Twit Cleaner

Every once in a while it’s important to go through the accounts you’re following on Twitter and clear out the ones that don’t tweet much, or just simply aren’t interesting anymore. Firstly, this will improve your experience on Twitter as you’ll see more interesting tweets in your timeline.

Secondly as a brand it looks much better if you have a higher number of followers compared to the amount of people you’re following. At a glance it shows that you’re interesting and likely to be engaging with a large number of people as you have so many accounts following you.

Twit Cleaner creates a report that categorises the people you follow into different groups based on how interesting they are. With this information you can choose to unfollow those annoying spam bots and ditch people who only ever tweet the same boring links.

Twellow and Listorious

A few months ago Hollie wrote a great blog post explaining how you can use these two sites to find new people to follow. But did you know that you can submit your own account to both these sites? This makes you easy to find for users searching for keywords you’re associated with.

Listorious also has a feature where users can submit questions to you through Twitter. When you reply, your answers are posted to the site so that visitors can gain a better understanding of what you tweet about.

Submitting your account to both these sites won’t gain you loads of followers straight away, but it is worth doing as it increases the visibility of your profile and gives users more insight into what you do.

Who Follows Whom

Identifying influencers in your target market is crucial for a successful engagement campaign. A large part of this task involves researching blogs and websites, but it can be supported with analysis on Twitter as well.

Finding users with large followings is often a tentative sign that they’re fairly influential, but if you have the time it can be useful to see who these users follow, and if other influential users follow them. This kind of information can help you to understand who the most authoritative people on Twitter are in your industry.

Who Follows Whom pretty much does what it says on the tin. You simply enter a number of Twitter names into the app and it tells you how the different accounts are connected.

Snap Bird

Snap Bird shows where and when your tweets have been added to someone’s favourites, re-tweeted or when another user has mentioned you. As well as using it for your own tweets, you can look at other people’s tweets to see how they have communicated with each other in the past.

This kind of information can be really helpful when you’re trying to map where your tweets have been shared on Twitter. For instance if you want to see who else has shared your link after it was re-tweeted by a user with a large following, you can put their details into Snap Bird and it will produce a report for you. With this information you can work out how effective targeting certain users has been.

Tools like Radian 6 will produce this information for you in a lot more detail. But if you don’t have the budget to pay for their services or you simply want to see a quick overview then Snap Bird can be very useful.

What the Trend

What the Trend is an online community managed by HootSuite Media. The site tracks trending topics from around the world and provides useful information including when the trend first appeared, where it originated from and what it means.

For example, while I was writing this blog post, the site informed me that “Austin Rivers” was trending in New York because he’s an American college basketball player and it’s been announced that he will play for Duke University in the autumn this year.

What the Trend can help you avoid a Twitter faux pas such as mentioning inappropriate hashtags in tweets posted by your brand. The tool also helps you gauge how long a hashtag is likely to stay popular for, as you’re able to see how long people have been talking about it.

These are just some of the tools that we find most useful when we’re working on client campaigns. What do you like using the most?

The R&D team is the insight power house fueling everything from campaign implementation to the development of the agency.

If you enjoy deep diving into data, pouring over measurement platforms and generally ranting about social media AND can wax lyrical about the newest digital platform until the cows come home, then we are the team for you.

The ideal candidate will have worked for at least one year (including internships) either client or agency side. You will have experience in a social media/online PR/digital media role and be passionate about progressing your knowledge across the measurement and insight elements of digital campaigns.

You will…

• Have a good working knowledge of Excel/Powerpoint/Word
• Be able to use data effectively to support analysis
• Have an understanding of Facebook Insights/Google Analytics
• Be able to manage your own time effectively
• Have previously conducted competitor and/or benchmarking research
• Be able to add insight and value to monthly performance reporting
• Report to the Research & Development Manager

About C&M
C&M is a young, dynamic agency with a great sociable atmosphere. We’re based in Lewes, East Sussex – 10 minutes by train from Brighton. We work with mainstream brands such as TomTom and Hackett, plus a range of clients in the world of technology, travel and consumer services. To find out more about our work, visit the Case Studies page.

If you are interested please send your CV to Cindy

There’s stacks of good things happening in London town – take your pick.

On Wednesday 15th, I’ll be chairing a breakfast panel discussion at the DMA with a bunch of smart people. We’ll be asking the following question: does social media really need its own set of metrics or are good old fashioned frameworks the things we should still care for?

Having turned 40 last year and developed a like for cardigans (woollen, not skinny rib), you can hazard a guess to which side I lean on.

Shock of the old. Will we talk about acquisition, loyalty, share of voice and other old chestnuts? Or will the chatter be about new fangled engagement levels?

Come along and join in. It’d be great to see you there. You can also take the survey here.

(Image by New York Public Library on Flickr.)

(NB: not actually a pitcure of me. But nice cardy, huh?)

The value of a Like is determined by many variables. At the start of the year the social network announced the opening up of its advertising platform to support the News Feed. How does this affect you? Pages are now able to directly target their Fans with ‘featured’ content.

As an everyday user of Facebook this sends alarm bells ringing. Will I have to be more selective of what I chose to Like?! If I decide to Like something on a whim I may be stuck with receiving content I’m not entirely happy with. Also, what content will it replace?

I compiled a list of what I might have to consider…

This makes what I chose to Like on Facebook much, much more exclusive. In fact, it makes the action of clicking Like a more considered process. This is because I am only willing to participate in conversations, or receive content that I am entirely interested in.

Facebook has essentially created another barrier to entry when building a community. Not only do we have to make sure we are on-brand with tone of voice and message content, that we encourage comments. We also have to reply to questions. We have to post photos. We have to entertain, engage with advocates, share, create competitions and tag up photos.

We now have to keep the Page in a constant state of awesome to increase the chance that potential new Likes convert by clicking the thumbs up.

So what is the value of a Like? I don’t think anyone truly knows. We just have to keep working hard to make our communities the best they can be.

P.S. If you do want to know how Ad Age and Entrepreneur got their figures, it is rather interesting.

View the story “Stay Curious. Social PR Weekly: 03.01.12″ on Storify

The Power of Specificity

My favorite recording isn’t of the best song I ever heard, or have best vocal I ever heard, but it does have my favorite sax solo.

The point is — like most people — when I have a preference, it is usually for a very specific reason.

And yet, throughout my career one of toughest things I have had to do is to convince my clients to be more specific.

Many have a hard time understanding that “we answer on the first ring” is a more powerful statement than “world class service.”

They don’t believe that “50 dollars off” is a stronger motivator than “we’ll make your dreams come true.”

Many have thought that the bigger and more ambiguous the promise, the bigger the payoff.

It is usually the opposite.

Gravity and the Internet

Driving through Berkeley, it’s not unusual to see a beat-up old VW bus with a bumper sticker that says “Think Globally, Act Locally.”

Unfortunately, if there’s one thing we humans are not good at, it’s thinking globally. We have a tendency to think very locally.  I see it every July in San Francisco — people from New Jersey, dressed in t-shirts and shorts, freezing their asses off because they think it’s summer, like at home.

Alan Wolk calls it “NASCAR blindness.” It’s our inclination to think that things everywhere are like they are where we are.

Conversation with a Web Maniac

[Just read this one in full : )]

Why Can’t Marketers Talk Straight?

Spend time at a conference, read a trade publication, listen to a presentation and it soon becomes obvious that speaking plainly and clearly has become anathema to most marketing practitioners.

Instead, we have developed an appalling lexicon of contrived phrases and dreadful gibberish meant to confuse rather than elucidate.

Our most popular words have vague meanings and fuzzy definitions — branding, engagement, conversation…

It’s my belief that a sure sign of a deteriorating discipline is that the participants have agreed on a system of imprecise discourse to replace clear thoughts and exact meanings.

On the value of speaking plainly, Einstein once said, “It should be possible to describe the laws of physics to a barmaid.”

The Age of the Complicator, Part 4

We want to engage consumers. We want to have conversations with consumers. We want to have relationships with consumers. And in the process, we have forgotten the essential purpose of advertising — to persuade consumers.

Is Bill Gates Still Stunned?

As we have said many times, marketers always overestimate the appeal of new things and always underestimate the power of traditional consumer behavior.

Why We Need to Kill Them All

“We must create content that changes the world.”

How about creating content that sells some shit. Wanna change the world? Join the f***ing U.N.

I’m Tired of Strategists

Can you please send me some people who can do shit, not talk about it.

Da Vinci didn’t need a strategist. Neither did Newton. Or Einstein. Or Gershwin. Or Hitchcock. Or Riney, for that matter.

They just did brilliant things. They didn’t need people chattering at them about what they should do or how they should do it. They just did it.

I’m tired of business strategists.
And marketing strategists.
And advertising strategists.
And media strategists
And web strategists.
And social media strategists.
And editorial strategists.
And content strategists.
And copy strategists.

It’s a Wonderful World

These new humans want a direct relationship with their peanut butter maker and their muffler manufacturer. They want a relationship with the company that makes their socks and their chairs. And their pickles, and their half-and-half, and their mayonnaise, and their cookies, and their tires, and their chewing gum, and their toothbrush, and their umbrella, and their dishwasher, and their napkins, and their toaster, and their gasoline, and their horseradish, and their dental floss, and their paper towels, and their golf balls, and their shoes, and their pillows, and their pencils, and their deodorant, and their books, and their nail clippers, and their furniture polish, and their frozen chicken strips, and their lamps, and their potting soil, and their bathing suits, and their glasses, and their clocks, and their fungicide, and their dishes, and their cat food, and their sun block, and their cookie dough, and their motor oil, and their light bulbs, and their burglar alarm, and their ironing board, and their fire insurance, and their coffee filters, and their pillow cases, and their allergy pills, and their mouthwash, and their vacuum cleaner bags, and their shower curtains…

So you needn’t bother telling them that your product works better, or is cheaper, or looks nicer. That’s just a sign of failure. It’s just a sign that your relationship is failing.

These new humans live in a wonderful world. It’s a world in which their minds are free to evaluate the relationships they have with all these companies. They don’t have to worry about their jobs, or their children, or how they’re going to pay the mortgage.

They don’t need to wash their bath tubs, or have mammograms, or go to work, or apply for loans, or bail their kids out of juvenile hall, or fold the laundry, or take their parents to the doctor, or vacuum the carpet, or make dinner.

They have all the time in the world to develop relationships with brands. And then, when they’re finished building these relationships, they go on line to social media sites and have conversations about them.

The Crisis of Advertising, Part 5

There just isn’t enough value anymore in big, slow, expensive ad agencies. Smart, industrious clients can cobble together small groups to get the work done at lesser cost and with superior creativity. They just don’t know it yet.

The most important client-side marketing job currently does not exist: Someone to coordinate the activities of a variety of small, nimble marketing and advertising resource providers.

The idea that global agencies can provide global marketing solutions is an idiotic fraud that anyone with the intelligence of a gnat can see through. You can’t find a single agency to get done everything you need done in Houston, how the hell are they supposed to do it worldwide? That global agencies even exist is a testament to the laziness of global marketers.

The Crisis of Advertising, Part 5

Every agency is trying to convince clients that they can do it all. Instead, be an agency that does only one thing really well. Specialize in retail, or become expert in marketing to Mid-Westerners, or only work on luxury brands, or only do creative work. Find something you can be famous for.

View the story “Stay Curious. Social PR Weekly: 27.01.12 ” on Storify

Whilst, for brands like CBS, Google, Facebook and ITV, neuroscience is not especially new in market research, such techniques have been relatively confined to advertising. Neuromarketing has the potential to encompass a much broader marketing landscape, however. Especially interesting are the recent investigations that look at how consumers react and interact with messages in the online sphere.

Alarming pictures aside, I set about trying to understand the implications for online communication beyond advertising. What is the potential for current findings and future investigations to benefit brands in leveraging consumer responses for effective social engagement?

The backstory – why bother?

We’ve recently seen an influx of material written about the art (or science) of creating ‘customer love’. Evidently, if you’re a communications professional, much of your energy should be focused on fostering this valuable emotional connection between your brand(s) and customers. Understanding how this complex connection is created is no easy feat,  and is where Neuromarketing can come in handy.

American neuroscientist Read Montague used such techniques to shed some light on the age-old clash of the two soft drink giants – Pepsi and Coca-Cola.  His group of scientists had 67 people take part in the Pepsi vs Coke Challenge, a blind taste test of Coca-Cola and Pepsi. The brain scan results demonstrated that consumers’ preference for Coke over Pepsi has more to do with their experiences, memories and impressions of Coke than the actual taste of the drink. The behavioural effect (in this case personal preference over the two brands) was modulated by mood and emotion caused by the recollection of contextual information in the brain.

However, this example should not mean we eliminate performance from what we consider to make up the emotional connection between consumers and brands. Performance itself invokes emotional attachment – the obvious example being when performance evokes security and trust. If neuroscience can help brands understand why consumers make the associations and decisions they do it has obvious benefits.

Context is everything

How many times have you sat on a request, waiting for the exact right time to ask, and how many times have you failed to do that and scolded yourself for not waiting for a better moment? The task is much easier if you know the person you’re approaching and can gauge their reactions and expectations. Apply this to your brand communication and any science that has the potential to help you leverage various neurological profiles, or states-of-mind, will increase your effectiveness.

A study by NeuroFocus to help advertisers optimise their online advertising spend found consumer reactions to different web sites to be deeply linked to the expectations people bring to these web sites, and that these expectations in turn impact how people respond to brand messages on said sites. It measured three main emotional responses  - attention, emotional engagement and memory activation. The analysis provided some interesting, although, not entirely surprising, points:

·      People displayed a higher level of emotional engagement to advertisements on social media, over television adverts or corporate web sites

·      All three emotional responses – attention, emotional engagement and memory activation – were activated to high levels when people viewed their Facebook News Feed page

·      The Yahoo home page (representing a ‘light news and entertainment experience’) elicited higher levels of emotional engagement than the New York Times home page (a ‘hard news and commentary experience’) but less than the Facebook page (‘a social online experience’), and less memory activation than either

Such insight could be useful for identifying the most effective spaces and channels for brand communication, as well as considerations for how messages should be designed for maximum impact.

Mind blowing design

Eye-tracking technology has been used to monitor iPad owners’ reaction to and cognition of ads to provide some scientific insights into the iPad experience. The study by neuromarketing company Universal McCann Time, Inc. and EmSense defined ‘engagement’ by three elements – visual attention (how well the ad functions at grabbing and maintaining the viewer’s attention), accessibility (whether the ad offers easy entry points that pull in and engage users) and propulsion (the ability to actually get readers to move from the first page of an ad through the interactive elements). High emotion and low cognition proved the most preferable reading – meaning the ad produced positive emotion without prompting the user to think too much. Negative emotion and high cognition indicated the user was frustrated. In short: clean, simple ads worked better than those that over did it with text, interactive features and nonessential buttons. Having to think too much caused frustration, which in turn caused a lack of propulsion and a wasted opportunity on the brand’s part.

In another example, SEOMoz used eye-tracking systems to conduct an experiment  on Google searches. Heat maps showed people’s direct visual interaction with SERPs for a number of queries that produced some interesting insights into how visual elements on the page – maps, videos, images and titles -  pull in the user’s attention.

To maximise on consumer engagement, marketers need to balance multiple considerations when designing online ads, apps and creating messages.

Neuroscience then, can be useful in identifying the prescription of visual and interactive elements that would best engage the consumer.

There could potentially be an immense number of opportunities where neuroscience could be useful for brands and marketers. Of course, we don’t all have such significant marketing budgets as to be able to conduct this type of research. Imagining you did have such technology at the tip of your finger tips, how would you use it?

Ruder Finn’s Intent Index is a quarterly census of 500 people which – very simply – asks people ‘why do you go online?’.

Check the weighting – right side to left side.  How geared are you to helping people to learn, have fun or socialise (with one another)?

Here are the charts:

NB: legend – for the purpose of this study, impressions equals the number of people who view a post.

NB: legend – for the purpose of this study, reach equals the number of people who see a post (visibility).

Side note: one man’s reach is another’s impressions – don’t get lost in the labels, Allfacebook’s piece is a little bit garbled but if you stick to the top line conclusions you’ll follow the plot. Read the original post for more.

As I’ve said elsewhere, whatever you make of the above, it’s clear that over time Facebook is successfully Google-ising it’s interface so that certain types of content are harder to see and advertising becomes a more attractive route to some brands and organisations.

So, we all need to up our game. Engagement and creative needs to be better researched, more innovative, useful and entertaining. Otherwise it will sink. Every brand needs to have its finger on reach, extended reach, impressions, interactions and – most importantly – end of the funnel actions. These things need to be clearly tracked with a coherent method behind them. They need to guide the plan. (We have our own approach to this – most sensible social comms managers and agencies will too.)

Meantime, if you are sinking, lower impressions over time within the main news stream creates a greater case to focus resources on paid for content promotions (sponsored stories, etc).

But a word of warning on this point. Facebook is not Google. It’s a content and communications platform, not a library index that routes people to other parts of the web.

An ad-biased strategy on Facebook is flawed. Facebook needs content. People want content. More importantly they want to talk to one another, and our job is to figure out ways to help them do this – and put brands in amongst these interactions using the mechanics of the platform.

Ads can help this to happen, but as yet the formats available aren’t designed to insert brands into conversations – and my guess is that they will never be… too invasive. Smart brands win because they carry friend to friend interactions forward in organic and interesting ways …they gain love, adoration and action in the process.

View the story “Stay Curious. Social PR Weekly: 20.01.12 ” on Storify

In the last couple of weeks we have received (and devoured):

• Apple crumble from me
• Cupcakes from Amy
• Banana cake from Rowan
• Banana cake from Cindy (the battle of the banana cakes was particularly fierce as there was a split in the office between the Cindy’s chocolate chips and Rowan’s icing)

And plenty more, but there’s been so many I can’t remember them all!

So yes, this has indeed been the year of the pudding and if we continue to produce confection at this rate, our food engagement rate will likely continue to increase at a healthy percentage. However, our referred food reach (and subsequently, our total reach) is particularly low, I think this is due to a consumer reluctance to share said content. This I think (I say think because data volume is still low) is due to the targeted market being quite niche and also very precious of any material provided to them.

The data also shows that there are a series of variable factors that affect cake success and how long a cake will last, I call it (wait for it) CAKE RANK. The main variables that determine cake rank are:

1. Time of Posting Presenting the Cake
This varies not only day to day, but from hour to hour. For example, cakes are often best received on Wednesdays, Thursdays (and particularly) Fridays. Immediate interaction with the cake is also at its highest when the cake is distributed in the early hours of the afternoon (1:30pm – 3:30pm). Obviously as the length of time increases following the status announcement of a cake, the less likely it is to appear anymore….

2. Weight Quality of cake
Naturally some cakes perform better than others, which is generally down to the type of cake that has been created. For example rich multimed… well-decorated cakes are more likely to receive a higher volume of impressions and subsequently be liked more, as well as attracting more comments (most of which are usually of positive sentiment). Cakes that lack decoration but still contain valuable flavour will still perform well, but are likely to receive less comments, recommendations and shares. The flavour of the cake also has a large impact on how many impressions it receives – it is well known that fruit based cakes such as lemon, banana and apple puds are always well-received. Chocolate cake is always liked, but doesn’t necessarily have the same viral aspect as a more unique recipe.

However, although unique cakes often provide a better engagement rate, you shouldn’t get carried away in creating something …’too’ wacky in order to produce a viral effect. A typical example of cake viral content gone wrong is the Applewood Apple Crumble (Apple crumble with Applewood cheese grated on top.. duh). This was an early attempt at using cake as a progressive tool and the results weren’t quite as expected (sentiment was truly divided and confused). But hey, you have to take cake risks to receive cake rewards right? (Or cake upvotes).

(In previous campaigns fruit has been experimented with, but the engagement rate is particularly low and sentiment is generally negative.)

3. Affinity Whether People Actually Like Your Cake
Of course something that must be considered when creating conten… cake is your audience. For example, I know that in the office there are several people who are fussy eaters and would prefer a gluten-free recipe, so by creating cake specifically for that audience I am far more likely to receive interaction from them and because it’s personalised caketent – I am well on my way to securing a cake advocate.

Do beware, though, because people can ‘unsubscribe’ from your cake updates in their news feeds… in their minds… some people choose to opt out of cake notifications due to them being ‘uninterested’ or ‘dieting’. We’ve even had some producers risking bans following complaints of certain cupcakes being classed as ‘sexually explicit’, which is something CakeBook admins are now investigating.

What is Pinterest?

Pinterest is a visually stunning social platform that allows people to share theme-based images via virtual pin-boards. Users can create an unlimited number of pin boards, each designed to store a category of image that they’ve found particularly interesting or inspiring. There are 32 handy themes with which to categorise each image ranging from Humour and Pets to Art and Technology, a number that I suspect will grow and diversify as the site does the same.

Images, photographs and videos can then be sourced from anywhere across the web. With the simple installation of a ‘Pin It’ bookmarklet to your toolbar, you can easily pin anything you see online to one of your pre-defined pin boards. Pinterest allows you to ‘re-pin’ content from other people’s pin boards to your own, notifying them if you do so. You can also ‘Like’ and comment upon anything you see.

Pinterest is as simple as it is beautiful, and has huge potential to be incorporated into a social media strategy, because it offers something powerful that other social platforms simply cannot (yet).

What can Pinterest offer that Facebook and Twitter can’t?

Less chatter

They say a picture paints a thousand words, and Pinterest epitomises this. Both Twitter and Facebook are heavily text-based platforms that generally require a person to read lots of things. Pinterest, on the other hand, makes people visualise content which is conducive to less clutter, a cleaner user experience and arguably produces a more accurate reflection of what makes that person tick. Perfect for marketers.

An opportunity to (innocently) discover people’s innermost thoughts

Facebook is a great platform for finding out what people like – if you’re Facebook. The social behemoth has been involved in countless data collection issues and privacy violations since its inception making it feel a bit insidious. For marketers without a significant advertising budget or hours of time, it becomes very tricky to get insightful information about large groups of people in realistic time.

With Twitter you’d need to create endless columns and lists and trawl through vast amounts of archived tweets to get similar details. This is time-consuming and impractical.

Pinterest offers a refreshing, at-a-glance snapshot (quite literally) of a person’s life, conveniently categorised by the person. No surreptitious sleuthing or sly tricks are needed to gain valuable insights into a person or community – they are all right in front of your eyes. And yet despite this, the person doesn’t feel breached.

More anonymity (if you want it)

Twitter, and Facebook especially, are all about the person. Where do we live? Where do we work? When’s our birthday? Are we in a relationship?

If not forced, we are fervently encouraged (and sometimes rewarded) for disclosing data about ourselves to nearly 1 billion strangers, data we probably wouldn’t disclose to a person on the street.

Part of the appeal of Pinterest is its decision to vociferously make this process an optional extra. Pinterest does not require your real name, nor is it compulsory to fill in the ‘About’, ‘location’ or ‘website’ section in order to be an active member, simply just an email address with which to verify your account. Pinterest even gives the option to to remove your account from search engine results. Interestingly, the majority of people do choose to disclose a fair amount of personal information, presumably in an attempt to personalise their profile, making Pinterest a great platform for marketers but equally a safe haven to creatively express oneself anonymously if desired.

Better competition functionality – pin it to win it

Facebook and Twitter are great platforms for competitions. Whether you’re interested in running them or entering them, there are lots of ways you can do it. However there are none quite like Pinterest. For a start, Facebook forbids running competitions and giveaways on your Facebook page wall (you need a custom tab to do it legitimately). Twitter is realistically and often logistically restricted to ‘retweet-to-win’ competitions which can become repetitive and spammy and usually garner unengaged audiences. Other concepts are often unmanageable or ineffective.

Pinterest allows a user to set up collaborative pinboards that can be added to by anyone, and so the concept of ‘pin it to win it’ is born. As a brand, why not offer a fantastic prize to the person that submits the best image of your product being used or to the person that builds the pinboard that reflects your brand in the most visually stunning way? The scope for having users create content for you and disseminate it is limitless, especially if you include an element whereby users must be ‘Liked’ or ‘re-pinned’ a certain number of times to qualify.

All the functionality is taken care of by Pinterest, especially if users have the bookmarklet installed. It’s possible on Facebook but costs money and isn’t as visually appealing.

No advertising

Pinterest is still in open-beta mode which makes its estimated 200 million value very credible. What’s even more impressive is the fact that it has achieved this without earning any revenue from advertising streams.

A recent article in The Huffington Post emphasised the dangers of targeted Facebook advertising, with a man being ostracised and made homeless following his parents discovery of homosexual advertising on his profile page. Homophobic parents aside, advertising on social networking sites is generally considered to be annoying – an unwanted addition to an otherwise pure platform. Pinterest is currently a joy to use because is lacks this kind of third party intrusion; the user interface is completely unadulterated, which in itself is a unique experience amongst social networking platforms.

Twitter, while not as blatant as Facebook, is laced with adverts, from sponsored tweets and trends to featured tweeters.

It would be naive to assume that Pinterest will stay this way, not least because the concept of the site lends itself perfectly to an advertising model. Facebook pulls in over $2bn in advertising each year and, quite frankly, Pinterest would be foolish to ignore such riches.

Better synergy between third party devices such as tablets and mobile devices

If you’re an avid user of Facebook or Twitter, the chances are that you use devices other than a Mac or a PC to access them. This rings true for both marketers and the audience they target. These days, it seems a marketing professional’s arsenal isn’t complete without the likes of a tablet or smart phone swinging from a belt, and it’s a similar story for their audience. These are platforms that have notoriously struggled to integrate the likes of Facebook and Twitter intuitively into a user-friendly experience. It feels, understandably, like an afterthought. Pinterest feels as if it was designed with a myriad of different platforms in mind from the start. It looks and feels superb and is arguably easier to use with tablets and smart phones, owing to their photographic capabilities. With the number of social networking hits sourced from mobile and tablet devices on a relentless rise, Pinterest could find a market share easier to come by as a result of its transferrable design.

The integration of ‘prices’ into images

While I think I’ve made clear my propensity for a lack of advertising, Pinterest carries a quirky little feature that allows something similar. It is, however, a mutually beneficial method of advertising, one that adds an exciting and more importantly, unique element to a social networking experience. Again, it’s very simple: we are given the option to ‘price’ any of our pins. By adding a ‘£’ followed by a number of your choice, your image can be branded with this figure. This opens up a wealth of creative opportunities to both marketers and the general public. Companies can complement their shop-window-style pinboards with prices so consumers can see how much they cost. Members of the public can effectively set up their own business in a matter of minutes or perhaps just let everyone else know how much they paid for something. Either way, the ‘pricing’ concept isn’t obtrusive – users can choose to follow or unfollow whoever they like. If someone starts to get a bit over-zealous with their pricing, you’re one click away from a blocking all (or some) of their content.

A welcome release

In a recent blog post by Arik Hanson, many people have cited Pinterest as a place they go to get away from the saturated social sphere. People are sick of constant Facebook notifications infecting their days and tweet streams racing by at an unreadable rate. They just want somewhere where they can casually browse through things that interest them at their own pace. Pinterest is their Take A Break magazine, except it’s not a publication that just panders to morons, it’s a social network that’s tailored to the needs of all who might read it.

Pinterest, it appears, is a far less frenzied platform, one where people go to relax, unwind and generally chill out. The benefits to the average user are obvious, those to the marketer: less so. Consider though, that if Pinterest is a breeding ground for those seeking an escape from the norm, those with their guards down and their interests aroused, that marketers just might have an enormous, highly impressionable audience at their disposal.

Brands and agencies are already experimenting with Pinterest as a platform for engagement with their customers. Only this week Kate Spade New York launched its own Pinterest profile [link], and certainly the fashion industry seems like a natural home for such a visual service. We’ll be watching with interest to see what else pops up as the platform opens up beyond Beta mode, and will be looking for opportunities to integrate it into our own creative strategies in future.

Have you tried to integrate Pinterest into your social media strategy? I’d love to hear any ideas I might have missed on other ways to maximise its potential. Please leave a comment with any thoughts.

The brand introduced its Toluna Quick survey product as a bit of a disruptive force in the world of online surveys and community polls.

The tool enables brands (large and small), agencies and individuals to ask questions about anything, get fast answers from a global consumer marketplace and get easy to read (and share) results and graphs…and to not pay a fortune for the privilege.

Unlike other survey tools on the market, Toluna Quick has a few interesting advantages: it’s free; it’s highly integrated with Social Media (results and polls are very, very sharable); and it delivers the survey community (and their responses) as part of the package… Meaning anyone can get a survey up and running within minutes, and results are delivered within hours. (ie, No more painful survey recruitment!)

So, here’s what we did for the launch.

In a nutshell – we delivered a different style of partnership online PR program to embed the brand within key media content. In turn, we delivered the new product to all of its target audiences in a very effective way – lot’s of value for all, and definitely not a smile and dial ‘would you like to feature my new product’ pitch exercise.

Would love to hear what you make of it all.

You can check it out here. (Subscription only. Go buy one.)

Refreshingly, most of the opinions are grounded (unlike mine, Jetpacks did not feature). Here are the best snippets – essential ideas in bold.

Year Ahead in Creative

Brands that succeed will be those that are social from the start, not as an afterthought.

In an age where people are increasingly able to filter and block ad messages, there is a significant imperative for brands to shift from merely telling people that they make their lives better to actually making their lives better by providing value-added content, services and utilities that people will want to own, use and share. See Nike+…

@AlisonHoad, joint chief executive at Rainer Kelly Campbell Roalfe / Y&R

Year Ahead in Digital

Good things really do come in small packages. Small is fast. Small is easier to do. Small is easier to buy. Small gets done. Small can be tested quickly. Small can punch above well above its weight. Small is not insignificant. Small is beautifully simple, not simplistic. Small is innovation too. Small is less wasteful. Small is specific. In fact, small done well many times over can become ‘the big idea’.

‘critical non-essentials’ is a phrase used in business and sport that describes the small advantages in many areas that, when added together, give an organisation or team the edge over its competition. I predict a transition to this philosophy for brands and their agencies, as small but ambitious, innovative and convention-challenging ideas will define the ambition they set out to claim as their own.

@3onner, CEO at Razorfish.

Year Ahead in Data

…the use of data remains largely an ‘end of campaign’ thing, delivered by smart econometricians in a specialist department: ‘Did it work? How many people did we reach? Did people like it? Did it shift the dial? Did we sell something?’

It’s a sobering thought for any agency that Google, Facebook and Adobe already know more about some of our clients’ businesses and their audiences than we do. Why? Because they have the data.

…we will need to evolve our processes within our agencies so that we weave data, in all its many forms, into the way we work, from start to finish.

Ben Wood, Managing Director @iProspect

Take Aways

As stated elsewhere on this blog, brands need to facilitate communication on Social. This is why people use and value it. (We don’t use Faceborg to ‘talk to brands’.) This is the near end game, and it means we have to start thinking of ourselves as vehicles for talking, sharing, recommending, etc, and not the destination.

The creative ideas and assets that work best are consequently small, not big.

And they are data-driven and iterative.

See my post of last week for more. Coca Cola has got this down in a very, very strategic way. Now follow suit…

View the story “Stay Curious. Social PR Weekly: 13.01.12 ” on Storify

If you haven’t, then watch this:

Here’s some reactions from search agency people, via @NewMediaAge.

See this piece from SearchEngineLand for a view of what’s really going on under the covers.

And, so what…?

Well, it’s very, very neat. The near-end game for G+, no?

But Google SERPs will only be ‘socially’ relevant (and thus of more value to regular search results) if they are displaying your Google+ friend’s content (or other people’s Google+ content) in relation to your query.

If a ‘personal’ search only shows brand content, then what you have is x2 views of non-personal SERPs.

It only really gets interesting if lots of your friends / people are using Google + to post interesting content. (Think: people / content aligned with your own world view, locality, age, gender, etc, etc.)

Which currently they don’t.

But I can see why brands should care, a lot – for now, this is a radically different opportunity to appear in a parallel SERP view. And this view will be given increasing prominence on a SERP as Google tries to convince the world to jump on G+ (probably by pushing aside other content from other social networks in its results – see above from SearchEngineLand.)

Which, short term, will probably lead us to spammy, keyword-driven updates from brands (and their SEO agencies) in their G+ stream.

Which, short term, would likely have an adverse effect on anybody wanting to use this new SERP view and – further – to get on board with G+.

So does this really does align Google search more closely to pure play social communication / engagement work?

Yes and no.

Your thoughts?

Tools. Where would we be without them? Tools for checking Facebook EdgeRank, tools for finding the best influencers, tools for reporting on our successes – the tools that we use are the metaphorical loom to the warp and weft of our daily work. We’re so used to ‘having a tool for that’, that sometimes it comes as a shock when there isn’t.

We’ve kept a note of all the times we’ve thought ‘I wish there was a tool for that’ and have come up with a list of C&M’s top five dream social media tools that we really would love to have at our disposal, but which currently don’t exist.

We’d love to hear from any developers, magicians or time travellers who could help these ideas become a reality – particularly the last one…

1. The Facebook Freak Out Facial Recognition Tool

It would have been great to have had this one when we were at Bestival last year with TomTom. Picture an event, let’s say a launch event or a gig. It’s a prime engagement hotspot, where you have the opportunity to capture information about, and begin engaging with, an already enthused audience. You can signpost your event #hashtags and Facebook happenings, but imagine if there was a simpler way to get people involved with the brand.

It goes without saying that you’d be taking photos at your event, and the resulting album represents a database of faces already interested in your brand, waiting to be tagged. The trouble is, how do you turn faces into Facebook fans, with no way of contacting all the people in the photos?

A tool that could analyse your photos using facial recognition, reel off the social credentials of each person identified in them and provide amazing engagement suggestions and opportunities would be gold dust. Even better would be a hand held scanner that you could rub against the queue of people live at the event, to get an instant read on their details, allowing you to start engaging with them then and there. (This would also lead to more event intimacy – always a good thing.)

NB: We think this idea has legs. Radian 6 can find a person’s social profiles instantly, so if they could just get the facial recognition stuff down then we could be onto a winner.

Photo by familymwr on Flickr

2. The Twitter Trend-olator  

When it comes to clothes, everyone likes to be a trend spotter so they can claim “I wore that big floppy hat before Kate Moss did” or “I had Posh’s asymmetrical bob two seasons ago”. On Twitter, the same principle applies – getting in early on a popular hashtag makes you look super cool and cutting edge (oh yes it does) – especially if that trend has emerged from a popular person or source.

But sitting around on Twitter all day can be taxing (trust us) – and it’s usually hard to figure out who started a meme. This is when The Twitter Trend-olater steps in, alerting you to nascent trends before they’ve trended, so you can jump on the bandwagon straight away and claim all the credit. Sort of like a virtual Gok Wan for the Twittersphere.

Even better would be if you could tell the TT which celebs or brands you want to be down with, so that you could receive an alert when something they said was about to go viral, allowing you to respond before everyone else, like a Tweacher’s pet (geddit?), virtually stalking your idol and gaining you your own Twitterati status in the process.

Photo by icanteachyouhowtodoit on Flickr

3. The All Universal Audience Automated Question/Response Tool 

Everyone loves finding the solution to a problem that’s been bugging them. Geeks like us rely on sources like #Hollipedia, or the #LazyWeb to solve our quandaries, but the General Public’s first point of call will invariably be Google. Creating branded content that solves common problems can be a great way of connecting with people, if well made and optimised to appear in search results.

Usually, finding out what these common questions are takes a whole lot of grunt work. But in our imaginary world of four beers later, this one would instantly create issues that people never knew they had, establish a meme (Facebook, Twitter – don’t mind) that prompted soul searching searches, and used content algorithms to auto generate fifteen heavily optimised blog posts a minute directly from your WordPress blog.

With this virtual contraption, you could create amazing automated content and then let Google do the rest.  Time saved researching could be spent thinking up creative, inspiring campaigns. And having extra cups of tea. Which in turn will make you more creative and productive. Fact.

Photo by photosteve on Flickr

4. The Socially-Psychic Subtext Scrutiniser

Whatever people are talking about on Facebook or Twitter, it stands to reason that they are probably thinking about other things as well. This tool works on an advanced algorithm that screens people’s conversations to identify the subtext beneath their updates, thereby allowing us to serve ads and content that speaks to their innermost desires and daydreams.

Armed with this type of info on all your fans or followers, you could identify common trends and use this info to create powerful psychologically-loaded online marketing campaigns.

Photo by JoeLodge on Flickr

5. The Client KPI Marching Band

We all love to shout about amazing work we’ve done. It’s part of the daily routine here at C&M HQ to share results with colleagues and clients alike. But until now this has generally involved a report, a nicely written email, a phone call or a drunken speech at an award ceremony – all of which are great (depending on just how drunken the speech is…).

But wouldn’t it makes things more exciting to have a process for sharing results that really had a memorable impact?  Clients deserve more.

We’d like to commission an augmented reality robot marching band that could be dispatched anywhere in the world, direct to iPhone, to update a client as soon as a KPI has been reached or exceeded.

It may seem a lofty ambition, but we think it’s really important to sing about successes. So, if you have a spare robotic marching band gathering dust somewhere, and the ability to hook it up to a Google Analytics api, we’d love to hear from you.

Photo by zoenet on Flickr

Can you think of any other ideas for new tools – just as crucial as the above – that would enhance the daily work of a Social PR agency? Or perhaps you’re already working on one of these concepts? If so, drop us a line in the comments.

Watch them both from front to back. I promise it’s a great use of 20 minutes.

In short, they capture brilliantly the creative, process and R&D changes that are necessary to rewire a brand’s presence for the social age.

There are ten chapters in all, across the two videos.

I’ve written up what I feel are the essential learnings below – Coca Cola’s core content concepts, cases for change, evolution of communications, and methods for research and development:

Chapter #1: Liquid and Linked Content (0:22)

• Liquid creative assets and ideas are (as the label suggests) fluid and not fixed – and will evolve once in the marketplace. They are the endgame. (i.e. Viral, fixed, 30 second video spots that are viewed and shared are not the ultimate goal.)

• Linked content and communication is tightly linked to an external public agenda – which ought to form the basis for all creative briefs and planning.

Chapter #2: The Case For Change (01:20)

• The volume of consumer generated stories now far outnumber the volume of stories generated by The Coca Cola Company. And the majority of these stories are not prompted by the brand (and will never be).

• New social technologies provide a wealth of opportunity for different levels of engagement – making brand communications more useful, valuable, fun, etc (think: creative communications as a service, not a message). Technologists should thus become part and parcel of every progressive marketing team.

Chapter #3: The Evolution of Storytelling (02:46)

• Beyond the static video spot, we need to create a spread of different kinds of stories and communications:
  • Serial stories
  • Multi-Faceted Stories
  • Spreadable Stories
  • Immersion and Discovery Stories
  • Engagement Through Stories

• NB #1: I’d like some more detail on these ideas please Coca Cola! This is the guts of the new. Watch this space – I’ll post on these ideas soon.

• NB #2: Minor gripe. Not so keen on the idea of ‘stories’ being the focus – per point above, most brand content will not be ‘told’ by the brand – and this is the endgame …low friction, minimal direct involvement, lots of activity, lots of scale, highly cost effective. ‘Stories’ doesn’t sit well within this.

Chapter #8: Researching Liquid Content (04:33)

• Don’t bake (or freeze, whatever) the creative idea prior to launch – the goal is fluidity (again, 30 second virals are all good, but a simple ‘share’ doesn’t exploit the full potential of social).

• Ideas should be drawn from consumer research and analysis – data is the ‘soil’ from which creative should grow.

• Avoid qualitative testing – use quantitative methods (there are enough sources available!).

• Don’t move on too early. If the creative is right, the program should evolve, providing opportunities to further engage, tweak and adapt. Get out of serial campaign mode. Focus on the creation of ideas that are built for this journey.

• Hence, think liquidity.

Key Ideas as ScreenGrabs (Download / Cut Out and Keeps)

Coca Cola Content Research

Coca Cola Content Development

Coca Cola Dynamic Storytelling

View the story “Stay Curious. Social PR Weekly: 06.01.12 ” on Storify