9 out 10 of the top twitter postings during that period were about the earthquake

I really enjoyed watching Clay Shirky’s TED talk about how social media can make history. He is a deep thinker and great speaker.

He makes some interesting points about this new technology of ours. Some of the concepts are fairly simple. Firstly that the phone was a 1 to 1 dialogue which facilitated conversation. Radio and Tv were 1 to many mediums where a message was broadcast out. The internet facilitates both groups and conversation. What he says is amazing about the internet is that we all become creators “it is like you have phone and it could turn into a radio as well”. So basically we are now dealing with a Many to Many medium where everyone is both receiver and producer.

As an aside I have always found it fascinating comparing the difference between conversations using a speaker phone with a one on one conversation. If you have ever tried a two way speaker phone voice conference the dynamics are seriously stretched. Telephone technology really does not facilitate this many to many group conversation in any comfortable way!

Clay’s argument is that the internet really transforms the power of what people are able to do. He uses the example of the earthquake in China in May 2008. People started texting, taking videos, pictures and using twitter. Many people uploaded visual images to QQ the popular chinese social networking site. People heard it first from the social networks. The BBC heard about the earthquake via twitter. The Chinese government have a reputation for acting as gatekeeper for information about what is going on in china but in this instance they had no choice. This was because the information was very different to traditional news stories – it was produced locally, by amateurs, very rapidly and in huge quantities.

Clay suggests that the days of professional production of information is over. Now the majority of information is produced by amateurs. Who talk to each other and connect with each other. This has huge implications for how organizations need to act. He uses as an example the MyBo website used in the Obama campaign. During the campaign Obama change direction on a policy decision to the great dismay of many supporters who complained vociferously on the website. Obama had to respond and did. However what was interesting was that the conversation then turned as people started to realise that they had been allowed to express their opinions and the Obama campaign had not tried to control what was being said. Clay argues that is the way to make really mature use of this new technology.

Clay’s point about control is one that many businesses still need to grasp. Businesses can no longer expect to control their “image” in the media (if they ever really could). Too many consumers now have the power to publicize their own take on what a company is doing. Instead we need to listen, learn, participate and change what we do.

There is another critical characteristic about this new medium that I’m sure Clay is aware of though he did not cover it here. That is the fact that there a time element. These media can be both synchronous and asynchronous. The asynchronous part means that there is a stored history. The great value to this is that people can catch up and join in a conversation at any point. The synchronous part means that there are also opportunities for spontaneous live dialogue. The combination of the two is extremely powerful.

SociaLNK supports organizations in listening to their audience and building better brand enagement. Contact us.

Social Media is certainly becoming a buzz word in many companies. But how can we measure return on investment (ROI)? It certainly isn’t simple. There are many ways being touted to track social media but there is no obvious “perfect” solution. It isn’t like a simple email campaign where you can measure the number of emails sent out, the number opened and the conversions that resulted. Most of what happens in social media is securely hidden from view by a login. The outcomes are often much more fuzzy things like developing “brand awareness” etc. The things that appropriate for your company will be specific to your current situation.

So what can we measure? To start measuring Social Media ROI you need to define your own set of metrics relevent to your particular context. What do you value as a measure? Could you measure the number of retweets a blog post get? Number of views of a video? Number of comments? Would it be relevant to define a metric based on comment length? By setting up a system you can start measuring your outcomes to establish what is working for you.

It is important to realise that simply having a large number of followers/friend/subscribers does not actually mean anything in terms of engagement. You need to look a whole lot deeper than this to understand what is really going on. The things you measure should aim to identify the people that are actually hearing what you say and are actively engaged in building community themselves.

So where are the conversations relevant to your brand happening on the internet? This is where you need to be. These niche areas often have fewer people but they are often highly focused and engagement levels are high. The best way to find such relevant conversation is to use social media monitoring software.

Your company can make a real difference to the level of engagement in their brand by the way they behave on social networks. If you simply use the network as a way to advertise then you are loosing a lot of the value of social media. Social means participating in social channel, by sharing opinion and giving people a reason to interact with you. A company that engages with personality and a level of giving will have a much higher level of engagement from others.

At a higher level you also need to set up a social media strategy with clear objectives. This helps not only justify your activity in the long term but also helps you work out what your logical next steps should be.. SociaLNK can help you develop metrics and strategies to help you understand your own Social Media ROI.

A presentation at Adtech in September made a good stab at trying to identify the difference between today’s social media marketing strategies and yesterdays more direct push advertising approaches. In the former the whole focus was to get that consumer to a specified “destination”. Nowadays,  Nick Burcher of Vivaki argued, the focus is on the “conversation”

 As Nick points out Web 1.0 was a one way street. Everybody had their defined roles consumer, advertiser and publisher. Since the arrival of Web 2.0 the distinction has become much more blurred. Now anyone can be a publisher through Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, forums and blogs. The advertisers are taking a full part in the conversation by having their own Facebook pages, Twitter streams and Blogs. The interaction between the two is creating communities that share information and support and help each other. An example I like is in the software industry where consumers of high end software (e.g. Oracle) actually post bug reports and get into conversations with developers. What better way to build reputation than to let their customer feel part of the picture!

 SociaLNK has a developed a range of strategies for helping companies start conversations with their clients. Whether it be through an event, a widget, a blog, a forum or a facebook page. And it is not simply partaking in the conversation that is important. The wealth of data on the internet is also invaluable for gaining feedback from your customers. If you can learn what the consumer is thinking about you right now then you are in a great position to move forward.

 Nick goes on to point out that the cost of advertising has also completely altered. If you can engage your customers and encourage them to share positive information about your company then you have immediately created free brand ambassadors. The potential pay back if you can get it right is huge. Some of this pay back is not easy to measure. By building reputation you are increasing sentiment and engagement with the conversation. This will stand you in good stead for the future.

Troubling news for companies who are relying on traditional advertising on the Internet. Apparently the number of US users that click on banner adverts is down 50%. I guess a simple argument would be that this proves that the push of traditional campaigns is not working in our new social media world.

However one of the SociaLNK team unearthed this gem yesterday from Comscore and Group M. This research shows that if consumers are exposed to brands via social media i.e. they have been involved in a conversation about the brand they are more likely to use brands as their search terms.

What is more paid search makes a difference here. As they put it: “consumers exposed to a brand’s influenced social media and paid-search programs are 2.8 times more likely to search for that brand’s products compared with users who only saw paid search.”

The study, completed in September 2009, was a 3 month analysis of clients across a number of verticals, including automotive, consumer packaged goods and telecommunications. Another key finding was that there is a 50% increase in click through rate for paid search for consumers who had been exposed to “influenced social media and paid search”. In other words those who engage in conversations about a brand are also more likely to click on the brand’s paid search ad.

This is great news for Social Media marketing as it clearly demonstrates how important it is to actively engage in conversations with your clients. Maybe using data like this we can shift a few of our more traditional colleagues towards new ways of thinking that include more open democratic and transparent interactions with their customer base!