Archive for the ‘Social media’ Category

Google+ – Google’s combination of search and social

January 19th, 2012

Google’s announcement of the uplifting of Google+ (or G+) pages within search results has been eliciting reactions from a number of people in the search industry. Everyone seems to have an opinion about how they feel Google’s new preferences will affect search results, but in the furore that this has raised, businesses have to ask “How will the average searcher react?”

I think there are a number of ways in which this could play out for Google and, in turn, the businesses that get traffic from their search results. First I think it’s best to examine exactly how Google came to make this change. The rise of social media has put “the big G” into competition with “the big F”, even though they are in similar, but not the same, markets. For a large part, this decision seems somewhat ego-driven, because Google has confronted Facebook with their foray into Social through G+. So far G+ just hasn’t captured audience share from Facebook that Google hoped it would. So, to keep G+ front of mind, Google wants to increase its importance to searchers, in the hope that companies will flock to G+, bringing their fans with them.

Now those motives are not necessarily pure, it leaves search engine aware businesses with the realisation that Google’s results are no longer pure and neutral. However, for the average searcher, with little to no knowledge of how search engines actually work, will this make a difference? They will see these new details (like the result below), but their reactions are hard to predict.

Searchers seeing G+ or affiliated results, which their circles share, may believe that those pages are more trustworthy because Google and their friends endorse them. They are therefore more inclined to click on them as their level of trust in Google is high, which means that businesses could start to see G+ pages visited instead of their pages when people are searching for generic terms. This could draw greater numbers of businesses to create G+ pages as they believe their competitors’ G+ pages are gaining greater prominence in key search result pages.

Another alternative is that people start to distrust the entirety of Google’s search results because they no longer see them as neutral and unbiased. This is heightened by the fact that it is only G+ elements that are being integrated, not Facebook or any of G+’s other competitors. With this lack of trust, it could mean searchers have to find another trustworthy way to find new sites. This could mean a gap for a new search platform, becoming to Google what it was to Yahoo, or it could mean that Bing has an opportunity to seize market share. However, a new search platform would mean and entirely new problem for businesses to solve, as predicting where people will go is something that no one has completely nailed down yet.

At the end of the day, word of mouth is great when people are searching for a great place to have supper, or the new cool place to buy clothes, but friends and circles don’t know everything. We know that our closest friends don’t all have the same likes and dislikes as us, and that’s not taking into account the drive to acquire as many friends as possible. It’s a phenomenon we’ve seen in Facebook, where people collect friends to try and compete for the biggest number of friends. If people start to do that on G+, then all of those people will impact what search results they see, even if it’s a second cousin twice removed that you emailed out of family duty.

As a business, you obviously won’t know who your potential visitors are connected to, and how populated their search results will be by G+ results. This can cause businesses to potentially overestimate the impact of the new integration on their potential customers and panic. However, what they needed to bear in mind is that Google has been integrating social elements into their search results for a while, but never so overtly. Therefore without downplaying the effect that the change may have, it serves little purpose for businesses to panic that they’ll lose masses of searches overnight. For the moment, businesses need to ensure that their sites are well setup, and that they have a G+ page as well as one on Facebook.

[A potential side effect could be for those businesses with extremely poor customer service or some PR disasters in their cupboard. People are more likely to share information about bad experiences with their circles. This means that even if someone didn’t see a piece that was shared in their circle, future searches for the brand concerned could highlight the negative press. An example of this would be an article about Easyjet discriminating against a disabled businessman, which is likely to be shared in a G+ circle, so that could appear prominently when someone is considering booking a flight with Easyjet. This would make online reputation management even more important, as measuring this would be very difficult]

Blog post by Juliette van Rooyen, Search Consultant at Reform

Strictly come surfing – at the half way mark

November 28th, 2011

Last year, after an off the cuff comment in a meeting with our PR agency I set about digging around online data sources to see if they could be used to see who would win Strictly Come Dancing. Looking at search and social data in the build up to the show launching last autumn, there was a clear front runner – Kara Tointon. It also happened that she was an excellent dancer, and so as the weeks went on it was very easy to keep chopping the data in a different way and confirm that Kara would win.

This year the stakes have been raised as the challenge of examining the data to see who would go out each week was laid at our door. Manfully we accepted the challenge and have been writing a weekly post for the Guardian’s Media Monkey blog outlining what the data says and what that means for who is going to leave Strictly in any given week.

We found out very early on that predicting the loser each week is much more difficult than predicting the winner of the whole show. Who’d have thought it, hey?! The first issue we encountered was that of collecting clean data for the celebrities. Is there a more generic name out there than Alex Jones? Perhaps John Smith, but after that I’m not so sure! It has taken us until this, the half way point to be entirely happy that the data we’re looking at is actually about the right people as we’ve tweaked our queries each week.

Another issue that we have faced has been in examining the sentiment behind the buzz of celebrities. Our experience told us that volume itself was no sign of popularity, as people love to get on social networks to have a good whinge as much as they use it to declare themselves a fan – if not more! Our in house self-expressed data fiend developed a tool for sentiment analysis (well done Richard!) that does a pretty good job of sorting the positive from the negative, but there is no tool out there that is 100% accurate. In fact, even paid for tools such as Brandwatch and Meltwater aim for 70% accuracy – so we’re always at risk of being wrong. Just as an example one week someone tweeted ‘@bbcstrictly bloody hell that was absolutely fab…u…lous!! Len you are wrong #scd’ – our tool put this firmly in the negative camp, but clearly it’s not!

All that is before anybody has even danced a dance. We found that the volatility in the dancing performance by the celebrities in the bottom half of the table in the first few weeks made it very difficult to judge what would happen. As the couple that leaves is decided by a combination of the judges score for their dance and the phone vote, a novice celebrity doing the pasodoble one week and a waltz the next might be near the middle one week and then rock bottom of the judges score the next. We quickly had to factor this fluctuation into our algorithm, allocating a score for the perceived difficulty of the dance celebrities were undertaking each week.

So how have we done? We’re currently sitting at about a 50% success rate in predicting who will go out each week – so using the data is certainly more effective than randomly guessing! More than anything I think our experience doing this analysis has shown that data on its own isn’t enough. Without understanding the context and the content of the data we would have been way off the mark every week. By examining the source and taking into account the limitations of our data, we can be much more calculated in the way in which we read it. Data is one thing, but insight is another!

Blog post by Penny Anderson, Consultant at Reform

The untapped potential of online video

October 21st, 2011

Recently I had the privilege of jumping across the pond to attend the online media, marketing and advertising expo, OMMA. Not only was it two inspiring days of serious talks and discussions with all the most up-to-date news, information and ideas in the world of online marketing but plenty speculation on the future of digital.

My focus for the two days was to understand more about online video. The statistics, courtesy of comScore tell an interesting story:

In the US alone there are 108 million people watching online video with 1.3 billion videos been watched daily. Video has seen a 1,290% growth since January 2006. An amazing stat, and yet this fast growing internet segment is increasingly under-monetized. In 2010 the US spent $1,440 million on advertising and had 441 billion videos viewed as opposed to a $324 million ad spend and 63 billion videos viewed in 2006. So a 334% increase in spend but an astonishing 600% increase in videos watched. In August 2011 there were 185 million online videos viewed, 162 million of those were on YouTube alone. That is an average of 228 videos per person per month. For the average person that is, 17 hours a month.

When looking for examples of countries getting video right one needs to look at Canada, the US and China. China and the US both manage to get over 150 million unique views per month. Canada and the US both have over 180 videos viewed a month per viewer with the majority of the videos viewed are homemade and funny. However we can learn something from that. People like to be entertained and want funny content.

The heaviest consumers of online video are 18-34 year olds, with 49.7% being female users and 50.3% male. Men watch 1.7 times as many videos online as women, a ratio that has remained constant for the past two years.

Between 2009 – 2010, the growth among long-term TV programming sites of videos viewed increased 104%. So why then are advertisers not jumping in and making the most out of online video? Is it because we are still wary of the unfamiliar content, unsure of the true effectiveness, trying to put video into the TV model of storytelling?

I’m particularly excited to see the next stages of online video and how brands rise to the challenge to harness its potential. It’s already a big opportunity and growing by the day.

Blog post by Anthony Dobson, Business Development Executive at Reform

Gamification strategies are now a key part of UX and customer engagement – ignore this and your brand will suffer

September 30th, 2011

Social media is a game. Some people (like me) don’t get that at first. Or maybe in the early days social platforms relied very much on early adopters who were happy just making friends (and maybe making out with them) via social. In the last twelve months however, engagement, challenges, rewards badges you can virtually gift etc, have tuned me into the fun. I find myself immersed in a world of fans, followers, circles, news feeds and apps, and all that alongside my Klout perks, beta test invitations and the micro affiliate cash I can get for simply recommending a product or service to my followers. The power that rewards can leverage to an online brand strategy is awesome. See the overnight success of Badgeville, and the adoption of behaviour analytics as a basket of key metrics in the measurement of a brand’s power to engage customer loyalty meaningfully.

Simply organising your social media life, identifying and connecting with the people that matter to you emotionally brings immeasurable pleasure. As does listening and advocating those that you find thought-provoking and that you can learn stuff from, dipping into the musings of others you know it’s good to keep tabs on, and finding those people you perhaps knew long time ago when you had a different set of priorities that now keep you connected to a shared past. This emotional payback through connectivity is an intrinsic motivational driver to the key engagement piece, and is why I argue that, although I can see a world when Facebook is the suburbs with new and innovative social urban conurbations emerging, social experience utilising technologies is here to stay.

Games for Brands, a conference on gamification, is being held in London on the 27th of October and will be the first mover in what is set to become the new social media. A quick skim read of the list of keynote speakers sees representatives of the UK’s major broadcasters, agencies, and games developer communities, as well as the academics and social entrepreneurs. Harnessing the power of gamification and utilising it is going to be exciting and will be another step-changing crossroads in the incredible journey that digital is affording the marcomms sector. Bring it on!

If you would like to discuss your social strategy and the implications and opportunities that gamification represents, please contact Reform.

Blog post by Mary Keane-Dawson, non-executive director at Reform.

The ‘super-injunction phenomenon’ – is your digital reputation under attack?

May 11th, 2011

It can take years for a celebrity to build their reputation, but it can all be undone with one tweet.

Whether that tweet is written by the celebrity or not, the nature of the beast is that this tweet can spread so quickly that it very soon becomes common knowledge and, to all intents and purposes, fact.

So, how can celebrities manage their reputation online? Who is responsible for making sure that the image they are creating for themselves in the public eye is reflected online?

Who is responsible for reputation management?
There are two key people who need to be involved in both creating and managing a reputation – the celebrity themself and their management team. They both need to share a clear strategy on how they are going to build and maintain this reputation both on and offline.

Celebrities are brands and brands are alive 24/7. People don’t stop talking about you on Twitter or Facebook outside of office hours, which means that these kinds if channels need to be monitored 24 hours a day. Just like a celebrity can’t choose whether to be famous or not when they wake up in the morning, they also need to be in ‘celebrity mode’ online, constantly building their brand. If they don’t, they risk undoing all their hard work.

The other party who needs to be involved is the celebrity’s management team. I am constantly terrified at the lack of time and investment that agents, PRs and publicists put into their celebrities’ digital presence. I understand that this is a whole new world with different rules, but online reputation management is not a choice anymore, it is an essential part of their job.

So, to all celebrities and their management teams, my advice is this.

1. Take it seriously
If your brand comes under a cyber attack – a wave of negative publicity – it is very often too late to limit the damage. Tweets are in the public domain forever and it is impossible to ask everyone to remove their posts.

Reputations can evaporate in seconds. The speed in which this gossip spreads is astonishing. It is human nature to gossip and all Twitter does is give people an opportunity to listen and participate in it on a massive scale.

2. Have a plan – the best form of defense is continued preparation
Most of us invest in software and technology to protect the things we love the most – smoke detectors, burglar alarms and virus protection. If you have a brand or reputation that is worth saving then you need to invest in someone to develop a plan on how you might manage an attack on your reputation and to be able to respond intelligently 24/7. They need to live and breathe social media and have a true understanding of what the celebrity is trying to achieve.

3. Start NOW

Blog post by Rosie Sayers, Strategy Director at Reform

Google testing a redesigned search results page for US search users

May 7th, 2011

In the U.S. Google users are seeing a different look and feel to their search results page. This is the latest of several “tests” on Google.com – such as some users seeing “Google Voice Search” earlier this week.

New Google Search Result Test - May 2011

As seen above (click the image to see a full size version) – the search results page has more white space, a sort of muted colour tone, and PPC ads are not as obvious as before, since the colour of the PPC ads shaded much lighter.

Several users will notice the “cache” option has been removed from Google, much to the chagrin of SEO’s and users who want to check out a page before it loads in its entirety. However, they have replaced this from a visual standpoint, with “Google preview” – though this shows a page that one can hardly delve much information from.

Each result is also split by a dotted line, so that one can see where result one ends and two begins. And there is space between the result link and the snippet below. Overall, many people are guessing that this spacing below and above the title / link text may be a space for Google to later put their “+1″ button and various other social networking based aspects.

Last but not least, the results are not underlined anymore, which also has received mixed reactions. Unlike the recent layout changes on Google, this seems a bit more drastic. Several sites covered the story immediately with many users reacting to the change so shocked, that they thought it was a virus!

Let us know what you think.

Is Social Media Affecting Our ‘Real’ Lives?

March 25th, 2011

Often people moan a lot about the lack of privacy in our social media communication, particularly since Facebook and Twitter both make regular changes to their privacy settings. However, isn’t there’s another aspect that should be taken into account more often? That is, how those different platforms impact the lives we live away from the internet. As social media platforms have become more and more prevalent, there is almost peer pressure to join each and every one of the social platforms.

That peer pressure feels exactly the same as the one that typically gets us into trouble as children and leads to our mothers to say “If everyone else jumped off a bridge, would you?”. It feels almost as if we’re really disconnected if we’re not connected to the internet and checking in on Facebook, Twitter or Foursquare. The problem with all this connectivity is how vulnerable it leaves us ‘in real life’. We now have to moderate our behaviours on- and off-line to fit in with the image that we’re trying to portray to the world. The problems that this causes centre around the fact that we didn’t previously run the risk of baring ourselves and our lives to so many people at the same level.

Until the advent of social media, we’d have our close group of friends. Those are the friends we can tell almost everything to, the ones who attend our birthdays and console us after a breakup. Then we’d have acquaintances, the people that we go out for drinks with, invite along to house parties and see occasionally. There’s also the ‘work’ group that we socialise with at the pub on Fridays or see at company functions. Since the advent of social media, all these groups become equally privy to what’s going on in your life. Putting up a Facebook status that you’re hung-over after a night with your best friend won’t impress your boss, even if you’re at work that day.

An example is an acquaintance mentioning that no matter how much she wanted to share the photos of recent party she’d held, she couldn’t do it. The reason she held back was that there were friends on Facebook that hadn’t been invited due to one of those crowd dynamic issues that so often strike while planning a party. So in order to share the photos people wanted to see, she had to go through an entire process to only share photos with certain people so that no-one would get upset or offended at not being invited.  The emotional turmoil and feeling of dishonesty was overwhelming for them, and yet it wouldn’t have been present before social media.

Pre-social media, we could simply invite the people we wanted to see, and when photos were available, we’d simply take them with us and show those people who were interested. Now we have to sit and sweat about what we show people because all these different people have access to all of our activities. Facebook has introduced groups into which you can place people, but there is a need for better separation of the different groups into which everyone fits.

The easiest way to separate different groups is to either use different accounts or allocate different platforms to different groups. Typically the following allocation could be recommended:

Twitter: Acquaintances & Friends
Facebook: Close friends only, and potentially family
Linkedin: Anyone work relate, clients and colleagues alike

Horses for courses – or different social media for different sets of people.

Blog post by Juliette van Rooyen, Search Consultant at Reform

Being a top blog is no longer just about traffic

January 26th, 2011

This week, the British Beauty Blogger (www.britishbeautyblogger.com) ran a rant complaining that blog rankings had become worthless because they no longer relied solely on the number of unique visitors to an individual blog site. I beg to differ.

The Beauty Blogger leaves the distinct impression that the only thing that matters is the number of people that view his / her blog on a monthly basis. Fine – I understand that this is a measurable indicator of the success of a blog, but surely it is only one measure?

What are the real goals of a blog or indeed a blogger? Do they write what they write simply to ratchet up another reader on their site visitor log? Or do they try to impart words of wisdom, advice and opinion on matters that are dear to their heart? I would have thought that the latter is a more likely goal.

What is more valuable, a headline on the front page of the Guardian or a snippet on page seven of the Daily Mirror? Based on circulation numbers alone one would say the snippet in the Mirror, but I imagine that the headline in the Guardian would be much more influential. The journalist that wrote a front page story would, I am sure, be more pleased with a job well done.

In other words, it is not just the number of people that see something that makes it valuable, it is also the context within which it appears. So, if the objectives of a blog are not just objective, but subjective as well, then surely some subjectivity is required in measuring the success of the blog in question? If one was assessing the top ten news stories of the day, they would not all come from the newspaper with the biggest circulation.

Indeed within any one publication some articles are going to be more ‘influential’ than others. The level of influence will, in part, be determined by the content and the presentation. Equally, if not more importantly, the reaction of the reader to an article will determine its eventual ‘success’. So, if the purpose of an article or a blog is simply to broadcast information to a passive audience, then I concede that volume, content and appearance will be significant attributes in measuring its success.

However, if the intention of the article or blog is not just to inform, but to precipitate a reaction then the nature and strength of that reaction become very important metrics. In an offline world some degree of measurement is possible either at a personal level, or at a collective level if the reaction takes the form of active comment or activity. Indeed, the reaction itself may become newsworthy and a virtuous media storm could ensue.

In a digital environment the rules of engagement begin to change. Not only can third parties analyse the volume of reaction, but modern ‘social listening’ tools purport to also measure the sentiment expressed in the developing media streams. So, frankly, whether I am brand that wants to extend my reach or just a blogger that wants to make a difference, I think that the success of my strategy will be measured by much more than just the number of people whose eyes fall upon my prose.

Consequently, I would rather rank in a top ten list that incorporated some of the modern measurement attributes that are now available, rather than simply being hostage to the number of visitors.

Blog post by James Kilpatrick, non-executive director at Reform.

What are we excited about for 2011?

January 5th, 2011

Now that the holidays are quickly becoming a distant memory we wanted to take a look back at changes in TV, mobile and social media in 2010 and consider what exciting changes are in store for 2011.

In May Google announced that it had partnered with Sony and Logitech to bring a new product to our television screens. Called Google TV the idea is to allow “users access [to] all of their usual TV channels as well as a world of internet and cloud-based information and applications… all from the comfort of their own living room and with the same simplicity as browsing the web.”¹ Initially hailed as a major innovation in how we will interact with our TVs, Google TV has so far struggled to secure access to content from major US TV Networks and has received less than positive response to the initial software offering.  Despite these setbacks the ability for consumers to access web content via their TV will become a reality in the near future and could offer advertisers a unique opportunity to gain access to TV consumers in a new, distinctive and more trackable way in 2011.

Social media has also grown in influence amongst advertisers in 2010.  Although many major brands have had a presence on Facebook and You Tube for some time, the past year has seen a shift in how these sites are used by brands to interact with its consumers.  FMCG & retail brands in particular have begun to drive advertising toward their Facebook pages as a means of increasing the number of likes.  These pages can then be used to offer exclusive offers to customers that have already showed an active interest in the product. As we head into 2011 it is likely that advertisers will continue to embrace social media as a means of both reaching out to current customers as well as connecting with future shoppers not only via Facebook pages but also through advertising directly on Facebook via Ad Serving Units, the utilisation of in-application advertising and beyond.

It is often said that it is the first and last thing you interact with during your day but the mobile has come a long way since the days of simple calls and texts. Over the past year advertisers have begun to embrace the mobile by increasing their focus on building applications and mobile friendly websites for their customers.  Although this is a good start, the consumer is likely to demand that their smart phone enable them to do most, if not all, of the things their PC does in the near future.  With an estimated  $1.5 billion in sales worldwide made via the mobile on eBay alone in 2010 it is clear that businesses will not only need to have the capability to handle mobile e-commerce but also to ensure that their mobile advertising, including mobile search & display are a priority in 2011. ²

With so much innovation in the industry and so many new channels for advertisers to test and explore, 2011 is sure to be another busy year. Keeping up with changes in TV, mobile, & social media will be crutial to ensure continued customer retention & business growth.

1)    http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/pressrel/20100520_googletv.html
2)    http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/01/ebay-shows-where-mobile-shopping-is-hot/

Blog post by Mike Jennings, Director at Reform

Getting your brand into the right frame of social

December 14th, 2010

Social, Smocial, Searchocial… we hear variants on the social theme from every corner of the marketing universe, whether client side or agency, the new marketing holy grail has arrived. Bringing brands to life online has never been more of a priority, and I for one am absolutely delighted to see that the ‘stinging nettle’ of brand and consumer in conversation is being (tentatively) grappled with, as a good indication of how advertising will never return to the strictly ‘shouty shouty’ model of yore…

Although the tone, medium and messages may have changed, the conundrum as to how we divine ‘which 20% of my social media (formerly advertising) budget is actually working?’ must be addressed more than ever in these times of austerity and accountability. Having recently read Jim Sterne’s excellent book on Social Media Metrics (Wiley, New Jersey, 2010), I have discovered that the metrics of social are as messy as they are vital in determining how a brand can develop competitive advantage, lower costs and increased customer satisfaction. One of the many factors we need to address is that turning customers into brand advocates, a favoured social media objective of many brands, is not as simple as it may sound. As a sales person of some repute, I know that persuading someone to buy from you, and then to independently recommend your product and services to others, is not a five minute pile ‘em high sell ‘em cheap story. Yes, the 5 P’s of People, Place, Promotion, Price and Product still all matter; but now you have to factor in metrics for a brands emotional resonance, identification of influencers, recognising sentiment, hearing the conversation and triggering the desired actions. These soft metrics are what makes social so powerful, yet they are also open to subjective analysis and the qualitative understanding of online phenomena, which can include the fact that people lie about their identities online, have hundreds of virtual friends, but live alone etc. This blurring of where the advertising ends and the personal begins, brings with it significant CSR implications, as well as the need for silos within brands organisations and local communities to work more closely together.

Brands need to become ‘consultative’ in both their messaging, their openness to feedback and the ways in which they reward brand advocates and ambassadors, as well as recognising that they when they start or engage with a community, they can’t just subsequently abandon it without consequences. Social media is not a one night stand – because if you treat it as such, your name will be mud all over Facebook in the morning… Social is about brands not over promising, it’s about flirting with permission, moving onto a face to face meeting when it feels right for both of you (and your mates if you’ve asked their opinions), and it’s about still remaining on good terms when the relationship is over and you’ve decided to move on…

Recognising the nuances of how brand building social media strategies can work, has led to Reform developing a new service for our clients, whereby we formulate communications and messaging strategies which utilise the power of social media metrics alongside the development of tactics and plans that enable its optimisation. Called Sway, it encompasses the soft with the hard, and is designed to produce powerful conversations that lead onto even more powerful relationships between brands and consumers. Please contact Amanda Davie on amanda@reformdigital.com or call 020 7874 1898 to discuss how Sway can help get your brand into the right frame of social.

Blog post by Mary Keane-Dawson, non-Executive Director of Reform

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