did not have a local presence on Twitter.  This represents an ‘opportunity for brands to…become smarter about communicating through this channel,’ according to Edelman.

But is Twitter the right channel for all technology brands?  I don’t think so.

Take the enterprise tech sector as an example (the study covered: ‘Internet and Software, Consumer Electronics, Mobile and Telecommunications, Business and Consulting and IT and Technology brands).  This  sector of the IT industry is characterised by complex technology and business issues that aren’t well suited to the  open Twitter platform limited as it is to 140 character updates.

Enterprise tech brands tend to be most interested in reaching senior decision makers within medium to large organisations – individuals that are less likely to be spending time on Twitter.  These brands need to demonstrate authoritative positions on commercially sensitive and strategic issues.  Twitter just isn’t designed or suitable as a platform for this sort of discussion or engagement.

With these facts in mind, I would be inclined to recommend that enterprise tech brands seek to establish online communities where customers can engage with experts and product specialists but also – importantly – share ideas and experiences with other customers.   I would look to the social media platforms where these targets are already active, the most obvious one being Linkedin.

It’s important that organisations monitor conversations about their brands across all forms of social media, including Twitter, but the most ‘active’ channels aren’t necesarily the best places to actually engage your target audience in a meaningful way.

There are a number of factors that would lead you to expect that brands operating in Australia would be investing heavily in social video content and leveraging the large user communities in the top sites, such as YouTube.

These factors are:

1. The simple fact that Australians are demonstrating a huge appetite for online video.  Close to a billion, yes a billion, videos were consumed by Australians in the month of January 2010. A billion in one month, or 33.3 million per day, or 23,148 per minute.
2. Video and mobile. 42% of online Australians use a smartphone, according to Nielsen.  Everything is going mobile, therefore brands need to provide content that works well on mobile devices.  The answer is video.
3. Because the average online Australian spends more than 6.52  hours per month in social media (Nielsen).
4. Video content is three times more clickable than text – this is an anecdotal fact that I hear quoted regularly. I don’t have a source for it, I’m afraid.
5. YouTube is emerging as one of the leading search engines.
6. The media landscape is shrinking, presenting fewer opportunities for brands to engage with their target audience.  Therefore, brands have to seize the initiative and begin creating their own branded content.  That content could take many forms; educational and how to guides; infotainment; news; opinion; video based campaigns and so on.

The fact is that 65 per cent of the brands that we studied did not have an official brand presence in the top social video sharing sites. That figure is a little disappointing but not tragic – the bad news is that more than (just over) 50 per cent of the corporate channels were inactive, which we generously defined as having not been updated for more than 2 months.

Now, this inactive issue is one we have encountered before.  It points to the issue of brands engaging without the necesary resources or strategy or integration in place.  We’re not saying this stuff is easy but I strongly feel that no presence is preferable than an inactive / dormant account.

Here is the full presentation and a link to the press release on our local website:

One of the challenges when conducting this research is identifying a credible list of companies that can act as the sample for the research.  In this case, we used the Nielsen Top Advertisers Report for 2009.  We worked with Nielsen to make sure that they were comfortable with our methodology for the study.  It’s important to stress that the study does not assume any direct link between media spend and social media strategy or between advertising content and social media.

It’s possible that the methodology caused us to miss video content that is being produced by these brands because it is served via their own corporate website, or a third party channel provider (such as Viocorp) or Facebook.  That could be the case but it still represents a missed opportunity.  If you’re creating video content then you may as well make it available via the most popular online video service, even if your primary video channel is hosted elsewhere.

The research is far less rigourous and detailed than anything that Nielsen would do (for obvious reasons) .  Having said that, we do feel that the research produced some interesting findings.  It can act as a benchmark for brands in Australia that want to assess their social media engagement and presence against industry as a whole.

We’ve worked on quite a few of these now.  It follows our study into the use of social media (Facebook, Twitter, blogs) by twenty top Australian brands and an evaluation of online newsrooms.  For both of these studies we drew the sample companies from the Interbrands Best Brands report.

Have all of the leaves fallen off of your marketing program for the 2010 fiscal period?

Or, have you started stripping leaves to ensure that the full year budget is spent before the end of June?

Deciduous Marketing leads to consecutive campaigns targeting big groups of customers when simultaneous campaigns  with each targetting relevant / interested groups of customers would be more effective.  It is one reason why brands generally have a poor understanding of their customers.

Maybe its time your re-evaluated your marketing processes and approaches.

It is an interesting area for PR consultants to get involved with as it provides an issues rich environment for them to really add value through research, insight and execution. 

The best PR practitioners recognise that thought leadership presents an opportunity for their client to add value to its customers and differentiate itself.  In practice, PRs often struggle to find clients that can enunciate and commit to a thought leadership position.  

Organisations encounter a number of issues when it comes to executing against a thought leadership strategy:

1. They believe that thought leadership exposes them to risk – what if people disagree?
2. They’re happy to fly below the radar – no-one else is taking a position so why should we?
3. They don’t have the industry insights required to take a credible position on a topic
4. They don’t have the individual talent to deliver the content or are unwilling to invest in it 
5. They’re focus is lead generation and sales – they don’t see the reputational value in thought leadership
6. They’re not prepared to invest in the necessary research or partnerships required to establish a thought leadership strategy
7. They unable to take an industry view - their industry perspectives are insular, biased and self serving
8. Marketing investments are focused on promotional outcomes, rather than ongoing corporate objectives

Occasionally, you see organisations jumping onto an issue because it has become a business imperative, a good example of this is the Environment where many organisations are keen to be seen to be doing the right thing.  Don’t get me wrong, I believe that most companies are genuine in their intention to reduce their impact on the environment but the adoption of these goals was largely responsive in nature – it become a business imperative.  It was not a proactive altruistic motivation that could be described as genuine thought leadership.

The challenges in this area can be mighty frustrating for the PR agency and in-house team that recognise the opportunities presented by thought leadership to:

1. Build positive brand perceptions
2. Proactively lead the media agenda and add value to media relationships
3. Initiate discussion and generate publicity
4. Provide PR campaigns with a consistent theme or message
5. Raise the profile of senior executives
6. Add value to their industry and been seen as a positive contributor
7. Motivate and engage employees and partner organisations
8. Help drive a shared agenda with stakeholders
9. Engage new audience groups; Government; Industry Associations; Industry Leaders

I think the importance of thought leadership will grow in the future as brands become more attuned to their customers and marketplace.  Brands will need an agenda in order to ensure the sustainability of their online communities.  They’ll need to have opinions and insights in order to drive activity online and empower customer advocates.  They’ll also need to respond to increasing customer expectations about the role that their brand of choice plays in the community.

As a result, we’ll see brands re-assessing their thought leadership strategy and working to identify the relevant opinion platforms for their business.  I think we’ll begin to see support from brands for thought leadership topics that genuinely reflect the interests of their community and, as a result, more credible, personalised, actionable and specific. 

What do you think? Does this also apply to individuals online?  Will it become more important to take a personal position on an issue or are we more likely to exist in communities that reinforce our own world view?

It is particularly true today.  The Internet has empowered consumers to challenge, advocate and interact with the companies of their choosing via readily available and inexpensive forms of mass media.

Marketing conversations were largely one dimensionl pre-Internet.  Regular and hopefully relevant messages were filtered via various marketing channels and disciplines to the end customer.  They were generally self serving:

Look at this new product!
Take up this offer on this new package!
Here’s what we think about this. Aren’t we smart/committed/interesting?

The conversations were intermittent and short lived – more often than not the communication existed to drive sales, acquire new customers or build a brand image.  Budgets and marketing finance decisions were similarly focused on near-term outcomes.  Business priorities  were identified at the beginning of the year and then in quarterly planning cycles.  Dollars, Pounds, Rupee, Dinar etc. would be allocated.

Most companies still manage their marketing programs in this way today.

At the end of the fiscal year, if the marketing department has done its ‘job’ properly, all of the dollars are spent.   Like a deciduous tree all of the leaves have fallen off and the tree remains bare for a period of time .

The conversation goes on hold.

This isn’t a problem if the company is continually talking about itself but if the company has been successful in initiating a conversation, then consumer’s will notice – unhappily.

Many well established marketing practices are no longer relevant or useful in the context of social media, including traditional approaches to budgeting.  Social media demands that brands commit fully to the online conversation – you can’t pull in and pull out when it suits you.

One way for companies to tackle this issue is to embed social media engagement (and related costs) inside standard business process.

Ford has a plan to have 2% of its workforce telling the story of their lives at Ford via social media.  This combined with a dedicated resource for social media strategy and measurement allows the company to engage in authentic conversation over the l0ng term.

Failure to identify the necessary resources for social media engagement is one of the main reasons why projects fail to get off the ground, in my experience.  Lack of resources is one issue but cultural and procedural structural barriers to the long term view are another.

Senior marketing professionals need to adjust their mindset, and that of their organisation, to the new dynamics of social media and continuous conversation.

Each media site has its own visibility rating based on a combination of data points, the site’s physical characteristics (i.e. location, lumination etc.) and eye tracking data, which is charted on Move’s Opportunity To See (OTS) and Likelihood To See (LTS) metric.  

Could such a system be applied to PR measurement online?  What is the Likelihood To See (LTS) of a blog post (a product review for example) or a recommendation on Twitter?  The PR industry is hamstrung by the Advertising Value Equivalence measurement model, which serves it poorly.

There is a need for the PR industry to develop an industry standard for measurement, which isn’t related to advertising spend.  Every campaign has its own set of objectives but there should be some foundation metrics in place for measuring the impact of PR campaigns that result in online coverage and social media activity.