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To gain trust, you need to be part of the group – understand them and add value
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To include social media in your online business branding, you should include time spent researching what you need to do to brand your business….
Archive for August, 2009
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I love this. Just completely takes the piss out of most other beer ads! It’s doing a conventional ad in a way that makes you want to watch it. You know what’s going to happen but you want to know what they will say about it. Via Ben
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Brilliant. Paul McCrudden spent 6 weeks tracking the time spent waiting in various stores and restaurants. He then invoiced them for his time. Some ignore, some respond and some, like Pret, have paid
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Good summary and diagram of the steps to take in becoming a social brand – Objective..listen..identify areas..participate..build relationships
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A list of issues found with all social media analytics software. Are they worth what you pay?
The first thing I have to ask about this video is why. I’m obviously not the right target for this promo from MSI computers, I can’t even be bothered to ask how they managed to make the computer stick in his arse all the time (sorry, ‘butt’ is the US term). But it’s doing well in the viewing lists and in the number of copies made, which I often think is a far better test of popularity.
Anyone who’s heard me speak on social media or spent time chatting with me should know that I’m a strong believer in using social media across the board when it comes to companies.
- It should be a strategic component of the communications toolset.
- It should be integral to all marketing actions, not just a bolt-on at the end of planning just because it’s ‘hot’
- That in many cases the budget set up is wrong – it should come out of customer service budgets as well as marketing budgets. It applies just as much, if not more, to post-sales work as it does to getting people to consider your product or service.
I often draw the diagram below as a situation I would see as ideal. A foundation of ongoing activity, a combination of customer service and just conversation presence in social media areas, complemented by peaks of activities associated with campaigns, when new things are tried, when a brand extends what it is doing (with apologies for my poor graphing skills) Red is campaign activity, blue is service and general presence.
Social Media Activity over time
The same sentiment was reflected by Jamie Coomber yesterday when she tweeted:
Have been asked “what agency does great social media campaigns” 3 things wrong with the wording,
It’s all tied up with the thinking that marketing is just something that gets done by agencies on a campaign basis, instead of something everyone in the company who comes into contact with a customer or potential customer does all the time.
But what does Rackspace have to do with this? Well, last night they demonstrated how a company that integrates things across multiple channels can work when it comes to service. At Ale 2point0 last night, sitting in a pub with James Cridland, who runs mediauk.com, he was annoyed because his site was down and he’d had no communication from support. One tweet later and there were a bunch of people on it, including the official Rackspace account
@rachelclarke @jamescridland need immediate assistance? DM me and I’ll help route to right people ~ call +1.210.548.5616
James meantime had also raised a ticket and that was also picked up by the US based team and monitored to ensure it was resolved. Taking a look at the whole stream, that’s just what these guys do all the time; keep an eye out for mentions and get problems fixed
@gabeanzelini we’re real people, 24x7x365+
Thanks for the shout-out
Overall, completely impressed with the reaction and eagerness to get things sorted. This is the difference between a brand that uses the tools for campaigns and those that live and breathe them throughout what they do. One you treat slightly cynically because you know it’s just a short term thing that’s trying to get you to do things, the other will be there in the long term for when you need them to do things for you.
Update: BBH or Johnnie Walker are idiots. This is a brilliant film, but they’ve put a copyright claim in and pulled the YouTube versions without providing alternatives. There are a LOT of blogs that have embedded this. Idiots.
I’ve seen this a few times in my feed and finally got to watch it. I love it, brilliantly done and bang on message. Keep Walking is one of those great brand taglines that is global is usage and here’s a perfect example of it’s use. I’d love to know how many rehearsals there were to get every single cue correct. (It’s just a pity Diageo want to close the Kilmarnock plant now and lose the relationship)
Pear Analytics have just completed a study about the types of things people talk about on Twitter and made what was, to them, a surprising conclusion. It’s not as surprising to me though.
Study: took a random sample of 2000 tweets over a 2 week period (not that many really). Reviewed to see if Spam, News, Self-Promotional, Pass-along, conversational or pointless babble.
Hypothesis: That Twitter was being used predominantly for self-promotion, pushign a product or service
Conclusion: The most popular tweet type is the ‘pointless babble’, just random stuff about people, with 40.55%. Second was conversational types, with 37.55
They’re surprised, I’m not. Most people exist in a small group, they have <100 followers, many of whom they will know. They don’t tweet too often but there’s a lot of them so it adds up. It’s all between these communities, it’s gossip and passing of time, it’s stating what they are doing to their group. It’s the ambient intimacy thing, bring people closer together.
The number of people who use Twitter with an active purpose has alsways seemed to be to be small. Yes, they’re active and they can drown out others if you have them in your stream, but they are not the majority. For brands, the natural way of acting is not the way that most of the rest of Twitter works!
Last night, meeting Simon Darwell-Taylor, we were discussing previous lives and talking about his time at The Creative Greenhouse with Body Shop. One tactic he used was to send out cassette tapes, full of great content – but only on one side. There was encouragement for the customers to use the blank side to record their own contribution to the story. Of course some did and sent them back to the company. Not a lot, but the urge to create and add to the brand was definitely there. enough so that they posted a physical object
Today, the web makes it all a lot easier, with few barriers to creating things and sending them onto the company. But it’s still tapping into the same behaviours as when people posted letter and objects to the company so they could enter into a dialogue.