Is 'social media' the problem?

I wanted to write up the IPA Social event last week, but unfortunately I've had my arm in a sling for most of the time since, so here we go a week later! I've written a few things on here about how the IPA Social stuff kicked off, which was basically about a few people talking about what we thought other people might want to also talk about. The first event last week got a lot more folk joining in, and there seem to be a few themes that keep coming up - there's obviously a big piece around measurement, which I'll leave to people who know more about it, but I'm really interested in the role of brands, and their agencies, in "social media". Over on Advergirl, Leigh House makes the point that

When we talk about consumers paying for content, we skip over how brands get into the conversation. Can we really rely on WOM networks to do the work of mass advertising? Do we all want to turn into blathering mouthpieces for our favorite brands?

(as part of a much longer and very smart series of posts on the changing economics of mass media).

And a lot of the themes are around how things are changing for every type of communications business: brands don't believe for a minute that there is a whole population waiting to promote their products if they could only design that Facebook page right, but they are getting differing advice from their different specialists on what has changed.

Is the term 'social media' the problem for marketers?
It seems that the term social media itself is counter productive - a fundamental change in how people are able to communicate with each other will naturally have knock-on effects to all businesses that deal with communications. But it will affect each differently. So 'social media' means something different to an ad agency than to a PR agency because it impacts what they have traditionally done in different ways. So the advice that clients get from their roster is that 'social media' means a range of different things. Meanwhile the customer services and IT departments are finding that it means a set of other different things outside of the marketing department but intrinsic to the brand.

When you have a range of different disciplines, advertising, digital, PR, media, etc, in a room talking about something that crosses over (and changes) each of their specialisms, you naturally get different views of what is important and how to go about achieving it. Will's written a great piece on why a brand might not want to be social, asking why you would care more about what sharing opinions with your bank than how good it is at managing your money. Which makes sense from the perspective of what has changed for advertising. There's obviously some brands that aren't inherently social. In a lot of cases, it might be counter-productive for brand built around functionality and cost to try and make itself social. But only in its advertising, in what it says about itself. These type of brands also have over-stretched customer service departments in which NOT being 'social' ie not trying to initiate open conversations with customers, is far more counter-productive to the way the brand communicates. But these are outside of the role of most of the agencies employed by a brand marketing department because they don't sit within brand marketing. One of the key challenges to brands and their agencies that people have been talking about over the last few years is moving from campaigning to committing - as in John Willshire's great analogy about bonfires and fireworks. Someone (not sure who, sorry) at the IPA Social event challenged to this, saying that surely it is about committing and campaigning. Which makes sense; there's nothing wrong with 'social media campaigns', as long as they are part of a wider change in brand behaviour; but there's no point in talking about how you are 'listening to consumers' on TV and then ignoring them in call centres, as you'll get found out quickly and publicly. Campaigning has been the domain of ad agencies, while committing fits more into what we traditionally called PR. As media relations has evolved to include geniune 'public' relations (eg liaising with non professional journalists) among other things, PR agencies have been on the coalface of brands' moves towards 'committing'. This doesn't mean that 'campaigning' doesn't still have relevance, just that it will look different from what ad agencies have traditionally done (as Robin Grant rightly points out in his write-up of the IPA event). However, lumping all these changes to various comms disciplines together and calling them 'social media' makes it harder for marketers to understand the underlying changes, or the need to act on them.

To me the terminology is wrong because it confuses cause (structural change in communications that is far bigger than just our industry) with effect (that clients' objectives are best served by having a group of specialists relevant to their business needs). In that in a lot of cases clients find it difficult to put the correct roster in place because they are equally confused by the conflicting advice from specialists who concentrate on changes happening to their own specialist areas.... which is all labelled social media.

How to generate word of mouth....FAIL

Belkin's horrible cock-ups that came to light over the weekend are a timely warning of how not to use the internet to generate conversations. If you are the sort of person who doesn't spend their weekend reading Mashable and you've missed the story, this is the gist of it
(Screengrab nicked from Engadget, as the original has been swiftly deleted)
Someone employed by Belkin posted the above on Amazon's Mechanical Turk developer marketplace, essentially offering $0.65 per post to write 5 star reviews of Belkin products, and rate down any less positive reviews. Besides the obvious dumbness of not even trying to disguise the deception, this does raise a couple of other issues:

First, tech companies have less room for mistakes when learning in public, as the potential customers they are trying to influence (often by way of tech bloggers) are so aware of marketing generally and social media ethics in particular.

Secondly the brazen nature of this request (even using his real name - not that hiding it would make it any less wrong, just less dumb) suggests that he really may not have been aware of what he was doing - potentially thinking that this might help Belkin rather than being his last act in their employment (probably). As a firm believer in Rohit Bhargava's thoughts on the power of the accidental spokesperson, I think this really highlights the importance of training throughout an organisation on dealing with power of the internet. While there are lots of examples of best practice, I'd recommend the version of Porter Novelli's that Mat Morrison shared last year as a good place to start.

For what it's worth, this is the grovel/apology from the president of Belkin. And this is the proof of how easy it is to generate online conversations if you screw up

The best Tourist Board ad in the World?

How's that for a view on the way to work?
Huge respect to the Queensland Tourist Board, whose job ad for a "Caretaker" for Hamilton Island on the Barrier Reef has so far delivered 850,000 visitors to the recruitment site for the so-called 'Best job in the World'.

The premise is that the island needs a resident caretaker/publicist, who will need to explore the land and sea over the course of their 6 month contract, and blog, video and generally show off about the fact that this comes with a £70k salary. Applications will be judged on the calibre of writing and video as well as knowledge and general suitability. 10 candidates will be flown out to Queensland to interview.

So basically, this is a UGC competition with a great prize. Ok, a prize that is better than most. But still, not out of the ordinary as competitions go. The sheer genius is the 'recruitment' spin that gives newspapers, radio stations, etc an easy hook to hang a great story on. This was all over the BBC and the national press on Monday, and back today with the news that global interest has crashed the recruitment site
I had a look at the impact this has had on UK interest in Hamilton Island in a few places. On Google Trends, I looked at the impact on the campaign across searches for Queensland as a whole, the Barrier Reef generally, and Hamilton Island specifically. Although the news volume is not really registering, search volumes show a huge spike for each of the destinations, showing that the campaign is having a halo effect across the whole state.
On Twitter, we can use Streamgraph to look at the key sentiments the campaign is generating. Interestingly 'pay' is the key outtake: not sure if this says more about Twitter's 20-40 year old professional user base than about the campaign itself though. Forum posts are showing a similar trend worldwide. In the time it has taken me to write about this post, I still haven't managed to get the Island Reef Job site working, so assuming that the demand took the QLD web guys by surprise as well. One of the beauties of Addictomatic is that by searching for this campaign alongside web developer terminology is that it took me straight to the team behind it discussing it on Twitter. So great work @xcommedia and @ckjchambers.

Being followed by the godlike genius of Stephen Fry

and I've got the Twitter email to prove it!...along with 4835 (and counting) other people.

It's great that the wonderful Mr Fry is using Twitter to publicise the Rhino conservation work that he's doing in Kenya, and also inviting followers to check TwitPics to confirm that it is actually him. He's also making a point of following back everyone who follows him (which begs the question of how much actual work he's getting done out there, what with tweets, pics and following people back....but then the same could be said about me blogging about it). To me the best bit of this is the warm fluffy feeling I got on receiving the email that (I'm sure incorrectly) suggests that one of my all time heroes might take the slightest bit of interest in what I'm talking about in return!

As you would expect from a technology guru like Stephen Fry, this campaign is a great example of how being interesting and interacting with the community leads to social media success. This can be seen on Icerocket, where activity begins to spike on the 9th October, the same day as his first Tweet, as the social capital of that 'Stephen Fry is now following your updates on Twitter' email leads to conversations.

Conversations lead in turn to more followers: although these emails have been popping up everywhere in the last couple of days, it seems that the Twitter buzz started after the first episode of Stephen Fry in America. The Streamgraph for the last 3 days shows a huge spike in activity after the show.


Not sure if there was a reference to his relaunched site, which has a 'Follow Stephen on Twitter' link on its front page, but can't wait to see more Rhino pics and how the site develops.