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Insights 12 – what needs to be on your digital agenda in 2012? Nine of 10 – Social TV

January 26th, 2012

Long gone are the days that tv or radio shows were simply for consumption. Calls to text, email or write to us have been full of in-broadcast calls to actions for several years and this doesn’t just stop at TV. Radio, has been a great exponent of the interactive broadcast.

At the other end of the scale, we have audiences populating social media channels talking about what it is that they just watched, or, in the case of the Apprentice – giving the “characters” a real bashing on Twitter as they play out on our screens.

And, floating around somewhere beyond social media TV we have transmedia storytelling – a multi-screen or multi-platform way to tell and interact with the same television story – extending the programme’s reach and almost turning consumption almost into experiential.

In 2009, we saw Obama’s inauguration all being streamed live through Facebook, in 2010 The Jonas Brothers broadcast interactive, live streaming gigs and interviews through Facebook and last year, the Black Eyed Peas broadcast a Google Plus Hangout via a laptop at the back of their stage. So we are already some way on with social tv, but not in any consistent way which audiences are now expecting.

I think his year we will see much more of events like Channel 4′s How to save £100bn event – where tweets and comments from external networks were filtered in, in real-time to the show presenter and became the topic for debate. The content also provided additional visual stimulus which again, formed the basis for discussion in the show.

Also expect to see more play-along activity, such as that already being run with The Million Pound Drop. Viewers can play along with the questions on tv, on their computers, interact with a live-show twitter account, appear on the show themselves and can follow the stories of the contestants and behind-the-scenes material is broadcast through Facebook to maintain dialogue between shows.

And, with Celebrity Big Brother experimenting allowing viewers to pay for votes with Facebook Credits, we are going to see a much more interactive television experience in 2012.

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Insights 12 – what needs to be on your digital agenda in 2012? Eight of 10 – Social Websites

January 24th, 2012

Websites as we have come to know them are dead. In 2012, the brand whose sole social media/website “integration” consists of a share this page, Facebook or Twitter icon will fast become a thing of the past.

There are now so many social networks and so many conversations taking place away from conventional websites, that their original purpose has evolved to the point where many have become redundant. What were brochureware websites are now becoming interactive conversations on social channels about what the product is, how it works, what is good or bad about it.

With Google assigning more authority and visibility to social channels, more and more real-time, opinion-forming content is appearing within search results – influencing the next-click decision (or even purchasing decision) before people have even arrived at your previously visible brand site.

As such, it will be crucial for websites that are in development this year to understand how they can better integrate social content into their websites – whether that be brand mentions sitting alongside brochureware pages, user-generated reviews or images sitting alongside product or simply a list of bookmarks to social channels where product is being mentioned – all will help to ensure that rather than arrive, then leave your site to find opinion-influencing social content, customers will be able to make a balanced purchasing decision on your site.

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Insights 12 – what needs to be on your digital agenda in 2012? Seven of 10 – Social CRM

January 23rd, 2012

If social media has anything going for it, it is metrics. Whether you are tracking awareness, driving traffic or looking at influencers, the number of metrics available to marketers is immense. One of the biggest problems though, is identifying which metrics meet which objective.

Criticisms of ROI-aside, it’s fair to say that whilst there has been some standardisation of social media metrics in the last 18 months, 2012 will take things a whole league further by integrating social media metrics into conventional CRM (customer relationship management) systems thereby closing a significant loop, or missing piece of the social media ROI jigsaw.

Whilst referral traffic from social networks provides some evidence of the influence of social networking channel interactions on purchasing decisions, we will begin to see this year, the ability to integrate these brand interactions with actual purchaser behaviour which will present untold conversion modelling and customer journey insights. Whilst cookies are great (within the allowance of the European Privacy Directive) , the one thing they do not show is the influence that social interactions have.

The number of times a customer tweets us, likes a status, checks-in or leaves a comment or brand/product mention will soon be able to sit alongside their purchasing habits so we can begin to see exactly how frequently we need to interact, the nature of the social interactions they interact with and the kinds of topics they are interested in are all clues as to what it takes to get them to the page and convert into a sale.

Add in the power of dynamic personalisation and in 2012, I think we will see the introduction of some really, really smart technology.

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Insights 12 – what needs to be on your digital agenda in 2012? Six of 10 – Social Commerce

January 23rd, 2012

Social commerce has been on the rise for well over 12 months, and was actually a topic for my presentation at last year’s Insight’s conference. At that time, it was fair to say that the web was awash, with Facebook shops becoming commonplace. With it came the debate about whether or not Facebook users were ready yet or even at all comfortable with their favourite Pages becoming direct sales channels.

The ASOS experiment which made up so many of the headlines has gone quiet and ASOS have (not surprisingly) kept the results of their shop close to their chests – but are Facebook shops ALL social commerce has to offer?

As we have already seen in other videos, the increasing integration of our Facebook data – “the opening of the social graph” into applications, mobiles, the websites we use, as well as now ubiquitous checkins means that at every turn, we are AUTOMATICALLY able to see what our friends are doing, where they are, what they have watched, what they have bought or quite simply, what track they have just listened to.

i.e. things that WE may also want to do or buy.

Now whilst this is nothing new to anyone involved in word of mouth marketing, the big difference is that all of these actions, pre-2012 required a conscious decisions to post to our networks. As such, many of the actions which may have influenced a friend to rent the same film, buy the track their friend is listening to, or be the first to buy the dress that 2 of their friends were looking at on Site X were missing.

2012 will be a much larger and commercially-focussed one for the understanding of what social commerce actually is – the influencing of purchasing decisions through the integration of social data (profile and friends).

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Insights 12 – what needs to be on your digital agenda in 2012? Five of 10 – Platform Management

January 19th, 2012

The management of an ever growing number of social media channels has been a challenge for social media practitioners for years. As more and more clients come on board, each with their own time allocation, the number of channels increases as does the number of people required to manage them – but as we all know “technology scales, people don’t”.

In 2012, this will become much less of a cliche and more of a reality as brands see more and more interactions in social channel requiring more and more content to be published. Done properly, more and more engagement is generated, requiring more time for interactions. As a result, more fresh content is needed to be curated, located, edited, approved and published again. All of this can quickly slow even a two-person community management team right down and affect engagement levels.

Adding more people to the team doesn’t necessarily solve the problem either. There will be different writing capabilities, understanding of the content plan and team availability – all restricting the free flow of content, sometimes even its quality. We’ve all read about the case of the brand who has given the role of channel management to the junior in the office with most time on their hands…Habitat anyone?

To coin a new phrase “people are people, skills vary.”

Platform management dominates service provision in 2012
If 2010/11 was the year that social media monitoring became a staple part of your communications strategy, 2012 will be the year that belongs to social media management platforms even though systems of one form or another have been around for years.

The ability to a) manage many more, remote individuals (all of whom may have valuable contributions to make to your social media management channels), b) specify different publishing and moderation rights and c) schedule content, make the content creation and posting effort a much more effective, team effort – without losing ANY of the top-line control that the true social media specialist requires in order to manage multiple channels.

Likewise, email-driven workflows ensure that interactions of the slightest nature which require moderation or attention can be directed to the right individual – backed-up by smart pre and post-moderation.  Add in reasonably sophisticated analytics and you have take a huge step to solving the scaling and skilling problem so often associated with social media channel management.

Platforms = Control = Accountability = Assurance
Nervous or inexperienced brands need assurance  to see that if you are being their brand guardian that the proper systems are in place to manage their reputation – if you are going to be serious about social in 2012, a management platform is a MUST.

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Insights 12 – what needs to be on your digital agenda in 2012? Four of 10 – Definition of Influence

January 18th, 2012

2011 was the year that Influence, its definition methodology and benefit all came on to the radar. Pretenders like Klout, PeerIndex and Kred all entered on the to the scene with a bang and began to make life a whole lot easier for “people” to identify those movers and shakers who could, with the right approach, make a splash about your product or brand.

However, what many of these systems do is not make clear, nay avoid the main issue around influence – and that is context. Scores are great (Google’s Page Rank is a great generic indicator of a site’s relevance the search terms you are looking for) but on what basis is an individual in an area that I am trying to get my client to talk?

Klout most certainly is attempting to define this context (i.e. topics) based on the content we produce, making suggestions about the kinds of things we talk about – but this, as with all the other methodologies have to be based on a rational mix of frequency and time.

I actually think that this is one of the main reasons why Klout has suffered such criticism. Not because its methodology is flawed or any better than anyone else’s, but because it has barely had a full year to “get to know” someone’s content. Likewise, the challenge is to make sure that it can gather enough information abotu the changing topic tastes of an individual at the rate that they change them.

The year ahead

In 2012, both our understanding and experiences of these tools will mature as we make more sense of the definition of influence and pretty much spend more time WORKING with the tools and the influencers they highlight. Outreach mistakes will continue to happen as lazy PR’s think that the score is the key to the door and end up making an irrelevant approach to an unrelated influencers, so do NOT rely solely on score alone.

If Google’s most recent, fundamental changes to the way that they define search results has taught us anything, it is that influence is WAY more social and personal.

The score is a back-up – a tick-box and should be considered only in the context of a whole host of other content and channel-related metrics. So, understand influence before you write your next influencer email and your approach will change significantly – and I’d bet much for the better too.

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Insight 12: What’s on your digital agenda in 2012? Three of 10 – Dynamic Personalisation

January 17th, 2012

As marketers and communicators, we’ve long known that the more we know about people, the better our chances of success. The right message delivered at the right time to the right person stands a much greater chance of generating a reaction than something irrelevant. To coin a more recent social medial cliche, we are talking about context.

As media become increasingly digital and therefore accountable, there are plethora of ways to understand and identify patterns of habits through activity (and a lack of activity) around certain contant. However, in this increasingly social world, these are number, faceless statistics. At Brazen, we call these HARD metrics, things which are simply numerical in value which contain little indication of sentiment or emotion.

In walks Facebook and its social graph.

The social graph (upon which Facebook’s Advertising Platform is built) presents the significant human angle to analytics – the missing piece so to speak.

That we can now select and understand people’s personal and lifestyle preferences means that we can have a previously untold picture of WHO not WHAT the person is.

The Open Graph

Now that the Social Graph has become the Open Graph (i.e. 3rd party services can now connect to your Facebook profile data), we are entering an area where the web experience can be a totally customised one – and one which you may well not even realise is personalised until you see someone else’s version of the same site.

I expect to see a huge increase in 2012 in the number of sites personalising your website experience as a result of being able to access your social graph, introducing content and products that are more relevant than ever before.

The right product to the right person at the right time.

The Trust Issue

Facebook has to continually battle trust issues for good reason. Without the trust of its users (i.e. the respectful handling of sensitive, personal information), they lose the virtual tons of lifestyle information customers pour into it and Facebook loses a revolutionary way to provide insight for advertisers.

In some way, one might argue that in collating all this social data, Facebook’s more sinister data gathering role is actually helping to bring about a better experience for web users. But this will only work as long as trust prevails.

For 2012, get your head around how you could personalise your customer’s web experience just by looking at what information YOU give to your Facebook profile. It could be the most creative thing you could do today!

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Insight 12: What’s on your digital agenda in 2012? Two of 10 – Portable Friends

January 16th, 2012

Portable friends? What do I mean by portable friends? Well, quite simply, its the result of now vice-like integration of social interactions into your contacts.

In its simplest form, it’s the ability to see your most recent social networking interactions with your friends within your address book. In its most complex form, it’s the ability to seamlessly share, broadcast and receive social activities and marketing-incentivised offers with friends to peers.

You’re probably already seeing a simple version of this when you sign up to a new web-service. Connect your email, Twitter or Facebook accounts and watch the service return friends from these networks who are already on this service. The system may also recommend people who may be connected to friends of friends who you may also know.

More than just connections

Portable friends will take on a much more “actionable” meaning in 2012 though, way beyond just connecting people, thanks entirely to the growth in mobile social networking.

The earliest example of this is the latest Windows Phone and its address book (Windows Mobile call this the “People Hub”). Assuming you have already connected your social accounts to the phone, the phone is then able to list and group your interactions with your address book friends, it will list their latest posts and actions and locations where they are doing things.

The opportunities this presents are incredible. Imagine the power of a scenario where Friend 3 is automatically notified of Friend 2′s location check-in, which in itself was incentivised by a deal sent to Friend 1 and shared to their network. A call or SMS made to Friend 2 reminds Friend 1 that there is a check-in money off deal at Retailer X.

At the moment, as a result of the use of independent social network apps, mobile social interactions are asynchronous – they only happen when you open the app up. The social integration of your address book in 2012 will bring a whole new, seamless dimension to mobile social networking.

The impact

As we move to more seamless, mobile sharing experiences, it’s going to be more crucial than ever for brands to have to understand their fan’s mobile and social networking habits (through the use of things like Forrester’s Mobile Technographics profile for example). Brands need to understand how they can provide fans with the means, material (and incentives) to interact with your brand when they are out and about so that branded messages and actions are carried with the seamless interactions between friends.

This also brings with it a significant concern around reputation management - think very carefully how you are going to gear yourself up for mobile monitoring – an area that has being almost entirely untouched by social media monitoring tools for many technical and privacy reasons. Will your existing tools be able to track mentions on all your social channels (especially location-based ones), will you be able to reliably access all your Facebook check-ins and how will you be able to map identify your new, mobile influencers?

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Insight 12: What’s on your digital agenda in 2012? One of 10 – Privacy

January 13th, 2012

2012 has started off where 2011 ended…with Facebook in the digital headlines. The way that its Sponsored Stories advertising programme can use your “friendship” of a Facebook Page in its adverts had shocked a lot of people. The fact that these stories can now appear in your personal, customised news stream (the big stream of content in the middle of your Facebook page) and appear as genuine news items has caused even more concern.

Furthermore, Facebook’s integration with Spotify at the end of 2011 also brought with it the seamless sharing of music to your Facebook wall. Music that you thought you were listening to in private was suddenly, automatically being broadcast to Facebook.

All of these “tweaks” raise significant questions about privacy. In this social world, has the generally accepted definition of privacy changed? Do we understand what privacy is any more? Do we care? What opportunities and threats does this present to brands and consumers?

The video below is the first in a series of ten short videos looking at what needs to be on your agenda for 2012 as part of my participation in the brilliant Insight Twelve event put on by Don’t Panic. I’ll be lining up alongside some great names from difference creative and media sectors, all looking at what is in store for us in the year ahead.

As always, any opinions and ideas are very, very welcome.

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[analysis] The changing media landscape in 2012

January 6th, 2012

It’s interesting how, in this fast-moving space, the consideration of success is still largely based on coverage in traditional media – yet at the same time, we talk of the death of the traditional media like we are excited to see its demise.

This is why, I am desperately keen to see how Steve Rubel’s latest project transpires as he explores the new, traditional media. WAs Steve says, with the increasingly social focus to our media consumption, previously walled territories are now producing significant returns to media outlets.

That’s not to say that this social evolution will solve the immediate, long-term revenue decline (the answer to which is NOT paywalls), but perhaps as eyeballs go social as well as conventional, traditional media CAN enjoy a prolonged period of ad-supported revenue generation until such time as they hit upon a GREAT idea.

In the meantime, if the evolution of media DOES interest you (and it WILL affect you anyway), then I will leave you with Steve’s presentation.

The Clip Report Volume 1
View more presentations from Steve Rubel

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