Search results matching tag 'Linkedin'

Agencies not using social media well

255762 — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 10:19:00 GMT

The ad agency world is not shining when it comes to using social media to market itself, according to new research, but is pretty good at setting things up blogs and Twitter accounts and then infrequently updating them.

Overall, the **research from search consultants RSW/US found that very few agencies are using social media for new business prospecting.

The implications for that seem blindingly obvious: if you're pushing social media at your clients, but are not actively using it yourself (or just as bad using it well) then what kind of message does that send out?

Of social media used, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook are those that agencies are most often using. LinkedIn seems to be getting the most activity (56% use it most often), which the report says makes sense as it is a good resource for new business people looking to track down prospects.

However, while there are many signed up to LinkedIn there are far fewer (the report suggests) using it to share ideas or active participate in a community or LinkedIn group.

Overall 57% of agencies surveyed have a Twitter account; 74% LinkedIn; 56% a blog and 67% a Facebook page.

Those figures strike me as low. Why every agency doesn't have a blog is beyond me. It's cheap it is easy and in this business there is a great deal to blog about and to highlight to clients and new business prospects alike.

Even the 56% with a blog are pretty poor at updating: 45% never blog and 21% blog once a month or less. Once a month???

With Twitter the figures are worse. Of those on Twitter 74% tweet once a week or less indicating that agencies are taking a very passive approach to social media when the whole point about being social is being active and engaged.

To be fair Facebook fares better than Twitter and blogs, but I wonder if the social network is as useful here as Twitter or a blog.

Having a page on Facebook is not bad thing, but it doesn't strike me as useful as a regularly updated agency blog.

That said if you are not actually updating your agency blog or tweeting you have to wonder what activity is taking place on the Facebook page.

This is a US report, but my guess is the situation in the UK is even worse. On that note, there is a story on Ad Age today that asks the question: Are UK Shops Losing Their Touch in the Digital World?

While Daniel Bonner, European chief creative officer at AKQA and Adam Kean, joint executive creative director of Publicis, London, put in a good defence, former Saatchi & Saatchi creative director Dave Droga (now Droga 5 in NYC) argues that TV, press and outdoor are the primary focus of UK agencies; that there is less integration; and a tendency to default play it safe. Pretty damning stuff.

Former TBWA creative director and Howell Henry Chaldecott Lury founder Steve Henry, who of course has a blog on this site damns UK agencies further by saying that creativity is at an all time low. Ouch.

"The new interactive model requires a new mindset and a new skill set. Not everyone is able or willing to make the transition.

"Agencies have not risen to the challenge or brought in new skill sets, and their clients are looking elsewhere," he said.

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**The samples came from databases of 6,000 marketing service companies that range in size from under $5M in capitalized billings to over $50M.
212 agencies responded to the survey.

LinkedIn and Twitter partner up

255762 — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 09:11:00 GMT

On its blog today LinkedIn has announced a partnership with Twitter. Much needed I'd say and particularly for LinkedIn, which I think desperately needed a real-time web shot in the arm.

As Biz Stone, Twitter co-founder says in this little video with Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn (they describe the partnership like peanut butter and chocolate, which errrm maybe sounds nice to some - but to me sounds absolutely disgusting and wrong) below the business use case for Twitter has turned out to be much bigger than anyone imagined.

Twitter has proved to be a key plank in every social media strategy being looked at by most brands. Stone is absolutely right when he says this applies equally on the personal level in business and that Twitter has essentially become part of our resume (CV to you mate).

That's why hooking up with LinkedIn makes so much sense. Stone says: "The general idea of putting a little twitter in everything is being able to inject into LinkedIn a little bit more of this fresh here's what's going on with these other things, but with a little bit of a curated sense in terms of your professional life."

When you set your status on LinkedIn (do people do that? I need to use it more) you can now tweet it as well. This could make people more inclined to visit LinkedIn. At the moment it is not a daily visit for many people that I speak to like Twitter or Facebook. Although I'm not a heavy LinkedIn user and I know there are no doubt many more who turn to it on a more regular basis.

LinkedIn says its rolling out features over the next few days and here's what you will get:

1. On LinkedIn

First you join your Twitter and LinkedIn accounts to allow you to share articles you’re reading and letting people view your Twitter account name on your LinkedIn profile. To do that all do is check the Twitter box under your Network Updates box on the homepage and follow a few simple steps.

2. On Twitter

As part of the setup process, you can choose to either send all your tweets or select tweets from Twitter back to LinkedIn as a status update. So that means you might see an article you want to share on LinkedIn, but many not every single tweet.

More on the LinkedIn blog

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MySpace goes into rapid retreat/embraces its future

255762 — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 10:51:00 GMT

There's carnage at MySpace. Almost 800 jobs cut within a week and the closed sign is being hung up around the world. It looks like today we are seeing the social media map being reshaped.

Last week MySpace laid off 420 staff in its US offices. Today it has cut a further 300 internationally and is closing down a host of offices as it retrenches and faces up to its place in the world.

In the new world order of MySpace, London, Berlin, and Sydney will be the primary regional hubs for MySpace as offices in Argentina, Brazil, Canada, France, India, Italy, Mexico, Russia, Sweden, and Spain get the chop as has Travis Katzis, the MySpace SVP and MD, who is leaving, having grown staff around the world from two to more than 400.

The cuts have come as new MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta has been given the job of re-envisioning the social networking site and helping it "operate as a nimble and entrepreneurial company with the adaptive mentality of a start-up".

That has come against a backdrop of MySpace usage falling rapidly away. In the last year the number of minutes spent on the site has fallen by 31% (although it remains top for video) while Facebook soared 700%.

MySpace has lost its place as a general social networking site and these tough cuts are obvious signs that it has accepted this.

Where MySpace is strong, is in music and video or entertainment more generally. As a place for promoting new music and bands, as well as movies, MySpace has its niche, but is that enough?

I saw a headline last week on Adage, which posed this question neatly: Can Bruno (as in Sasha Baron Cohen) save MySpace? Or "MeinSpace" as the campy Austrian character calls it.

'Bruno' is another movie that has close ties with MySpace, which has a special MeinSpace.com hosted page.

The story detailed how 'Bruno' was only part of MySpace efforts to forge deep ties with the entertainment industry and major studios.

Something seems to be working. Bruno has 330,000-odd friends on MySpace, but only 31,500 on Facebook and around 14,000 followers on Twitter (who are these people?) where his username is @brunovassup.

For MySpace this is retrenchment, but clearly the right thing to do and from its perspective it is clearly better for it to embrace this rather simply try to continue to compete as a more general social networking site such as Facebook.

This suggests several things. There are a whole bunch of special interest gaps out there.

Fake profiles and anonymity have always been the order of the day on MySpace. As some have said before this was like Twitter in the early days, but increasingly Twitter has become more like Facebook. People have ditched their fake names and more and more only want to connect people who only have their real names.

I started out as GordonM before changing my username to my actual name. It makes sense.

The fakery and anonymity means that MySpace is taking on increasingly the properties of niche interest social networking sites. If you are a cyclist for instance you probably go to Bikeradar or a runner you go to Runner's World. And when you do you are likely to be a member of them in addition to broader sites like LinkedIn and Facebook.

This gives us a world where we have a number of top level broad interest sites (like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn) and more special interest sites (both international and local) of which a retrenched MySpace appears to be one of.

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Social Networking as a Recruitment Tool

654634 — Wed, 20 May 2009 12:03:01 GMT

Arguably recruitment has always relied on, among other things, being both 'social' and having the ability to network to find the best talent. So it's hardly a surprise that recruiters have embraced social networking sites and added them to their armory of ways to reach out to potential candidates and employers. If you register on one of the better known of the social networking sites, you automatically post a profile of yourself online and visitors, or people who 'connect' with you, can get a general picture of the kind of person you are from that information. In fact it's come to light recently that recruitment professionals may even research online profiles within these social networks to further vet their preferred candidates' suitability for a role. I, personally, believe that you can tell more about a candidate's suitability from their demeanour and experience offline anyway, but having said that, social networks do provide a clear route to a vast pool of talent.

More than that, because the internet is a truly global medium it is now easier than ever to see the world as a global work force and we have had applicants responding to our Twitter posts from the US and other international markets. It's a sign of the times that people are willing to apply for jobs in the UK and to move away from their own countries for the right package - relocating for the right job is just not the daunting prospect it once was and there's definitely an understanding out there that you have to move to where the work is. So while we as recruiters need to respect the privacy of these social network profiles, we would also be doing our profession an injustice if we didn't tap into the potential benefits they can offer.

IAB UK Gets Social Media - So Should You!

980070 — Thu, 07 May 2009 14:38:00 GMT

I just got an email from the fabulous Guy Phillipson at the IAB which had a side bar that looked like this:

You'd have to be a woolly mammoth buried under ten feet of ice for the past 10,000 years NOT to have heard of Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or YouTube!

But for every few people who have acknowledged their importance to marketing, there’s always one who appears to throw up slightly in their mouths at the thought of sending customers from a newsletter to the channels they’ve set up on these sites, because they’re worried they’ll see a dip in traffic or engagement on their own property.

Who cares?

People with control issues, or those that just don’t get it, that's who!

If millions and millions of your potential customers, readers, audience or whatever are on those sites then why not go where they are and they feel comfortable?

Sure, there are rules of engagement, but for goodness sake we’re operating in a fast-moving, ever-changing and dynamic (I think they all mean the same thing?) environment so get with the program.

There’s been a change in the way business is done and social media is now firmly part of the media mix.

Ditch page views and unique users and think about your ROI – Return On Inaction!

Think of the data! Look what people are saying about the IAB even now!

Failure to embrace these channels and to keep morphing as new channels start emerging simply isn’t an option.

Should big brands make a move into social media?

2292853 — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 11:07:00 GMT

Last night, as a guest speaker at The Future Laboratory's idea networking event, I had the opportunity to chat about who is doing what in social media, and the pros and cons of big brand's moves into the social media space.

Love it or hate it, with Facebook fast approaching 200 million users worldwide and Twitter adding thousands of new members daily, not to mention the popularity already established with platforms such as Linkedin, YouTube, Flickr and MySpace, the social media channel of influence can make or break a brand. Discussed was the fear factor that big brands have now toward the social media monster, and the question of whether to enter the arena, or stay out, for fear of losing control of a brand. As The Future Laboratory's mission is to look ahead and keep ahead of the curve, my counsel last night was that big brands need to define social media strategy now, rather than wait for a point in time when they may have to be re-active rather than pro-active toward the medium.

Whether it is a comprehensive strategic plan to making a brand's presence known among social media channels, or a short-term experiment into the space, such as a contest or other promotional campaign, brand's need be bold and step into this brave new world where consumers are hanging out and, in some cases, stirring their own little revolutions. In considering a few examples we discussed:

Mars recent campaign for its Skittles candy, a courageous approach that saw the website homepage transformed to showcase the brand's live streaming Twitter feed along with its Facebook, Flickr and YouTube pages. Usage triggered was so high for this campaign that at one point Twitter crashed, and the brand discovered that turning things over to consumers opens up to a challenge when not everyone played nice with the Tweets they sent along. In the end, the fantastic publicity received around the experiment, has made Skittles top of mind and won new enthusiasts for the brand, even if there has been a bit of brusing.

Comcast, an American cable and broadband provider, has been using Twitter to supplement customer service responses. They've posted a guy named Frank Eliason to man the Twitter customer service site, positively giving a corporate brand a real human being to interact with in real time. Customers simply Tweet their queries to @Comcastcares and quickly receive response.

Other big brands that are stepping into social media with a variety of approaches include: Dell, Starbucks, JetBlue, TheHomeDepot, Southwest Airlines, Whole Foods Market, HRBlock, Best Buy, Popeyes, Forrester Research, Ford, Samsung and Kodak, to name a few.

Here's a few quick tips I shared with folks last night in thinking about approaching social media for a brand:

Be Seen: What do you look like to your social media audience? Are you human, or are you something off a shelf? People want to see other people in the world of social networking so in reaching out to your audiences pay attention to showing them what you and your team look like. Upload images to your Facebook group of your brand in action -- people at events, people using your products, people in your office. Use Flickr to build an image trail of both products and people. Use YouTube to seed videos, integrating several visual tools to showcase the human side of your brand.

Be Real: Don't piss off your audiences by engaging in blatant heavy promotional use of Twitter, Facebook or other social networking sites. Show a personality and offer up a variety of information to your audience, pointing them to helpful or quirky items.

Be Brave: This is new territory for brand building, and it takes an adventurous sort to take some risks in approaching social media. Think out common sense approaches to using social networking for your brand, and don't be afraid to experiment out there.

Be On It: Assign a member of your team, or several, to be monitoring and watching for responses that come back via Tweets, Facebook, YouTube and Flickr comments, and blogs. Response to people's comments should be swift and effective, helping those with complaints and thanking those with praise.

Be Interactive: It isn't enough to hang up a billboard in Second Life or set up a Facebook group or Twitter account, unless you think out how your approach should interact with people. Think about what you can offer up to your audience that will be of interest and relevance to your brand. Can you host a virtual conference in Second Life with prominent speakers? Can you run a contest through Twitter? One company called Going.com created one of the most popular Facebook applications called Naughty Gifts, a slightly cheeky way to give adult gifts to your friends, that has produced millions of exchanges. To promote Going.com, they took the popularity offline and held adult-themed parties throughout America, promoting the events through the Naughty Gifts Facebook application.

For more about future branding trends, sign up for The Future Laboratory's Lifestyle News Network (LSN).

Thinking about social media branding,

-Lisa

Brave Brands With Social Media Strategy:

Facebook readies Twitter fight back

255762 — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 11:45:00 GMT

Facebook is waking up to the Twitter threat. Yes it’s a threat and the two are going to clash. Having proved it is no flash in the pan, Twitter is going to eat into the social networking site's traffic and Facebook is doing something about it.

Reports on a presentation that took place yesterday are saying that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg talked about making the site more "real time". Does that sound familiar? Sure it does, basically Zukerberg (who is apparently obsessed with Twitter) wants his own version on Facebook.

Facebook is going to revamp its status update, which was kind of fun and really kept us all quite busy until Twitter came along and then it kept us much less busy, which must be of a concern to Facebook.

Facebook wants its users to reengage with its central update feature to ward off the seemingly unstoppable march of Twitter.

It is a case of if you can't buy them then at least try to beat them.

Yesterday, I blogged about how Twitter investor Todd Chaffee sees real time search as the future of Twitter. He is sure this is where it is going to make its money. As this starts to happen, the threat level of Facebook rises significantly.

The real-time web appears to be the new future. The next step in 2.0.

Facebook's play to get on board the real-time web wagon (love the sound of the web wagon) will see it change the status prompt from "What are you doing right now?" to "What’s on your mind?".

Facebook also said that it is lifting the limit on friends. Like Twitter those really popular types (don't know any personally) and celebs can reach far beyond the present 5,000 limit and aim for the kinds of numbers achieved by the likes of Twitter god Stephen Fry who currently has a staggering 262,694 followers and rising.

It seems that all of this, as well as changes to Facebook pages, is designed to keep people on Facebook and in particular brands that are successfully turning to Twitter.

Will the Twitterization of Facebook work or is it too little too late? There are some out there saying it is too late and that the Facebook audience doesn't really get it.

On the plus side, unlike other Twitter rivals out there Facebook does have a very large audience to engage with. It also has on its side that we are at the early days of the real-time web giving it a window of opportunity to stake its claim and win its audience over.

At the moment Twitter seems to be dominated by social media commentators, digital workers, journalists and, oh yeah, celebrities, but as every day passes it is broadening its base as people other than early adopters wake up to the joys of the real-time web.

I think it has a very good shot at making it work. Very much like the explosion of social media with MySpace, Bebo, Facebook and LinkedIn, there is room for more than one player when it comes to the real time web.

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Twitter investor explains how it will suceed

255762 — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 11:51:00 GMT

One of Twitter's new backers has been explaining what he sees as the future for the micro blogging service.

Todd Chaffee, from Institutional Venture Partners and one of Twitter's new backers, told Ad Age that there is huge potential growth in Twitter and that growth is all about search. He said that was why the Twitter co-founders, who include Biz Stone, walked away from Facebook's $500m takeover offer.

Interestingly he says that offer from Facebook to buy Twitter did not only include Facebook shares (add your own valuation) but hard cash as well and a substantial amount as well.

Chaffee told the magazine the key to Twitter's future growth is search and in its purchase of Summize last summer.

The growth he said would come in evolving its search business from a search of "what's happening -- right now," to searches that will go out to the Twitter audience in the form of Wiki Answer type questions.

"You put a question out to the global mind, and it comes back," Chaffee told Ad Age. "Millions of people are contributing to the knowledge base. The engine is alive. You get feedback in real time from people, not just documents."

In another interview speaking to the Washington Post Chaffe explained more why he invested in Twitter:

Simply put he's looking for winners and market leaders who are going to grow at disproportionate levels and Twitter falls into that category.

"Twitter is bigger than a lot of people realize and growing faster than a lot of people realize, but it has not hit the mainstream yet. It is just starting."

Amusingly his comments come as Richard Eyre, chairman, IAB told the ISBA conference: "Twitter has turned out to be more than the pre-teen drivel we originally thought it was."

Word is filtering out beyond journalists, a crack team of celebs and professional social media types. As word filters out and its audience broadens then so does its use.

Chaffee told the Post that the reality of Twitter is that it is a network/platform that has millions of users and thousands of applications.

"Twitter does three things. It facilitates social connections with friends, colleagues, writers, and celebrities. The second is knowledge transfer. It is a real-time mechanism for tapping the wisdom of millions of people. The third is social expression. It is a mechanism for the global community to express itself."

Then there is the big question as far as Twitter is concerned: money. Where is it? Chaffee is pretty sure that it is out there because Twitter is so easy for others to build on top of and potentially more powerful than its larger more established rivals, which don't have its unique combination of a searchable, real time database of what is happening right now.

It is this that he says gives Twitter the full set: it is ubiquitous, scalable and persistent.

"[Twitter is] the only thing we've found that has all of those things. None of the other things out there [Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn] has all of those variables. That is why Facebook tried to buy them."

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Twitter should charge business users

255762 — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 09:27:00 GMT

And why not? Twitter is a great service that has set the web and media alight with chatter. Businesses find it very useful and to me that seems like a clear sign that Twitter should benefit from some of that and start to pull in some revenues.

Since Twitter launched in 2006 it has been searching for a way to make money. There have been a few false starts alone the way, and two and half years later it still makes very little while growing exponentially - just look at this weekend gone, it was everywhere. Making cash is the conundrum that afflicts a lot of web ventures, both in this Web 2.0 originated boom over the last couple of years and in the dotcom boom of 2000.

The story that Marketing has today "Twitter plots charges for commercial users" says specifically Twitter plans is to charge brands. The magazine quotes Twitter co-founder Biz Stone saying more and more companies are using Twitter and individuals following them.

"We can identify ways to make this experience even more valuable and charge for commercial accounts.'

He added that Twitter could also create revenue-generating features to tap into the way brands use Twitter as a hybrid marketing and customer-service tool.

There is no word on the level of charges so far or how all encompassing the move will be, but Twitter has proved such a success and most of us are probably following a brand or two. Even ones we might not directly consider brands (maybe like news services?).

The move does raise a number of questions. It does, of course, have to be pitched just so. Some have already raised concerns that if the price is too high it could kill off Twitter.

In a quick survey of the Twittverse the replies give a mixed response. With some in favour and others concerned about the model or the principle of charging for the service.

AlastairDuncan @GordonM Twitter proposing charging business users. Would consumers pay for twitter, like you they do for SMS on mobile?

mattwaring @GordonM - keeps Twitter ad free - Twitter is the new DM, dont see why companies will not pay, perfect return, you know who/what, etc

vanessaavina Icon_lock @BrandRepublic certainly adds another communications tool for business to customers and other businesses

JamesAShaw @GordonM The money's got to come from somewhere! Charging for additional 'business' features may be better than guessing who's a business..

benbold @GordonM Brands should pay to promote themselves

Direct message from Chris Byrne great idea... Will bring a linkedin quality to twland...Chris Byrne / sensorpro

sandlines @GordonM I think you just invited the first invoice from Twitter. I'd be curious to know how they plan to differentiate 'commercial' use

Direct message from sensorpro great idea... Will bring a linkedin quality to twland

I agree with most of those points. It is definitely a tool. Payment I think would help Twitter evolve and develop and possibly make it even more useful to brands already using it. Some of the pioneering work done on Twitter by the likes : Comcast (Comcastcares), DirectTV and HRblock has really paid off.

Check this very good blog post for others in the US.

As well as grow Twitter has a right to make some cash out of what it does. It is the ideas of Stone and co who have made this all possible and it is also more appealing than advertising.

For many brands it has become an increasingly important driver of traffic to websites and so works very well as a marketing tool.

Clearly, however, some have reservations about the model:

DanDimmock @GordonM It will be interesting to see how they plan to admin this - more commercial ambition in here than straight fwd 'business'!

finncomms @BrandRepublic It's not in the spirit of this social media platform. They should look to a donations style a la Wikipedia or Tiny URL.

Interesting point about social media and comparing it to Wikipedia, but I am not sure it’s the same. Wiki from the start was something very different to Twitter and they do very different things.

DanDimmock @GordonM Not sure I agree. Twitts have choice as to who they comm/conv. - as long as that opt isn't removd why change? Ah, $$$!

Direct message from Nick Myers - Better model wld b 2 chrge ppl 2 follow famous or popular ppl - subscrpition based model. But @ v minimal, or one off chrge eg apple store. Nick Myers / MyEveryMove

Direct message from Nick Myers Biz r only just starting 2 use Twtr, to charge will put them off. Nick Myers / MyEveryMove

I don't think businesses are going to be put off, particularly not if it continues to grow at the rates we are seeing. It's going to be interesting.

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1736064 — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 09:57:00 GMT

Been having some interesting conversations with the team at Linkedin in last few weeks and getting some corporate contracts arranged for our larger clients. I have to declare an interest here - I absolutely LOVE this product.
The growth in users is phenomenal (1 million more every 15-16 days globally) - the profile of the users amazing (avg UK salary £62,000 which used to be higher than global avg but is now lower - following sterling dropping like a stone) and usability simple.
We have undoubtedly seen improved results in some targeted campaigns we are running in last 6 months - but i cannot profess to know where Linkedin will end up in the recruiting/employer brand piece - will it be a market dominant place for senior executive networking/communicating/advertising or a big fat senior CV database. Gross oversimplification i know but both are sort of possible.
Next 2 years will be fascinating.