Recently there has been a major shift in the world of Corporate Social Responsibility. Climate change and the current economic climate have pushed companies to adopt a more pro-active approach to CSR. The bottom line is now centred around people, planet and profit. As businesses aim to build more sustainable and socially responsible entities, social media strategies are becoming paramount and it’s not hard to see why.

Can't we all just get along

Nowadays the focus is on social media. Social networks are key to our everyday lives and communication has been redefined based on our voice power. The communities we create are now who we are, who we know and how we reach people on a daily basis.

Over the last few years, social media has done more to promote causes, generate awareness and raise funds than any other tool or platform. Its advantage is that people can get involved in ways that are immediate and meaningful. Companies no longer need to host elaborate and expensive fundraising events to create awareness of their cause, they can now spread the word via tools such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.

Successful CSR campaigns are transparent, consistently delivered across multiple media platforms and open to public feedback. It is therefore clear that companies must adopt meaningful, effective social media practices and encourage their employees to become involved with their causes. By using social media, they can build on their relationships with customers and promote their good work in a way that feels far more genuine than a wordy press release.

Many web-savvy companies are rising to the challenge and taking advantage of the social media platforms available. For example, Pepsi skipped the Super Bowl for the first time in 23 years, investing instead in a large social media program called Refresh Everything, which utilises Twitter, YouTube and Facebook.

Pepsi

Although it remains to be seen how this initiative will benefit Pepsi’s bottom line, it has certainly paved the way for social media and CSR. Soon after Refresh Everything was announced, Pepsi’s arch rival launched its own CSR project. Every time someone visits Coke’s fan page or makes a donation, the Facebook campaign donates $1 to the Boys & Girls Clubs of America.

What next, I wonder?

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As I far as I was concerned, SXSW (South by Southwest, for those of you not familiar with the acronym) was a music event, a chance for A&Rs, managers and sundry other music industry types to blow their expenses budget, get together for a good gossip and, if there was time, discover some new bands. The advantages for talent spotters are obvious – see as many bands as you can in four days, in a small-ish space so you can get around easy. It’s like In The City (Manchester) or CMJ (New York) but with better weather and more barbecues.

The landscape of the festival has shifted gradually over the last couple of years though, and not just because I personally have shifted from a musical space to a digital one. Last year’s conference saw a massive increase in attendees visiting the interactive sessions at the festival, and the ubiquitousness of the iPhone put a serious strain on mobile networks. This year this process has accelerated even further – services like Foursquare and Gowalla have allowed people to see at a glance exactly where the hottest parties and most happening events are taking place. You can imagine the conversations can’t you? “Wow, [cool venue] has sixty people we sort of know there. It MUST be good”. In fact, the two geolocation services even threw parties on the same night, fuelling the social media focus even further.

We shouldn’t be surprised really, as passion points like music have always been the drivers for the adoption of new technologies and services, but it’s still a little bizarre that the platforms themselves have become the focus of the attention, so much so that the Foursquare/Gowalla parties were THE hottest events. One of the other big talking points from the festival was the Spotify keynote speech where they announced, well not a lot to be honest. But still, it would be nice to have some, like content, coming out of this festival. Seemingly gone are the days of a band like The White Stripes coming out of nowhere to blow everyone away. A quick browse of NME.com and the highlights appear to be Muse and Hole. Not exactly the cutting edge in terms of new music. However, with so many bands springing to people’s attention online via blogs and social networks, and bands themselves generally eschewing traditional models to go it alone, it’s probably a natural evolution. The geeks inheriting the earth. With the ‘talent spotters’ chasing after them, desperate to not be left behind.

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With Obama’s ‘masterful use of social media’ and the tweets of his 3 million Twitter fans sealing the election of the Democrats’ golden ticket, can our politicians and parties emulate this success and seduce the online masses and turn them into advocates?

There’ll be new blood on the hustings. According to Home Office sources, 134 serving MPs will be “spending more time with their families” instead of contesting in May (87 Labour, 35 Conservatives, 7 Liberals and 5 others.) While natural churn of MPs is only to be expected for personal, health and career reasons, that is an almost 50% rise on the 85 who stood down in 2005.

Various news sources have indicated that this might have something to do with expenses, surely not! Nevertheless, the stage is set for new firebrand candidates to fill the vacuum and the re-standing candidates to face fresh competition. These candidates have been immersed in social media explosion of the last 5 years in their private lives and now are looking to galvanise support with it through their political careers.

The vast majority will be utilising social media and search mentions to push their agenda and their shiny politician faces, at present a mere 81 serving MPs are without their own website.

New web savvy and Twitter prolific Prospective Parliamentary candidates (PPCs) or ‘iMPs’ include Chuka Umunna (Lab, Streatham, Twitter following 1,397) Iain Lindley (Con, Worsley and Eccles South, Twitter following 481) and Bridget Fox (Lib Dem, Islington South and Finsbury, Twitter following 698.)

We’re not expecting the right honourable member for Bexhill and Battle to boast a Twitter following in the millions, but parliamentary process is becoming more and more integrated with social media, one need only look to the fervent activity on Tweetminster to see that.

Over the next few weeks we’ll look at how specific iMPs’ social media campaigns are progressing and our ever changing Election Dashboard will also analyse how Brown, Cameron, Clegg and co are competing in the social media stakes.

Finally, there’s always that elephant in the corner to confront after the election dust has settled: ‘Does a big online following translate into a seat in the Commons?’

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There seems to be a lot of confusion about the purpose of online PR these days. Too many people think that the sole job of online PR is improve the client’s search engine optimisation and help drive traffic to their website. Granted, SEO and online PR do go hand in hand to a certain extent, but they are not the same thing and to think so is to underestimate the contribution that PR can make to your wider communications strategy.

Without wishing to understate the value of the discipline, SEO is essentially a technical exercise – it’s about figuring out how search engines work and determining the on and off-page measures most likely to put their clients at the top of the results for the most relevant search terms.

Online PR is, just like offline PR, largely about managing the client’s public reputation. A key part of this is building relationships with influencers, with the ultimate aim of gaining positive media coverage. Obviously, the coverage generated by online PR often features links to the client’s site from high profile blogs and online publications, which is undoubtedly great for SEO.

But the important point to remember is that the SEO benefit of the coverage is just a nice side effect of the PR activity, not its primary purpose. The point of building relationships with influencers is to get positive coverage for the client in relevant media, and the point of that, lest we forget, is to get the client’s message heard by the people that the client wants to reach.

SEO does not do this. SEO might help hook a business up with somebody who is actively searching for something that business offers, but SEO can’t tell people why that business’s products are better than their competitors, or whether that business has great customer service, or if that business has sound environmental policies. SEO certainly can’t help a business to communicate clearly and effectively with the public if it gets caught up in a crisis situation.

Most importantly of all, SEO does not facilitate dialogue between a business and its customers. Online PR can help you engage with your customers via the digital channels that they feel most comfortable with, enabling your business to build stronger relationships and earn greater loyalty.

So, while there is clearly an overlap between SEO and online PR, it’s important to understand that they are two distinct disciplines which require different skill-sets and deliver unique benefits. Organisations which don’t understand the difference between these tools are unlikely to be able to use them as effectively as their competitors.

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Flog Definition: When a marketing bod pretends to be a 12-year-old computer nerd and leaves made-up reviews of his own products all over the blogosphere – it’s known as a fake blog or flog. Like fake hair, fake nails and fake tans – fake blogs are cheap and nasty. It’s not a good look.

As part of our social media jargon report we have had a series of cartoons commissioned. We will of course publish a few on this blog; a few are being offered exclusively around the web; and all will be available in the report when it is out.

The cartoons also fit rather nicely with the tongue-in-cheek social media glossary on our site.  Sometimes it’s just nice to sit back and have a giggle at how ridiculous it is for grownups to say they are ‘tweeting’, or reaching out to the ‘blogosphere’. Or it that just my childish sense of humour.

Do grab and share the cartoons if you like them…

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Whilst reading the econsultancy.com online PR benchmarking report, it struck me that PRs and brand marketers were still talking a different language.

Clients wanting increased brand mentions online are met with agencies delivering blogger relations. Those asking for brand reach are offered optimised press releases.  A client wants outcomes: and the agency offers tactics. Well, nothing new there then!

The trouble is that this issue is completely exacerbated by the proliferation of social media jargon. Love or hate these new terms, agencies and clients alike are letting them fly from their collective lips: especially around the pitching table.

At the recent Utalk Marketing conference, presentations from different marketing agencies revealed the scale of the confusion within the industry. There is no common understanding between the different marketing professions. Just look at the PR and SEO industries where there is no agreement on the definition for online PR. No wonder clients get confused.

We might be using the words like ‘social media’, ‘influentials’ or ‘conversations’, but we don’t always mean the same thing: several social media terms could now be classified as homonyms there are so many different meanings!

And the cloud of confusion is getting thicker. Every time a new tool, technology or platform rises in popularity it is accompanied by a raft of new buzzwords.

It occurred to me that no one had yet determined how much the social media jargon was impacting client marketers. What is the effect of having to learn a new lexicon of marketing and technology terms? How is social media literacy affecting the understanding of what a client wants? And most importantly, how is the confusion influencing budgets.

So we are doing some research with brands in the UK, to be published as a report (and shared socially of course).

I would like to include some comments and anecdotes from readers and fellow bloggers in the report (accredited of course). So if you have an opinion, or story to tell on the issues of social media jargon, please do share in comments or trackback posts (now I am using jargon!).

Do certain terms need clearer definitions, or should we be going back to basics and using the language of communications? Are there words that you think are commonly misunderstood or often misused?

Our intention is to put the best into the report with a link to your blog or website – and give you the first view of the report before we officially publish.

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Sadly I missed being on Ian’s NMK panel for ‘Clients in the Wild’ as I just had over 200 staples taken out after an op. But it seems the discussion and subsequent blog by Will McInnes has created a stir – causing several blogging PRs some deeper introspection. Antony Mayfield summarises the issues up rather eloquently.

Like Antony , I too am an optimist. I also lived through the similar, if not so public, growing pains of the digital ad agency industry. Back in the 90s these start-ups and specialists departments were dismissed by the powerful TV ad world. And we all know how that has changed now. We now have a very different marketing landscape with digital taking the lead and the more handsome budgets.

(more…)

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Daryl Wilcox has launched video on his site DWpub.com in series called ‘Experts in Communication’ . The whole thing kicks off with a two part video interview with Antony Mayfield explaining why he took his PR skills to a search company. Very insightful and I am full of admiration for how Antony shares his knowledge amongst his peers.

The video is rather nicely produced too. But the picture shown above is a screen grab as there is no way to scrape it onto my blog – a shame as it hardly encourages blog comments. Also, rather surprised that there is not a transcript to go with the video. That would gain a lot of SEO traction, but it is just a stand alone QuickTime video. Missing a trick?

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Just gave this presentation at the Online Marketing Show. Not sure it makes a lot of sense without the banter over the top, but I thought I would share.

The slides really fall into four categories:

1. How brands are performing in social media
2. The changing landscape online
3. How you can trigger conversations by tapping into passions and interests and creating social currency
4. How Sony BRAVIA used this model to inspire postive discussion, raise search engine visibility and drive website visits

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Our latest research looking at brand conversation in social media shows that techie companies, Google, Apple, Yahoo! and Microsoft, take the lead in terms of brand mentions in blogs, social networks and photo and video sharing sites.The study, launched at the Online Marketing Show examines the Interbrand Top 100 global brands and their voice in social media.

Here are the results for the top 25 most discussed brands.

 Technology leads the way, with Disney and Ford just squeezing in  the top 10. But split across the top 100 reveals that the industry sectors are quite evenly spread, with all of Intebrand’s top 100 brands getting a mention in social media.

Of course, this is just a snapshot and, before my friends at Onalytica and Market Sentinel rightly jump in, this research doesn’t take into account influence. Which we agree is essential. But the study does show that brands are being talked about and that is what we set out to confirm.

The full study will be available on the immediate future website on tomorrow or you can pop along to the OMS show at the Business Design Centre in London to get a free copy.

Technorati Tags: Google, Apple, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Interbrand Top 100 global brands, social media, Disney, Ford, Onalytica, Market Sentinel

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