On the surface, URL shortening services such as http://bit.ly are a great idea, because they can turn long, messy web addresses like this:

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/support_services/article6788774.ece

Into nice tidy addresses like this:

http://bit.ly/g4ol9

This is especially useful for posting to Twitter, since it saves valuable space, but a lot of people have got into the habit of using URL shortening services all the time.

There’s an obvious problem with this from an SEO point of view. For a start, the shortened URL contains no anchor text, and secondly they do not pass on PageRank.  Since these two things are fundamental to Google’s ranking algorithm, any links to your company website that use a URL shortening service are practically worthless in terms of SEO value. They will do nothing to improve your site’s ranking for the relevant keywords.

[EDIT] As pointed out in the comments, it seems bit.ly and other URL shortening services do pass on PageRank (a few of these services do not) but the anchor text issue is still a problem, links without embedded keywords don’t provide much value.

But that’s not all. As the recent closure of http://tr.im has illustrated, sometimes URL shortening services go out of business and that means that all those millions of links on the internet which use that service will suddenly stop working.

So the long and short of it is: for online PR purposes URL shortening services are best avoided where possible, but sometimes they’re necessary, like on Twitter.

Here’s the really interesting bit

But there’s more to this story. They may have certain disadvantages and risks, but as long as Twitter is going strong, it’s fairly certain that bit.ly will be doing quite nicely too (did somebody say buyout?) and that creates an interesting situation.

Twitter is a hotbed of viral activity, with news and trends being retweeted backwards and forwards, spreading across the web faster than ever before. Given that bit.ly is rapidly becoming the de-facto URL shortening service, it is an amazing and unprecedented position in that it has access to a live, detailed view of these trends as they are developing.

Before anybody else knows what’s making an impact on the web on any given day, the people who run bit.ly will already have a clear picture of what people are looking at, what is spreading around the web, and how it’s spreading. If they’re smart, they will already be analysing that in all sorts of clever and interesting ways to figure out how they can extract value from it.

For most web users, bit.ly is just a handy way to make unwieldy URLs a bit more manageable, but for businesses it’s a goldmine of up to the minute data on consumer trends and behaviour, on an amazing scale. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see bit.ly selling customised dashboards to provide businesses with snapshots of that data in the future.

Twitter’s business model may still be a bit hazy, but it’s certainly created fertile ground for bit.ly to develop into what could be one of the most powerful and valuable business tools on the web.

[UPDATE] It seems tr.im has decided to stick around after all – although the service’s owners have a few things to say about the relationship between Twitter and bit.ly

Following the release of our Truth about Twitter report recently, we were contacted by Guy Stephens, the Online Help Manager of mobile phone retailer, The Carphone Warehouse, who wanted to highlight some of his company’s experience of using Twitter to support its customer service operation.

Since we’re not planning to produce another Twitter report in the near future, Guy kindly agreed to let us interview him for this blog post. It’s made a lengthy article, but if you’re interpreted in a big brand Twitter case study from the real world, you’ll find plenty of great insight below.

Can you give us an overview of what CPW currently uses Twitter for?

We have various accounts, which are used as follows:

@carphoneware – This profile represents the corporate voice of the company, and is used to tweet company announcements. It employs a formal tone without too much emotion.

@guyatcarphone – This has been the main customer service profile. It uses a personal, friendly tone to respond proactively or reactively to customer complaints and queries. We also use it for customer service alerts, help tips and so forth. I will be moving back to providing help and support to our customers via Twitter.

@becksatcarphone – Becks will be taking over from me to provide customer service. She is our first actual customer service agent to be providing customer service support for our customers. We will be adding more agents in time.

@erkanatcarphone – Erkan will be providing information and answering questions specifically about the iPhone and other handsets we sell.

@stuartcarphone – We use this one specifically for BlackBerry related information

@steveblancpw – Steve is the UK Sales & Customer Director, he’s only recently started using Twitter.

@shaneatcarphone - This is for official PR announcements, daily share prices, etc.

@cpwhelp – Help tips, service announcements. We’re building this one up at present.

@cpw1team – this was set up for a senior managers’ conference held in June. It was the first conference we tweeted and yammered live from. This allowed us to connect with employees, customers and generally anyone interested in getting a live tweetfeed of what was happening at the conference. I think this might have been a first in the UK. We had Charles Dunstone and Andrew Harrison speaking, and we officially tweeted about Vodafone and Carphone Warehouse partnering up again.

What drove the decision to engage with people through Twitter?

We realised that people were seeking out new customer service channels, often using social media to create their own peer-to-peer self help networks. It’s clear that information is decentralising, and as a company the challenge for us was working out how to engage with our customers in this new world.

Companies are being forced to use whichever channels their customers are choosing, rather than continuing to focus on their own websites and call centres. We also saw examples such as  BestBuy, JetBlue, Dell, Zappos, doing great things in this space.

Do you feel Twitter provides any specific advantages over the other channels you use?

From a customer service perspective, Twitter speeds up the identification process of a problem (although not necessarily the resolution of it, just the identification). Once the issue has been identified, then it is resolved using traditional channels such as email or phone.

It also serves as an early warning system. Various issues were higlighted on Twitter 24 hours or so prior to the launch of the iPhone, so we’ll take this lesson and ensure we’ve got the appropriate resources in place ahead of the next big launch.

In terms of customer service channels, emails, phones and letters are the most popular route that customers use to contact us. These are essentially 1-to-1 and private. No one else will see the customer’s enquiry apart from the person who wrote it and the person who reads it. Twitter and social media on the other hand, have completely opened up this world.

They are public mediums, where the resolution of an issue often takes place within a very public and populated arena. An arena in which bystanders are often more than willing to add their own experiences, suggestions and recommendations. This opening up of a historically closed space, is forcing companies to recognise the value of transparency, openness and collaborative working practices with customers firmly at the heart of it.

What are the main challenges you have encountered with Twitter so far?

It’s an evolving medium, so there’s a lot of learning as you go along. Sometimes that doesn’t sit too well with companies, because it opens them up to risk.

In terms of customer service, we’re looking to get our customer service agents directly onto Twitter, dealing with customers directly rather than through me. This is going to be great for customers, but it raises the issue of how scalable the service is.

One of the advantages of Twitter is the speed with which it can help you identify customer service problems. The challenge we face is how can we take the best of Twitter, such as that speed, or any social media platform and apply it to traditional customer service channels.

Moving forwards one of our challenges will be how best to involve all the different parts of the business and employees who want to get involved in this space in a coherent and effective way, not only for themselves, but also for customers. This requires making sure everyone who wants to get involved knows what is required of them, the risks involved, as well as the opportunities that are available.

What was the rationale behind running several different accounts?

We felt it was very important to be specific about how we wanted to use Twitter, rather than have generic jack-of-all-trade accounts.  This might not be the case for smaller companies, but for The Carphone Warehouse it has ensured that in each area we go into, can build up their own personality and characters as they see fit.

We also deliberately had a more formal account for the company which we use for corporate info, announcing our results, etc. To be honest, on one level we probably didn’t think about it too much either, as we were learning as we went along.

Do you have a particular strategy for deciding who to follow?

There’s no overall strategy or hard and fast rules about followers. At the end of the day, I’m probably like anyone else, if they look interesting I’ll follow them. I tend to follow them as an individual (’me’) rather than someone with their corporate hat on.

I think in both instances it’s more about building up credibility and trust within our customer base, rather than actively seeking followers. I would say that The Carphone Warehouse is still very much operating on Twitter in a somewhat functional way, we have not got to the level of a Frank Eliason at ComCast or Tony Hsieh at Zappos, who operate on a thought leadership level as well.

With the corporate account we deliberately do not follow lots of people as many add no value to the account. Those we do follow are linked to our business in some way such as Robert Stephens (CEO of Geek Squad). Being less ‘personal’ the account benefits from staying lean as far as followers are concerned. Its growth in followers is because people want to follow and it’s growing steadily.

Have you found that using a specific ‘tone of voice’ on Twitter works particularly well?

What you read is what you get, and our tone of voice reflects that; we’re there to help or to provide information. We encourage conversation with our customers and it is important to understand their frustrations or concerns and be open to listening and responding in a timely and efficient manner. In order to do that, our tone of voice has to be more empathetic, open and honest. Whilst our corporate account is more formal, there’s still an element of personality that comes through.

We’re trying to create a sense of ‘freedom within a framework’ for our employees who want to get involved in this space. We can’t stipulate how they should sound or what they should say, that works against the whole idea of social media. There’s room for lots of different opinions but coming from The Carphone Warehouse it would be in our approachable, honest and open tone of voice. Our challenge is to create a framework that allows that to happen.

Do you actively post comments that you want people to retweet?

We do not have an RT policy or guidelines. If you find it interesting and want to RT it, do. If you don’t find it interesting, dont. There’s no doubt that we try to RT colleagues where we can in Geek Squad, Best Buy, TalkTalk etc, but it’s still got to be interesting.

CPW has a quite sophisticated customer service IT system – is the Twitter customer service channel linked to that in any technical way, or are you just managing it personally?

At present, Twitter is not integrated into the business at a systems level. This is coming, and now that we are starting to put our customer service agents onto the front line, we’ll have no option but to find a way to ensure that Twitter is not only seen as a valid customer service channel, but is also integrated more fully into the business. We don’t know what that will look like, but I would imagine within the next 3 months or so, we’ll start seeing Twitter stats appear on weekly reports.

We are also planning to add Twitter and other social media sites such as Digg, StumbledUpon, Delicous to our online help content so that customers can share it if they like it.

What lessons have you learned from your experience with Twitter so far, and what advice would you give to other organisations who have yet to get started with the channel?

• Be specific and clear about how you want to use Twitter. Don’t try to be everything to everyone.

• Just have a go.If you’re feeling a bit nervous,start small, become confident in one area, whether that’s customer service, sales, marketing, PR etc, and then as you become more familiar and confident, grow your offering from there.Then get the directors on boardandusing it.

• Be prepared to change the way you think. It is an open medium that cuts across business units, it forces you to become more transparent in the way you work, and you begin to realise that actually customers can operate quite happily without you. You need to find your rightful place within their social spaces.

• Ultimately, Twitter is just another channel. You’ve still got to understand your customers, how they engage with you, and what motivates them. Once you start understanding that, you can then understand whether Twitter is really for you. Twitter isn’t for every company, so don’t feel the pressure to join if you can’t find value in it.

• If you do decide to join, do it wholeheartedly, embrace the space and the opportunities it offers, and simply keep listening to your customers, they’ll tell you everything you need to know.

• Encourage people to have a go and, if you can, help them to understand how toget thebest out if it. Sharing good content means that youwill attract good followers etc.

According to the latest predictions from research firm, Forrester, social media marketing spend in the US will rise from $716 million in 2009 to £3,113 million in 2014. The accuracy of these figures may be up for debate – all the research in the world isn’t going to tell you how the world will change in five years time, and the beauty of the being an analyst is that few people ever test your long term predictions – but it certainly points to a clear trend, which is more useful than any attempts to pin precise numbers on the potential size of the industry.

Source: Forrester Research

As the chart shows, social media is expected to be the fastest growing online marketing sector by a significant margin (although, unsurprisingly, mobile is also expected to grow significantly, but people have been expecting that to explode for a long time now).

The reasons for this should be clear, the marketing industry is currently experiencing a sea change for a wide range of reasons, including:

• Modern consumers are marketing savvy and cynical of traditional brand messaging, you can’t spoon-feed them your pitch and expect them to swallow it any more
• Conventional advertising is losing its effectiveness. People are increasingly using their PVRs (SKY+ boxes) to skip through TV adverts, internet users are developing ad-blindness, print and radio are also suffering
• The internet is making it easier for consumers to share their brand experiences with each other – this is increasingly informing their purchasing decisions more than the brand’s own communications

People want to deal with businesses that respect their intelligence by engaging them in interesting conversations, rather than doggedly pushing sanitised, on-message marketing blurb into their face through tightly controlled old-world channels. Consumers are saying: If you want my attention, you need to talk to me like a human being.

This is what social media is all about, and this is the future of marketing – figuring out how to talk to your customers (and other stakeholders) like real people  - and the figures from Forrester support this idea. It’s really only a matter of time before social media forms the core of all marketing activity.

There’s been a huge amount of discussion about how Twitter can be used most effectively for online PR and marketing, and there’s no shortage of interest in the subject since the mainstream media became obsessed with the platform. The only problem is that most of the current analysis is either lofty strategic level stuff, or is based on the assumption that you already know a lot about Twitter, neither of which are much use to the majority of people who just want to know where to start.

This prompted us to produce a practical guide to help PR and marketing professionals get some real value from Twitter, without assuming that they already have a deep understanding of the service.  You can get hold of a free copy of the Twitter for PR and Marketing Professionals guide on our website – we put a lot of work into it, so I hope you find it useful.

If you haven’t got time to read the whole thing, the following diagram outlines the basic steps you should follow to incorporate Twitter into your comms activities. It’s a very brief overview, and the full guide goes into a lot more detail about how you can accomplish each of these steps:

Simply put, you first need to monitor Twitter to find out what people are saying about the issues that matter to your organisation, then learn how to participate in the Twitter ecosystem appropriately in order to gain acceptance, and then you will be in a strong position to instigate the kind of conversations that are important to you.

One of the most interesting changes taking place as the PR industry evolves into an online discipline is the increased emphasis on measurement. In the old days of offline PR, little attention was paid to systematically analysing the relative success of campaigns, because measuring PR is hard to do. Measures that attempted to pin a quantifiable return on investment to PR activity, such as Advertising Value Equivalent were woolly at best.

But that’s all changing and it seems that PR isn’t getting a free ride any more. All of a sudden, acronyms like ROI and KPI are being applied to an industry that has long been used to justifying its budget with a ring-binder full of shiny, laminated press-clippings. There is now a far greater expectation that PR should provide hard evidence of its impact on the bottom line.

There are two things PR agencies can do about this:

• Keep banging on about how the qualitative nature of PR makes it impossible to measure in the same way as other disciplines

• Figure out how we can use all of these new metrics which are available in the online world to put together some kind of robust and repeatable framework for measuring the value of PR activity with some degree of consistency

You might like to take a guess at which of those approaches is likely to win the most new business.

Of course, there’s already a lot of healthy debate and discussion about PR measurement in the blogosphere, and it’s no surprise that a lot of the big names in PR have their own ideas about the most effective approach.

On the one hand, it’s good that there’s so much interest in solving the problem, but on the other hand, it looks unlikely that an industry-wide consensus will be reached any time soon. Obviously, everybody wants to implement a measurement standard that best represents their own strengths, and it doesn’t help that any discussion on the subject invariably gets sidetracked into an esoteric debate about the nature of influence.

Obviously there’s still a long way to go before this is anywhere close to being solved, but at least there now seems to be broad acceptance that rigorous measurement will be key to the PR industry’s future.

However the measurement debate unfolds, I think it’s absolutely key to ensure that the metrics used are properly aligned with the client’s business goals.  All too often, arbitrary KPIs are chosen simply to provide a tick-box for PR staff to show that they’ve done some work, with little consideration into how exactly they help the business achieve its ultimate aims. And that’s a far worse situation to be in than the old days where we relied solely on qualitative reporting, which at least had some kind of value.

Just before Christmas, we experimented with some new brainstorming techniques across a number of clients. It got me thinking how there is a lot more to a creative brainstorm when you are planning for social media ideas.

Offline, a PR brainstorms rely upon understanding a client: its business or products, its audience, and its requirements. In addition, a good knowledge of what is newsworthy, the media and what is currently capturing the headlines is essential.

Of course, this knowledge is necessary for online PR brainstorms too, but you have to add to the mix with a more detailed understanding of social media.
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Brilliantly executed viral by Lean Mean Fighting Machine.

LEAN MEAN FIGHTING MACHINE “Dem Phones”

viral marketing, video

Technorati Tags: viral marketing, video

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.

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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?

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