In August 2001 Victoria Beckham went on stage with her lip pierced. The piercing became an overnight sensation, with hordes of young girls (so the papers said) rushing out to get the look.

When the piercing was revealed as a fake, certain echelons of the press branded Posh as a betrayer and hordes of young girls were left with ridiculous holes in their faces.

The question is, if Victoria Beckham had started the lip piercing rumour with a tweet, would it have had the same effect?

A recent scientific study by Northwestern University, Illinois, looked at celebrity influence on Twitter, using mathematical algorithms to measure whether the frequency of tweets and level of followers ultimately impacts the opinions of others.

According to The Daily Telegraph, tens of millions of tweets were sifted through on a daily basis, to decipher who the most influential tweeters were and their impact on trending topics.

The study found that the most influential tweeters were individuals that had low profiles, but high levels of expertise in their fields. In other words, when it comes to social media, wisdom triumphs over celebrity.

This does, however, pose a dilemma for social media marketers. Paying a celebrity to endorse a campaign no longer cuts the mustard – if hearts and minds are to be changed, a brand advocate with expertise needs to be employed.

However, as Dr Christian Jessen of Embarrassing Bodies recently pointed out, in a profession such as his, doctors have to swear by a Hippocratic Oath, forbidding them from using their medical knowledge for marketing or advertising purposes.

Even without the oath, professionals who have worked hard to build a reputation might not be keen to put it on the line for the sake of a brand.

Perhaps it’s time for brands to look a little closer to home for their social media advocates. Celebrities might turn heads, but it’s the hidden faces behind a company that will ultimately sway influence.

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The much rumoured “BlackPad” has been revealed. Last night at the company’s developer conference CEO Mike Lazarides introduced its Apple iPad rival.

We know little more than the tech specs right now but the preview video looks pretty cool. Price? Well that is mooted by the guys at PR News to be double an iPad, estimated to be between $1,000 and $1,300. That is a lot! When can we get our sticky fingers on it? According to an interview with BlackBerry’s Dan Dodge, it will be early 2011 in North America and next summer in the UK. That is a long time!

BlackBerry is keeping its focus on their enterprise market and the video above specifically calls the device “enterprise ready” and a “professional tablet”. They are clearly positioning the device in a different place to Apple’s iPad. But then why call it a PlayBook? Not sure an enterprise IT director would countenance deploying 1,000 PlayBooks across his organisation?

As with the iPhone and iPad before it, key to the BlackBerry PlayBook’s success will be the range of apps available and the speed with which they become available. Apple has a huge head start and my feeling is that this will simply be another device wealthy BlackBerry fanatics will buy to “play” with in airport lounges.

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We’re very pleased to let you know that at last night’s Reputation Online awards immediate future and Sony Europe picked up the ‘Best use of online media/blogger relations’ gong for 2009’s Twilight Football campaign.

It’s a just reward for the team that worked on the seven month campaign, taking a small nub of an idea (to hold seven football matches in seven stunning locations at twilight) and putting together a coherent social media strategy that would ensure that the end results far outstripped the initial investment.

If you’re not familiar with Twilight Football, you can read more about it in the case study on our website. What the case study doesn’t give you a flavour of though, is the amount of effort that the Sony Europe PR team and team at immediate future put into the campaign.

Anyone who has worked in PR/marketing/advertising will be no stranger to long nights and early starts, and at times Twilight Football was no exception to this. Managing multiple campaign strands at a time, dealing with over a hundred different competition winners, bloggers and players, live tweeting from games around the clock – all these things were managed with aplomb and dedication.

So, big shout outs to client lead Aisling McCarthy (if you meet her, ask about the lion costume), Mark Wyatt and Jonny Stark on the immediate future side. Similarly, Ruth Speakman, Silke Schild and Rachel Batchelor from Sony Europe. We wouldn’t have won it without you!

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This year I finally made it to IFA! After two years of organising press trips and managing them from the office, I was allowed out to help support the Sony Europe (client) PR team with the mammoth job of co-ordinating their launch activity at this year’s event.

I won’t go into too much detail about what was announced by Sony this year (you can check most of the products out in video form on their YouTube channel), but suffice to say that 3D was very much the focus. 3D TVs, 3D PlayStations, 3D digital cameras, even a 3D VAIO – all were on display for attendees to try out and experience.

Sony has invested a lot in 3D technology, with the corporation covering all aspects of the process: the cameras used for filming, producing the content (movies/games/exclusive World Cup highlights) and obviously making it all available in people’s living rooms. Being able to cover the full range of 3D capabilities has put Sony much further down the 3D road than some of its competitors.

As 3D was the main focus for everyone, there weren’t any earth-shatteringly revolutionary products unveiled, but there was still plenty for the assembled tech journalists and bloggers to write about. It’s also worth noting that Apple’s decision to host their press conference during IFA (not a week later as they usually do) didn’t noticeably take the sheen off proceedings. A new social network and a touchscreen Nano? For most people I spoke to, the verdict was a resounding ‘meh’.

What struck me most about IFA was just how VAST it was. Unlike CES (which I also had the pleasure of visiting this year), different stands are housed in different buildings meaning you can quite easily get lost (as I did) moving between the halls. There’s even a square in the middle that was playing host to gigs by the likes of The Kooks and, er, Scooter.

For the city, and its taxi drivers especially, it’s a massive boon. Huge billboards loom over the city for all of the major consumer electronics suppliers. This included a highly cheeky gigantic Samsung poster just across Potsdamer Platz from the iconic Sony Centre building.

The presence of all of these major corporations does not detract from the overall vibe of Berlin. It’s a city in transition – you can still feel the history in the air, but there’s a fresh sense of purpose, a feeling of renewal.

I know some journalists and PRs complain of IFA fatigue, but for a first-timer like me, it was an eye-opening experience. Same time next year? Yes please.

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Last Wednesday I had the opportunity to attend a great event, hosted by the London Press Club and Women in Journalism, with Carole Stone, the Queen of Networking herself, as a guest speaker. Having heard so much about Carole Stone, her weekly networking salons and her legendary Christmas parties (what I wouldn’t do for an invite…), I jumped at the chance to attend this event!

Carole was an extremely entertaining, dynamic and engaging speaker, and, as you would expect from a woman who has over 40,000 contacts in her database, she had some invaluable tips for anyone making their first forays into the world of networking. I have listed below the key outtakes from the event, and as an added extra, for each of Carole’s tips I have written my own social media version (with some help from my colleague James), highlighted in italics….

1. Wear something with pockets – It is important to always have business cards at hand so you don’t have to awkwardly rifle through your bag to find them! (Maybe more of an issue for females!) From a social media viewpoint, ensure that you have a LinkedIn profile, and it’s fully up to date, before you attend an event. You never know who will look you up!
2. Always follow-up with an email the day after you’ve met someone. And/or send them an email through LinkedIn, adding them to your online network at the same time.
3. When handing out business cards don’t scatter them like lawyers and accountants (Carole’s words…), make sure you actually spend time chatting to the people you’re giving them to. The same applies online really, just because LinkedIn is there doesn’t mean you should ask everybody you have ever heard of to join your network. As a general rule, only add people you have had a proper conversation with or who you would feel comfortable emailing.
4. It’s not all about quantity, it’s about quality. Pick out a few people in the room who you really want to meet. Don’t fret if you haven’t met the ‘big players’ at an event, chances are they’ll have so many people thrusting business cards in their direction that they won’t remember you anyway. Old school networking tips live on, this is definitely still relevant online. Engage the up-and-coming bloggers or influencers who will want to, and have time to, share knowledge with you.
5. Always remember details. Note down one or two key details about the person you’ve just met to remind yourself who they are/where you met. Taking this a step further, you could use tools like Evernote, Digg etc to log relevant posts, articles or web pages that will help you re-engage your new contact in a later conversation online.
6. If someone is acting rude, or haughty, be honest and ask them “did you mean to sound rude when you said that?” (Maybe a tip to be used with personal discretion…). This is particularly relevant in the world of social media as sometimes irony or humour does not come across quite as well in an email or a 140 character Tweet! If you have engaged with this contact through Twitter, send them a simple @reply asking whether their last comment was supposed to sound rude… This is a win-win technique, the contact will either laugh it off or they’ll (hopefully) realise that their comment was out of line and clarify what they meant/apologise. Easy.
7. Stand up at networking events so you can get away easier. Conversely, online it’s easy to leave a conversation so get as involved as possible, comment on walls, reply to tweets and use those hashtags!
8. Carry an empty glass so you have an excuse to leave a boring conversation (“I’m just going to get another drink…). As previously mentioned, online you can leave a conversation whenever you like, but always check back and make sure you are not missing an opportunity to engage with new connections.
9. OR carry 2 glasses of wine, pretending one is for a friend, allowing you to leave a conversation to look for said friend if necessary… See above… but there is nothing to stop you having two glasses of wine anyway!
10. . Don’t worry about failure! Absolutely true in social networking online as in the real world, be bold and don’t be afraid to get involved in conversations, it’s the best way to broaden your knowledge and understanding of a subject.
11. Never toss a card aside! You never know when that contact may come in useful… Hopefully LinkedIn won’t go down.

Et voila… the top tips from the Queen of Networking… and yes, most of them are pure common sense, however it was nice to hear these things from a lady whose reputation and business success are built on networking!

Hopefully these tips will prove useful and show you that, when it comes to taking your first tentative steps into networking, both online and offline, everyone has been in exactly the same situation as you and everyone is nervous about not having someone to talk to or saying the wrong thing. Confidence is key!

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Last week I attended a pretty insightful WOMMA UK talk where Dr. Paul Marsden presented his latest thinking on The Rise of Social Commerce: Converting Conversations to Commerce.

For those of you that don’t know him, Marsden is a renowned digital marketer, author and social psychologist.  He is editor of Social Commerce Today, managing editor of Connected Marketing, and former managing editor of the Journal of Memetics.

You may or may not have seen that there is a lot in the news at the moment regarding social commerce, with Marketing Week recently stating “forget e-commerce; social commerce is where it’s at.” Last month Mark Zuckerberg went as far to say that “if I had a guess, social commerce is the next area to really blow up.” IBM defines social commerce as ‘the concept of word of mouth applied to e-commerce,’ and Paul discussed why this is a major opportunity for brands and word of mouth marketers looking to monetise word of mouth measurably.

He believes that the future of word of mouth marketing is in commerce, not conversation and detailed how social commerce is heralding a new generation of word of mouth marketing that offers a digital trace from conversation to commerce.

Paul’s presentation was littered with examples (which will all be within the deck when it arrives), he used Groupon as a shining social commerce success story to illustrate his point. Groupon is the fastest growing website of all time (even more than Facebook), it started 18 months ago and is now worth a staggering $3.35bn! He also covered P&G and Disney with their pop-up Facebook campaign stores (utilising F commerce and tryvertising) that generate word of mouth sales around product launches, viral newsfeed stores embedded in user news feeds, Levi’s use of Facebook social plug-ins to drive traffic, conversion and order value by word of mouth on its e-commerce site; and Diesel’s in-store DieselCam syndicating pics and comments to social networks from the fitting room.

So why is it such a popular phenomenon? Paul stated that the age old issues of accountability and ROI are always top of a client’s agenda and to date, this has been the biggest bugbear of social media because word of mouth is hard to measure. He believes social commerce solves this huge issue because it has tangible financial benefits as you can link word of mouth to sales, solving the ROI hindrance issue. Certainly something to bear in mind for our clients!

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A few weeks ago Google‘s chief executive, Eric Schmidt, suggested people may be forced to change their names in order to escape youthful misdemeanours immortalised online on social media sites, like Facebook. As a university student looking for a placement for my third year, I found myself doing some housekeeping, but there was nothing I deemed bad enough on my profile to warrant a name change.

Schmidt’s comment provoked a vast debate on the volume of information we freely publicise, which is next to impossible to eradicate. He told the Wall Street Journal:

“I don’t believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time.”

As someone who has grown up using social media, I certainly understand where Eric Schmidt’s suggestion comes from. My generation spends a vast majority of their day logged on to social platforms, such as Facebook, where they document every aspect of their lives, without supervision or thought as to who their information is available to.

An Independent article including the story of a trainee teacher, unable to complete her qualification following a comical picture online of her captioned, “Drunk Pirate”, is a stark warning. Therefore, Schmidt has a good point.

But is this suggestion relevant to companies?

Brands might be attracted by the idea of a new identity, but is this possible to achieve when an online reputation can last forever? If the internet behaves as a public archive, is it possible to turn public opinion around? And is damage to brand reputation ever enough to warrant giving up brand awareness?

When Aviva changed its name two years ago, from Norwich Union, members of the public polled by the Guardian, thought ‘Aviva’ was a bus company, not the UK’s biggest insurer. Brands need to consider social media as part of their campaign management strategy and a channel to manage any risk to reputation. Name changing may be an option for individuals, but the cost to businesses can be much higher.

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So it’s official.  Facebook has moved into the location-sharing space in the UK.  At the time of writing there are already 150 million Places users at this stage across Japan, UK and US.

Everyone is probably familiar with what Facebook Places is, but just to recap.  It’s a mobile app allowing users to alert friends to their location, provide a real-time update of where they are and what they’re doing.  When a Facebook user checks in to a location, an update will automatically be published to their friends’ News Feeds.  They can also ‘tag’ friends who are in the same location, either by way of a photo or a status update.  Note however that these tags can be removed.

The product manager for Facebook Places targets three goals for the service, “to make it easier to share where you are, discover new places and discover new friends.”

So will Places present some nice opportunities?  How great would it be to check in to the pub and learn that an old school friend you’ve been meaning to catch up with for a while is round the corner in another bar?  Or that you have friends at the same festival or night club?

And the initial stats and commentary seem quite positive.  Facebook certainly has strength in user numbers.  Perhaps the biggest negative point will be the location security concerns (reports in the US linked burglaries to Facebook Places earlier this week), although Facebook say they, “wanted to prepare a robust set of privacy controls and are really proud of what we’ve done with the Places privacy settings.”

Will it make Foursquare redundant?  A survey of 1,184 British Foursquare users commissioned by MyVoucherCodes.co.uk showed that most (82% in this case) would ditch the check-in service once Facebook Places launches in the UK.  No mayorships, points or badges to worry about (although many would argue this ‘gaming aspect’ is the attraction of Foursquare).  Interestingly though, these rival location-based services such as Foursquare and Gowalla are all using Facebook’s API to develop products that integrate with Places.

I’m on the fence here as to whether it will take off.  We all know that Facebook is the largest social network on the planet, and people arguably carry more friends on this platform than Foursquare, so surely it’s a better platform base to share locations, discover new places and make recommendations?  Then I consider how many Facebook users have ‘acquaintances’ rather than ‘real’ friends on their profile?  Surely if you were ‘properly’ connected with your real friends, you’d know where they are anyway?

Will it lead to people culling these so-called acquaintances?  Or ex’s that they fear they might bump into (I’m sure we’ll hear some stories connecting Places with such scenarios very soon!).

Either way, it looks like a giant step to bringing social networking into the real world.

As for what this will do for brands, keep reading our blog as we’ll be looking at this very soon…

You can check out the Facebook Places video on YouTube as well at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZfX_ZQag1BM&feature=player_embedded

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www.popewatch.org - christened by Paddy Power

The Pope is here in the UK today, but where is he in social media land? I thought I would do a quick check on some of the big networks and see what kind of presence the Holy Father has.

One quick search and we can see he is all over the place, or is he? There are more than 80,000 Popes on Facebook. Before you ask, yes, that does included all those called Mr Pope or Pope Smith, but even the pages search – more than 500 results – is most confusing.

This Facebook page (unofficial) does a good job of seeming to be affiliated with the official Pope Benedict XVI (although it isn’t) and has managed to attract over 127,000 connections.  Just ten seconds reading some rather polarised wall posts and I think I can see why an official page might be a little difficult.

Twitter has a lot of pretenders to the Vatican’s throne. However, there is no genuine Papal profile although this one does look quite realistic.

Go to YouTube however – where it is much more about being a virtual pulpit – and the Vatican has done a decent job of building a channel that will surely give the faithful (all 25,000 of them) something to do online. Just don’t expect to be able to comment.

Seriously though, if social media gives us a view into the mind of the next generation of social, business and political leaders, then the Catholic religion seems to be even further out of touch than I first thought. He has obviously identified the problem when asking priests to blog back at the beginning of the year. How about leading by example your holiness? Just don’t forget that social media is a two way conversation, no pulpit heroes here please!

P.S. Thank you PaddyPower for the photo. Do click on the image above to check out popewatch.org

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Mashable have just written about the facebookification of twitter. We’d been having the same conversation in our office. With the launch of the new Twitter coming out of nowhere and then building into a frenzy of energy, the introduction to the next generation of twitter has been a hot talking point this morning – and we’d also noticed that the social platforms seem to be blurring. Whilst the Twitter launch video’s very watchable, we’re not really sure how the user will benefit – or whether Twitter is losing its 140 character selling point and over-complicating itself.

Time will tell.

For the moment, we only have a two minute video to go with and, whilst it’s useful to be able to slide out more information about Twitterers and Twitter trails, and visual is always nice, we’re not quite sure what this will mean in practice, nor what the difference is between the new twitter and platforms like Tweetdeck which already permit this.

Possibly this: “Twitter is for news. Twitter is for content. Twitter is for information.”

RWW have been covering the launch of new Twitter extensively. Whilst we I have been rather hung up on the appearance of Twitter and a little resistant to yet another online change (it’s been a busy week), RWW’s coverage brings some interesting insights from Twitter headquarters and adds some rationale that suggests that facebookification is not the overall aim. For Thau, Twitter’s VP for business and corporate development, Twitter is seen as a place for breaking news, providing information, and creating a space for discussion. It’s also very much for the people who just visit the site to consume what’s going on.

With these objectives in mind, expanding the scope of Twitter to include more content – and more types of content– is a kind of evolution rather than a sideways step. It’s a way of expanding Twitter’s ability to convey news, content and information in different forms and a further broadening of the different ways in which people read and talk.

Which sounds great.

It’ll just be interesting to see the impact it has on the dialogue and how the distinction between social network and news provider plays out in practice.

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