It’s tough being an island - all alone and conspicious.  There are many social media islands out there in companies.  These people have been tasked with “getting some social media going”; they’re doing what no employee has done before; and what’s more, it doesn’t even look like real work.

If you feel like a social media island at your work the good news is that tomorrow is your day because Sydney (and the world) is having a Social Media Day. It’s essentially the world’s first unified day that celebrates online communities and a chance for social media champions to get together, share a drink, and tell war stories about fighting the good fight to make the world a better and more connected, social place. 

The folks at Mashable came up with the global idea and Australia’s Laurel Papworth, social media strategist, has turned event manager to organise proceedings which will be held at ivy.

In Sydney, visiting BBC journalist and social media expert, Euan Semple, will be sharing his knowledge and expertise around introducing social media tools into large, successful organisation such as Nokia, The World Bank and NATO.

The worldwide event has drawn interest from over 8000 people across 86 countries, with nearly 500 worldwide events taking place tomorrow.  Attendees will use the hash tag #smday on Flickr, YouTube and Twitter.

When: Wednesday, 30 June at 6.30pm

Where: Ivy Ballroom at 320-330 George Street

How: RSVP to MeetUp here / Follow on Twitter / Join Facebook

Posted by Renee Creer

“We’re in the business of advertising”

Somewhere along the way I forgot this fact about Facebook but Paul Borrud, Facebook’s Australasia boss man, reminded me last week at a breakfast conference.  And it’s a lucrative business, one that will make Facebook $605 million this year according to a report by eMarketer, as described by Brian Solis.

During Paul’s one hour presentation he covered off some current user stats and reiterated their mission (…give people the power to share and make the world a more open and connected place) but it was more interesting to hear about the direction of interactive advertising on the platform.

Facebook has always advocated ads that blend into the overall content experience and are not disruptive. Aside from the basic template ’self service’ ads that you can create in a matter of minutes, Paul showed some very cool, interactive examples of how to connect with consumers in really targeted, relevant ways.

Through their work with brands, Facebook found that there was a ten fold increase in the success of an ad when it included interactive or viral extensions.  Also, when the names of friends appear in an ad, engagement with that ad increases almost 70 per cent.  So, do anything that’s more than just ‘a click’ and you’re guaranteed much greater success.

Paul also described ’sampling ads’, which I think are pretty exciting.  Example 1: you’re a young female and you’re engaged - let’s call you Hayley.  Hayley logs onto Facebook and sees an ad from wedding venue Doltone House in Pyrmont.  She notices that her friends, Melinda and Gabby, also ‘Like’ Doltone House so she clicks on the ad.  A larger pop up ad appears telling her that Doltone House can post a detailed brochure with venue and catering guides if she enters her address.  She does and the brochure arrives a week later.  Job done.

Example 2:  You run a local Tea House near a university.  You decide to use Facebook ads to target 18-24 year old female tea drinkers who are at univeristy because you know that tea and hitting the books go hand-in-hand.  You offer a two cup sampling pack to people who click on your ad and type in their address. This creates opportunities for both trial and long term relationship building.

In a perfect world all brands would do this because it’s efficient and clever, but I believe there is a heafty minimum spend for Facebook’s advanced interactive advertising which could price smaller players out of the game.

I’m on the look out for interactive ad examples; if you’ve seen any great ones let me know.

Posted by Renee Creer 

Image by David Reece

For now, I’m writing this post from a brand perspective and first, let’s get straight that Brand/Business Pages are now called Official Pages.  Just to clarify:

• Official Pages are maintained by an ’authorised representative’ of a business, brand, celebrity, or organisation and shared content appears as news in individual News Feeds
• Community Pages (see further below) are new and don’t generate stories in individual News Feeds, and they are not maintained by a single author, they are maintained by Facebook in association with Wikipedia

Official Pages - say goodbye to ‘fans’ and hello to ’others / likers’
Official Pages will no longer amass fans, people will now just ‘like’ Pages. Facebook says this is a more lightweight way to connect on the platform (…and they are rolling out the ‘like’ concept across the broader internet).  Page wall options now show the brand name and ‘others’ instead of fans (I hate this).  You’ll notice also that Facebook is changing their language by focussing on ‘making connections’ across the platform. Connections are pitched as the main way you express youself on Facebook. Personally, I’ll be sticking to calling people fans because saying “You have 3000 likers this week Mr Client” sounds naff.

I see both positivies and negatives to this move.  Being a fan, I think, has more meaning than just liking something.  I personally prefer to identify as a fan - it implies a certain level of passion.  I’m a fan to only a few brands that I really love but I imagine I could like a bunch of brands with less committment or interest - I suppose that’s the point from Facebook’s perspective.  This said, I won’t be liking more Pages because I don’t want my News Feed overflowing with brand info. On the flip side it might reduce brand obsession with the number of fans they have and allow Page owners /admins to focus more on interactions rather than the race for a larger fan base.

Promotions on Official Pages - not any more
In November last year Facebook released their promotion guidelines for brands using the platform. Prior to the guidelines Facebook was a veritable ‘free for all’ in which brands could run giveaways, competitions, contest and promotions however they chose.  Competitions are a win-win on Facebook because punters get free stuff and brands get spikes in their fan base, as well as interaction.

I read the new guidelines very closely, many times over, and afterwards reflected on the fact that lawyers and tech nerds should not write documents for the greater public.  Over at Ogilvy’s blog Kristin Parrish provides a great interpretation of the guidelines but in short, you can’t run promotions on Facebook in any shape or form; you need a third party application to do it for you.  Alternatively, you can hold a competition outside of Facebook and talk about it on Facebook but you cant use the platform in any way to administer the competition.  The recommended app is great, but it means you need money and preparation time, you can’t just run a quick and dirty giveaway at the drop of a hat - if you want that, head to Twitter.

However, some brands (heaps actually) are still running competitions without the app that don’t adhere to the new guidelines. As I commented on Julian’s blog recently, I can’t figure out if this is ignorance or cunning because brands risk their Pages being disabled without warning.  It does happen and good luck trying to get the Page back - if you’ve ever tried to contact Facebook you’d understand why.

Community Pages - what are they?
The idea is that Community Pages are created around topics, causes or experiences (i.e. cooking or cycling). They are said to be the best collection of shared knowledge on a topic (note: I had to use TechCrunch’s examples because when I looked for Community Pages in Facebook I couldn’t find any as Facebook hasn’t updated its search functionality to show them).

Community Pages apparently allow you to learn more (without you having to leave the platform… clever) and hear what others are saying about a topic.  A key distinction is that the content comes from Wikipedia and people can’t edit or add their own content.  Facebook says that “we update the information and profile picture based on the article for that topic in Wikipedia.”

So you can’t actually do or say anything on Community Pages.  There is no wall but if you happen to mention ‘cooking’ in your chit-chat on the platform, Facebook picks that up and adds it to the Page via a ‘Related Global Post’ feed. This feature enables you to ”see what people are saying about the things that matter to you, and discover the friends and people who share these connections with you.”  Nice in theory but it doesn’t seem very community minded if you can’t interact.  I’m not sure I totally get it but I am sure this new addition is a ‘work in progress’ which will somehow be appealing to advertisers.

Overall, this move is designed to stem the flow of people setting up Official Pages around general topics which breaks Facebook’s Page Guidelines.  Check out Silk Charm’s recent post about Facebook shutting down these Pages.

That’s enough for now but I’ll highlight some of the other (maybe scary?) changes Facebook has just announced in a subsequent post.

Posted by Renee Creer

If there’s one good habit to develop early in 2010, it’s the habit of exploring and engaging with the blogosphere - but where to start? That’s the question.

Lucky for us, people (with a penchant for laborious tasks) like to rank bloggers on lists, which is great if you’d like a short cut to the cream of the crop. For example, Australia has some cracking bloggers who can be found here:

Top 100 Australian Blogs
Top 100 Australian Women Bloggers
Top 129 Marketing Blogs

Also see The Australian Index Blog Directory for bloggers listed in different categories.

For top blogs from all countries try the Ad Age Power 150 and Technorati’s Top 100. Or, if you’re looking for the best American bloggers (…I think they’re all team USA) by topic try Post Ranks’ Top Bloggers 2009 list. This is a great list to browse. There are three categories:

1/ Most Engagement… stuff that’s very very engagement
The blogger in each topic who received the overall highest engagement total over the course of the year (Congratulations Brian Solis - my personal PR hero - who topped the list for PR. He’s coming out in April for Connect Now).

2/ Most Influential
The blogger in each topic who received the highest average engagement with posts over the course of the year (Brian won again for PR. Yep, he’s pretty good).

3/ Biggest Mover & Shaker
The blogger in each topic whose engagement grew the most over the course of the year (Damn it Brian! At least leave something for the rest of us to fight over).

As the results show, if you’ve got anything to do with PR or you want to know anything about PR you need to know Brian’s blog. The man is a blogging machine. In the first 18 days of 2010 he bashed out 13 posts on a variety of topics, including a post written on New Year’s Day (…if I had of written a post on New Year’s Day it would have come out in hieroglyphics).

Finally, if you have burning questions about the Blogosphere check out Technorati’s annual State of the Blogosphere report. Or if you’re wondering how to keep up with all these busy bloggers, you need a Google Reader, which is simply explained In Plain English.

Posted by Renee Creer

When I think MC Hammer I think three things:

1. Hammer pants;
2. Hammer time; and
3. You Can’t Touch This

I don’t think social media entrepreneur.  At least I didn’t until last night when we social media ruffians packed into a UTS lecture hall to hear the Hammer break it down at the Social Media Club in Sydney. 

I’ll out myself now as a fan of the guy.  Loved him in 1990 - bought the album, wore the pants, did the crab dance – loved him and then forgot about him once he left the charts.

In the mean time Hammer continued his journey, became a tech geek, ended up besties (well, ended up at meetings) with the early founders of Google, YouTube and Twitter.  He started a music website called Dance Jam, a blog (six years ago) and became the kind of social media star that has 1,640,910 Twitter followers and needs a desk top in his bathroom.

The man is a born and bred entrepreneur. 

Last night he began by recounting a story about how, after exhausting his neighbourhood of lemonade sales, he walked 8 miles (almost 13km) to a sports stadium which held 50,000 people.  He didn’t know what he’d sell the people once he got there but he knew he’d think of something.

Hammer sees the eco system around social media as similar fertile ground and encouraged the audience to embrace present opportunities. He is particularly interested in solving problems as to how to monetise social media and is no doubt a keen investor in social technologies, one of which he confessed is the Bump App.

Overall he was interesting, inspiring, articulate, entertaining, good humoured and straight up. Here’s what he had to say on…

Brands and social media:

• Never let anyone else tell your story.  Also, position yourself at the centre of the flow of information as this gives you more control and the ability to address issues and incorrect information.
• Perception has trumped reality; it’s more valuable now so continuing to manage your brand and create ongoing perceptions is paramount.
• Transparency is an asset and when brands don’t want to participate it leaves him to wonder what they have to hide.

Detractors and hecklers:

• From day one set the boundaries of your brand and if people are negative or add nothing to the conversation, block them!
• Dealing with conflict on Twitter sharpens your skill set and makes you more able to handle conflict.

The line between private and public:

• Artists are created to a particular image however social media forces artists to be themselves.  The line between private and public is gone and it’s more important to be yourself rather than the image.

The next big thing:

• Augmented reality eg.  you’re walking down the street and receive audio grabs of historical facts via your mobile phone.
• Mobile phone credit card devices eg. you can swipe credit cards via your mobile and the transaction goes through to your bank account.

Question of the night (via the Twitter stream):

• Dear @mchammer, can you give me any advice as to what I can and can’t touch?
• Answer:  You can’t touch the concept of Hammer time.

Aside from being awesome, he’s a believer in the law of attraction, a fan of ‘joining a dinner without being invited’, and the kind of person who could smell money underwater, so it’s clear to me that it will be Hammer time for a long time to come.

Posted by Renee Creer

“I’m supposed to be on top of what’s new in tech, but there’s just too much, too fast; it’s like drinking from a fire hose”

I like this quote a lot.  American tech columnist, David Pogue, said this and it’s sometimes how I feel trying to keep up with social media. 

Today’s PR professional needs to be on top of many new things to keep up with the rapid technological and social changes we’re experiencing.  Knowing traditional methods is one thing, but it’s important to keep abreast of new developments that can help client’s achieve their goals.

It’s not enough to be good or great these days, you need to be brilliant, which takes a lot of bloody work (…or, comes quite naturally to some really annoying people!).  It is impossible to know everything, but here are some areas that today’s PR professional should, in some degree, be across or should be working toward knowing:

1. Knowledge of the macro environment, that is, the forces that are shaping media and media consumption and the new influence structures that have developed
2. Knowledge of the main social media tools and their nuances and direct experience with them, that is, actually being part of it not just talking about it
3. Knowledge of different types of releases from traditional media releases, to consumer/customer focussed releases sent via wires services, to social media and search engine optimised releases
4. Knowledge of social media etiquette and how to have and sustain two-way conversations with people and communities
5. An understanding of the importance of search and search engine optimisation and how search and content work together
6. An understanding of the value of content and context, and also what web-friendly content is and how to distribute it across the social web
7. Knowledge and experience with information organisation / management tools - RSS, tagging, bookmarking etc
8. Knowledge of monitoring and insight tools, from free tools and blog search engines to paid monitoring tools
9. Knowledge of how to integrate social media into PR programs based on strategy not random tool selection based on what’s cool right now
10. An understanding of how to measure social media results

I’m still grappling with some of these points and I don’t know a whole lot of stuff but I do know what I don’t know and sometimes that’s half the battle won.

Posted by Renee Creer
Image by the brilliant Carl Sherriff

I attended a New Media Conference last week.  By far the most entertaining speaker was Dan Ilic. His talk was more stand up comedy routine than conference presentation which at 9.30am on a Friday, was fine with me.

From his viewpoint the best virals are strong on character, content and narrative; they make an emotional connection and stay true to the idea.  Controversity, celebrity and comedy are obvious winners and his guide for time was between 45 seconds to 3 minutes, with about a laugh a minute (I know, easy for a funny guy to say).

Dan also mentioned the ‘T-shirt Economy’, that is, how viral content often ends up on t-shirts, making money for the creators - an example being Beached Whale on Cafe Press.  This reminded me of a post I never got around to posting. 

At the end of last year I interviewed my friend, Jarod Green from Currant Creative, one of the guys behind Beached Whale, a hugely successful Australian viral which has had over 4 million views on YouTube.  Jarod is a film director and social media analyst and as an aside, he looks like a very young, sandy haired version of Tom Cruise.  Sometimes when I look at him I imagine him in whites and want to call him Maverick.

Anyhoo - this is what Jarod had to say about his experience:

RC/ When did you realise that you might be onto something with Beached Whale?

JG/ I’d honestly have to say from the moment we recorded it.  It just made us laugh time and time again - so much so you can actually hear Macca (the seagull) laughing in the final video.

RC/ When did it get really big?

JG/ It took about four months to crack the first million hits.  We never really tried to push it, but when Flight of the Conchords posted it on their blog and Fairfax Digital added it to all their online publications last July it certainly got a kick along.  Today it enjoys around forty thousand hits a day.

RC/ Who was the first to approach you about buying it?

JG/ TV networks in Australia and New Zealand were keen to licence the film early on.  Since then we’ve had offers from stationery companies, toy manufacturers, ring tone retailers, jewellery makers, and of course, clothing companies (like Supre).

RC/ Who have you sold it to and how much money have you made?

JG/ Whilst I can’t disclose the terms of any contracts, I can say that collectively we’ve sold over $1 million worth of Beached Whale products globally.  That’s not bad considering we only began selling the brand in late August and the total overhead cost of production, distribution, marketing and maintenance to date is about $15.

RC/ What have you learned from the experience?

JG/ The plan for us was always to use Beached Whale as a proof of concept for utilising the free distribution channels of social networking tools with a financial return. If anything, Beached Whale showed us that the business theory we build was certain sound.  It’s an exciting time to be creating content as the media industry experiences a paradigm shift into new technologies and a globalised market, but with the Old World truth of ‘value in the idea’ stronger than ever.

RC/What’s next?

JG/ A sequel?  Probably not, but you can be sure the beached whale will be returning in some capacity in the coming months.  There’s plenty of other projects we’re working on and towards as we try and keep ahead of the curve and market leaders in unleashing the powerful and rewarding opportunities of new media channels.

Posted by Renee Creer / Photo by Cafe Press

“Change is the only constant”

The last ‘big change’ change I can remember in the PR industry involved switching from faxing to emailing press releases and wow, didn’t that shake things up! 

In case you didn’t realise, PR is undergoing some pretty big changes and we have social media to thank for these exciting times. 

The evolution of technology and the creation of social tools on the web has opened up a brand new world of opportunity for the PR industry. 

Huge debates have been happening (mostly in the US for well over a year) around who should own a social media program; how PR will adapt to social media; how and if practitioners will upskill to seize this opportunity; whether social media will kill PR; even how the social media release might kill off the traditional media release.  I know what you’re thinking - “Please dear God, not the press release!!!” 

I’ve spent hours following these debates in the blogosphere, and I’ve gone so far down the rabbit hole my mind has boggled, or should that be bloggled?  To date, a blog by Brian Solis best captures the state of play and provides the best overview of most current debates and Jeremiah Owyang’s Social Media Frequently Asked Questions is also a great starting point.

Renee Creer