Credible communication must now evolve from directional messages to consumer participation and brand engagement. While we may be at the very beginning of this evolution, it’s important for the communications industry to recognize the need for a different set of skills and a better understanding of this new landscape.

How do you navigate this elusive yet essential social media trail with confidence and aplomb? ‘Jump right in’ says social media evangelist and blogger Nixdminx.

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Guest post written by Nixdminx

Recently there has been a lot of buzz on the blogosphere whether bloggers should be paid for coverage after it had emerged that a few bloggers were offered money by a PR agency in exchange for shining some positive light on their social media campaign.

Here at Brando Social we believe in a mutual relationship with our team of bloggers. Key in these relationships is to provide each blogger with creative, relevant content to share with their peers or their communities. We never try to target bloggers at random since this wouldn’t be any different from actually spamming them. This formula enables us to “pay” our bloggers with high quality content rather than with real currency. Again, incentives do not have to be monetary.

In our daily work we deal with people who are passionate about something, this might be a product, a brand or an initiative. It’s this passion we are trying to harness and it works quite simple: Someone who loves your message will pass it on (for free). Again, mutual trust is key, not just between you and your blogger, but also between the blogger and his peers. We believe that involving money can break this trust. In the worst case this will either result in negative PR for us or our client or it will cause our blogger to lose their audience. “Bought” opinions always come with a certain amount of bias and that’s where the whole construct clashes with our values we hold so dear, honesty and openness. Once your online reputation is damaged it’s very difficult to get it fixed; unlike offline reputation, which can fade with time, online reputation will always stay on the Internet and there is not a lot we can do to save it. If you like, see the Internet as a massive eternal storage.

Safeguarding credibility is very important in social media & PR alike. We’ll be always judged by our actions, therefore anyone overly endorsing one brand or product would be soon exposed as an advertiser rather than advocate.

Paying for coverage is something we do not advocate, and quite frankly, if you are creative in your approach you should never be forced to go down that route in the first place.

We’d like to hear your stance on this topic. Does the end justify the means?

Paul Bradshaw’s course at Birmingham City Uni includes some work placement and hands-on doing.

Teaching takes place in small groups. There will be a mixture of lectures, seminars, research workshops, presentations and field-trips. In exploring and innovating in research in social media you will work with other students and engage with professional practitioners, interacting and disseminating ideas through websites, blogs, Twitter and other social media as well as at networking events.

Jamie, Neville and Dan have shared their thoughts. Now I’m going to wade in.

Because for some, there’s no beating learning on the job. And have no doubt, there are going to be more of these jobs to learn on. We’re going to have more need of people who can do, as well as think.

A vocational approach could prove to be a more affordable and realistic option for many grads (the BCU course is £4K and lasts 48 weeks), while at the same time delivering people with a skill set that is an exact fit with the requirements of social media businesses right now.

Let me be clear: I’m not suggesting there isn’t room for both approaches.

What I am asking for is help in defining those more practical tasks you think the holder of a Masters in Social Media ought to be able to accomplish.

For example:

• Able to quantify and cost a social media proposal - understand and value KPIs
• Perform a top level (and ideally deep level) brand listening audit - demonstrate effective use of listening technologies. Be able to advise effective response strategies based on analysis of that listening.
• Identify influencers, score for influence and sentiment
• Perform basic network analysis to identify relationships between users, influential nodes and important connectors
• Know and practice the basics of social media etiquette and demonstrate this in both their professional life and in building their own social graph (via blogs, forums, social networks etc). Demonstrate through action the value of partipation.
• Be able to identify a community of purpose and its needs and work with that community to build solutions that community will find useful enough to want to share (create social currencies).
• What else should be added? What should be removed? Add your comments please.

Is this in the remit of a Masters? Should it be? Does it matter what the qualification is called?

We welcome your thoughts because we’d really like to see something fellow social media practitioners will value, creating useful industry standards along the way.

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He dropped in at Brando Social to share his thoughts about the platform and future of newspapers in a networked world.

The award serves to celebrate the wealth of female speakers and practitioners of social media living in UK. In doing so its objective is to challenge the current under-representation of females on event panels by offering a high profile platform for women.

In the running is Suw Charman-Anderson who is currently in talks with Brando Social to join the Consult team. More on that from David Cushman at a later date.

Anyone can nominate a person to be one of the five speakers at the final event, to be held in April 2009, here. 

The five will be selected through a poll of industry members, hosted on the Social Glue blog. By asking some of the UK’s best connected social media users to utilise their medium of expertise in order to promote themselves across Twitter, their blogs and respective communities we are ensuring maximum exposure for the competition, nominee pool as a whole and associated sponsors.

Each speaker will choose a subject they want to present about (subject to liaison with the event guardians to avoid any cross-over on the day).

Speeches from the event will be video recorded (courtesy of Wordia.com) and hosted on a dedicated competition site built by Brando Social. The site will then host a further round of voting by the industry at large (open to those outside of the UK) to choose a winner. All profits from ticket sales for the event will be donated to the Macmillan’s Cancer charity. The event winner gets to choose which specific sector of the wide-ranging care offered by Macmillans will benefit.

Additional prizes for the winner will be subject to event sponsors.

Social media is now the largest of all media, accounting for 50% of all time spent by consumers. Brands and organisations can no longer ignore it or expect that social media can be something they consider fringe or experimental activity - it should be core to what they do.

The Cossette-owned Band & Brown Group has launched a full service social media agency to help guide clients with support from some of the biggest names in the business.

Brando Social is led by ex-JWT digital specialist Jamie Burke and has a roster of non-executive consultants headed by permanent strategist Director of Social Media and Adage Top 20 Blogger David Cushman.

Cushman said “Our people are global authorities - published authors, world-class speakers, deeply ingrained and experienced in social media. We advise organisations on how to adapt to the rapidly changing media landscape and flourish in a networked world”

Consultants are available on a retained or project-by-project basis. They include Alan Moore, the inventor of ‘engagement marketing’, Dr Chris Thorpe, technology advisor to MySpace and The Guardian and Luke Brynley-Jones who founded the UK’s first social networking consultancy.

To celebrate these brilliant minds joining our team we will be hosting an intimate morning with these key-note speakers as they discuss:

If you’d like the whole white paper to download, copy, share, whatever, it’s all yours right here.

Examples of success with social media are myriad. Here are a few examples complete with links to investigate further.

• Dell IdeaStorm:

Dell calls on its users to tell them how to make better products. The result is products more people want. Thousands of ideas. Draws on the idea that the cleverest people don’t work for you – and none of us is as clever as all of us.

• Cadbury’s Gorilla ads mashed-up on youtube

Cadbury’s didn’t grant permission, didn’t enable and didn’t encourage. But there are now more than 1000 versions on youtube, spoofs, mash-ups etc. One ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’ was copied as an official TV ad.

• Subservient Chicken garnered about 14 million unique visitors and 396 million hits to date, through Adweek here (March 7, 2005).
• Up Your Budget Treasure Hunt for Budget Car Rental in 2005, the first ever blog-based viral marketing campaign, promoted entirely through bloggers and blog advertising - with no traditional marketing whatsoever. The results: one million unique visits to the site, 2,000 registered treasure hunters, and over 10 million page views in only four weeks. The clue videos were downloaded a total 43,000 times. There were 19.9 million blog advertising impressions at an average cost of 33 cents.
• Click TV - Blogger Relations for Click TV (April 17, 2006): An outline of a blogger relations campaign for a Web 2.0 company
• Fiskateers for Fiskars, who make crafting tools. Branded mentions of Fiskars products are up more than 400% on a per-week basis since the program began (2007)
• Coca Cola’s Community Approach to Second Life (April 17, 2007): Coca-Cola’s new social media strategy in Second Life featured an approach other than buying real estate and creating a store, SeaWorld San Antonio: Journey to Atlantis (May 3, 2007): The launch and results of an “event” site to support the opening of a new ride.
• Splashcast’s Social Media for Marketing: (May 16, 2007): Splashcast used social media for marketing purposes, and succeeded by directly engaging the community.
• GeoCommons Social Media News Release (May 29, 2007): An outline of the pitfalls and successes of releasing news
• New Adventures of Old Christine (June 14, 2007): The show was about to get a new day and time, and she thought outreach to parent bloggers was a perfect fit.
• Sci Fi Channel Digital Press Tour (July 12, 2007): Sci Fi channel begins blogger relations program by providing access to filming sets Sci Fi, Channel via Marketing Roadmaps
• Goodwill’s Social Media Strategy (August 29, 2007): How Goodwill used social media to rebrand its vintage clothing, Livingston Communications
• Five Lessons from the SIGGART Online Word of Mouth Campaign (August 30, 2007): This eco-friendly aluminum water bottles company chalked up tons of quantifiable results, including 8000 unique visitors who visited for an average of 17 minutes
• Hugh Macleod marketing Stormhoek wine entirely through blogs and social networking. (Sept. 17, 2007)
• Gates Foundation ED in ‘08 (Sept. 25, 2008): This very successful case study shows social media tools from video to Facebook, and calls to action like ordering endorsement kits.
• Social Media Case Study: CMP’s TechMash (September 27, 2007) Social media forms used to garner attendance at CMP event
• Dell Computers does a complete 180 and reverses Jarvis’ Dell Hell to become a company admired across social media circles. And Jarvis writes them up for their great progress in BusinessWeek (October 18, 2007).
• Squidoo is profitable, and without venture capital, Viget Labs and Seth Godin (December 18, 2007)
• The White House uses social media to get the word out on drug policies (December 18, 2007)
• ITToolbox, who’ve grown their social network for IT professionals into multi-million business with more than $8 million in ad sales, and 1.7 million pages of user generated content as of Jan. 1, 2008.
• Sony drives approximately 11,000,000 million visits to 30 Days Night moviecontests page using Facebook widget (reported by Forrester’s Jeremiah Owyang, January 29, 2008)
• Nokia’s Mosh creates more than 200,000 rabid friends, almost 30 million downloads through crowd-sourcing
• H&R Block Friends Stressed Out Taxed Americans on Twitter (reported by Social Media Explorer, March 21, 2008)
• Disney’s continued MySpace Step Up 2 the Streets success yields a surprise box-office hit; it also managed to expand the movie’s already sizeable and enthusiastic group of fans. The movie’s MySpace profile has more than 156,000 friends (March 24, 2008, AdAge).
• Neat Receipts Becomes a Hit with Mommy Bloggers (SHIFT Communications, April 2, 2008).
• The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Pandemic Flu Leadership Blog: HHS engaged national leaders and the online pandemic flu community through its 5-week blog summit (June 2007).
• Joffrey’s Coffee & Tea Company drove traffic to their site, increased buzz and branded in social media and the blogosphere using a beta test. More than 1500 blogs participated (, June 3, 2008).
• Scripps Networks - HGTV’s Rate My Space. Online community creates prime advertising real estate, generating ROI within weeks and creating continuous stream of advertising revenues. Success leads to companion television series - social media successfully serves to bridge gap between online and on-air (NY Times, June 19, 2008).
• Adidas leverages mobile social media to increase retail revenues 20x around NBA All Star game in Vegas (Event Marketer, June 24, 2008).
• The Nature Conservancy leverages Facebook and Digg for cause marketing: How TNC raised nearly $75,000 through Facebook Causes and a partnership with Lil Green Patch, a popular Facebook application. The group has also built significant brand awareness through the social news site Digg! (As reported by Jonathon Colman of TNC, September 29, 2008).
• Comcastcares: US company changes perceptions with customer service outreach programme initiated through twitter.

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3. User developed activity in this space:

* Users creating and sharing videos
* Users creating and sharing images
* Users creating and sharing polls
* Users creating and sharing mash ups (taking two or more pieces of content or function to a new one)
* Users creating and sharing audio
* Users creating and sharing text
* Users aggregating things they are interested in and sharing these

Examples of the impact of user generation.

Google searches every piece of content on the web (provided it is not password protected).

It does not distinguish between user generated and professionally created content.

Users have already created more content than professionals. The web is tipping towards UGC as its dominant mode.

There are 80M+ blogs – serving every imaginable niche.

There has been more content uploaded to youtube in the last year than has been broadcast in the whole of TV history.

We are shifting towards a culture of participation rather than passive consumption.

Models which enable and encourage user contribution are effective in increasing participation (giving users a sense of ownership of the outcome with the value inherent in that).

And by creating more content than professional teams can ever hope to match the result is that more content on the subject is now discoverable. The more discoverable, the more people who share the interest will be drawn to it.

Isn’t the vast majority of UGC rubbish?

This is only ever true from a traditional broadcast perspective.

Quality is defined by attracting mass – but in the longtail world of the internet there is more value outside of the ‘mass’ hits – typically 85% of the value resides outside the hit end of the scale.

If I make something to entertain myself and a small group of friends, it isn’t meant for you or the majority. It shouldn’t be judged against the production standards of content which is intended to be a hit.

The fact that it is about my friends and I, or is particularly relevant to my friends and I, makes it valuable to us. Relevance beats quality every time.

We’d rather watch it than an episode of Emmerdale – even if by objective evaluation it isn’t as ‘good’.

Be less concerned by the value an outsider may get from viewing what a small community create together, and more concerned by the value those participating get from it. Subjective experience in this world of ultra-niches is more important than objective comparison.

And there are many many more UGC iterations of content, than pro.

Part four tomorrow!

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Here’s part two of our ‘What exactly is social media?’ white paper.

The key distribution mechanic:

In social media, the key distribution mechanic is the peer-to-peer pass on.

This takes two main forms:

1. I pass on (or display) something I find useful/interesting to someone I believe will also find it useful/interesting
2. I see something I think is useful or interesting displayed by someone I trust – and copy it.

Creating something interesting for people to do together is the key to being welcomed in and shared in these peer-to-peer networks of trust.

This is why the creative element, ideally working on the brief creation with those you would target, is so important. The more time and effort spent getting this part right, the less time and effort is required in seeding strategies.

Widgets, badges and applications:

These are essentially pieces of code which create a piece of online furniture for users to place on their profiles, forums, desktops etc.

They can be grabbed and shared and easily installed on places such as facebook profiles or users blogs.

A youtube video is a widget.

These are at their most effective when we allow users to add something of themselves – to create their own personal outcome through customisation and personalisation.

If they are allowed to join in the creation they are more likely to value the result and want to pass it on to their friends.

So we make our products and messaging adaptable in order for them to be adoptable, if we are to expect successful transmission in social media.

If I like something I may pass it on to peers by:

* texting them a url or invite to join in
* emailing them a link or invite to join in
* IM-ing a link
* Posting about it on a forum
* Posting a blog post
* Microblogging about it
* Creating a video about it and sharing that
* Taking pictures in relation to it – and sharing those
* Talking about it in all of the above and offline – recommending it to people who trust me
* Recommending and voting for the results in places such as delicious, digg, stumbleupon, maholo etc

Bearing the above in mind helps guide which share-able functions it is wise to include in robust and effective widgets.

But it’s not all about widgets:

Distribution can be effective provided we give something interesting and useful for people to do together. This can be a microsite which serves a need, a simple tool or service which provides value/saves times, a video, graphic, game, cartoon, image, text , audio.

The distribution of any and all can be improved by making it adaptable in order to be adoptable and by making it as easy and compelling as possible to pass on to friends. And by making it something people can do together.

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Over the next few days we’ll be sharing a white paper which aims to explain what social media is, exactly, complete with sectors and examples.

We’ll talk about what does and doesn’t go on in this space, what the key distribution mechanic really is and the vital role user generated everything plays in this (from content to connections).

We’ll end up (in the last part) with a nice long list of success stories, which we hope you’ll want to add to with links of your own.

We hope you’ll find it useful - and that you’ll help us make it better.

So, let’s start with:

What is social media? (Part 1)

Broadcast media functions by sending a message from one central point to many destinations.

Social media, as the name implies, takes a pluralist approach.

Here messages are sent from many points to many points.

Social Media is a catch-all term to describe all forms of digitally enabled peer-to-peer environments. It includes all forms of many-to-many communications.

These include:

• Text messaging; sms and mms
• Email; including webmail(gmail etc) and fixed (outlook)
• Instant Messaging:  eg Windows Messenger;  skype
• Forums; of the traditional message board variety.
• Social networks: such as Facebook, MySpace, Itsmy
• Blogging: Platforms such as Blogger, Wordpress
• Microblogging: eg Twitter, Plurk
• Video sharing sites: eg Youtube, Vimeo
• Image sharing sites: such as photobucket, flickr
• Conversation aggregators: such as Friendfeed, Disqus
• Human-powered search sites such as mahalo, ditto.net
• Human filtering sites such as digg, delicious, stumbleupon
• Comments on more traditional ‘broadcast-style’ sites – such as the BBC, Guardian.co.uk
• Wikis: wikipedia et al

What goes on in these spaces?

First, it may be wise to consider what doesn’t go on in this space.

The broadcasting of one-size-fits-all messaging tends to fail.
Broadcast is effective when you have an audience ready to consume the message.

In social media there are no audiences – there are many, many, communities of people talking to each other about things they care about. Sometimes, if you are lucky, they’ll talk about you.

They self-form into groups of shared interest/purpose – as evidenced by Facebook groups and the more adhoc interest groups which emerge in Twitter.

They are talking to each other not looking at the stage from which advertisers would like to attract their attention.

They attract each other’s attention. They act as navigators and arbiters of choice.

This is clear from the click-thru rates on ads in social networks. They are typically very low (0.01% on average).

In context and related ads can increase this rate. But even when the CTR increases advertisers are faced with the fact that ads are only trusted by 5% of the UK population (Edelman trust report, 2009).

Trust cannot be broadcast. It now resides in our relationships with our peers. More than 70% of all purchase decisions are made on the recommendation of peers (according to Forrester).

So how can we reach into this ever-lengthening, ever fragmenting long tail of demand (people are still making decisions about buying things, just not in the traditional ways)?

We can’t. They can.

How? See part two, tomorrow!

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