Despite the official closing party on Thursday night, attendees were wide awake for Like Minds’ ‘Trust and Social Influence’ event at 8:30am. It generated the most conversation of any event all day, as the volume graph in the infographic shows.

Like Minds also got people talking with ‘The Future of Being Social’ at 3pm, which tackled some of the broader issues around what it means to be social, and what’s next in the field of social evolution.

Other highlights include ‘The Story’, which was a day long workshop and discussion all about the joy of telling stories, whether in games, books, movies or at the local pub.

We’ve had a great time at Social Media Week London. Attending the talks, reading the tweets and understanding what got people talking has been lots of fun. Check out the infographic for day five below.

See you next year, folks!

A flurry of tweets revealed some more interesting discussions:

 ”Google+ is much more visual than Facebook or Twitter – if you don’t post an image your post will be lost #smwldnDoco #SMWLDN #smwGoogle”
- @kerryjeanliste

“80% of people on Google+ interact with it on a weekly basis, 60% on a daily basis according to Google at #smwldn”
- @DannyWhatmough)

“Consensus from a room of SM community managers “we have a google plus page but….just in case” #smwldn” 
- @RoseMcGrory

Despite all the related tweets, it’s slightly surprising that ‘Google’ didn’t enter into our top word list. The conversation, however, highlights some of the conflicting opinions that persist around the platform.

Global sponsor Nokia remained at the forefront of conversation, as did the terms reflecting the popularity of this year’s livestreaming and the very ‘social’ nature of the week. While the conversation may be about what’s online, the action this week is very much offline.

• Has Twitter redefined the global news cycle? Citizen journalism is on the rise, and Gigaom offers an interesting look at how social media has impacted news reporting. Whitney Houston’s death, for example, was all over Twitter around an hour before any mainstream news outlets got hold of the story.
• The Premier League plans to almost double the size of its communications team as part of a major push to develop a “clearer voice” across social media, creating new Facebook and Twitter accounts as well as a revamp of organisation’s website being part of a multi-million pound strategy.
• Econsultancy took an in-depth look at how the online bank first direct has implemented a great customer service strategy using Twitter.
• Social media marketers could be faced with some issues for targeted ads after an analysis of the online universe shows the actual number of users on Twitter, Facebook etc could be as small as one-third of the reported total, as many accounts are empty, fake or contain no profile information.
• Tic Tac has launched a fresh new marketing campaign called Shake It Up, which is centred on its new mobile app. Check out this video for a good look at what’s on offer.

Can’t see this video? Click here to view.

• Apparently the differences between men and women can even be extended to your social media preference. Slightly spurious? Maybe, but Tech Crunch suggests that 97% of Pinterest’s Facebook fans are women, while two-thirds of Google+ users are guys (read: male employees of Google).
• Smart Insights offered an insightful 12-step “how to” guide on online marketing via Pinterest.
• Continuing the Pinterest theme, Metrica’s own Alison Jarrett explained that the popular social media site sees clusters of users in locations as specific as the Midwest US, while Foursquare has taken South East Asia by storm leaving UK users in their dust. As Phil Spencer and Kirsty Allsop would say, it’s all about location, location, location.
• Made Up Stats wrote an interesting piece on the ownership of Twitter content, explaining that a bit of common courtesy and acknowledgement goes a long way.
• Animal charity PETA really miss the mark with their new “My Boyfriend Went Vegan” video campaign, suggesting that going vegan gives you more, ahem, oomph, in the sack. In reality the video shows girls wearing neckbraces and eye-patches, which offers a wildly different image than what the charity was aiming for:

Can’t see this video? Click here to view.

•  A really clever person has made this amazing interactive model showing the ‘scale of the universe’ .

PRMoment.com’s ‘Good and Bad PR’ awards

Good PR

• The Greatest Movie and TV Franchise ever made, The Muppets, is back (as if you hadn’t noticed…) and their PR team wins Rich Leigh’s Good PR award. As well as parodying Twilight posters and announcing the sultry Miss Piggy as the new face of make-up brand Mac, the team has also created Muppet cupcakes. These beauties were sent out to celebs and high-profile Tweeters, including Stephen Fry. I’d feel bad eating one of these, they look amazing!

Bad PR

• PR Moment suggests that the recent Liverpool FC/Luis Suarez farce is this week’s Bad PR, after the Liverpool player sent football pundits and fans alike into a frenzy of analysis over the handshake that never was, and probably had Liverpool’s comms team sat head in hands at the thought of the ensuing PR battle.

Pinterest: USA vs UK

With some diverse events – from food photography to Social Business, and including trends in mobile and teenagers’ use of Social Media – the online chatter remained high on Wednesday but, according to our analysis of key words, largely unchanged. With references to Nokia, live streaming and business remaining in the top 15 words, the only notable addition on Wednesday was “Facebook”- although these references didn’t appear to follow a consistent theme.

One interesting trend was the move towards exploring the wider cultural impacts of social media:

“Let’s hope social can help us to solve some of the global problems we face collaboratively #likeminds #smwldn”
-@waynegibbins

But the debate wasn’t without scepticism:

“RT @lesanto: ES “A well aimed tweet can change the world” #likeminds #smwldn <do u have examples? i have serious doubts about it”
- @ggheorghiu

It will be interesting to see which examples are identified – and whether these are able to take the edge off this stat:

“Made in Chelsea was Channel 4′s most tweeted about programme of 2011. Lord. #smwldn”
- @sesp

January’s charity benchmarking report is now hot off the press and gives us the first inklings of what 2012 has in store. Welfare reform and increasing hardship faced by UK households were two hot topics which particularly increased volumes of UNICEF and Citizens Advice Bureau mainstream coverage.

Lord Ashdown’s (President of the United Nation’s Children’s Agency) refusal to support a planned benefit cap by the government featured strongly in UNICEF mainstream coverage while Selena Gomez’s performance at her second annual UNICEF concert really set the social media world aflutter. I think it probably helped that the ‘Biebs’ was there as well supporting his lady. How sweet!

A continuing theme throughout charity coverage, and a strategy which I think is used very well, is the use of celebrities to generate coverage as well as to increase awareness and ‘talkability’.

PETA jumps on this bandwagon very effectively and is well known for using ‘naked’ celebrities to increase awareness of its cause. It’s the old adage that ‘sex sells’ and it certainly works for them in the social media sphere. PETA rank number two on the social media league table with close to 46,000 mentions (last month they were ranked third). Twitter users were quick to share that Olivia Munn will be the latest celebrity to post nude and that Pamela Anderson is planning to auction off her car to raise money.

I’m keen to see what else will set the social media world afire this year and already looking forward to February’s report. I’m hoping it will be full of hearts, cupids and of course chocolate! If you want to find out more about the Charity Barometer Reports drop us a line at govandngo@metrica.net

January’s top of the pops

Mainstream media – UNICEF (2,661 articles), Age UK (2,475 articles), Citizen’s Advice (2,085 articles)

Social media – UNICEF (54,291 mentions), PETA (45,754 mentions), Greenpeace (33,643 mentions).

Despite this slump, Nokia has remained front of mind and is still present in the top words list; however, we have also been interested to see that a large proportion of the conversation is dominated by sharing whereabouts rather than sharing golden nuggets of information.

We’ve pulled out some of these gems for your interest on our daily infographic below.

The addictive image-cum-idea sharing site has indeed infested my homeland. According to a recent article from TechWatch, Pinterest has saturated the Midwest, and has yet to spread itself quite as thickly anywhere else. Why is this? What is it about the site that ardently appeals to the young ladies of the wide open plains? No one has figured it out yet, as far as I’ve read… but that’s not what I find intriguing. The concentration of Pinterest users in the Midwest is a testament to the idea that social media traction is largely dependent on location. Different regions stick to different kinds of social media.

Take Foursquare. According to the 2011 Ignite Social Media report, the location-based social media app stuck with Indonesians, Singaporeans and Malaysians like white on rice. In the UK, however, it was barely a tenth as popular. “But that’s just East versus West”, you might argue. Surprisingly, however, Foursquare’s popularity in Japan was closer to the UK than it was to Singapore.

Of course, there are exceptions. Facebook and YouTube have traction everywhere, great (ahem) firewalls permitting…

In addition to location and culture, trust is a major factor set to significantly shape future social media trends.
Another recent (and fascinating) article from TechCrunch gave some insight into where personal technologies have room to grow, and pointed out that even the most useful Siri can’t tell you the best place to take your clothes when the washer breaks. That’s because even though Siri is ‘everywhere’, Siri is not here.

An increasing number of media minds are subscribing to this notion of hyper-localisation – that ultimately, infinite knowledge can never win over local knowledge. This is because the intrinsic value of knowledge is trust, and trust is strongest when it’s right outside your front door. The knowledge itself doesn’t need to come from your aunt or your college roommate, but more than likely it’ll need to be endorsed by them. Jon Batelle summed it up nicely in his post on the future of search engines: “the future of search isn’t search; it’s a conversation with someone we trust”.

Globalisation is all well and good, but at the end of the day, the network theory makes the most sense. Globalisation has not produced a flatter world – it’s produced a complex set of networks built on varying degrees of trust in relationships. We can access any network we want, but we don’t afford all of them the same level of affinity.

So where does social media marketing come into this? Like everything else, these local networks with their local features and local characteristics are open. They’re accessible. They just require a little adaption. Alexandra Tursi from KSV wrote about how these “narrowed communication channels” provide a more intimate, direct and personal approach to marketing. Tursi also linked to a fabulous report from SocialBakers whose research illustrated how local Facebook pages commanded more engagement than global ones.

Localised social media strategy requires a little more legwork – a fusion of marketing, media theory and social anthropology.
For example:

• Who are the people you’re (really) trying to target?
• Where do they live?
• What do they see when they wake up in the mornings?
• What do they eat for breakfast?
• And most importantly, what makes it different than breakfast bowls elsewhere… and why?

This week’s top PR and social media picks:

• Gorkana met Charlie Parrish, editor of Askmen.com, who discussed bringing a British voice to the site, the mutual relationship between journos and PRs and why Twitter is his primary source of news. 
• Soon after announcing plans for a $5billion IPO, The Financial Times reported that Facebook is about to begin showing advertisements to users of mobile devices.
• Forbes ran an article explaining why Google must buy Twitter if they are to reverse their social media fortunes
• The Drum  reported on a study from Chicago University which suggested that Twitter may be more addictive than alcohol & cigarettes
• According to The Huffington Post, Superbowl XLVI saw a peak of 12,223 tweets per second towards the end of the game.
• Staying on the Superbowl theme, The Wall Street Journal has released this YouTube video discussing the Social Media reaction to the Superbowl advertising.

Video not working? Click here to view.

• The Guardian reports that BBC journalists have been instructed not to break news over Twitter before they tell their newsroom colleagues. 
• ZDNet published the results of a study of advertising agencies which showed that companies are still choosing Facebook above all other social networks for marketing campaigns. 
• Twitter went into overdrive following a sighting of Kanye West in Shoreditch on Thursday afternoon. The rapper was launching his new video but – as reported by The Sun today – he was a no show on the night
• Finally this week, Pinterest continued to be the darling of the social media sphere as CNN featured an article on why Pinterest is 2012′s hottest website

Infographic of the week: Facebook pages in the U.K

This week’s top PR and social media picks:

• Gorkana hosted a breakfast briefing with the new editorial team at FHM. Deputy editor Dan Jude reveals what the future holds for the reinvented mens’ magazine below.

Can’t see the video? Click here

• Metrica director Kristin Wadge spoke at the PRmoment.com conference, ‘How Should Brands Prepare for a Social Media Crisis? Follow the conversation with the #prsocialcrisis Twitter hashtag.
• MPs and Lords were advised that they could bar British users from reading tweets that break future celebrity super-injunctions.
• A new study revealed that 49% of British children would feel ‘sad’ without an internet connection.

Quote of the week:
“People say FHM is a lad’s mag but we haven’t shared a nipple in 4 years!”
- FHM Editor Joe Barnes

• How Twitter gave former bad boy Joey Barton a PR makeover.
• SEO heads – avoid ‘over optimization’ of anchor text.
• Google+ reached 100 million users.
• Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted a picture of his desk, in the wake of the company’s IPO.

• Twitter’s advertising revenue is predicted to triple by 2014 to reach $540 million.
• Journalist Brian Whelan reminded us once again that we’re not as anonymous online as we think we are. Don’t be that guy.
• Channel 4′s FactCheck blog answered the question, would there be more tube delays under Ken or Boris?

• Sainsbury’s renames tiger bread following social media response to Lily’s letter.
• The earliest copy of the Mona Lisa has been found in Madrid.
• How social media will steal the show at this Sunday’s Super Bowl XLVI.

Infographic of the week: Is Pinterest the next social commerce game changer?

On 18th January 2012, 30 million US citizens saw Mozilla’s blackout Firefox start-up page; 1.8 million visited its SOPA information page, and 360,000 people emailed congress about the issue. Other internet giants participating in the anti-SOPA camapign boast similarly impressive figures: 13 million people viewed Google’s anti-SOPA page, resulting in 7 million petition signatures; whilst Twitter saw 2.4 million SOPA-related tweets in 16 hours (figures from The Huffington Post). Visual.ly has offered a great infographic mapping social media influence on this issue.

Through tracking the issue on Metrica Radar, I’ve found that high proportions of content produced were actually links and workarounds for the sites that went ‘dark’ on the 18th Jan. Even when disregarding these types of post, The White House campaign’s generation of 103,758 petition signatures pales in comparison, displaying the huge force and influence of the social media-led wing of the assault on SOPA/PIPA.

What was it about the anti-SOPA/PIPA campaign that made it so successful, and what lessons about conducting a social media campaign can be drawn from it?

The first considerable hurdle for the campaign was getting people to understand what the rather esoteric-sounding SOPA and PIPA acronyms actually meant. Secondly, to convey why they would be so detrimental to the internet if passed.

These are just a couple of examples of the way the anti-SOPA/PIPA message was relayed in succinct and punchy formats – attention-grabbing and easy to share.

Simply raising awareness of SOPA and PIPA, however, wasn’t the only factor of success; the campaign also invited people to react – to do something to stop the bills. The aforementioned figures from Mozilla and Google show that this call to action was answered on a massive scale (Business2Community).

The third deciding factor of the success of the anti-SOPA/PIPA campaign was the sheer capacity that social media and the internet have to reach a wide audience. As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, it’s hard to have missed what’s been happening with SOPA/PIPA, which isn’t surprising when you consider that; 85% of us (by which I mean UK adults) use Google, 26% spend 6-10 hours a week on the internet – 4% more than 40 hours a week, and 56% of us have a Facebook account (statistics from Metrica’s UKPulse).

Internet and social media usage have woven their way into the fabric of our lives so completely that it’s hard to imagine a society without them. It’s for this reason that tackling the proposed SOPA and PIPA legislation through this medium was successful when compared to the first ‘blackout’ in 1996, where internet users protested against Clinton’s internet ‘indecency’ bill. So argues The Huffington Post’s Patrick Ruffini, who comments that social media has become ubiquitous to the point that it will be impossible to win political campaigns without a comprehensive social media strategy in the future.

Considering the often disastrous attempts at social media engagement that our current politicians have committed (The Telegraph lists some of them in its ‘Top 10 Twitter faux pas’ article), this could be a way off, certainly in the UK. However, the anti-SOPA/PIPA campaign teaches us important lessons that can be put into practice with social media campaigns now;

• Put your information out there and let your online communities share it
• Include a ‘call to action’ in your campaign (i.e. as the anti-SOPA/PIPA campaign asked supporters to petition congress)
• Don’t underestimate the influence of the internet and social media – its use is established and pervasive in society. The notion of the public making their opinions heard and collectively affecting change is a powerful, and increasingly important aspect of social media strategy.