Pass It On

I am about to do something unashamedly in order to tap into the heartstrings of the seasonal masses.

This year, instead of sending out cards, or even buying charity cards, we are directly calling people to act upon the following:  Please add to and Pass The Parcel.

Having teamed up with the British Red Cross, we are asking that clients, friends, people interested in social media, simply click on the link below:

Pass It On - for the British Red Cross

By adding something to the basket and passing it on to your compadres to do the same, perhaps we can help some people whom are less fortunate than ourselves and whom are really suffering due to the credit crunch.  We may all be a bit skint, but lest we forget that in other parts of the world it gets even worse as a result.

Please, this year, buy something small and Pass It On….

Thanks!

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… But not social media.

In the same week that I was hailing the welcome back in to the global social sphere of the American nation, the state of California ruled OUT the legality of same sex marriages.

Laud away we may do on a grander scale, but now I must retreat back into meek sublimence as I admit that the right wing power seems to prevail above all else.

From a state that hails Ellen and Portia de Rossi, Li Lo and Sam Ronson and many others as their global ambassadors of liberty, they seek to subject, somehow, the international esteem that voting in a truly global leader has assigned.

So, let’s use social media in the same way that it has been used to win elections, mobilise nations and create awareness worldwide and get on it. Here’s hoping the launch of Worldeka will make a positive difference

So, America, are you really a liberal nation or are those ‘assassination’ rumours going to become a reality in the same way that liberation was not.

Our globe is your theatre. Please, let this play have a happy ending. Or woe betide the future of us all….

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According to a survey cited on Big Mouth Media 79% of Britain’s leading PR agencies have yet to develop online PR and social media services.  Indeed 89% do not publish a blog!

Naturally, this is a travesty to my mind, but how is this impacting PR agencies in the commercial sense? Adam Parker, Chief Executive of online news distribution company webitpr said that “those failing to do so run the long-term risk of losing out in the inevitable battle for the online communications market”.

This is both in the sense that social media tools can increase the PR distribution network but also that it improves consumer psychological brand impressing and improves SEO.

Whilst it may be argued that social media fits within PR, I see it fitting in between PR and Marketing quite neatly:  the PR element is persuasive and marketing element in that it is trackable and there can be tangible ROIs.  Jason Falls would go as far as to say that social media was created because people were ‘running away from marketing.

I agree.  I ran away from marketing as i realised that the marketing channels on which I was working were the same marketing and PR channels that I ignored or avoided in my spare time.  I am much more likely to make a purchase or act on a call if i am recommended it by a trustworthy source.  Even if i know that that source is working for a brand, if they speak to me in ‘my language’ then I will listen.

So to message something within the PR remit through a network of trusted, grass-roots brand ambassadors is going to spread the message much farther and wider than throwing out a release and, not unlike traditional marketing, seeing what sticks.

PR will be more effective if PR firms fully embrace social media. Both in the communications sense and the business sense…

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Hailed by WOMMA as the ‘ultimate list of social media brands’ and a ‘must read’ list of those brands looking to gain insight into social media interaction, it certainly does make for an interesting read.

Compiled by Peter Kim it includes a wide range of brands such as The Economist, Sony, Puma and Purina, and goes some way to give an insight as to how these brands use social media tools to broadcast their message.

But note that I say ‘broadcast’. The list, whilst long, and certainly revealing, only really describes the broadcast element of social media: wikis, newsfeeds, blogs, RSS, facebook pages. However, to my mind, this really only describes the ‘Push’ factor of social media. This goes nowhere to demonstrating the ‘pull’ factor or indeed the true meaning of social media engagement. The principles of which are outreach, one-to-one conversation, offering incentives and exclusives, and ultimately turning a key influencer into a brand ambassador.

Whilst social media tools can be extremely useful in broadcasting a message more efficiently, let us not forget that we also have to be social within social media. It’s not enough to invent social media as a broadcast network….

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It’s official: people are not spending enough on Social Media marketing. According to a Jupiter Research report cited in WOMMA yesterday, many advertisers are only spending 5% of their digital budgets on social media marketing, thus not realising the potential of the industry as a whole and indeed of engagement marketing as a high converter.

The reason for this, so say WOMMA, is that people don’t really understand what social media marketing is. And I agree. Half my time is spent explaining to people what social media is and does to augment brand impressionism, and thereafter how it’s done.

That’s not to say that this is the fault of the person I am speaking to – it’s a relatively new discipline to online, and the lack of understanding comes from, in my experience, an inability to translate the principle to an online execution beyond Facebook Apps or MySpace pages.

However, when you break it down, social media is essentially the oldest form of marketing in the world. You make a product, you get one person to buy it, they like it, they tell their friends about it. A recommendation from a friend is much more effective on a purchase decision after all than a poster – who do you trust? A marketer or your friend (or colleague or celebrity…)?

So, it raises brand awareness, but how does it economise? Well, if you have an online portal you can track it directly to sale, and if sales are generated offline and you need to test channel effectivenees, well, do a series of exclusive promos.

See? Not that much of a mystery after all…

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Now it’s not very often that I’m wrong (*office stifles a unison snigger), and less so that I simply don’t understand things (*all-out raucous laughter ensues behind me), but there are some things that fathom me more than others.  The latest, being Cuil.

Ok, so it’s a search engine (with a stupid ‘cool’ pronunciation) that lets you see the web pages in a grid pattern with preview text and image.  Well, didn’t Ask search engine do that a while back?  And yeah, it claims to be the only search engine that produces results through indexing references such as page rank and links, but, doesn’t Google page rank do that anyway?  And notably with only 120 billion pages indexed which is, so say Giga Om, a lot smaller than Google.  Though, the San Francisco Chronicle cites that in actual fact Google only index 30-50 billion pages and that this is based on their own page ranking system, which could be skewed, as many of us know from loopholes in the algorithm that allows a page to rank higher.

So, what’s all the fuss about?  Why do we want to index our pages more relevantly?  Well for one, we can then see those that are more frequently visited based on the context and concepts within the text, rather than the sites linking in to the site as per Google’s API.  Well, is this going to do us any good?  As SEO specialists, this means that meta-tagging and article relevance have more sway over, say, affiliate link building and blog/forum link building. However, without people supporting their comments/articles/content with these long-lost concepts such as ‘fact’ and ‘evidence’ it could lead to a cacophony of mad people contextualising complete insanity and ranking top of the search results as a result.  And, ironically given that the premise is to avoid spam, could create even more of it!

Mind you, I’ll give Cuil this: they managed to identify another 25 billion websites in its opening weekend due to their 10-years-in-development-web crawler system, which will give the WOM monitoring software developers such as Radian6 a run for their money.

That is, of course before their servers overheated and it was discovered that a major flaw in the system is that it doesn’t index by age of site, which means that a lot of old data is thrown up.

Google has built a much wider overall site recognition system based on user analytics, input, branding and it’s plethora of applications, that seem to be building a one-stop stop in an age where we are starting to see the emergence of micro-networks and usage such as Ning.

Google still wins out in my mind – and ex-Google staff or not, I think they’ll have to work very hard to get the kind of usability that Google has.  Which, after all, is the key.

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Now, as starkly real as it is hearing endless counts of credit crunches and spiraling service bills, I am, also slightly tired by it all. No, really! I know my bills are going to go up, I know I’m going to have to choose between essentials such as food OR alcohol (slightly reminiscent of my uni days to be honest) or renting or buying a house, but please, stop reminding me that I face an uncertain future of abject poverty.

Though, saying that, as everyone tightens their belts, one thing that people are looking towards within media and marketing is cost-effectiveness. Which is to say that every investment must be valuable and yet remain valued, and therefore outlay should, of course, have a high ROI.

We at Pass It On Media have therefore been ‘lucky’ regards the credit crunch as social media deals only in targeted marketing, so you know that your ROI is likely to be optimised as you are only communicating with people who are likely to want to be communicated with, and therefore it’s a one-to-one, targeted message that, well, hits it’s target.

Whilst some doubt that this may be ‘alchemy’, Check out the Chinwag site for clear insight into how the metrics work.

Referring back to the Credit Crunch, the PodCast Sisters have even tackled this issue in their podcast as to how social media can actually help overcome the recession!

I’m not sure that it can alleviate the effects of an entire socio-economical meltdown, but what it does highlight is that good business practise is what this forces us reconsider: Let’s stop wasting money on ‘blanket marketing’ and refocus on messaging to the right people in a highly targeted way. And get them to spread the message for you…

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Despite having worked in broadcast and social media for the past 10 years or so, I’ve had absolutely zero interest in ever creating my own blog. EVER. Until I became involved in the marketing side of social media. And realised that it was interesting: repurposing one of the most basic marketing disciplines (Word of Mouth) and repurposing it for a digital generation. Also, it’ll be fun to see if anyone actually bothers reading me.

Ok, so what have I been looking at this week? I have been looking at the how to explain social media to people. Because they inevitably ask what on earth I do all day “Facebook, right? I want that job!” - wrong.

Well, despite the name, at which my juvenile mind had to have a snigger, the Social Tools on Facebook is actually pretty useful for anyone wanting to maximise their media positioning - worth a gander for sure. Of course Pass It On should be the one-stop shop for all things social media, but to get an understanding of what it is this is a useful group to observe

When you speak to someone who doesn’t ‘get’ it about consumer buy-in, neutral advocation, potential ROI, they will love it…but start rattling off techno-speak about algorithms and folksonomies and it becomes a completely different story.

So, how do you get to a point whereby a client or your manager understands how what your doing translates into their ROI? Well, Neil Morgan dealt with the money aspect rather well in January, so, once they’re salivating over that, try the simple approach: explain each stream step-by-step. It may take a while, but better to hand hold and manage client expectations than having to nurture a broken account manager who is parrying phonecalls from the MD who is wondering why a Channel 4 PR posting is out-ranking his 1 day old viral on Break.com…

Anyway, that’s a bout it for now.  Hopefully not too dull an opener.  I promise to go into more detail about each of our services over the coming weeks, and also to write it in human speak so that we can help people get a better understanding of what we do and how that benefits your brand.  Because it really does…

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