Media Week

While many brands sit around twiddling their thumbs, Innocent is moving ahead with its social media strategy and has launched itself on Twitter.

http://twitter.com/innocentAGM2008

Innocent is using Twitter to report on its AGM and is opening itself up which is a key characteristic of social media. This follows its blog, You Tube channel, Facebook presence and Flickr presence. Clearly this creates a lot of additional work for communications teams but it is clever how they are starting to cover the visits of journalists (bloggers) to their offices in videos.

www.itsopen.co.uk

Edelman PR has launched a very interesting content initiative

The idea of sourcing content from a variety of sources and then pitching it to marketeers is a clever model. They are turning their business into a crowd sourcing model and inviting submissions for ideas to keep themselves fresh. Maybe other agencies could try that approach?

www.itsopen.co.uk

Some interesting thoughts here on how social media networks could monetise themselves through special personal subscription services..

I think that the idea of social media networks being closed areas is going to change over time as it did with AOL's walled garden approach etc.

charlene Li of Forrester has some very interesting thoughts on this. The problem is it is such a pain having to develop different passwords etc to enter each social media network. What could emerge is open social media network tools.

http://blogs.forrester.com/charleneli/2008/03/the-future-of-s.html

Google is rumoured to be developing a social network search engine.With the explosion in social media content this could be highly useful for marketeers and advertisers.

For advertisers to establish what is going on about their brands in social media networks is challenging to say the least. Sure computers can do some of it for you but it requires human intervention and some creativity to work out how to capitalise on what is happening in particular networks.

http://www.shinyred.tv/2008/04/23/hide-n-seek-web-20s-killer-app/

 What is clear though is that control of social media is impossible. Anyone can freely jump into a social media space and broadcast their messages to the world. While search tools might help guide the bewildered through social media networks, it will be very hard to develop ad campaigns which are genuinely interesting for people clustered around niches of mutual interest. PR online I think is going to be critical for major brands, to identify issues and engage with people within networks.

Charlene Li of Forrester has come up with a useful method for companies to follow when creating social media strategies.

It is called the POST method. It is pretty simple. P stands for people (assess the social activities of your customers first); O stands for objectives and what you want to accomplish; S is strategy and planning for the kinds of relationships you want to have with your customers (supportive, collaborative, engaging etc) and T is for the technology you wish to use.

Charlene Li has credibility. She has been writing about social media way before it became fashionable and I can remember quoting her work in a piece for The Guardian about blogs several years ago. I think the method though misses a couple of elements. Firstly I think it is important that companies spend time getting up to speed with social media. They have to understand the social media culture in order to be able to plan strategies and secondly social media is not just about technology solutions. The characteristics of social media (sharing content for niche groups, co-creating etc) can be applied offline as well.

http://blogs.forrester.com/Charleneli/2008/03turning-radic-1.html

www.itsopen.co.uk

First we had David Cameron's web cam, now Gordon Brown is twittering. See: http://twitter.com/DowningStreet

It gives you an interesting insight though into Downing Street life....

An interesting piece by David Howell, who writes for The Guardian, in Business Edge magazine (the magazine of sussex enterprise) which I picked up in Brighton. Here are some of the key points:

Dialogue with audiences in digital environments is an on-going requirement and if it is not done on a regular basis then campaigns and relationships will be disjointed.

 It is not just the large social networks like Facebook that carry influence, it is also niche forums, niche sites and niche blogs.

Advertisers need to build trust of members of social networks before they will become receptive to any advertising or promotional messages.

Social media is at its core about interaction, engagement, communication, openness and sharing.

Businesses must understand they they cannot control or exploit social networking but they can influence, create awareness to kick-start and generate debates.

Anyone interested in social media marketing should learn by use. Get involved and participate and then your understanding of the potential will improve.

If people on a social networking site don't want your adverts they are not going to click on them or respond to them. The most successful companies are going to have made an effort to build relationships with people on social media networks.One of the ways to build commercially fruitful relationships with people on social media networks is to create content that is relevant, interesting and useful to them. It is the consumers that control these sites.

I met a senior brand manager from a confectionary company yesterday and showed her a blog which was talking about her brand. Some positive comments and some criticisms. She was exasperated.

I can understand why it is hard sometimes for marketing people to keep on top of all the information coming at them. But this situation was bizarre. The company firewall meant the senior brand manager was totally unaware and unable to see the blog mentioning her brand. It was not being monitored in any way. Plus she had not even seen the youtube videos about her brand. The attitude was we will get around to social media at some stage. Nor could she believe that people would want to spend time blogging about her brand.

My attitude is that if people are passionate enough about your brand to actually blog about it then you should be having a conversation with them or at least listening to what they are saying. The web is made up of networks which affect brands and if someone in your network is saying things about your brand, you should be aware of it and be coming up with ideas to take account of those views. It will make your marketing more relevant.