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C Tim li
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Future ia
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CM
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Top 5 ns Social
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p a ig
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U seful G e d ia
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Social
SEO SOCIAL MEDIA PPC AFFILIATES DISPLAY
ONLINE PR IN 10 COUNTRIES 30 LANGUAGES
The Really Useful Guide to Social Media was lovingly crafted by bigmouthmedia’s dedicated social media team,
with special shout outs to Andrew Girdwood, Leanne Rinning, David Law, Jemma Porter, Iain Bruce, David Hardy & Heather Leach.
Oh, and thanks to Red Bull.
Frie n d s R e u
n
2000 Blog platform LiveJournal launches 1999 Six Degrees (first SN site) launches 1997 Evolutionary Timeline
ited
La
un
ch
es
2
02 0
Fr
brief
people suddenly began to think that there really might be
r Lau
A Then in 2007, when Microsoft handed over $240million for a tiny 1.6% stake in the social
networking site Facebook, a lot more businesses started getting excited about the idea of
history
talking online.
2003
But it was in 2009 - when twitter topped 55 million users and became a key battleground
in elections everywhere from the United States to Iran - that the full mind-boggling
evolutionary
evolutio nary
The internet has always been about communication and sharing. The first electronic
bulletin board service launched in 1979. Commercial online services offering online
communication and chat such as Compuserve began to proliferate in the 1980s and by
the end of the decade, dozens of modem based services were competing to provide
users with a conduit to the burgeoning electronic talking shop.
timeline
C
The early ‘90s brought the web, and almost immediately as they logged on users flocked
timelin e
M
to Usenet - the original home of online conversation - which by 1995 was habituated by
Y millions of users worldwide. As the phenomenon grew the talk spread across a proliferating
labyrinth of forums and chatrooms, and it became clear that one of the main things people
2005
CM
CY As the 21st Century approached people began working on ways of pulling these
conversational strands together and the first social networking site as we know them today,
YouTube, Bebo & Facebook l a u n c h e d
CMY
Six Degrees.com, opened its doors in 1997. It shut them again in 2000, but by then the
K
genie was already out of the bottle. Within a year the professional networking site Ryze
had begun reaching out to the business community and was soon to be followed by a rash
of new services including Friendster, LinkedIN, Orkut and, eventually, Facebook.
CIAL MEDIA? Social media had arrived, and it wasn't long before the commercial world began looking
WHAT IS SO sion,
for ways to exploit it. Marketing activity using the new channels began to grow rapidly,
ri al m e d ia such as televi up, and in 2008 commercial interest in online conversations reached a tipping point with the
u st set
Whereas ind ap e rs co st a packet to Beijing Olympic Games, which saw Panasonic, Samsung, McDonalds, Volkswagen, Nike and
w sp
radio and ne of entry are PepsiCo launch simultaneous campaigns designed to cash in on the phenomenon.
ci al m e dia the costs part.
wit h so
w an d an yo ne can take
extremely lo g blogs,
Today, with the world's biggest brands now enjoying social media success, the market
rl d o f w o n ders includin shows no sign of slowing down. Coca-Cola regularly communicates with consumers via its
That covers
aw o instant
ci al n e tw o rks, forums, 3.7million member Facebook group, Ford has chosen to push its new Fiesta range by
so ltimedia file
microblogs, orks and mu having 100 recipients of free cars record their every move on YouTube, Flickr or Twitter and
in g n e tw eate and
mess ag
- an y w h e re that users cr Dell sells direct to the public via its own customer blog and a range of online tools.
sharing sites
ation.
share inform Nobody can tell you exactly what the next 12 months holds for social media, much less the
next 10 years, but what is clear is that whatever form the phenomenon takes on next,
200
*This came as a bit of surprise to many. Nobody knows quite why, because it doesn't seem particularly remarkable that people should want to talk to other people in the the first
6%
e
ar
of
Fa
ce
bo
ok
sel
ls fo
r $ 2 4 0 million 2008 Beijing Olympics sees launch of social media campaigns from McDonalds, Panasonic & Nike 2009 Social Media goes nuclear
p4and5.pdf 16/11/09 15:01:56
how good
Think you’ve got social media covered?
Run through our 5 minute checklist to see if you’re
maximising the benefits and avoiding the potential
dangers of the online revolution
you
YES NO
1 Do you have a good understanding of the way social media is being used in
your market sector? are (and your company)
social media?
2 Do you know what your competitors are doing with social media and is it
working?
C
4 Do you promote your blog by reading similar sites and engaging with their
audience via comment boards?
5
M
Y
Have you signed up and customised your Twitter account?
CM
MY
CY
6 Are you using Twitter to distribute information about your products and
services, or to engage in industry discussions?
How do you measure up?
Award yourself one point for every time you answered
CMY ‘yes’ and rate your performance against our scale below
K
7 Have you set up a profile page, fan page or group on Facebook to help
promote your products or services?
1- 4 5-8 9 -12
9 Are you syndicating your online content and channelling traffic to your site
using popular social bookmarking sites like Sphinn, Reddit and Digg?
11 Are you taking advantage of any of the myriad of the available free moni-
toring tools such as Google Alerts, Google Blog Search, and Backtype.com?
promote your brand to
millions of people
worldwide. Go back to
little more time
developing your social
media strategy to
media. Just fill in any
gaps and remember to
keep at it - the best
question one and start maximise its benefits. campaigns are long
12 Have you created a clear set of policies for responding to enquires and
comments arriving via social media?
making some changes! term.
TOTAL
p6and7.pdf 16/11/09 15:06:22
social media
access detailed statistics and sentiment analysis
tools
experience.
C
1 3
4 Board Reader http://boardreader.com
Stay in touch with what people are talking about in your sector by searching
for key phrases across multiple forums.
5
M
Y
BlogPulse http://www.blogpulse.com
CM
6
CY
CMY
4 Backtype http://www.backtype.com
K
Searches through blog comments.
5
7 Blinkx http://www.blinkx.com
Search all the top online video sites from a single site.
7
9
6
8 Google Alerts http://www.google.com/alerts
Setup alerts for every time your keyword is mentioned
8
9 Twitter Search http://search.twitter.com
Twitter’s very own search engine. Find out what people are saying about you
about right now.
10
10 Yahoo Pipes http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes
Merge RSS feeds from the above tools using Yahoo pipes to create your own
custom monitoring tool.
p8and9.pdf 16/11/09 14:59:56
planning
Want to begin engaging in the social media sphere?
evaluating
Deciding on the most appropriate ways to measure a
The steps below are by no means exhaustive, but good social media campaign should be done before the campaign
pointers to get you started. is launched.
The ideal metric for many brands may well be a public opinion survey before and after the
campaign. The challenge is surveying the same demographic as the social media
M
Talk to your customers? Free sites like Alexa.com and Compete.com offer a rough insight into the popularity of a
website and the Technorati blog authority metric is also freely available. Conversations on
Y
Once you have established your objectives, use your landscape research to determine popular sites could be considered more significant than conversations on niche sites.
CM where you want to position yourself. Don’t just jump on every social network out there. Sites can be graded for appropriateness or desirability. Downgraded sites might be subject
MY
Firstly that is bad practice and impolite. Not every platform will be useful to your brand or to a reduction in their effective popularity. Upgraded sites might be treated as twice or
your objectives. There is no point being in places where no one will listen to you. thrice as popular as the freely available web metrics suggest they are.
CY
And lastly do not become involved in areas where it may require resource and
CMY
management that you have not accounted for. If you try to communicate through many Paid for web metric utilities like comScore, Forrester and Hitwise offer a better level analytic
K platforms at once and you do not have the time or resource to keep track, monitor, analyse insight. These tools are frequency costly but many brands already have access to these
and respond you will be unsuccessful. tools via their Search or Display digital agency or in-house team.
3
In some instances traffic itself is a measure of success. It may not be appropriate to
Create content measure the impact of a social media campaign by counting the web traffic but it may be
What are you going to give your audience? Why would they want to interact with you? possible to measure the impact of tweeted headlines by calculating clickthrough ratios or
Work out how you’re going to add value for your audience. Don’t go out to create a ”viral”. even tallying clicks.
The best virals go viral by accident, and so can’t be artificially produced. It starts with
excellent, engaging, entertaining and downright useful content. Brands involved in user engagement mapping or click path analysis for their search
Maybe you are providing a useful tool, providing advice or giving support. Think about campaigns may well notice that shoppers tend to visit the site many times before making a
what you are doing /offering and how you can promote it. purchase. This is especially true if a would-be customer needs to convince themselves that
they have found the best place to make a purchase.
4 Resources
Make sure you have the resources to be in social media. Being successful in social media
takes patience and dedication. You need to be dedicated to writing that blog, or answering
your customers’ questions and you need a superstar that is passionate about your brand to
Brands that are still building up their reputation and might not be well known to the
consumer are particularly prone to this. A successful social media campaign, one that
reaches a broad demographic, may shorten this click path as users are quicker to make
their purchases from brands they are familiar with.
manage your social media presence.
5
In this scenario the user engagement analysis can be compared before and after the social
Monitor media campaign, the average CPC factored against the average click path length, and the
Monitoring is vital to evaluate the success of your social media campaign. Monitoring will difference between the two benchmarks be used to produce a monetary value success metric.
help you gauge the pickup of your campaign, how many people have been interacting
with you? How far have your messages gone? It will also provide insight into where you
can tap into industry conversations that perhaps you should be part of.
p10and11.pdf 16/11/09 14:59:06
Lenovo
The Beijing 2008 Olympics may have been at the centre of a marketing whirlwind, but it
hot campaigns
was computer manufacturer Lenovo that walked away with the gold medal for sheer
innovation.
Voices of the Olympic Games brought together 100 athlete bloggers from 25 different
countries and connected them the world as they blogged their way to the 2008 Games.
Over the course of the event Lenovo’s Athlete Bloggers published more than 1,500 posts
and received over 8,000 comments from fans around the world. Supported by a global
social media campaign the strategy was judged a huge success and demonstrated the
Social media success is hard to come by. It takes time and effort, value of using real, unfiltered voices to reach consumers.
constant attention and patience. But when it does work, and you
can see your message spreading as people start talking about and Starbucks
engaging with your brand, you can begin to see what a powerful Launching a concerted social media marketing campaign using Facebook and Twitter has
effect a social media campaign can have. helped Starbucks establish better communication with its consumers. The world’s most
recognisable purveyor of hot coffee now regularly announces news, introduces promo-
tions and answers enquiries via Social Media. In addition to using both platforms to launch
Ford fiesta movement sales initiatives the company also provides regular updates from CEO Howard Schultz on
In 2010, Ford will launch their highly successful Fiesta in the US for the first time. As we all the corporation’s commitment to corporate social responsibility practices worldwide.
know, our friends stateside are not the biggest small car fans, so Ford had their work cut
and mistakes
out to show them just how good the all new Fiesta is.
Ford launched an initiative called Fiesta Movement. A national campaign to recruit 100
‘Agents’ who would each be given a Ford Fiesta for 6 months with one objective – to blog,
C
twitter, Flickr, YouTube and Facebook their experiences of the car to the world. Over 4,000
M people applied to be a Fiesta Agent but the lucky 100 were chosen and set off sharing their The most important thing to remember about social media is that
Y
experiences and completing monthly missions to show the US what experiencing the Ford everyone makes mistakes - even the experts. Here’s a couple of
Fiesta is all about.
CM
examples of companies that got it wrong so you don’t have to.
Why is this so successful?
Habitat
MY
CY Blogger outreach - Ford found 100 relevant and influential bloggers to act as
advocates for the brand. In perhaps the most famous example of a social media fail, Habitat used Twitter’s hash-tags
CMY
and trending topics to advertise their products. This would be perfectly fine and rather
K
Researching the social landscape - Ford carried out research to determine which savvy if the hash-tags were about chic furniture or interior design, however tweets about
channels would be successful for the Fiesta Movement use. the ‘totally desirable spring collection’ were popping up in searches for the political
Engaging in community participation - Ford manage the Fiesta Movement Twitter situation in Iran. This caused a public outcry, especially when Habitat simply deleted the
page and Facebook page where their marketing and comms team engage with their offending tweets and slunk off for a few days to draft a response.
audience. Additionally, every ‘agent’ is engaging in community participation on Think less traditional public relations, think more live stand-up
behalf of Ford. comedy: there’s no time to sit down and figure out a response to
REMEMBER
Press releases – Ford are posting press releases announcing the progress of the hecklers. You must be on the ball, quick, and ready with the perfect
campaign as well as each challenge that the ‘agents’ have to take part in, helping to ith other answer.
raise the presence of the campaign. op le wan t to connect w on’t
Pe s. D
e, not brand
people onlin
Providing incentives – Ford provided each agent with a free car for six months. inte nt io ns , but
hide your true e a real human being
Skittles
Who could turn that down? b
remember to ntative By this point you’ve got the picture: social media is all about
st an d co m pany represe ces interacting with and understanding your audience. But before
fir sp ec ia l p la
e are
Ford has used the power of the crowds to promote the Fiesta for them. By providing a second. Ther es, but social media inviting the general online public to get involved with your brand,
ch
large amount of advocates with a car to use for 6 months, they are guaranteed a constant online for pit make sure you really think it through. In a bold move, Skittles
em.
stream of conversation about the Fiesta, coming from the people who their target isn’t one of th replaced their official website with a Twitter search page show-
audience really trust. ing, in real time, every Tweet mentioning Skittles. This seems like
a cool idea until you consider the deadly cocktail of cheap broadband, short attention
The numbers spans, and hunger for internet fame. Soon the page devolved into racial slurs, profanities,
To date, the Fiesta Movement Facebook fan page has 1,706 fans and their Twitter account and suggestions for crude new slogans. Needless to say Skittles soon resumed regular
has 4,470 followers. The reach of their campaign is huge due to all of their 100 Agents service.
being active influencers on either Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Flickr or in their own blog.
Although there are ways Skittles could have filtered the results to exclude vulgar language,
it’s probably wise not to replace any official page with one that can be edited by the great
unwashed.
p12and13.pdf 16/11/09 14:58:10
Predicting the future is never easy, particularly when it comes to the web - where phenomena can arise, build
million-strong audiences and then wither away to nothing within an extremely short timespan. When it comes to
plotting your company's course through the online media minefield it's easy to get confused, but the trick is not to
be too distracted by the mass of unknowns, instead focus the bulk of your energies upon the technologies you can
be sure of while keeping a weather eye on the latest emerging trends.
There are some things, after all, that we know WILL happen in the future. Mobile devices will continue to play an
increasingly important role, with the iPhone, Google's Android phones and a developing range of smart handsets
playing a key role in the shifting patterns of how people communicate, search for information and buy goods online.
Rising on the back of the smart phone revolution, another buzzword that's gathering pace is "Geo-aware".
Applications that deliver information specific to the geographical location of the user are becoming increasingly
common, and you can expect to see a rapid proliferation of interest as companies begin directly reaching out to
consumers with location aware devices based on where they happen to be at any particular time of day.
With so few definites to comfort them, it's no wonder that many
organisations hesitate when it comes to planning their social
URE media strategy. They worry that any plan they come up with may
IN T H E F U T fall victim to changing fashions almost as soon as it has begun,
online PR and
invest in? quite naturally, and consequently do nothing while their
What do we
t Facebook? competitors make hay.
Is it all abou
la st?
Will Twitter e So how do you get around this? Simply by cutting through the
a small fortun
social media
ow
Didn't we bl l offices in Second Life? chaff and concentrating on the cold hard facts ...
building virtua edia
hole social m an?
What if this w
future of
C
sh in th e p
a fla
thing is just
survey
M
CM
the
social media
MY
CY
CM
Company results
MY
What do you see as the main benefits of social media activity?
CY
CMY
Response: 391
Response: 392
p16and17.pdf 16/11/09 14:57:15
M Response: 338
Y
CM
MY
CY
CMY
Agency results
Has the amount of money your clients typically
spend on social media increased or decreased in
the last year?
Response: 340
Response: 352
p18and19.pdf 16/11/09 14:56:28
CM
Response: 338
MY
CY
CMY
2008 results
How satisfied are you with your
agency’s level of social media
and online PR knowledge?
Response: 336
cover.pdf 16/11/09 16:50:48
Top 10
ols
ood SM To
How gat SM?
yo u
Media a re
Social ne
C Tim li
e
Future ia
Med
CM
SM
Top 5 ns Social
MY
p a ig
rategy Cam
SM St
ing
Plann
y
CY
www.bigmouthmedia.com
R e a l l
The uide to
CMY
K
Tel: 0845 130 0022
hello@bigmouthmedia.com
U seful G e d ia
M
Social
SEO SOCIAL MEDIA PPC AFFILIATES DISPLAY
ONLINE PR IN 10 COUNTRIES 30 LANGUAGES
The Really Useful Guide to Social Media was lovingly crafted by bigmouthmedia’s dedicated social media team,
with special shout outs to Andrew Girdwood, Leanne Rinning, David Law, Jemma Porter, Iain Bruce, David Hardy & Heather Leach.
Oh, and thanks to Red Bull.