Danny Whatmough.com

Last night I attended a debate on social media and the election hosted by our frenemies, Lewis PR, over at the very flashy Lewis media centre.

Alas it was, I regret to report, mainly a dull affair with the highlights for me being a delightful little montage of ‘thoughts from the general public’ fronted by the very smartly dressed Eb Adeyeri and some entertaining shenanigans with the Twitter wall.

Despite these amusements, in a great example of how not to chair a focused seminar, the event started thirty minutes late, the four speakers (Evening Standard Editor Paul Waugh, Tory MP Jeremy Hunt, Labour ex-minister Tom Watson and Dan Burton from Salesforce who apparently didn’t have a Twitter profile) were given a ludicrous 40 minutes to pitch (it was advertised as 5 minutes each) their pretty mundane and predictable thoughts (including a tedious sales pitch from the sponsor, Dan from Salesforce, on cloud computing of all things! A guy who I hasten to add didn’t then contribute anything further and had to leave halfway through to catch a train! – ouch #whydidyousponsor), leaving very limited time for questions.

The unfocused discussions crawled their way through the predictable traditional versus social media quagmire and much to and froing about whether MPs should be tweeting at all.

The advertised title of can “social media make or break and election” was largely ignored.

So I regret to inform that it therefore falls to me to use the obligatory ‘report on an event I’ve been to’ blog post to give some of my thoughts on the theme of “the impact of social media on the general election”.

TV is going to play a big role

As Tom Watson quite rightly observed, the TV debates will have the biggest effect on this election. Business Zone editor Dan Martin made a good point (on Twitter) when he questioned why it’s taken us so long to even get to this point. And with this in mind, it’s hardly surprising that social media usage by the main political parties is at such a base level.

Social media is not enough on it’s own

Many forget that social media wasn’t really what won the election for Obama. It played a part, but a relatively small one. That’s not to say it couldn’t be a winning formula, but just ‘doing it’ isn’t enough. What Obama did teach us, was that a carefully thought out and executed strategy from day one (take note Mr Cameron) is vital.

Don’t forget Facebook

The debate raged limped around the various merits or not of tweeting and blogging but, as anyone who knows their stuff will tell you, Facebook is where the war can be won or lost. Twitter is the media’s shiny new plaything, but Facebook is where the majority of voters are to be found.

If social media has an impact on the election, it will be from the grassroots

So in the absence of any real strategic planning in terms of social media from any of the main political parties so far (happy to be proved wrong about this), any innovative social media action in terms of the election is likely to come from ‘below’. We’ve already seen Mydavidcameron.com and I expect more grassroots movements like Invincecable before May 6th has been and gone.

If this event taught me anything…

…it’s that the traditional media, despite the valiant efforts of the Paul Waughs and Rory Cellan-Jones of this world, still don’t ‘get’ social media. And similarly, the vast majority of politicians, despite the valiant efforts of the Tom Watsons and Jeremy Hunts of this world, still don’t ‘get’ social media.

If they did, they would realise exactly why spending time using social tools wouldn’t be better spent dreaming up policies that no one knows about.

Winning elections is all about winning the hearts and minds of the punters on the street. And, despite the fact that the Tories are intent spending more of Ashcrofts money on it, billboard ads are no longer cutting the mustard.

What do politicians need to get over the crisis of the expenses scandal?

They need to start engaging with the voters again. And I just wonder whether arming MPs with (cheap) laptops with Tweetdeck (other desktop apps are available) and iPhones, might just be a good starting point and the wake-up call many of them need.

That’s how I’d use social media to win the election. Simple really.

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PR Week has today revealed comments from the Daily Telegraph’s assistant editor Neil Midgley who warned journalists and PRs that Facebook shouldn’t be used for work:

‘It’s my network. I won’t post details of my sex life on it, but I can post status updates on there that I wouldn’t post on Twitter. Don’t talk to me about work on it’

These are comments that I’m sure many PRs and journalists – indeed most people – would agree with. I certainly use Facebook very much from a personal standpoint.

But, as you have possibly seen me ranting talking about recently, I think Facebook is changing. And I wonder whether these changes will alter the way we all use the service.

This has appeared on the same day as PR blogger Steve Rubel has launched his own Facebook page. As Steve explains:

“Now I am also adding a Facebook Page that will feature everything that’s posted here plus exclusive content for those of you who opt in and become a fan. It’s very similar to how I approach Twitter – which also features links that I don’t always share elsewhere. The difference is that the new Facebook Page will sit in between what I do here and Twitter and hopefully spark a rich discussion from a broader group of people who don’t necessarily read blogs or use Twitter.”

So is this possibly the way we – as individuals and also possibly as brands – should be going? Are Facebook pages the new ‘public Facebook’?

With Google in the US now showing Facebook updates in Google social search, I’m sure it’s a trend that Facebook is keen to encourage.

Facebook pages don’t have the same ‘conversational’ element that Twitter has, but could be an effective way to have a publicly available presence on Facebook that doesn’t encroach on your personal space.

If there was any doubt about whether social media would play a big part in the forthcoming general election then mydavidcameron.com is proof.

Last week some spoof images of the Tory’s latest campaign posters started appearing on the Go Fourth Labour blog. This led to Clifford Singer – a creative director at Sparkloop graphic design agency and creator of the Other TaxPayer’s Alliance website – to build mydavidcameron.com (itself a play on the myconservatives.com site) to encourage grassroots supporters to create and upload their own spoof posters.

And today, the Labour party has officially adopted some of the posters as part of their election campaigning by posting them on their website.

This move has got some Tory bloggers up in arms, but as Gordon Macmillan points out, they are all largely missing the point!

What this demonstrates is good engagement with the grassroots of the party and driving engagement from the bottom up – a strategy that is very effective in all forms of social media marketing, but in particular in political campaigning as a certain Mr Obama clearly demonstrated.

Yes, it’s pretty negative, but unfortunately that is UK politics for you and at the moment you feel the Labour party has to play hard to even stand any chance of changing the polls…

I don’t want to write another 2010 prediction type post – I’ve written a few already! But, in the first few days of the New Year, I’m already seeing a lot of noise around a trend that I expect will grow by necessity in 2010 and beyond.

As social media and social networks in particular increase in popularity, there is an increasing information overload. Managing your connections across Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Foursquare and the like becomes a full time job in itself.

So services that try and combine this are going to become more and more prevalent.

One example of such a service is Mingly. The product is currently in ‘alpha’, but you can read all about it here.

Now this is my kind of startup – a company that sees a real need and tries hard to solve a problem without borrowing millions of VC money to get started.

Could this be a good example of a brave new wave of post-recession entrepreneurs? I hope so, there are too many useless startups around at the moment.

Social media is a great tool for marketers, no question about it. But what about when things go wrong and the tables are turned?

I’ve argued before that in many ways, PRs are best placed to run social media operations and there are number of reasons why I think this is the case. One of the key reasons is that experienced public relations pros are adept at responding to situations – good and bad – and communicating messages quickly and effectively to a particular audience to inform, whilst taking strides to protect the reputation of the brand or business involved.

Last night, five Eurostar trains stopped working as they entered the Channel Tunnel, leaving the trains and passengers on board trapped. Many were trapped for hours in what must have been a scary and terrifying ordeal for them as well as their families and friends.

This is a nightmare situation for a company like Eurostar. And this is not the place to look at attributing blame. But, I do want to look at how the company approached one of those mainstays of traditional public relations: crisis communications.

Across the board, Eurostar seems to have fallen down on it’s duty to its customers, by failing to adequately transmit information.

And nowhere has this been more evident that on social media and, in particular, on Twitter. Mike Butcher at Techcrunch has covered the unfolding of this story in detail. But, essentially, there were no updates on either the @Little_Break or @Eurostar_Uk Twitter accounts as the crisis unfolded. In a twist to the story, it transpires the latter account wasn’t even an official Eurostar channel – it has now been suspended – and @eurostar is used by someone in Shanghai!

The @Little_Break account wasn’t updated until 11.30 today (Saturday) – a full 16 hours after the first incident happened! WTF!? If we have learned anything about social media, it is that it works best in real-time.

What does this situation teach us about the handling of social media when things go wrong:

• It doesn’t matter what you want the account to be used for – it looks as though the @Little_Break account was being used for some sort of social media marketing campaign. Which is fine. But the public don’t put brands into boxes like this. If you have a social media channel then the public will see this as your brand on Twitter. So expect them to get in touch with you as they see fit, and not necessarily in the way you would like
• Monitoring, monitoring, monitoring – it doesn’t matter if it is a Friday night before Christmas, the public will still use social media and will expect companies – if they are using the channel, and increasingly even if they are not – to be listening
• Social media is real-time – we all know this, so why did it take Eurostar 16 hours to update their Twitter account? There is no excuse, especially as real-time take centre stage with Google transmitting the whole story as it unfolds
• Social media shouldn’t be an afterthought in crisis comms – as all good PRs know, in an emergency, you need to get clear, transparent and helpful information out to people as quickly as possible. And that means social media too
• Advanced planning is crucial – when something like this happens, there isn’t time to start putting plans together, it needs to have been thought about in advance. It looks as though this didn’t happen. Having social media as part of your crisis communications action plan is vital
• When things go wrong, who’s in charge – with this confusion over ‘who is best placed to use social media’ within organisations, it is no surprise that when things go wrong, social media could fall through the cracks. Is it the PR, ’social media’, SEO, marketing or customer service team that should be in control, pushing the agenda to the fore?

Obviously this is a horrid situation for Eurostar and it is easy to sit and criticise from a distance. But the fact is that this has not been handled at all well and their reputation, their PR, has taken a serious knock.

UPDATE: It seems this is a topic that isn’t going to go away any time soon. Already there are some great posts from Dirk, Rachel, Mark and Neville on the subject. As Dirk says, expect this to be coming to a social media case study near you soon…

UPDATE: Eurostar CEO Richard Brown has released a video apology on the Little Breaks blog site – it’s a good effort and sounds pretty sincere.

UPDATE: I was very careful not to mention any agencies associated with Eurostar in the above post. At a time like this, decisions will be made at a senior level within the business. An agency will only be able to sit and advise to their best ability. If this is ignored, there isn’t much to be done. And it seems this is pretty much what happened. In a very honest post, Robin Grant from Wearesocial, a social media agency, has given a very open overview of things from their perspective. It’s worth a read as it perfectly highlights some of the organisational challenges I referred to above.

I like a good prediction post as much as the next person and so I was intrigued to read an article by Augie Ray from Forrester entitled: 2010: The Year Marketing Dies…

In it, Ray asserts that, due to a number of factors (including the demise of traditional media, the growth of technologies like PVRs that are rendering TV advertising obsolete and the growth of social media), marketing as we know it is under going a dramatic sea-change.

And 2010 is guaranteed to be the year when social media has its biggest impact on brands to date. The recent real-time search changes will only quicken this as I’ve already suggested and as Ray states:

The search engine changes mean that 2010 will be the year when brands can run but they cannot hide.  Gone are the days when marketers could carefully craft messaging and then broadcast that message in a few channels to huge portions of their audiences.  Oh, you can still spend money that way if you want to but in our transparent world, no marketing budget can possibly overcome the actual experience consumers have (and share with friends, followers and Google) with the product, service, or organization.  It no longer matters what you say;  in 2010, your brand will be more defined by what you do and who you are!

So actual experience will replace the image that brands want to portray about themselves, especially as we all get more involved in social media and climb up the social technographics ladder (see above). What does this mean in practice?

• customer service and customer experience becomes vital
• product development needs to be more user focused
• marketing and PR teams need to be ready to act and react to issues; crisis management becomes crucial, but harder
• marketing and PR campaigns need to focus on engagement rather than trying to enforce brand values
• no part of the business can afford to ignore the audience

Central to all of these is the ability to understand your audience. One line in particular in Ray’s article is fundamental to this too:

“in 2010, your brand will be more defined by what you do and who you are”

It’s a challenge.

Yes, I know this has been all over the web in the last 24 hours, but I wanted to mention it here too as I think it’s a brilliant campaign:

If you haven’t come across it, IKEA in Sweden have launched a competition on Facebook. They set up an account for one of their senior employees and posted up some of the displays from their new Malmo store.

They then asked ‘friends’ to tag the furniture in the images, with the first person to tag an item winning it!

They’ve got over 700 friends on the account already, lots of positive (global) media interest and some good social media buzz.

So why it this such a clever campaign and why has it worked so well:

1. Simplicity – it’s so simple that you could tell anyone about it in a few sentences
2. Cheap – it’s hardly cost anything for IKEA to set it up and market it
3. Technology – it uses social tech tools in a new innovative way
4. Value – it gives something back to social media participants
5. Creative – it’s a wonderfully creative and innovative idea

I was at a PRCA event last week run by Cristina Hoole, European PR and Marketing manager at Linkedin.

The problem with Linkedin

I’ve always been a bit confused by Linkedin. I can see the potential benefits, but just can’t bring myself to make it a major part of my everyday working life. My profile is kept updated. I often add new contacts. And I’ll use it to look people up. But I just don’t use the site on a regular basis.

Having said that, Linkedin isn’t failing – Hoole reported 50 million users worldwide and 3 million here in the UK – but I wonder how many of these actually visit the site every single day, as they would with Twitter or Facebook?

Linkedin is great for linking together your business community, but it doesn’t have that everyday application that other networks have. This is potentially a problem: two of three of its revenue sources – advertising and premium accounts – are mainly focused ‘on-site’ (the third being software packages for recruitment agents).

Linkedin Outlook Integration

But Cristina revealed an interesting new feature for Linkedin – Outlook Integration. And it makes total sense.

Where do most ‘business people’ spend most of their time? In Outlook.

Outlook integration therefore seems like a great idea. I now don’t need to visit the Linkedin site every single day, but I can still harness the usefulness of the tool through Outlook – something I use for long stretches of time every single day. Obviously monetising this will be a challenge, but at least it could begin to make Linkedin an everyday, business critical tool.

Twitter has had unbelievable success with third party applications and increasingly Facebook is entering and finding traction here. As we start using more and more networks, bringing together more and more friends and followers, these third party apps are crucial to helping us keep on top of everything.

And I think this could be the key to future success for Linkedin too.

Footnote…

I actually wrote most of this post last week, but only got round to finishing now. And, by sheer coincidence, Linkedin has today announced a brand new API for third party developers. Tweetdeck is reportedly releasing an integration later this week.

Could there possibly be ray of sunshine round the corner for Linkedin?

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This is brilliant. Simple. Clear. Astonishing.

Credit to Gary Hayes and thanks to Dirk for the link.

Via Robin Grant, I came across the above diagram from Nick Burcher and the accompanying blog post. It’s brilliant and is well worth a read.

What Nick manages to encapsulate is essentially the quite simple concept of how social media marketing works and takes place. It’s so simply conveyed however and with such clarity that it makes immediate sense (though the accompanying blog post really is worth a read).

As Nick explains, the diagram centres around two distinct areas – the destination:

“Traditionally marketing efforts have focussed around ‘The Destination.’ Ad space is bought to push people to a main site / microsite and this could be anything from Paid Search to TV to Print. It’s all about ‘go here now!’ There is a direct correlation between ad spend and ‘Destination’ traffic… This is changing though. New ‘Destinations’ are being created, it’s no longer just a main site or a microsite. Facebook Fan Pages are being used as an activity hub with paid ads driving traffic … Alternatively the Destination could be a YouTube channel … or other social platform.” (my emphasis)

…and the conversation:

“The democratisation of tools of production and distribution mean anyone can create and publish. The emergence of social platforms means anyone can get an audience for their thoughts and content. The Conversation is therefore about the mechanics of sharing.

“If advertisers can successfully participate in the Conversation then it becomes less about paid pushing. The Conversation is about engaging rather than broadcasting, and if done successfully it changes the equation. Instead of having to pay to recruit every visit, consumers can be co-opted as brand ambassadors who then will freely relay the advertiser message with consequent Destination traffic the result. Thus when people talk about ‘going viral’ what they actually mean is ’successfully harnessing The Conversation to drive incremental attention / site traffic.’”

Nick goes on to explain how social media marketing depends on creating the content that can “kickstart” and drive the conversation that will in turn drive traffic to the destination.

Of course, the reality is never quite as straightforward as these models suggest, but this is still a welcome and much needed visualised representation of what many agencies, brands and businesses are trying to get to grips with.