Primark, diversification and super-advocates

Experian and Hitwise have published a report on social networking entitled The Impact of Social Networking in the UK. I attended my first webinar (woooo) to listen to Robin Goad and Tony Mooney talk about their findings. These are my notes…

The social networking landscape

Some examples of social network campaigns and activity, demonstrating the power and influence they are starting to gain.

The Primark Appreciation Society

This is a very successful Facebook group (essentially a social network within a social network) which was started by a ‘normal’ girl. Due to its success, Primark have stated that they are not going to be creating their own official group, because they don’t think it would be as popular as the existing user-generated one.

It is interesting to note, that the Primark group is not entirely for ‘appreciation’ and does feature negative comments, too. Perhaps this is why the group is so popular – the sense that it is not being controlled top-down appeals to users. Negative comments are not necessarily all bad for brands in this context, demonstrating different spin to make the group seem more ‘grass-roots’.

Cadbury’s Wispa

Cadburys decided to relaunch their Wispa brand, discontinued in 2003, following campaigns across a number of social networking sites e.g. Facebook’s ‘Bring Back Wispa’ group. Followed up by clever 80s nostalgia marketing campaign.

“This is the first time that the power of the internet played such an intrinsic role in the return of a Cadbury brand.” – Tony Bilsborough, spokesman for Cadbury, quoted on Brand Republic.

HSBC’s graduate accounts

Unlike the Primark Appreciation Society, the biggest HSBC group on Facebook was a forum for students to complain about the bank and its decision to scrap interest-free overdrafts for graduates. It generated lots of bad publicity and eventually led to the bank reversing their decision.

“We are a service-oriented organisation and we have to listen to our customers – that is a priority for us. It’s a good example of where a medium like Facebook has enabled customers to tell us something they feel strongly about.” – HSBC spokesman, Education Guardian.

Scrabulous

The unlicensed Facebook Scrabble application, Scrabulous, proved to be one of the site’s most popular applications, attracting over 500,000 daily users. Hasbo and Mattel have recently sued the creators over copyright infringement, and want the application taken off of Facebook.

In response to this, the Save Scrabulous Facebook group now has almost 50,000 members in a campaign to keep the application on the site.

 

Hasbro and Mattell may win on legal grounds, but the battle might be lost as the image is one of large corporations attacking small entrepreneurs. Scrabulous is now seen as the default online version of the board game. Twice as many people go to Scrabulous after performing a search in Google as they do to official Scrabble.

Successful niche social networks

As well as Facebook, Bebo, MySpace, there are also examples of very successful niche social networks emerging. Screwfix has a very successful online DIY community, with over 600,000 posting in its forums, pushing it up to the second most visited online DIY site.

Saga Zone is also worth mentioning, the online community for the over 50s

The Facebook Poppy Appeal

This is an example of a very successful ‘top-down’ approach to marketing on social networks. The British Legion created a poppy application which users could add to their profile for Armistice Day. It resulted in a big increase in traffic and new visitors to their Poppy microsite, and in turn received lots of traffic from the microsite to the main site. The Facebook Poppy application also attracted younger users to a typically ‘untrendy’ campaign.

Social media marketing in 2008

Tony Moody discussed the key factors businesses need to think about when planning their social media marketing campaigns. One of the key points he made was that social media should not been seen as another box to tick (“I’ve got a page on Facebook, therefore my social media marketing is complete”), and marketers need to focus on targeted, relevant messages rather than blanket, one-to-many advertising. Marketing needs to be timely and use people’s specific interests to create useful messages. But marketers also need to strike the balance between providing relevant content and respecting consumer’s privacy (Goad and Moody suggest that the existing use of data policies is inadequate).

How can companies use data to target consumers?

• Personalisation – configure the offer / communication to use personal data within the message
• Targeting – the consumer does not see their personal data beamed back at them, but the content of the communication is relevant to their interests

Often the best way to offer people relevant and timely communications is to go down a targeting route and tailor, personalise and configure, which will reduce junk and irrelevancy. Marketers need to also respect consumers’ personal data whilst ensuring relevancy, otherwise they will become critical.

“It’s popups all over again”

“Dumb and simplistic fashion”

“If you don’t use it wisely, don’t be surprised if your customers rebel against you”

The report suggested the three areas of focus for 2008 should be:

• Increased social media diversification
• The emergence of ‘super’ brand advocates
• Using a value scorecard to direct social media spend

Increased social media diversification

“84% of social network traffic is spread over just three sites – Facebook, Bebo and MySpace”

 

As well as the growth of the major players, we’ll also see the emergence of specialist social networks offering users a higher degree of relevance and exclusivity. Both niche and mainstream social networks look set to grow, however the growth of niche networks does not necessarily mean the decline of mainstream. Social networks do not exist in a vacuum, and cannot guarantee user loyalty.

Now that we are entering the second wave of social networks it will be interesting to see if the current top mainstream sites maintain their popularity, or how much will users be willing to switch or create multiple profiles across multiple networks. Tony described the situation we saw with MySpace and Facebook, and the network sigmoid curves which can easily occur.

The emergence of ‘super’ brand advocates

The examples of the Wispa and HSBC campaigns above well demonstrate how social networks are changing the ways consumer power can influence brands and businesses.

Opinion formers will start to become very powerful, having both positive and negative impacts on brands. Super-advocates will be great for successful viral brand marketing, but there are risks and even the potential for militancy e.g. www.fuh2.com

Companies need to ask themselves what they are doing about their super-advocates. How are they encouraging them? How are they finding and keeping track of them? Companies need to recognise the seriousness of super-advocates and be aware of how powerful their opinions can be. Care must be taken with these relationships because if an influential advocate turns, it could have a huge effect on the brand overnight. Super-advocates may get very demanding however, as they begin to realise how powerful their own opinions are!

So the speed of reaction is also very important, and marketers should be adopting realtime marketing strategies. They need to be prepared for any online backlash, and have a response or strategy in place, which could involve a reconfiguration of processes in order to react quickly. Tony puts forward the need for an executive mindset change, as criticism against brands is usually resolved by sending in the PR people – this needs to change. Mature organisations should allow for the ebb and flow, tolerating manageable levels of online criticism in order to appear transparent.

Using a value scorecard to direct social media spend

Measurement will become complicated. Marketers will need to establish ways to measure the effectiveness of all online marketing including social networks, and ensure that learning ensure subsequent activity. Goad and Mooney propose an online scorecard, which cuts through the hype to focus on end to end purchasing behaviour e.g. clicks don’t mean anything – it’s all about the money!

Businesses will also need to find ways and means to find out how their reputation is faring online, in order for the super-advocacy programme mentioned above to work. Marketers need to know how well their super-advocates are performing to inform them of the need to improve relationships.

 

This all runs in complete parallel to everything I’ve been reading recently about email marketing targeting and relevant advertisements.

Christmas geek dinner

Me and Kaya went to the Christmas girl geek AND guy geek dinner at OhSo Social (by the way, if you sign up with them you get a free bottle of wine) on Wednesday. It was really good, and totally put me in the festive spirit. We got given party bags with squishy spannerballs, stickers, bottle opener keyrings. I’m telling you, it was a real treat. Aral Balkan spoke and was entertaining as ever. He did what all the end-of-year TV programmes do and gave a rundown of all the exciting things that happened in 2007, and what we can look forward to in 2008.

What happened in 2007?

Aral clearly loves his iPhone (“I can touch the future with two of my fingers!”), and I’d agree that its launch was a pretty big 2007 event. It also demonstrated one of his points about usability over tonnes of functions featuring highly in 2007 design. He did show us some godawful examples of usability though, mainly banking-type sites and stressed that interfaces should not be built for developers (making their jobs easier) but for users. And if such un-usable sites are built that way to comply with W3C standards, then W3C standards are bollocks. Go for ‘usable accessibility’ instead i.e. user testing and common sense. On the subject of standards, he noted that the divide between accessibility/standards/CSS and Flash is getting smaller as the ‘Flash look’ is becoming more integrated in traditional sites and Flash designers/developers are becoming more concerned over accessibility. It’s all good.

Aral talked about 2007’s uptake of APIs and mashups (demonstrated with a lovely pic of mashed potato) and the possibilities open to developers to ‘ave a little bit of this and a little bit of that and mix it all together and create something cool.

Things to watch out for in 2008

2007 saw the start of the RIA (Rich Internet Application) and Aral reckons 2008 will see loads more gooduns. RIAs are online applications that act a bit like desktop applications. Online Photoshop anyone?

Flash games are going to get bigger and better, especially with 3D spunkiness. Check out the Papervision3D 2.0 demo to see the 3D spunkiness in action.

Introduction to After Effects with Angie Taylor

I went to my first FlashBrighton event last night (not really sure how I managed to last this long without going to one yet) and it wasn’t about Flash! It was enthusiastically presented by the amazing Angie Taylor, author of Creative After Effects.

I’ve never used After Effects before, and to be honest I thought it was just for making film credits. I was wrong, wrong, wrong. Angie only managed to show us a teeny bit of what After Effects can do, and that was a huge eye opener in itself.

With After Effects, Angie tells us that it really helps to have some kind of action plan before you start. It’s not that easy to just open a blank project and start working. But if you really don’t have a clue where to start, open up some of the presets and start investigating. ‘Fractal noise’ is a great filter to learn and play about with, as it can do cool things like smoke, fire, water. Play with all the elements of a filter to find out what each element does, but remember to reset once you have finished. Angie said that After Effects is great for coming up with ideas you hadn’t really planned on. So, if you are in the middle of a project and you figure out how to do something wicked, you can save it as a preset for reuse later on.

Photoshop layers

After Effects lets you edit layer styles brought in from Photoshop. A ‘composition’ will bring in all Photoshop layers for you to play around with. There are also blending modes like in Photoshop but with an added extra – a blending mode for each layer. You can also edit text layers from Photoshop and add presets (make sure you convert to editable text though).

The composition window is like the stage in Flash and is the main section of the screen. It uses a timeline like in Flash or film editing software, but defaults to using a timecode (hours, minutes, seconds) rather than frames. Of course, you can choose to work in frames instead if you like. There are loads and loads of preferences and settings to play around with, so it will probably take a while to set your preferred way of working, but the choice is yours.

The stopwatch tells After Effects that you want it to start recording everything that changes about that property from the point you are at. Animatable over time. If you move to a new timecode, then drag an object, it automatically creates a keyframe for you, so you don’t need to manually add keyframes.

Motion paths

The best thing to do is set motion paths to show ‘all keyframes’. Pressing CTRL and ALT allows the curser to change in order to create curved motion paths. This reduces the need for extra keyframes and also smoothes the animation.

Keyframes

There are two types of keyframes in After Effects; spatial and temporal.
Spatial keyframes – define the motion
Temporal keyframes – define the timings e.g. easy ease in/out
The key is to first sort out your motion, then do your timings.

Motion blur

You can set this in Composition > Composition Settings > Advanced. This may not be called motion blur in older versions; it might be called shutter angle. Here you can increase the iterations of the blur.

Using audio to animate

Angie showed us an example of where audio has been used to set animations. It was all massively clever. Create keyframes from your audio by using the magical keyframe assistant, which creates keyframes for you based on audio levels. Can use amplification and frequency. Pickwhips and expressions are great for animating to audio. Plus, if you have to change the soundtrack to your animation, you don’t have to go though and reanimate to fit the new song – it does it for you. woop woop!

Puppet tool

Dancing Budweiser bottle. The puppet pin tool lets you select bits you want to move. It places a mesh over the object and it kicks ass. Plus, you can automatically record motion (motion stretch).

Rendering

Don’t use file > export because you’ll have to render per format. Instead, go to Render Cue because you can render once and add multiple format settings. Make your own templates – ‘make template’. This makes an .ARS! this stands for After Effects Render Settings.

Note: Filmstrip file format is cool.

Always have a fixed camera when filming if you can, as it speeds up compression. If you want a shakey effect or camera movement, you can add all this later on after you’ve compressed.

The amination codec is the best to use for archives as it looks for changes rather than rendering every frame – so it’s good for a lot of Flash-type animation.

Angie talked to us a bit about Open GL. I’m not really too sure what it is, but apparently it’s good for previewing but not rendering. And you need to make sure you update your Open GL card. I think it speeds up the preview process. She recommends Open GL Interactive for beginners, as you can keep it running.

Keyboard shortcuts

PARTS or STRAP
Position
Axis
Rotation
(T)Opacity (think transparency or opaciT)
Scale

Alt P – stopwatch
0 (on bar) – preview button (works like the spacebar – beware, not always realtime)
0 (on num) – RAM preview
UU (uber key) – opens up anything that has changed from default value, so you can play with all the presets

Resources

http://www.trackcode.com
http://www.artbeats.com – great resource for royalty-free footage. Angie said it “provides me with footage I’d either be shot or arrested for getting myself!”

Clients in the wild

Last week me and Simon went to an event hosted by New Media Knowledge called Clients in the Wild, about PR and corporate blogging. It was a panel discussion with Roger Warner from Squiz and Velocity Partners, Will McInnes from Nixon McInnes, Drew Benvie from Hotwire (who looks like he’s from New Kids on the Block) and Sarah Ogden from Midnight Communications.

I’m not a PR lady; I work as a producer for a digital agency, so me and Simon (student) were totally in the minority. But, it didn’t matter, coz I did me some learning, and as I wasn’t from a PR agency I didn’t feel like I was being told off by Mr McInnes. Here’s what I discovered….. (my notes from the night)

Roger told us that PR used to be easier to understand, but it lost the plot when blogging came along. He used to do PR for IBM, but then it was a case of parties and press releases. Now the PR industry is a right pickle.

“The freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one”. This saying used to be the case, but now everyone has the option of their own press and can publish whatever they like on blogs, Facebook, Twitter etc.

What has happened, says Will McInnes (in a scary voice) is disintermediation. A major role of PR (er, that would be mediation then) has vanished, or in the least has changed in a big way.

Clients are looking for control. Clients want to know how they can control what is broadcast in digital media. But the simple answer is that they can’t. We do not have the power to control digital media, but we can influence it. Clients/brands need to listen to the conversations which are taking place online, especially as now there are so many, and they need to engage with audiences.

How do you evaluate a PR campaign? How do you prove value?

A pretty big discussion started on how to measure PR success. In an evolving market, there are different ways to measure success – it’s not just about press releases. PR needs to be applied on all forms of media; press, television, blogs, websites etc. and every client has a different idea of what success looks like. This is why it’s difficult to have an industry standard. Each campaign has different goals, therefore different measurements of success. However, online activity poses much more tangible ways of measurement as it’s often easier to collect data.

What is a good communications reason for blogging?

Humanises the brand, defines a spokesperson.

Transparency – this can be beneficial, but only for some companies. Doing it for the wrong reasons can lead to big fuck-ups. However, it is better to at least attempt to do something and learn from mistakes if it all goes wrong than not to try at all. McInnes named Dell as a good example of a brand which has fucked up in the past but learned from it and used the online experience in a positive way.

Online activity should be integrated into a PR campaign and not seen as an extra box to tick. Technology is often ‘tagged’ on to PR campaigns, but this should not be the case. Clients need to look at how their businesses are set up to deal with social media. they should look at how two-way their online communications are, and aim for an integrated model. Blogs should influence the website, user interaction should influence the blog, which should influence the company.

Company blogs communicate the corporate message, but we must pay attention to all the other blogs out there which communicate many different messages about your company. Bloggers are influencers who want to share ideas in a genuine way.

Don’t do bad PR – beware of approaching bloggers in the wrong way.

Tom Coates (Yahoo) appeared on a list of top 100 bloggers. Then he got spammed to buggery by PR firms.

What is the future of PR?

Everything is changing. Reputation is everything. Companies are becoming more transparent. The media has changed, society has changed, but has PR? Will didn’t think so. Online PR companies are emerging which embrace this change, but traditional PR firms need to adapt. It should not be a case of online versus offline – the two need to be intergrated and should work together.

5 years ago a brand would have employed separate agencies for different activities, but now web/PR/marketing agencies work in collaboration as activity is much more fluid. Now digital agencies and advertising agencies are starting to do bits of PR, so PR firms really need to hurry up and get involved if they want to stick around.

Who writes the blog?

Clients may think that having a blog is a great idea, but who actually writes it? Drew didn’t reckon that corporate blogs were a very good idea for clients who wouldn’t have time to write them, as they’d end up completely pointless.

Northern Rock – there was no online voice. From the minute it started, Will said the CEO should have started a video diary and been transparent. Hourly publishing, live news, immediacy. They couldn’t control the conversation but they could have influenced it.

What is the point of social networks?

Information gathering – what are people saying about your brand?

Brands need to listen to what people are saying. Customer services phonelines can tell you one thing, but they won’t tell you that there’s a protest planned for the next day. Facebook can.

• ‘Bring back Wispa’
• ‘HSBC overdraft’ (but, someone asked, would they have still backtracked if traditional media hadn’t have picked up on the online activity?)

So information gathering is one of the key uses of social networks. If brands decide to participate officially, they need to be able to offer users something useful. They should be able to offer value to users. It’s not just about presenting brand messages – give people something they can use.

• MyStation (not yet released)
• MyCokeMusic (this is an example of one that arguably got it wrong – where is the audience?)

Facebook launches ad system, they got slammed for it. Why? Sarah suggested that the backlash is around the fact that companies are making money out of social networks, possible invasion of privacy?

Danah Boyd – carried out a social investigation into young people’s perception of online privacy.

The dangers (haha) of blogging

• Legal issues
• Loss of competitive edge – giving away ideas

But these are mere excuses. The CEOs that blog aren’t too concerned with legalities. By offering themselves up as experts and offering free advice and information (even to competitors), companies can give themselves the competitive edge. They have the opportunity to be seen as experts which can lead to increased credibility.

There were plenty of questions and audience intervention (not from little old me though) which proved how important the issues raised were to audience members present. Then the bar tab ran out.

It was a great event and I’d definately go to a Beers and Innovation session again, but they all kept talking about elephants. I don’t think I got that bit.