We’ve been hearing a lot recently about how Facebook fan numbers aren’t the be all and end all.  Brands should concentrate on engaging with their existing fan base. Even Facebook’s own are towing the line. David Parfect, agency sales group head at Facebook recently told the audience at the Social Media World Forum in London that brands should look beyond fan numbers. In his own words David said: “Just because a brand has 17,000 fans on Facebook, that does not mean these fans are engaged with them. That is just where the marketing should start.”

Fangager has listed the top engaged pages on Facebook based on their active fans. Looking at these pages closely, we’ve identified 5 recurring content themes that drive fan participation. While these pages listed by Fangager are mainly celebs, personalities or sporting clubs, their key themes can be adopted by brands to generate conversations on their own Facebook pages.

Lifestyle focus

The majority of pages with high interaction levels are lifestyle brands such as sports clubs, celebs, musicians etc. and the input from fans stems from these passion points. Even traditional product focused brands, such as Red Bull and Converse don’t use Facebook as a tool to directly promote their products. Their pages are filled with content that relates to their other ventures, for example Red Bull and extreme sports.

News and service announcements

As with most social media platforms, brands use Facebook pages to tell their customers about their latest news and often link to their website or blogs. Man Utd, which is third in Fangager’s list, uses this tactic a lot on its page. Nearly 4,000 people have comments on their latest post about Rooney’s match ban.

Platforms like Windows Live Messenger and even Facebook itself use their pages to tell fans about the latest service announcements, which for most people is more convenient than visiting an external page.

Personable

To help break down barriers between brands and their customers, some pages have adopted a personal tone which has helped keep them connected to their fans.  Some examples of these are:

• Justin Beiber – his page is populated with things he’s found interesting and make use of ‘I’ so it is as if he is personally writing to his 20 million fans. His average post receives around 7,000 comments.
• Skittles – it posts funny/random content to its fans and takes a personal approach by using ‘I’ instead of ‘we’. Its recent post that said: “I balance out my electric blanket with a refrigerator pillow” received 11,000 likes and 700 comments.
  

Questions

Almost all of the pages listed by Fangager use questions to help drive fan participation. Questions can be related to products and services or have no obvious connection at all. We’ve seen this work particularly well on the Sony UK Facebook page, which we manage alongside our client. For example, when we asked Sony’s fans  to tell us what they wanted to see in future home entertainment products we received over 50 comments.  

Event

Some of the top engaged Facebook pages often post links to brand events, whether they are real life such as gigs or sports fixtures or calendar events like product launches. Over 16,000 Man Utd fans were listed as attending the clubs Champions League match with Chelsea recently and fans posted over 9,000 comments.

Photos and videos

It may seem pretty standard nowadays but posting videos and photos on Facebook pages is a good way of increasing interaction with fans. For example, a video posted onto Justin Bieber’s fan page showing him pranking Willow Smith received over 74,000 likes and 20,000 comments. Exclusive, behind the scenes content also goes down well with Bieber’s fans.

You can view Fangager’s list here: http://www.fangager.com/site/top100/more/

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What do ancient philosophy and social media have in common? Well, let’s see. In a possible world in which Aristotle transcends time to come face-to-face with the social team at Facebook HQ; he stands there in his toga and sandals and asks everyone to stop rushing around and sit cross-legged on the floor for a moment of metaphysical contemplation. The social team stares at him blankly in a vacuum of stunned silence, before darting their collective heads back to the future and keeping their fingers tapping firmly away at the technical revolution.

Me: “Sorry Aristotle, they just didn’t have time for contemplation.”

Aristotle: “Well when they do have time, could you please point them in the direction of Physics 239b11, I think they might like the Dichotomy paradox of motion.”

Me: “Sure thing Aristotle, you’re the man.”

The Dichotomy (Paraphrasing Aristotle, who in turn paraphrases Zeno of Elea)

It is impossible to walk from A to B. To get to B, you must first walk half way and this should take you half the total time of the journey, assuming you are in constant motion. To walk half way, you must first walk a quarter of the way (i.e. half way to half way) and even before you can walk a quarter of the way, you must walk an eighth of the way (i.e. half of half of half). Therein lies the problem: how do you even take a step forward from A, when the space in front of you can be divided an infinite number of times and should therefore take an infinite amount of time to cross? A bit like social media, no?

You’re a brand, you want to take a simple step from A (no social media integration) to B (successful social media integration). But, before you can reach successful social media integration, you need to know your brand voice. And before you know your brand voice, you need to know your strategy. And before you know your strategy you need to know your risks. Suddenly, the space between your brand and that ever-so-simple goal of reaching B starts dividing in front of you. And as the social media landscape continues to change at lightning speed, where do you even start?

The truth is that you can walk from A to B. You do it every day. But perhaps there’s comfort in knowing that a seemingly new and perplexing problem is reassuringly ancient.

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You may have seen news of Google’s latest attempt to introduce social recommendations to its platform. +1  (US only service at the moment) allows people to up vote any website they like; this can then be seen by their social connections on Google in much the same fashion as you might like a friend’s post on Facebook. This can be considered a blatant, somewhat belated, but very welcome addition from Google in the social media arms race, but it also throws up a number of questions.

Could it be gamed?

I’m positive Google’s beta testing will place lots of whiz bang algorithms to stop unscrupulous people +1ing select sites to death. But, it does raise the query: will brands who have worked hard to appear in the Google Golden Triangle through great stories, competent SEO practices and positive reviews see smaller sites leapfrogging them in people’s search due to lots of local +1s?

What would motivate someone to +1?

Your +1s can only be seen by your Social connections on Google.

• People in your Gmail & Google Talk chat list
• People in your “My Contacts” group in Google Contacts
• People you follow in Google Reader or Google Buzz

But, how many friends do you currently have on your Google profile? Is this group big enough to provide meaningful search impact? In addition people currently understand, or have been taught to understand the motives for liking something amongst their social group, but does this motivation transfer to search?

The upside

I may have seemed pretty critical of this new service, but I’m sure Google will iron out these potential issues. +1 in search can only be a good thing, we have been saying for months that human recommendations need to be considered in search; it shouldn’t just be down to algorithms and will combat SEO blackhatting.

When +1 comes to the rest of the web population, what site would you up vote? Oh yeah and Google, where’s the -1?

For further information check out Google’s overview video.

For a more detailed overview of the service there is a great description on Search Engine Land.

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I’ve been reading a lot (and trying out) some new and exciting music applications over the past week or so, with people starting to explore hitherto uncharted territory. Everyone and their dog are launching cloud based music streaming services (Amazon have joined Sony in making theirs live, leaving Apple and Google behind), but the really interesting ideas are all stemming from the different ways that we share music and the situations in which we listen to it.

It all started last year when Spotify added in social elements to its service. We all had fun nosing at other people’s playlists and their most played tracks. We thought carefully about what we would share and who should share it with and made collaborative playlists with people we’ve never even met in real life (IRL.)

Then at the back end of 2010, Shazam followed up by announcing Spotify integration in its smart phone apps. If you never Shazam-ed, it’s a music recognition service which helps you find out what that song is you can hear when in a shop/Starbucks/pub. Last week, Shazam took another big step in increasing its social music service by adding Shazam Friends. It’s a tab on its smart phone app which is integrated with Facebook and allows you to see which songs your friends have tagged recently.

It’s the fact that Shazam Friends recognises the different ways we consume music in the 21st century that’s so interesting. It’s not just about picking a song to play, it’s being aware of the music that surrounds us all the time and taking an active interest rather than letting it wash over us. That’s where my new favourite app, Soundtracking, takes its lead. It’s a way of tracking music across your entire day and sharing it with your friends. In a similar way to foursquare, you have Soundtracking friends, but you can also automatically share your updates with Facebook/Twitter/foursquare. You have three options in the app – the song you’re playing on your iPhone/Touch, tag a song you can hear (like Shazam) or just update manually. When you use the app and stop and think about, we hear a lot of music every day, jogging our memories and playing with our emotions.

If you’re not interested in sharing your musical loves and hates with all and sundry, than maybe Moodagent is for you. Services like Last FM and Stereomood allow you to pick tunes based on your state of mind when streaming through your PC, but Moodagent goes one step further, scanning your library on your music playing device and grouping your tracks according to its index of songs. This Mashable article has the full details, but it shows the next level of music consumption, and the sophistication that listening to music on an internet-enabled device.

Does it mean the death of the classic iPod? Not just yet, but Soundtracking has made this iPod Classic devotee think long and hard about switching to an iPod Touch.

Related articles

• Shazam Interacts with Facebook Friends (musicbusinessheretic.wordpress.com)
• Amazon Cloud Player lets you play your music from anywhere (cnn.com)

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The Martini and Dolce & Gabbana partnership is an interesting one. One is an iconic, but slightly old-fashioned alcoholic drink, the other a high-end fashion house. Both are big Italian brands joining forces to launch new spirit, Martini Gold.

The partnership was launched at the end of last year with a short movie which resembles a perfume ad. Although this is what you would expect from a high end luxury brand, it is uncharted waters for Martini. The film, directed by Jonas Åkerlund, is set in Rome and celebrates the Italian lifestyle as well as Monica Bellucci’s heart stopping beauty.

It has generated a considerable amount of interest online, with many consumers sharing and commenting on the content.  To date the movie has received more than 111,000 views on YouTube and more than 1,000 ‘likes’ on the Martini Gold Facebook page. Consumers have also been visiting the Martini Gold YouTube channel to access additional content, such as behind the scenes clips and interviews with the cast and crew.

Martini is the perfect example of a well established brand being given a facelift through social media. This partnership has generated a great deal of online chatter for Martini, helping the brand reach a wider audience and target new demographics who are actively interested in the fashion industry, but may not be familiar with the Martini brand.

Having generated initial interest in the drink with this campaign, it’s absolutely vital that Martini continues to engage with fans of the product once the advertising has come to an end. Only this will ensure that people, who have bought Martini for the first time during the campaign, continue to buy and enjoy the product. Without continued engagement online, new fans of the brand may be left feeling as if they have been forgotten. It also helps if it tastes good, anyone tried it?

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By Kate Eglinton

Last summer whilst researching graduate positions in communications and public relations, I was drawn in by the social media buzz that has taken the PR industry by storm in recent years.  Social media seemed to be big business. With my curiosity piqued and a brand new Twitter profile, I decided to take the leap into online PR – and managed to secure myself an internship at immediate future, where I’ve been for the last few weeks.

3 key learnings from my stint at IF:

Social media is without a doubt, social.

Social media has widened our communication horizons by an immeasurable amount. It’s human nature to want to share and discuss with others and social media allows us do this – wherever, whenever, non-stop.  The popularity of social media platforms is evidence enough in itself – we love to communicate. With social media you can have fun, be inspired, get involved, learn… and all a super speedy rate. I think there is nothing to lose and everything to gain.

It is also diverse.

Each social media platform serves a plethora of purposes and is used differently by different people. We must be careful not to lump all platforms into one social media box just because they come under the same label. I use Twitter to learn from tweeting PR and social media professionals and to keep-up-date with the latest news. Others use it for chitchat and staying in touch, which I save for Facebook. There are no rules of how to use social media – it’s entirely up to you! This diversity extends to brands and businesses…

A career in social media is equally diverse

Working in social media is surprisingly vibrant. From being at IF, I’ve learnt that social media still requires the creativity and communication prowess that traditional PR and marketing demands – with an element of geek which I love. It’s exciting to be involved in such a fast developing and ever-changing arena of business. And I don’t want to get left behind.

To round off…

I think social media’s brilliant. It’s a fabulous new way of communicating – but it’s also a big change which can scare some people. It took me a while to take the plunge and even now I’m a little nervous about tweeting. However, the social media sphere isn’t going to disappear and I believe there is something in it for everyone, whether brand or individual

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This year, it seems Christmas is truly social. And for many brands social media marketing is definitely playing a big role

image courtesy of Creative Nerds

in the festive push to consumers. M&S and John Lewis are integrating TV with their social media efforts, whilst Argos is pushing out a Facebook wish list.  Even Angry Birds is jingling with their advent calendar downloads.

The next few days will see the final turbo charge of social activity – leaving brands dripping in new fans, followers and influencer relationships.

And after the turkey is but a memory, what exactly will happen to all this hard-won social engagement. How will companies capitalise on the nascent connections with consumers? How you can refresh the relationships, tap into the long term value, and maybe learn a thing or two to inform your 2011 initiatives. The first steps to spring-boarding from your festive success into next year are:

Intelligence

What data can you extract from your Christmas activity? Are there trends in purchase behaviour? What were the triggers that inspired sharing, friendship, interest? Look for the associated interests and the reasons people engaged with you during the festive season.

Filter

Distil your new communities. Who is an advocate, who is leading the pack and can your community be divided into segments or tribes? The aim is to pinpoint those consumers that have influence – the connections that will deliver lifetime value. Look for the people with whom you can connect and form relationships.

Nurturing

Don’t stop talking to your newly connected consumers – manage them as you would any community. This requires curation by the brand. Of course you need content, but you also need to start weaving stories, creating reasons to participate, and inspiring sharing amongst your followers, fans and advocates.

If your Christmas campaign was successful, you punched through the festive noise to extend your marketing reach. Now you need to think about the frequency and longevity of your activity. Done right your investment in Christmas this year could last all through 2011. Now that sounds like a great Christmas present.

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When Santa Claus comes to town, the rules are simple. You watch out, you don’t cry and you don’t pout.

I put to you that in 2009 the social media marketeers ignored every single one of these rules, pedalling Christmas campaigns that involved risks, made people cry and yes, made them pout. For this reason, I propose last year’s social media marketeers did not want Santa Claus to come to town.

The offending articles

Item One

In 2009 Essex couple Jon and Tracy Morter diced with fire when they attempted to topple Simon Cowell’s UK Christmas Number One monopoly.

The couple used Twitter and Facebook to build a groundswell around shunning X Factor winner Joe McElderry’s single, The Climb, for Rage Against the Machine’s 1992 release, Killing in the Name.

The result? More than one million fans joined the Facebook page and Killing in the Name reached the top of the download chart just in time for Christmas.

Item Two

US blogger Jill Kocher wasn’t worried about bringing tears to ours eyes when she launched a campaign to bring SEO to the charities that needed it most.

Kocher, SEO Manager at Groupon by day and blogger for WebPieRat by night, found local-level charities had little knowledge of SEO and optimisation.

Following her findings, she set out on a mission to provide back links to charities in featured posts in the first instance, followed by arming them with the skills to embed optimised terms into their sites in time for Christmas 2010.

Item Three

Fashionista definitely wanted you to pout. Last year the augmented reality tool was developed for fashion retail sites to help shoppers virtually try on their Christmas party outfits and share the pictures with friends via Facebook.

I think the evidence is clear, social media marketeers do not want Santa Claus to come to town.

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It’s that time of year again: lists, retrospectives, best ofs, highs and lows. Take twelve months of experience and package it up into a pithy blog post or a commemorative special issue. I am, frankly, powerless to resist. My list of the top ten albums of 2010 has been under construction for quite some time now.

Rather than bore you all with my tales of joy from this year (including Las Vegas and the Champions League final), I thought I would give an extended hat tip to a couple of my favourite blogs that have kept me entertained and informed in equal measure over the past twelve months. Digital Buzz Blog is pretty much always my first stop when I open up feedly of a morning. Written by the New Zealand based Aden Hepburn, it covers the wide world of digital activity with a deft and selective hand. Whilst I love Gizmodo and Engadget, the sheer volume of posts every day constantly leaves me feeling that I might have missed something. Digital Buzz Blog prefer to post two or three articles a day, but almost always provide something that is worthy of a tweet, a mention in a meeting or that provides a creative spark which leads to something new being concocted.

Fave articles from the past year:

Diesel Cam: Connecting Stores With Facebook

Diesel Facepark: The Analog Version of Facebook

YouTube Launches The “Life In A Day” Project

Chat Roulette: HIV Guerrilla Marketing

Heading up the category of ‘entertaining’ more than ‘informing’, I can’t get enough of Will Sturgeon’s The Media Blog. It’s a fairly UK-centric look at the increasingly ridiculous world of newspapers and their websites: the frenzy to get the latest stories, give people what they think they want and aid ailing sales. There’s a lot of laughing at the Daily Mail too, which is always nice to see. On a more serious note, Will’s articles also take in the hot PR topics of the moment, such as the muddied waters of relationships between PRs and journalists, and also how the position of the dailies is changing from being moral guardians and arbiters of taste into something much more reactionary (in both senses of the word).

Fave articles from 2010:

If you only go on one ‘trianing’ course this year…

Old alcohol bad, new alcohol good?

More evidence the Sun gets its headlines from Twitter

On a very personal note, I also love Nerd Boyfriend. Pictures of celebs looking cool ‘n’ nerdy, along with links where you can buy the clothes yourself. Nice.

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Recently, Econsultancy published a piece on ten great e-commerce product pages. Following our research into the social shopping explosion we wanted to find out exactly how ‘social’ some of these retailers are. All of which will be popular destinations for consumers this Christmas.

We’ve judged these ground-breaking online retailers on the following criteria:

• Do they provide on-site reviews (1 pt per method of review)
• Do they have links to off-site social media estates (1 pt per platform)
• Do they actively engage and interact with customers (1 pt per platform engaging on)
• Personalised site recommendations (4 pts)
• Innovative, quirky, value added social media offerings (1 pt per offering)
• Exclusive offers for members? (1 pt)
• Colourful and entertaining campaigns (1 pt per campaign)
• Blogs (1 pt)

We all know Amazon will be a big hit for consumers this Christmas and the customer review ratings and personalised recommendations on the site provide useful tools for purchasing decisions.  In terms of being truly ‘social’ though it’s the fashion retailer that takes  advantage of social media channels to gain fans, really involving and engaging with them.  Asos even allows fans to review items via its own YouTube videos and engage with each other via community pages.  We’ve seen a rise in popularity of collaborative online shopping through sites like Groupon, so is this the next big step for retailers in 2011?

It’s apparent from our research on social commerce, the articles and conversations we pick up on, that it’s an exciting time for retailers. Especially when it comes to social media.  Do you have any recommendations for great sites and product pages that are being smart with social media?  As ever, we’d like to hear your thoughts…

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