Audio: .

Slides: The Future’s Bright, the Future’s Social.

Transcript:

Well, um, it’s not surprising that this gathering of social media experts or digital natives. But someone like me who’s obviously a digital immigrant is invited to open the <inaudible>. Most of you weren’t even born when I set out as a copyrighter over forty years ago in the market, simpler communication world than the one that faces us today. But the best ads from that era demonstrate that engagement isn’t just an invention of the new media world.

The principle of involving your audience with wit, humor and emotion so it becomes a virtual, two-way communication has always been present, even with one-way media. But the explosion of media technology in the span of my career has clearly transformed so many things, though advertising agencies have themselves stayed stuck in their thirty-second silos for far longer than they should have done. And the one reason why we set up an engine where <inaudible> is no more than a quarter of our business. And there’s fourteen companies covering virtually all aspects of the media spectrum.

And in the US, the social media experts working in at least five of our companies is our attempt to respond to this new world. If we move forward to 1994, now we got two babies in the room. And if we move forward, ah, move forward or back, in fact, in 1994 that, which is when the future started to be bright for Orange. And the campaign that built a business were 29 billion pounds when it sold five years later. We still find that it was essentially an old media campaign.

How different would it be if Orange was launched in 2009. And one slide that dramatically demonstrates how the communication world has changed is this one, which some of you may be familiar with if you’ve worked on the interesting five-minute [inaudible] on YouTube on how the future is changing. It says, more video was uploaded to YouTube in the last two months than if ABC, NBC, and CBS have been airing new content twenty four seven, 365 days of the year, since 1948, which is when ABC started broadcasting.

User-generated content which is the driver behind the explosion of social media, clearly, it’s still transforming our communication world. Does that mean the brand should cancel their off-line spend and give it all to the likes of many of you in this room? Well, that would be in my view as unbalanced as neglecting the social media itself, as too many brands today do. What I want to do in my remaining minutes is begin to sketch the outline of a communication model.

It starts to fuse from a consumer standpoint the best of the old and the best of the new. From a consumer standpoint, it’s worth recognizing why brands exist in the first place. Brands exist because they help consumers make buying decisions without using too much brain energy. Brands don’t exist because they can help me [inaudible] like Orange [inaudible] 29 billion. That only happens because a brand like Orange is useful to them, partly by signaling status for their owners and partly by helping them to choose with, less, less effort.

According to a professor at Southhampton University with nothing better to do, if you spend ten minutes of valuating each mobile phone tower, it will take you six years to evaluate all of them. Now, the brain has actually got better things to do. It runs on what is called a cognitive miser system, because the brain uses twenty times as much energy per ounce as any other part of your body. It wants to save brain energy for the important things.

Who are you gonna fall in love with? Who are you gonna have lunch with? Not what new paper or even sometimes what mobile phone you are going to buy. An old-fashion television advertising act as best have served brands pretty well by embedding their slogan and their imagery in the brain, the thinkbox, which is the body that most television advertising recently shown in a television commercial which had a patient [inaudible] shouting out [inaudible] slogans.

But, at some stage, the brain needs more help than a TV ad can offer. For a mobile phone perhaps, and certainly for a car like BMW, the consumer needs more than the ultimate driving machine that we launched about thirty years ago embedded in the drain, the brain, with lots of, ah, status-linked imagery. That’s why over 50 percent of people buying a BMW go to the website, help get information to make their choice from, obviously, a huge range of models.

So, here is new media coming to help old media. And that’s all fine, until we come, ah, to the biggest problem face, facing marketing 40 years ago and still facing marketing today. The biggest problem is that once your brain has made up its mind, it doesn’t like changing it. And the reason for that, as you can see from this next slide derived from a brain scanner is that it takes twice as much brain energy to perform a new task, like trying a new brand, than repeating a practice task, like buying the same brand you bought before.

Our brains are wired-up on a same-again please program. And there’s a mechanism called cognitive dissonance indented in this book over fifty years ago which explains how this happens. Anything that doesn’t fit in with your existing belief system tends to be re-processed until it does. So, ten years ago, when Audi did this film attacking BMW by implication, if not by name, it was re-processed by the brain. I’ve speed it up at the same time.

[05:48]
<inaudible – sped-up sound effects from a film>

[05:56]< On film >
Man1: Wow. What do you think.

[05:58]
Man2: Nah. It’s not really my style. You know what I mean?

[06:06]
Man1: Gabby, tell Charles I’m on my way. Taxi …

[06:10]<End of film>
Robin: Let me ask people then, what car that nasty customer normally drove? The answer showed how the brain had re-processed the information, cause it then didn’t like an attack on a brand it valued, such as BMW. As you can see, almost as many people fought with a guy normally drove an Audi that normally drove a BMW. It wasn’t a good intent on my good friend Johnny <inaudible> at PBH. And this is where new media can start to come to the rescue of old media.

Old media always preached that attitude change leads to behavior change. But, as I just demonstrated, the brain resists the new attitude change which can stop the new behavior occuring. Brain scientists taught us that it’s normally the other way around, behavior change leads to attitude change. If you can get a consumer to do a small behavior change, for example, like smoking in a different hand the day before you start to give up.

This starts to re-wire the brain to be open to a change of attitude, I can give up smoking, which can lead to a bigger change in behavior, I give up smoking. And this object, familiar with all of you, can be the doorway into precisely the small behavior change that can open the brain to changing its mind about brands. Just by clicking a mouse, and then by managing a flow of pages on a website, a flow which is of course chosen by you, not a brand, maybe enough to start the brain changing its mind, was certainly to open its mind to the possibility of change.

Now this is an area which needs further research and investigation, but I think it’s a plausible hypothesis. Brands discovered how new media, especially social media, can change consumers’ minds, when they found themselves being attacked online by consumers. Dell were famously torn apart by blogger Jeff [inaudible] in 2005. But Dell’s final response to create the idea-stored website where Dell customers can suggest improvements that are then voted on by online visitors to the site, is a way of changing peoples’ minds positively towards Dell.

So, even if companies start using social media as a defensive tactic, they’re learning both engagement and transparency in social media can build reputation and not just protecting against attack. Brand websites are now almost old media, but here’s an example of how that mouse-clicking engagement for [inaudible] led to doubling of positive measures towards the brand. As few of you are in the target audience, we might have just one. I will play a little bit more of the ad at normal speed.

[08:58]< Beginning of film>
Woman1: I give up.

[09:00]
Man3: So, here at the <inaudible> mini factory, we take huge whole grain wheat <inaudible – sped up film speed>.

[09:14]
Man4: Oh. No. Not again.

[09:17]
Man5: Please help us find Nigel, Nigel dot com.

[09:21]< Break in film>
Robin: As you can see, the viewer is asked to visit a website to find Nigel.

[09:27]< Film resumes>
Man6: Welcome. I suppose you probably can’t find Nigel.

<09:35]< Film ends >
Robin: <inaudible> through all that. Now, here’s the interesting bit. Evidence that mouse clicking engagement changes minds better than even a good television commercial. So, look at this slide. The ad alone, as you can see from the center white box, had a bid, big impact. But, look at how both taste and health scores were boosted by the eight minutes the average kid spent playing the game, compared to the two and a half minutes of TV advertising that he or she typically had.

Of course an, an online game is not user-generated content, but the level of mind changing prompted by a mouse click means that maybe we should all be working harder to get consumers to make these finger clicks going from television ads to websites. Here’s an example from our new [inaudible] campaign that’s going online today. If you type in a question and enter your football score which usually comes out in mirror writing, and then you see the hard-working Google person rushing around to give you the answer, demonstrating that someone’s had their [inaudible].

Of course, in a world of 100 percent user-generated content, it’s harder. The risks are greater for a brand that is no longer in control of all of its marketing. But this one chart from Digital Buzz shows the way the world is moving. If you look on the left, you can see that brand website visits are going down and social media site, media site visits are going up. The end of destination web creates huge challenges for brands, and I’m sure that will be discussed in later sessions.

But, if we understand how mouse clicking opens the brain to mind changing, and if we remember why consumers need brands, and that it is much harder work for the brain to browse information from blogs about a brand, we will probably be able to get the right mixture of new media and old media. And I look forward to hearing from others today about achieving that balance. Thank you very much for your continuous part of attention.

So this is a quite fun campaign. but im gonna hold my hand up and say actually this is from about 18 months ago. and the worlds moved on in a lot of ways. so i think theres some really interesting lessons we can learn so we can try to pull those out. but some of the things that when i show them to you youre gonna say oh, thats so 18 months ago. and can we go on.. do we have a … so some of you will remember the original .. sorry.. the original wonder bra hello boys campaign. our consumer uh folks at jcpr sort of worked on this and it was a big part of who they became and this was i think an iconic campaign. wonder bra came back to us about two years ago now and said, ya know , the brands drifted. um its not what it was when hello boys finished. we kind of lost some of that sheen of glamour around who we are, we wnat to recover it. so we need another poster campaign. we said actually in 1992 or 3 when we did hello boys that was innovative, that was cutting edge, that was what was happening. thats not whats gonna work now. we said lets think more broadly. lets think holistically. lets think about a complete campaign, that brings all the pieces together and is on the cutting edge of communications for today. i know ive committed a faux pas here its bulletpoints. you can throw tomatoes at me its fine. the pooint really here is as i said, wonder bra really wanted to recover its status. the idea that it was glamorous. and they had a retailer problem as well. it was sort of they were finding themselves a little lower on the shelves a little further back in the back. they needed something to kind of recover that, to show how they really are very much actually at the center of fashion, the center of whats going on. the center of the “zeit geist” as my friend jackie cooper would say. so what did we do? we delivered what amounted to i think, as it says, a nearly complete campaign. and what was quite fun about this is ive been doing communications, a little bit of this and that, for 14 or 15 years this is the first campaign ive worked on that had absolutely no paid advertising. so this is 100% social media and traditional PR. so looking at how these two things complemented each other i think really shows the potential of both mediums in many ways. now the campaign centered on the idea that we were gonna go get a big celebrity, dita von tees, to design a high fashion line for wonder bra,so to address peoples expectations as to what wonder bra is and has to offer. and so dita did that, she did it all herself, and in fact, the screen shot in the upper left there, are the drawings she did of the idea she had of what she wanted her line to look like. so it was very much about her, and it captured her personality. and with that in hand, a beautiful brilliant line of product in hand, we then created a whole load of content to basically communicate and fuel the conversations we wanted to have about the brand and the product line. so then it was simply a matter of taking that content out into the world. now i think there were a couple of things that contributed to this, 1 dita von tees was a bit, over exposed, so how did we address that? we wanted to make sure that the line sort of, and her products, were consistent with her personality, what she wanted to be. so really raising up the quality, raising up the fashion sense of it. but then also as we went out into the cimmuntys we were thinking about niches. and this is one of the things that when i talk about social media i talk about all the time. the idea that the web isnt a big monolithic thing and the web audience isnt a big monolithic audience. the way i think a lot of people think about the tv audience. its a series of little tiny audiences. and so the way we contemplated our engagement, the way we wanted to have conversations with people is in those small audiences. now it happens that some of the small audiences that we were dealing with here, like celebs, were quite large. but some were much much smaller. there was some very interesting ones when youre doing a campaign about dita vontees. now what do we do with this in terms of how we executed the campaign. well again it was all about conversations but we needed to have assets. and the strategy that we undertook was lets be everywhere, lets be everywhere that people can interact with us. lets make it easy for people to interact with us in whatever form or whatever location, whatever venue they wanted. so it was in part about us engaging audiences that we would think were interested. it was also about us being in so many places that the audiences would find their way to us. and we also knew that this was also gonna be sort of a big PR topic. there was gonna be loads of coverage and loads of conversation happening about it in the traditional space. and so as a result of that we said look if we put this out there in a load of places people will find it and people will talk about it. and then its just a question of, as we heard earlier, keeping those conversations going. and so yeah, we had a website, we needed a website to have some information about the product on it. but actually the website was always a secondary thing. the website was never really the top focus of what we were doing. we were much more interested in who we were interacting with and where we were interacting with them. te idea that we were gonna go out to where they were instead of them coming to us. and so actually youtube and flicker became much more important venues for us. we actually had more people interact with the campaign on flickr than the actual website. and that was fine, that was actually what we were kind of after. i thought that was wquite cool. we did loads of blogger outreach. ill come on to some numbers in a minute about that. but that was mostly about, again, going out in to those audiences and getting a conversation started. now this point i think is really important as well. when we think about conversations, think those of us in particular those of us who do PR, think about whats the big launch moment, because we never know what the journalist is gonna fall in love with right, so we say right, heres everything you ever wanted to know about us, and the journalist says ok i like point 4 and goes off and writes about it. but thats not how you have a conversation. so we said right we are gonna inventory all the assets all the crative, all the content we are creating and were gonna use it as a starting point for an ongoing conversation with people who want to interact with us. and so i put up here, we actually started weeks before the launch, introducing ourselves to people, saying hey this thing is coming, its quite cool, we had dita von tees, so we had to build a teese website, sorry. that was quite cool though, we were able to put out an 8 second little nibbly trailer of the film that was eventually gonna be released. and we kind of built some momentum, some conversation prior to the big day, and then we did something that i think is genuinely different. we said our primary main piece of content is this beautiful two minute film we created. and it really was a film worthy of those accolades. were actually not gonna put that out when we launch the line, were not gonna put that out around the product, were gonna be it out a week before. because we knew if we put that out around the product its just gonna get drowned. but if we put it out before, it gave us an opportunity to have some engagement to have some conversation to keep that conversation going, and then when we got to the launch we knew the conversation would take care of itself. but then we wanted to continue after, so we started a contest, we created some places for people to engage iwth us on our site, we made a commitment to keeping the conversation going with all those folks we had engaged before the launch, afterwards to find out how they liked the product, where were they getting it were they having trouble finding it, what did it mean to them. we asked some more interesting sort of questions about, we were talking about the science of sexy, what does sexy mean to you. and we got some conversation going around that, and it was quite good. we had loads of poeple actually engaged with the campaign, i think thats my favorite thing about it. we had loads of coverage, as you would expect, from somebody, we had celebrity, we had underwear, we had a great piece of content, we had a good conversation going. it was where the conversation was happening that was more interesting to me. i kind of eluded to this before but we had almost an a lark it was kind of by accidnet and as an experiment, we said actually we were gonna build a website weve got all these wonderful photos, why dont we put these photos on flickr. so we did. not realizing at the time, two years ago, what a massive entry point flickr would be.

Q & A:

Are campaigns that ONLY use social media and don’t integrate with offline PR missing the true potential?

In short, yes. My view is that today’s communications environment compels us to be more integrated — to ensure that what we’re doing in social media joins up with the PR and yes, even the advertising. But adopting this approach suggests that overall strategy ought to be engagement and content led rather than ad led.

who was the campaign aimed at? Women or men?

The campaign was aimed at women, and as we planned it, I was concerned that the video would not resonate with the target audience. I need not have worried. The film that the creative team developed appealed equally and resonated with the target audience. According to YouTube’s analytics, the audience that watched the film was 53% female.

What measurements did you provide for wonderbra

Many of the slides that I used in the case study were taken from the post campaign analysis package that we provided to the client. We were interested in volume of coverage, tone of coverage, film views, photos views, contest entries, overall interactions., etc. The impact on Search volume that I mentioned wasn’t something we had planned as a KPI, but it was a good demonstrator of the effectiveness of the campaign, and we have used it as a KPI in some subsequent campaigns.

but what were the metrics/targets/deliverables? Increased bra sales? What % of engagement were potential customers vs NSFW spotty teenage  boys?

At the end of the day, the key metrics were product sales and reputational enhancement. The product line sold out and Wonderbra was *very* pleased with the reputational impact. See above for some information about how the campaign connected with the target audience — and it did.

What did wunderbra do with the community they got in to after the campaign? Did they carry on engaging or just walk away?

We wanted to continue the engagement that we had begun with this campaign, but unfortunately, circumstances intervened that made that impossible. In another circumstance, I could see this campaign serving as the first step in a long-term relationship with many of the people who engaged with us.

Is the conversation still going? Did you consider this upfront?

We did consider during planning how to continue the engagement following the campaign period. Indeed, we had a number of plans in mind. Unfortunately, we were not able to take those forward.

Sarah: We are all here of course to talk about Social Media.  Now, I have to admit that I’m a bit of an IT moron actually, unlike most of you here, but ultimately, the internet and any internet site, all it’s trying to do is reach people.  So it’s people we should concentrate on.

So it’s not surprising that when you link together like-minded people who can share things that they’re interested in, it’s a fantastically useful marketing tool; and the internet allows us to do that incredibly quickly.  That’s effectively what online social media is.

Now I think one of the most exciting things about the internet is the way it creates a level playing field for everyone.

Male: [unintelligible] I’d like to be where it begins…

Sarah: So unconventional.

Male: [unintelligible]

Sarah: Perfect…This is David Hart by the way, he’s my business partner.  That was meant to be on the screen before; that’s why I’m telling you now.

Anyway, I think one of the most exciting things about the internet is the way it creates a…oh, we’ve got no sound either.  I could pass my thing..

It creates a level playing field for everyone out there, especially businesses; but one of the downsides to this very one-dimensional world is it’s very difficult to be seen or heard.  So this is where social media steps in.  It allows you to reach people and have one-to-one conversations that you could never have had before.

A few years ago, I launched my dating site, “My Single Friend”, and the success of that site lead to the launch of Tepilo.com about three months ago with David’s company, Codegent.

It’s a simple, but beautifully built site — I didn’t actually build it so I can say that — which helps you through the process of selling your house without paying an estate agent, and saving the £10,000 that you’d have to pay an estate agent normally, and allowing you to stay in control as well.  So how did social media help with this launch?

Well, the short answer is massively.

David: OK, well, we’ll also look at the why-how results and learnings, and we can’t do that really. So why do we need social media?  Hmm, well Tepilo is not a household name yet.  We didn’t really have a huge amount of money to market it, so we wanted to create something…what we really wanted to do was prove something would work, and a good way of doing that was using social media.

We wanted to create a buzz around the different phases of the launch we were going to do.  It was also tying in with Sarah doing the latest series of Property Snakes and Ladders.  So we thought if we launch it around that time, we can obviously ride a little bit on the coattails of the publicity that she was getting.

Then finally, we thought it was a real cool way of getting feedback instantly.  We kind of launched it in three phases and what we were able to do, we’d just put stuff out there and say, “Do you think that’s a good idea?  Do you think that’s a bad-good idea?”

People were saying, “Oh, actually I’m confused about how to upload a home here” and we could react instantly.  For us, again, that was an awesome tool that we could get instant, live feedback about how we were doing.  So that’s the why-how.

Well when I first spoke to Sarah about Twitter she’d had some problems before with Facebook with someone nicking her against he.  Didn’t you have to kind of…

Sarah: Meander it back again through some lawyers…

David: …to wrestle her…

But, so I said, “Oh, you probably want to register on Twitter because I reckon that’s kind of the next thing that’s coming around the corner.”  Sarah was like, “Oh, OK, I’ll register my name, but I’m not going to use it.”  So what we did, we…

Sarah: It was much more fun than I thought it was gonna be…Look we’ve got…yeah, sorry about that.

David: So she started kind of using…

[Baby crying]
[laughter]

David: Oh, technology and babies never…  She started using the Twitter account…

[laughter]

We just brought him along so we’d have a bit more sympathy!

Sarah: In case we really fucked up!

[laughter]

David: We made sure…so we created Sarah Beeny a Twitter account on a Tepilo account and as Sarah was talking about more and more about things that she was doing, we could push people toward Tepilo and obviously not in a too obvious way; and made sure that when she was on TV she was talking about the fact that she was Twittering and that kind of thing, and you know, grew us a bit of a ground swell in what we were doing.

Then the most important thing, she was not just talking about Tepilo.  She was talking about the everyday things like oh, I’m about to have a baby, or this is my favorite [unintelligible] routine, so that was important to do it in a credible way.  Oh yeah, and we obviously made friends with some influences, people who were out there who preferred to be Tweeted; people like For Homes, uh…

Sarah: Mydeco.

David: Mydeco, SPAREROOM, Dreamhomesource [?], these sorts of people who were really good, and we could re-Tweet what they were doing and they could re-Tweet what we were doing, that kind of thing.

OK, creating some results.  As I said, we’re not a household brand.  We’re not Vodafone  with huge amounts of money.  What we wanted to do was just prove that this was a concept that would work, that people kind of got the idea of generally, you ask people do they like spending £10,000 on an estate agent or don’t they?  Most people fall into the latter, so that was quite an easy battle to win.

What we really needed to do was get at least a kind of critical mass of proxies on the side before we launched because obviously you went there looking for a site, looking for property and there’s one in Wales or something and you were living in London, that would be pretty rubbish.  So we were able to get 300 properties prior to launch which meant it was kind of credible-ish.

Tepilo has got about 2,000 followers.  Sarah has got about 16,000+ followers.  But now at just three months into it, we’ve already got almost 5,000 properties uploaded on the site.  It’s more than [unintelligible] pretty happy with that in this climate   And, brilliantly, we had three accepted offers in the first month which is like absolutely awesome, and we’ve had some massive — sorry, a. is bullet point for this one — we’ve had some massive interest from potential partners and that kind of thing.  We’ve felt it has worked really well.

OK, so learnings.  What did we learn?  Well the first thing is make the most of your assets.

[laughter]

In this case there were two assets.  Codegent as a digital agency, and Sarah with her knowledge of property and everything else.  Obviously, we couldn’t have done it without her.  I kind of like to think she couldn’t have done it without us, but she probably could’ve found somebody else.

Sarah: Certainly couldn’t have done…

David: I generally think every business has something that’s special about it.  It’s kind of like what have we got that we know about that we can really push?  So Sarah being on the TV at the time, we’d be mad not to push that while she was doing this.

People talk to you all the time and they ask questions and they want to be responded to.  We encourage people to feed back through the site and also through Twitter.  It’s really important that we’re responding as quickly as people are asking us questions.  The other thing also is, people are talking about your brand even if you haven’t instigated it.

So everybody always says…we say this so often, like, “Oh, isn’t it amazing that nobody ever listens to Sarah; her advice is always right.  And, Oh, by the way, she’s always pregnant.” So actually the whole point about people not listening is claim to the point of the show.  This is Sarah’s fourth baby and…

Sarah: I have been pregnant a lot.

David: Yeah, she’s had twelve…she’s got twelve babies.

But it’s really important obviously to be aware of this stuff and go what, “OK, how are we going to respond to this?  Do we need to respond to this?”  and it’s just a real opportunity for branding to see what’s happening and then kind of responding.

So, where are we now?  I mean it’s obvious, there were lots of opportunities for people, for us…we could’ve emailed people every week, but there was no real reason.  So we want to make it really clear that we wanted to create dialogue because dialogue is really important in social media, but you have to do it in a way that’s responsible and people didn’t feel like they were being spammed.

It was really important we didn’t go, “Hey, Tepilo, this weekend do something…” you know, every other day just annoying people.  You have to make it relevant and interesting.

The other thing is making it really easy for people to share on their social networks as well.  So obviously, people uploading their own homes must have a vested interest in promoting it themselves.  So we made it very, very easy.  Soon as you uploaded a home, one click and it’s on your Facebook, or one click and it’s published to Twitter.

The other thing really is thinking about the long tale of [unintelligible], I mean, Sarah was on TV a lot and that…

Sarah: But I think it’s really important not to underestimate the power of even the tiniest, tiniest bit of media.  Everybody’s got a local newspaper or local magazine or a really tiny website, but it’s those small, little bits of noise that create an overall bigger noise.  So don’t ever think you’re too big for any bit of media, whatever it is, whatever mention it is anywhere.

So that brings us onto partnerships.  This is the other thing that I think is incredibly important is you must be open to partnerships.  We’ve got some fantastic partnerships with MoneySupermarket and forhomes  and mydeco, but the great advantage with partnerships is that you can get what you’re trying to say goes to all of their audience; and what they’re trying to say goes to all of your audience.

Ultimately the customer, which is the person who ought to be winning from all of this, gets all the information that they’re interested in to you, but because it’s all relevant, then they’re benefitting from that as well.

So kind of everyone is a bit of a winner; the customer, and both of you.  So team up with as many people who it makes sense with as possible.

David: OK, and the final one is experiment, test, and react; and…afraid to fuck up fast [?].  It’s really, really important, especially if you’re doing something new — new not as in rocket science, but in a new site — it’s really important to see what’s up there.  If something is not working, then change it or take it off or pull it down, but don’t be afraid to encourage people to respond…and be ready to react kind of quickly.

And that is what we have to say.  Thank you.

Sarah: Thanks very much.

[applause]

Male: We’ve got time for one question and then we’ll abbreviate from there, and that is, “How did your celebrity status influence this as opposed to the genuine, original social media aspect?”

Sarah: Well, I think there’s no point in pretending that it doesn’t help to a certain extent, but I think it’s interesting because, social media I think, it’s a level playing field.  It does get your voice heard better, but without social media it’s nothing really because you need it to get out there.  I feel that probably if you had to choose between the two of which is most powerful, social media is probably more powerful because it works without that celebrity status; and celebrity status doesn’t really work without social media.

Male: Great, thanks so much.

[applause]

Q & A:

What happens when offer accepted? Who sees sale through?

Tepilo allows people to buy and sell property, but it’s not an online estate agent. The idea is that you take control of your own property sales, marketing and negotiation, removing the middle man and saving a commission. So once an offer has been accepted it is down to the vendor and buyer to instruct solicitors just like they would ordinarily. Tepilo has no involvement other than creating the environment for people to do this.

Who will be our ‘editors’ of social – our best friends or strangers?

Not really sure what this question means. It may be to do with the idea of who editorialises the content we see. In other words, with so much noise out there, how do we find something meaningful and who will find it for us. I think it’s less to do with whether someone is a friend or a stranger, but more to do with trust. So if I trust a source then I’m more likely to read content that they recommend. People who Retweet relevant (to me) stuff, are going to be trusted more than those who just talk about themselves and their lives.

Do you manage your own Twitter account?

Sarah manages her own Twitter account. I think if you go in and read her Tweets it would be pretty self-evident that she is writing them.

What does tepilo mean?

Tepilo is a fictional castle that Sarah’s dad used to make up stories about when she was a child. The name evokes a magical place where anything is possible. Plus there is something there about an Englishman’s home being his castle (or her castle!).

Do people follow @tepilo after they’ve bought & sold their house?

I imagine they are more interested before or during their house purchase. Tepilo tweets are more to do with what is going on in the housing market as well as the odd bit of news about successes from the site or new functionality. We encourage everyone who uploads their homes to the site to tweet about it, but they don’t need to follow us to do that.

How much did your celebrity status drive success in social media vs social media itself? SM adding incremental traffic above your existing fanbase?

Obviously it helped enormously in terms of creating followers. A few people seemed to have an issue with this, but that’s kind of missing the point. Why do people believe that “success in social media” is measured by the number of followers? Having followers is one thing, but how you use that opportunity is a totally different one and we tried to illustrate this in the short time we had. We used social media effectively to create a buzz around what we were doing through the different phases of the site launch. The key challenge was to get content (ie houses) onto the site before the site went live, not just to get loads of @sarahbeeny followers. We planned what we were going to say and when we were going to say it, and we encouraged people to feedback when we released new functionality. In our opinion that was a great example of using social media effectively. Celebrity inevitably amplified this effort, but doesn’t  somehow invalidate it.

We’re going to talk about a couple of case studies, using social media in
quite different ways, but actually complementing traditional marketing
disciplines at the same time.

So, hopefully, the first one.

All right, okay.

Here we go.

So, the first thing we’re going to talk about is a campaign that we ran for
Transport for London.  Second set of bullet points of the day.  There is
no celebrity in this one, you’ll be glad to know.  Very simply, we had to
raise awareness of road safety, cyclists, and to drivers, and, really,
specifically raising awareness of the fact that it’s very easy to miss cyclists.
So, what we had to do was work with a very limited media budget.  We
worked with our sister company WCRS to develop a [?] that
could work on TV but could also work online, something that had the
potential to go viral.  Now, viral is a bit of a dirty word, it sounds a bit,
sort of, 2004.  But the reality for us is that a viral is something that creates
a catalyst for conversation.  If you can create a good enough piece of
creative work, then you’ve got something that, by the very nature of
social media, people will be able to spread more effectively.

In the context of this kind of campaign, social media, quite simply, is
about people being able to maintain a much more wider circle of friends
and people that they talk to, and talk to them more regularly, and , in fact,
pass things on more easily.

So, the creative, that we created:

This is an awareness test.  How many passes does the team in white
make?

The answer is thirteen, but did you see the moon-walking bear?

A very simple message at the end of it, obviously.  But, in producing a
piece of creative that has the kind of hook, that people have that kind of
moment of, “Wow, did you see that?”  It creates that kind of social
currency.  They want to pass something on.  They want to, kind of,
challenge people that they know, “You’re not going to believe this.”
“You’re not going to believe what happens.”  “I know the secret.”  “I
know what it’s all about.”  It gives it a very, sort of, a very, sort of, pass-
on-ability, whatever you want to call it.  It’s got that kind of social
currency.

So what we had to do is, we had to seed it.  We had to seed it very
effectively.  We knew it was a very strong piece of creative.  We had
to think about how we got it out there.  Our first challenge, that was set
by TFL, was, you know, put it out to some cyclists, because cyclists,
as many of you may know, are quite active bloggers, or, quite a lot of
them are.  And there are some very well read cycling blogs.  But,
actually, really, our audience were people driving.  That was the primary
audience for us.  We needed to think about people who were driving in
London.  And we needed to think about what their media consumption
was online.  So, where were they going?  Where were they spending
time?  Where were they talking to each another?  And so, for us, it was
about taking a strategy of, yeah, let’s seed the cyclists, because they can
spread this message for us, and they’re quite easy, that sort of low
hanging fruit.  But, also, let’s look much more at where the media is being
consumed by the people that we want to hit.  And a lot of that was about
seeding in the [states?].  So…

So, in term of getting out there, there were two strategies.  One was,
first of all, social media optimization and the second was social media
marketing.  So the optimization was making sure that it was very easy
for people to find it, hitting all of the social networking sites, making sure
that it was on Digg, making sure that the YouTube and the share facility
was enabled, things like that.  Social media marketing was based on
connecting with people.  So, it was making sure that you were in social
spaces where conversations happen and also reaching out to the core
tag audience, which was hard-core London cyclists.

So, the results.  The key KPI’s for this campaign were to raise awareness,
which is very broad.  So, obviously, numbers were a key factor.  But,
also, it was relating to an attitude change, as well, which is a little bit more
difficult to measure.

The numbers, however, were very easy to measure.  To date, there have
been sixteen million views on video sharing sites, reaching a lot of people.
And, of that, you have people sharing on blogs, with it being the second
most blogged video on March the nineteenth and March the twentieth,
just behind Barrack Obama.

We also reached the core target audience, which was your cycling
enthusiasts.  And, reaching them through views on video blog sites.

Of the sixteen million views, one point five of them came through social
bookmarking sites.  So that was proving that social media optimization
worked.  Making sure that it’s there, people could then share it very
easily.  And, it was a help with the search results.  A couple of people
in there have been talking about SEO and social media.  Well, here’s the
first example.

The results from the blogs, the forums, the discussions, the tributes,
they’ve all brought together and reached over fifty-two thousand search
results on Google, for a term that didn’t exist before this campaign,
‘dothetest’, all one word.  And, it inspired people, as well.  People
created their own fan groups on Facebook and shared the content
through Facebook, as well.

But, importantly, the results were more than numbers.  Key KPI was,
obviously, attitude change and raising awareness.

Oops.  Jerked a little bit.

But, one third of London motorists and cyclists recognize the campaign.
So, obviously, in terms of raising awareness it’s been incredibly
successful.  But, importantly, it related to an actual attitude change.  You
have motorists saying that, who had seen the ad, saying that they will
check their blind side more often, and cyclists stating that they will avoid
being in the blind spot, not wanting to be that moon-walking bear.

And, if you look at the step from awareness through to attitude change,
you can actually see results in terms of a reduction in fatalities,
year-on-year, and a reduction in serious injuries, year-on-year, which
is a nice little three-step way of looking at how this campaign was more
than just numbers.

So, the key learnings.  To integrate on and offline for maximum impact,
this campaign started on TV, which created the first wave of awareness.
And it’s a wonderful campaign where, you know, TV and online are not
enemies, which is, I suppose, a bit of a risky thing to say at a social media
conference.  But, it’s definitely helped with the impact, getting that first
wave of awareness.  Making it easy for your audience.  So, getting in
touch with them directly.  If you want them to share the content, if you’ve
made the content that’s relevant for them, get in touch, showcase it with
them, talk with them, build that relationship.  And then, also, optimize
through sharing facilities.  So, again, making sure that it’s in the places
where they are and make it easy for them to pass it on.  Engage in the
content yields more.  So, the key to this was the creative.  Obviously, it’s
a fantastic piece of creative.  It’s funny, it makes you want to pass it on.
And, affecting real change.  So, it’s a lot more than just numbers, as you
can see.  You know, there’s, a few less deaths is not a bad KPI for a
social media campaign.

Okay.  So, again,very quickly, we’re running over

I’m going to allow you to have sixty seconds to speak with that slide.
One more slide, if you want.

Really, okay.

Kleenex.  This is all about, actually, doing something that wants a payoff.
Using social media is a pay-off stunt.  And what we did, very simply, is
we refer to the Hay Fever map.  We used Twitter and we used Google
maps to create a mash-up around the hash tag of tissue. So, if any of
you remember the Snow map from earlier on in the year, a very simple
idea.

That’s two slides.  I’m flying through them though.

And, we created this lovely hay fever map, here.  Very simply, what we
had to do, we asked people to put in a hash tag of tissue, score out of
five for how bad their hay fever was at that particular point in time and
created this wonderful map of the UK.  Now, this was about hitting a
peer audience [?] the traditional press.  And that’s exactly what we did.
We got coverage everywhere.  By also making it something that was
embeddable, it meant that people like the London Evening Standard could
stick it on their web site, bloggers could embed it in their own sites.  So it
creates that kind of spread for us.  But, fundamentally, it got the press
coverage that we were after, it was about, it really was about stunt.  So,
key learnings.

Last slide.

Social media campaigns can be newsworthy.  They can work as stunts in
exactly the same way that a traditional PR campaign can work as a stunt.
Technology can help you provide content.  We’ve combined a feed-list
technology there with some news to effectively crowd-source this
information.  We got what we needed.  And it’s great to take advantage
of proven behavior.  So, the Snow map, a lot of people understood the
concept of putting a post code and putting a score out of five.  It had
been done already.  We were just using that idea and that mechanic in a
different way.  And, finally, utility can be as powerful as entertainment.
It’s not all about funny videos.  Creating tools that are useful can actually
get people engaged, as well.

Thank you very much.

Speaker: So, I’m going to tell you how we have used social media as a key part of the marketing mix to help the recruitment campaign, which we now recruit about 4,000 people a year into the RAF. [xx] So, we are trying to open up the RAF, and we want to reduce the barriers to entry and increase recruitment. What we want to do, we want to build connections between people who are in the RAF, so that’s the 44,000 people in the RAF, and the people who might want to join. We also really want to open up the RAF so that people have a better understanding of what their life is actually like in the RAF. We, basically, want to reposition it, so, at the moment, it’s all about planes(?) and also it’s perceived as being a boys’ club, an elite boys’ club. We want to show the real RAF, which is more human who wants to be more visible and more practical. So, we’ve done this in two key ways, we’re using storytelling. By storytelling, we’re using these 44,000 people and to tell them the stories, because I think there’s an air of mystery about what the RAF is actually like and what people do what their life is like. The second part is actually sort of monitoring the conversations as much as we can where people asking questions that we can answer. When I say we, I mean RAF, that they answer. I should just get them to join the conversation and answer these questions. We started this activity on YouTube about two or three years ago, and our first activity was the Goody Diaries, and this was SAC Paul Goodfellow. When he’s out in Afghanistan, he recorded some video diaries everyday and then a special one every week. I’m just going to play, it’s is about a minute long, but it just shows how it really kind of crosses the barriers a bit because it shows how human they actually are when they’re working out in Afghanistan. (I think you should just click on that, yes). Man in video clip: As you see, I’ve got [xx] video a day. We’ve got the storm going on out here in Afghanistan. [xx] I’ve never seen [xx] make it. [xx] It really show [xx]. (Men laughing, speaking unintelligibly) Speaker: I just think it’s really a lovely video, and there are a lot like this, but it’s just showing that they’re doing a massive important job out there, but at the same time, they are still normal people. The next slide just shows some of the comments on this YouTube channel. We’ve had thousands of comments and they vary enormously. Some are from their friends and there’s one that says, “That’s my brother in the rain.” There are some from other Armed Forces and there’s kind of rivalry between the forces. (Excuse me).There are some who are anti-war and there’s a massive variety. But what we’ve seen is that for every negative comment that you get a number more of those basically fighting the RAF’s corner, so it’s really an interesting dynamic. We’ve got another strong presence on a Bebo profile as well. We set this up last year when we sponsored one of the Bebo productions and publish it with Endemol called “The Gap Year.” This was great because it really launched the profile really and, basically, since that, we’ve had a strong presence on there. We’ve used it to communicate with the friends on the page and also show videos and generally answer questions from people on the page. A new piece of activity – and all these activities kind of build one on the other so we’re getting a stronger and stronger presence – is this we’re using Flickr and Twitter. So, we’ve recruit seven people on the RAF with mobiles to tell their story using photos and small blog updates, small group blogging. They’re very varied, so we’ve got men, women, officers, non-officers, people who do different [xx] in the RAF, and they are just telling their stories. It’s low key, it’s photos, and blog updates. This is just to show some of the photos they take. Then, the other thing I said we’re doing with this conversation monitoring, so what we’re trying to do is just make sure – because lots of people have questions but they didn’t want to pull the help center to ask because it sounds too trivial. They don’t really know who to ask, so what we’re trying to do is just intervene at that point. So, if people are thinking about joining the RAF and have a question that they want answered, at least three people who have networks and they can fan the conversation and just answer the questions. This brings me to results slide, so this is basically a slide of numbers. I think the numbers are largely meaningless (laughter) in many ways, because what we have on, on the YouTube and the Bebo channels, we’ve got a really strong dialog with the people on that, and we had actually having a conversation. Flickr and Twitter, I think it’s coming, but it’s in its infancy and we really need to kind of persevere with it. But, what we have seen is, on YouTube and on the Bebo channels, we’ve seen people have gone from there and then on to the RAF website, and then they’ve actually gone on to apply. So, we can see that this dialog is really supporting the campaign. Then, the final slide, and what we’ve learned. What we’ve found is that I’m not really interested in the people in the RAF, in the [xx] RAF. We found that some things don’t pick up immediately and they kind of gather momentum. I think it’s really important not to just give up straight away, but actually, to see what they think is going to work and then persevere if you do. This kind of thing requires really careful planning, and we do see that every bit of activity should build on the previous bits of activity. I think social media for the RAF is a long term investment. And then finally, I think, what we’ve found is that we don’t always see to get involved because sometimes, the discussion is going on and we don’t enhance it. So, in some places, like on Facebook, it’s working on [xx] we don’t need to work in it.

Q & A:

Question:

How do you address responsibility to depict the ’seriousness’ of the RAF? Critics suggest YouTube campaign trivialises the military…makes it look all fun.

Answer:

Whilst the RAF is a serious career choice, there’s few other jobs where you can develop such a high level of camaraderie between your fellow airmen/airwomen, so it’s important to show this in our YouTube content. Other videos show a more serious side, whether that be training challenges, or the harder side of life in theatre.The content on YouTube is intended to give users a complete picture of what it’s like to be in the RAF, research has shown this is what they want to see. The videos present RAF personal as they actually are – human beings, and so help to build a relationship between those serving and potential recruits, so they can make a more informed choice.

Audio: .

Slides: The Good, Bad & Ugly of Social Media

Transcript:

You may have noticed that my understanding from whatever was going behind me, you may have noticed that my parents who were big believers in social networking sent me off to public school, when i was about 13 my dad stopped on my first day of school by the side of the road to give me my first and last man-to-man, father-to-son talk and it was a very strange moment for both of us and there is almost no memory of embarrasment except for these two things, the first he told me that i should do my best to avoid pubic lice and the second thing he told me and i’ve no idea what was going through his mind at that time was that there was a particular wine of the sauternes called shoteracum and that the most important thing about that was it was franing expensive that i should never buy it was you dont pronounce the deal so sauternes, which seemed unmanaged to go all the way to the school without using either of these bits of information, astonishingly, but only a few years off while at school, i was entertaining ago and actually i ran out for dinner it was a very expensive dinner certainly represented several weeks worth of my then salary and there was a ofcourse a flogra course and i knew enough to know that i should order a glass of soturn and i need nothing else and i tried to talk to some alien who was very scared, of i said could we get a glass of soturn with the flogra and he said yes sir and we serve shatter again, which bit i rememberd bit what my father said and indeed i looked at the price and that was my cost per glass. I would still be shocked by this, but imagine young ad executive really this was no, i mean this was not but still a big part of my week’s wages and as i was watching her, drinking her glass but i was also seeing was there a 5 pound sip and i was thinking and i say actually ” i better get lucky” but she ofcourse didnt notice that at no point could i have said, by the way have you any idea what it costs to me if i hope i would get lucky because that would have treating everything as though according to what we call market norms, and infact what i should be looking at when i am being a nice person and taking someone for a date to a restuarant, this thing is called social norms and these two things are widely different and yeah for example if you are looking at market norms you will really be asked most times about ROI and market volumes and if you are talking about social norms, then we are talking about much more interesting much more deeper rooted very sort of powerful things which to a certain extent we’ve being trying to tap into reference, when we try to hit this kind of conflict between market norms and social norms like i did at that moment in that restaurant we enter some kind of crisis, its the crisis of values versus the values. So this is the question i think is coming up into all sorts of businesses at the moment and it is the crisis which faces any one who is engaged in social media or indeed not engaged in the social media and we cant avoid it. I asked the question about how do we begin preparation for this what is the brand and the answer that i got back would astonish anybody who grew up in advertising in the 80’s and 90’s, a brand is what is customly defined it as, this is good people by the way, they are not fools and players actually knew. This is all i think a bit about a bit passive if a brand is what people say about, then what the hell is the point in any of our jobs. We got to be out at doing something. We should be looking certainly at both the product and the perception of that product and we should be doing what ever we can to influence that perception. Its not simply lives in the audience no where else. And to give you a little bit of history, brands started off and this is from the most simple side of things as a.. you kind of guarantee the quality and situation here in 1848 just as gold was discovered in california there we 800 people living in sanfrancisco, the following year 1849, there were 50000 people living in sanfrancisco. Whole new market with no infrastructure and 10 years later when the railway came in, you had this fabulous new thing called mass transport open up to the massive audience with no infrastructure at the same times we had mass production in industrializaiton of the east coast or rather the north-east coast. You had a mass production, mass transport, massive audience and no infrastructure when there was this suddenly, this was the environment in which modern advertising kind of grew up and here is modern advertising. You will notice a few things about it, there were a couple of things which were making claims on quality and the rest of it, but i think what really is interesting is the moment being replaced here isnt just sort of we are not just making a guarantee of quality, there is this promise thats in its sort of makes childrens as fat as pigs, this is big early uprising. I think we have changed, but there is also this other thing where what we are also trying to replace is the relationship that had existed until then if they had been an infrastructure in sanfrancisco, then there would be a shopkeeper and you would be trusted the shopkeeper to give you what you want to know the retail relationship, that personal relationship is very important. But when there is no mass market products you may have to bypass that relationship very neatly. The guarantee of quality not comes from the brand, but also kellogs or jumani you see all these things are personalities whether they are real or not is the early brands coming through and replace presonal relationships or thats part of their original job. And its just what is a brand, brand is a product plus personality and the ads that i grew up with and now that i grew up, helping to make and all the rest of it and we are about taking big faceless national or privatized sort of organizations and giving them a personality, If you look at all the way that advertising changed in 80’s and into the 90’s, thats absolutely what i was saying is how do we get rid of personality which means that this isnt the product, this isnt the services somebody we want to take it into our home thats where advertising has been. So the big problem that we face in social media is that the promises we made about the personality which appear to act like they are social norms, appear to say “trust me, im your friend, im BT, im nice, im like your mother” those things were fine when we were starting to open up in TV, when we are starting to open up in social media, its a bloody night mare. Ultimately all we have with our customers is a business relationship, this is really a nice example i wish lovely add at this moment im sure you will see me with alexander hole of the meerkat who is the most cudley the sort of brand icon i think, but what he represents ultimately is a as see much floats on top of the financial servies and insurance business, and the financial services and the insurance business is not run by fluffy little merecuts, its run by people who have business relationships. This is the kind of what we see all over the web actually coz one of the things i have compared with merecuts with what market does is when you ask for a quote and give them your phone number, they immediately sell that if you dont actually take them up. They make money either way its fine, they are just an affiliates game. Can we continue pretending that we have a social relationship with our customers when really we are just having a business relationship.

I just want to spend a few moments telling you about Live, which is
First Direct’s latest social media and marketing campaign.  For those of
you who don’t know First Direct, we’re a direct bank known for
recommendation by our customers, but also, great levels of customer
service and, embarrassing as it may be, we’ve had quite a bit of award
winning this year, which has been fantastic.  We’ve also got very loyal
customers, which is relevant to us talking about Live.  They’re very
evangelical and they talk about us a lot and recommend us, which is
fantastic.  But we also know that they’re more likely to be tech savvy
and also use social media.  And as this slide shows, ever so slightly more
than the general adult population.  So, we knew it was an important place
for us to be.

So the backdrop to Live, obviously, frightening slide here, but trust in
banks has decreased by sixty-nine percent.  So we had a big job to do
to try and build that trust back up again and show that we’re different and
differentiate in the market, and that we have happy customers at the heart
of our business.  It’s a big challenge, big challenge.  But our customers
have always been our greatest advocates.  And so, we needed to look at
how we can use the comments that they made to leverage the brand in
the current environment and give us some endorsements that we could
use in new and different ways to try and position First Direct in a new
and dynamic way, and one that, sort of, puts trust back at the heart of
people and their banking.

And whilst there was a massive amount of enthusiasm in the organization
to do this, it was a difficult decision to make, because, I think, if you take
this step, you have to be completely transparent and it has to be about
the good, of which there was a lot, and the bad.  So, you know, we knew
that we had to embrace this.   So we kick-started the process by just
doing something really, really simple and looking at the last six months
reviews of First Direct and, really effective, sticking them in a [?].  Just to
start to look at what the messages that were coming through, it became
instantly clear that the service messages were being talked about by our
customers.  We then compared that to some of our competitors.  This
one is Halifax.  And you can instantly see there’s a bit of a difference, if
I just whiz back to First Direct, there.  And this one is Lloyds.

So, we felt it was the right thing to do, that we could set ourselves apart
from our competitors.  Naturally, the customer journey that we were
going to take people on was really, really important.  Our campaign
elements had to provoke people enough to engage with whatever it was
that we did.  That they would act and that they would then go on and
share this content.  So from all of this digging around and head scratching,
Live was born.

And, hopefully, this hyperlink should work and take us to the site.

Well, who knows?  We’ll see.

…Well we were hoping to get into the actual Live site…

Sorry, we should have rehearsed this, shouldn’t we?

Oh.  You’re on it now.

There you go.

Obviously, it’s a bit bigger than the page, but, basically what you can see
is, we had all this information.  We knew it was out there.  We needed to
know what to do with it.  And how would we visualize it, that was going
to be engaging, informative, easy to understand, but most of all, above
everything else, very First Direct?  And this essentially…see quite a few
boxes.  The bubbles which are going up and down are the positive and
negative sentiments that have been said through the sources that we’re
looking at.  On the right hand side, the keywords that are coming out of
the sources.

And just to explain where we’re getting our information from, we’re
pulling together any site online, so that could be a blog, comments on blogs.
It could be newspapers online, Twitter, Facebook, as long as it’s in the
public domain.  Basically, eight million sites have the RSS feed that
we’re pulling in.  So, we’re looking for comments about First Direct.
We’re sifting through the ones that are irrelevant to First Direct, we get a
lot of first direct flights, first direct film, whatever, first direct message,
and then filtering again for profanities.  And then it’s fed in, and this is,
essentially, how it comes out.  So it’s showing, live, exactly how the
sentiment of First Direct is looking online.  Now, I know that we’ve had
comments, such as, you know, why isn’t there a live Twitter feed?  And,
you know, if I was perfectly honest with you, I personally feel it was a
brave step for us to do, to actually use customer commentary, live
commentary, general consumer comments in this way and host them
online.  And as it went through the, sort of, compliance and legal side of
First Direct and HSBC, we were advised, really, that in case of any
obscenities, or anything like that, that might appear on Twitter by using
incorrectly we should leave it for now, and it’s not to say it won’t come
in the future, but I think for now I’m pretty happy with the way the site
looks.

So, what do we do to try and encourage people to go there?  Well, we
provoke London commuters by using all of the digital methods available
on the underground and any, sort of, live panels, TV in the train stations
and underground had these type of ads on.  So they were moving and
sharing in real-time exactly the sentiment of First Direct at that point.

Also, to provoke debate and provide some content, we spoke to over
two thousand people about their attitudes about openness online and also
about businesses and transparency.  We asked them about, you know,
which businesses they thought were particularly open and transparent.
Internet businesses did really well.  Google was top of that.  But the
banking sector, unsurprisingly, didn’t do well at all.  And so, all the time,
it just started to feel right that for First Direct, as a brand, this was the
right way for us to go.

And what did we do about engaging customers?   Well, Talking Point,
which is in the bottom left-hand corner.  And, we led them four, sort of,
provoking questions and asked people to give their comments back.
And, to be honest, they have done, which is exactly what we wanted
them to do.  And we asked for the good and the bad, and I can safely
say, we’ve had both.  But that’s great.  That’s what we wanted.  And,
you know, I wanted to show you those, because if we’re going to do this,
we have to be honest about the fact that, you know, not everybody is
going to have a good experience in their everyday banking.  And the
great thing about Live is that it’s really being looked at, both within
First Direct and HSBC, sort of, very seriously.  It’s being held up as a,
you know, great piece of work which will help take the businesses
forward in their social media thinking.

So, the results.  Well, twenty-five thousand unique visits since launch.
Amazing.  Two thousand five hundred comments.  They come in all the
time….consideration…brilliant…leading category for being different….
Over two hundred tweets.  So, essentially, what was a brand campaign
as well.  I think it’s been tremendously successful for us.  There’s been a
huge amount of commentary and debate online and in the media as well.
So, a huge success.  But, obviously, more to come from Debra.

So, I mean, you know, PR and getting people to talk about the campaign
was really important to us.  And, it seemed to capture the imagination of
people like you.  It got, and we did purposely just target online influencers,
who, you know, on the one hand are our target audience, but, also, we
wanted to see how people respond.  And I think, you know, the PR story
for Live has only just begun and there will be more stuff that will come
after the back of that.  But, really well, you know, responded to on the
likes of Twitter.  It was described as brave, a good move, et cetera, et
cetera.  You know, some great coverage from our influencers and media
sites and a fantastic reach.  So, it spoke volumes to us that, you know,
what we were doing was being embraced and appreciated by people.

What next?  Well, we started at the beginning of the year, sort of, first,
looking at social media.  I had a social media newsroom built, which was
fantastic, I was very excited about it.  And that’s been a great success
for us.  It’s allowed us to get stories and messages out about the
business that wouldn’t have either got the time of day in the media, or
I probably wouldn’t have even thought about writing them.  So that’s
been brilliant.  Live has obviously been the next step on this journey and
now we’ve started we’ll obviously keep on going.  But it’s not a quick
move.  I think we all have to be very honest about the fact that it’s one
step at a time.  We’re learning all the time from Live.  You know, last
week Matt Colebrook, our chief executive, put his first comment
back on Live to start responding and joining in the conversation with
customers.  We’ve had new technology put in, which means that we can
now start commenting back to customers on Live, which is fantastic.  So
it means we’ve started that conversational journey.  So we’ll continue to
learn with Live.  But, also, moving into next year, we will start to work
with social media more and involve customers more in, sort of, building
the business of the future for First Direct.  So, we know it’s out there.
We’re learning to live with it.

Audio: .

Slides: MTV – Say Yes to Safe Sex

Transcript:

All right. Here we go. Basically, I’m talking about MTV campaign we did for the Staying Alive Foundation, who you may have seen in the news recently. They do MTVs, HIV/AIDS, and awareness charity, they do AIDS prevention work all around the world. I’d briefed with them in April this year, I think, it was, was to raise awareness of safe sex, get young people advocating and talking and thinking about safe sex amongst themselves, and to drive sales of a lip balm produced and sell by the Body Shop, which raises money for…I keep looking at the screen for some reason…raises money for campaigns in Africa.

Basically, we had a challenge here, and the young people, 16-24 year olds, they’re not the traditional media consumers like the older generations are. They very much use social media, they’re very much used to switching off to traditional media, switching off to message-driven marketing. Actually, when it comes to safe sex, they’ve heard it all before. They hear it from the public sector, they hear it from their doctor, they hear it at school, at university. It’s not the most interesting message in the world, everybody knows they should do it. It’s one of those things that actually and it comes relevant at the point of consumption when you actually need to put a condom on.

So, to get through this, we looked apart the shifts. I’d be honest, we didn’t have a lot of money, this is a charitable thing we did. So, we had to look at doing things that would create collateral, create their own content without us having to spend a lot of money on things. So, I was going to talk about three partnerships we did. One was with Spotify, we got together with the world’s biggest online music service. One was with a website called Someone Once Told Me, which some of you may know as a photographic site that sort of prints and uses evocative photography to deliver a message. One was with a site called Hecklerspray, which is one of the UK’s biggest blogs, bit like sort of FHM, slightly off-the-wall voice kind of blog.

With Spotify, we happily and luckily tapped into a really strong vibe on the Internet. You know, remember a few months ago, everybody was talking about Spotify, everybody was sharing playlist. It was the new kid on the block, people were collaborating on things together. We realized that, actually, yes, people love Spotify, people love sex, people love sex and music together. So, we got together with a bunch of MTV presenters, we got top bloggers like Paris Hilton, we got [xx] and we pooled them all together and got them to create a place like playlist. So, 10-track playlist, you can listen to when you’re having sex. We released those through MTV’s social media channels. We got bloggers to talk about them on their blogs. We released them on to Twitter and got people to actually share their own with us. Very quickly, we created a lot of buzz around this playlist, just the whole concept of them. On the back of that, we drove the safe sex message.

In terms of how that went, I think we delivered something like 500,000 people to the MTV campaign. I mean, we connected through various channels whether it’s Twitter or blogs or traditional online media. [xx] cents with about half a million people in the UK. In terms of driving traffic to the website, I think we sent about a quarter a million people through that.

Moving on, and I wish I could show you. [xx]. Skip to the end. Here we go. See what I’m talking about now?

Man: Your [xx] is 26 megabytes.

Speaker: Oh, is it? [xx]. Right. The skiff. Here we go. Someone once told me. Yes, I think, probably on this site already. Mario is very well known on the UK social media, a very popular guy, very popular site. He told me once that he’d love to get more celebrities on the site. I remember that when we were putting this campaign together. We went back to MTV and we said, “Look, we can tap into this network, we can give something of value to Mario, and actually, to his users.” So, we had a chat, we saw what we could do, like there is Travis McCoy from Gym Class Heroes. He’s actually just recorded a single for this charity that’s going out this week. It was the first time celebrity content had ever been seen on Someone Once Told Me, which gave Mario something to shout about and gave his users and sort of followers something to be excited about.

We also involved – I’m pointing in the wrong direction – people like Laura Whitmore from MTV. We involved people like Abby Lee, the sex blogger, from Girl With a One Track Mind. Of course, people liked that, took part in what we were doing, and then went and told other people about it on their own blogs and their own Twitter feeds. There’s an important things to remember is if you can get people fired up and excited about something and get them going off and shouting to their users, their followers, whoever those happen to be, they’re going to do that advocacy job for you.

Another example there, BitchBus.com doing the same thing. Of course, like I said, Mario  shared it through his Facebook page, Twitter feeds, Facebook application, all the rest of it. Spotify we talked about, and again, the principle was the same. It was about getting people involved, people who have resonance with the target audience, who have their own massive followings on the Web, and getting them to go out there and talk about the stuff for us. Popjustice, brilliant example of how a brand took our campaign on, gave it its own flavor. Popjustice, if anyone follows them, [xx] x-factor, very irreverent, very off-the-wall, very silly, and you can tell, looking at their playlist, things like “I’ll Do You Like A Truck,” part of that sort of song list there.

Final partnership I’ll talk about today was Hecklerspray. I’m a big fan of blogger relations, but I absolutely hate it when people start sending press materials and press releases and regurgitated surveys to bloggers. I don’t like it, I’m not interested. Same goes for a one-size fits all approach to blog relations. I got another friend, he’s a blogger who absolutely can’t stand it when he gets approached to run a competition because there’s nothing in it for him really. He knows that all of his 10 rivals have also been approached to run the same competition. Just don’t do it.

So, we built or have made some of the world’s smallest condoms. We knew Stuart Heritage of Hecklerspray had a good sense of humor, so we sent one of them to him. He spent the whole day on Twitter, taking photos of it, sharing it with his audience. Another example there, Optimus Prime, with a bayonet(?), (laughter) fantastic. My favorite one had to be this one which is the world’s biggest cock with the world’s smallest condom. (laughter) He spent the whole day teasing the audience like that on Twitter, getting people wondering what was going on. Then, at the end of the day, he hit them with a blog post about it. Again, I mentioned about sort of giving things back to the community providing value. Since he did that, Stuart has actually been approached by World Contraception Day, and he’s now one of their global ambassadors. He goes around schools talking to kids about condoms and safe sex in his sort of own irreverent fashion.

In terms of results, I’m not going to go to lots of statistics here. What we’ll tell you is that we created 1,400 % more impact than the previous years campaign when no social media was involved. So, we’d created something that created so many tweets, so many blog posts, sent so much traffic to the website that actually it really kick things into [xx] this year.

In terms of learnings, I think the one key learning for me is get all of your agencies and all of your people talking together. I didn’t actually get to meet the person that built or ran the website for this campaign until about a week before we went live. So, I’ve no influence in terms of content that would then keep people coming back to the site. I actually had to deliver the safe sex playlist through a blog because it’s the only thing we could throw together quick enough.

So, yes, get your digital guys, your PR guys, your marketing teams, internal and external, talking together beforehand, and get them collaborating on this stuff. Don’t treat social media as a magic bullet or something to just wrap around whatever else you’re doing.

[audio] Hello, everyone. Last slot before tea, and I’ll try to do it very quickly. One thing I’ve learned about the biggest challenges in social media this year is trying to do a presentation in seven and a half minutes, but let’s give a will. So, skip the head. I take it everyone here knows what crowdsourcing is. It’s about using the power of the crowd to come up with some good ideas for a business problem or a marketing brief, in our case. Jeff Howe coined the term in, actually, in 2006 in Wired Magazine, and our site, which is called Idea Bounty, uses the principles of crowdsourcing to try to solve creative briefs from clients, from marketing organizations. Right, but it’s not anything new. In fact, the Oxford dictionary, in the 19th century, was put together by people coming in and handed in words that they thought should be included. But today with social media, the crowd is much larger, it’s better connected, and there’s a lot of different ways that people can submit their ideas or their opinions.

So, how does it work? Really, a company has a problem, they [xx] that problem online, the online crowd is asked to give solutions, the crowd submits their solutions, the crowd vex(?) the solutions, the company rewards the winner and solve this. The company then earns the solutions and, hopefully, the company profits from those ideas. So, that’s a really quick aids tip guide to crowdsourcing.

There’s quite a few businesses out there that are doing some sexy stuff in the space. Most of you probably have heard of Threadless, which is a t-shirt company and they would design t-shirts based on the crowd’s ideas. But they range everything from wikipedias through to 99designs and CrowdSpring, which does graphic design and logo development through crowdsourcing.

So, what do we do? We try to solve clients’ marketing problems by using the principles of crowdsourcing. So, clients can upload a brief or problem that they have on to our website, they set a bounty or reward, and the community of creatives that we’ve developed over time, respond with their solutions. Then, the client then goes through those ideas, decides which ones they like, and hopefully pays a winner.

What do these all got to do with social media? Well, we wouldn’t be standing in front of you if we didn’t use social media to develop the community that we built around Idea Bounty. We’ve spent all of about $200 in marketing so far, but we’ve managed to build a community of about 8,000 people. We’ve done so through a variety of social media tactics. We have a very active blog and Twitter screen, where we don’t just try to promote ourselves but we try to give as much value to our community as possible. So, we know we talked to a creative audience so we write about anything from Sex Toys through to Stopmotion through to the latest ads and reviews of the latest creative products. That really have built a community over time that are very involved and enthusiastic about what we’re doing.

Our site has caused quite a shake-up in the industry. I’ve actually spent most of my morning commenting and reading comments on Amelia Torode’s blog. Amelia is the head of Scrap Planning at VCCP, and she wrote a fairly scathing review of Idea Bounty and accused us of exploiting the creative community and a few other things. I think a lot of her points were valid, but interestingly, within putting up that post and I’ve been active in following her in the back in the room, there’s now been almost 50 comments since she’d put it up, from a wide variety of audiences.

I think we’ve actually changed the way we’re thinking about our business based on the comments that people got in. They’re all the challenges that some of the people have responded has really made us think about how were going to go forward with the business. So, I think, social media has not only built our community that we belong to source ideas but very importantly helping us evolve our business to be more meaningful to the people we’re trying to communicate with.

It definitely isn’t easy. From our perspective, we get a lot of flak online, Amelia is not the first person to give us a hard time. We have to try and pick up those things as a socially aware brand and respond to them as quickly as possible. But also try to not to only have our own Idea Bounty had fun as we do it, but you try to see their opinions and take them seriously, and trying to, as a business, run your actual business and follow all those conversations and respond to all of them appropriately is really challenging. I’m sure it’s a challenge that many of you are experiencing. Modest piece of advice from this is invest in some kind of monetary and software, I think that makes your life a lot easier. There are some very good ones out there, and they can help cut down a lot of your workload.

So, I thought it would be interesting in terms of this audience to talk about what kind of brief work in a crowdsourcing platform. I think it’s very important to make clear that probably the vast majority of marketing or creative [xx] with for crowdsourcing. Either because the product hasn’t been launched yet and it’s confidential or you don’t want your competitors to know or the problem is so complex that someone would need to have a strong, strategic knowledge in order to get a head around it and solve it.

But there are some problems that are well suited to crowdsourcing and to social media applications. These are some of the clients we’ve had on our site so far…four minutes, I’m doing well then, I’m way ahead. So, Levi’s put up a brief on our site asking for ideas for activations and music festivals. They sponsor a number of them and they were looking for what could they do at a music festival to help raise brand awareness and push out the brand values. They’ve got some very good solutions, I’m not actually at liberty to say what they are because they haven’t implemented them yet, but that’s the kind of brief that works very well.

WWF was our second from last brief that we had on the site, and they ask to let us help make the planet a better place. They were actually blown away by the communities in response to this, we’ve got close on a thousand ideas, and they really struggle with time to work out which one they were going to pay for and implement.

So, our most recent brief, and probably our most controversial, has been for Peperami, the Unilever salami product. Most of you know this talking salami chap and his name is the Animal, and they’ve been running this campaign for about 10 years, and in fact, 15 years now. Lowe was their advertising agency and then actually got the can, unfortunately, in order to use Idea Bounty to source their new TV commercial and print campaign.

What we did was try and build the community’s interest into this product through social media. So, not only did we go and speak in creative forums and respond to bloggers and tweeters who have a creative interest, but we also went to look at mommy bloggers and at kids who actually eat the product and tried to get them to get involved and respond to the brief, of which many thousands did.

So, to give you some top line result from this for your interest, we had, all in all, about 1,200 campaigns submitted for this brief, which was far more than we expected and ended up causing a lot of late nights for myself and the team. And, Unilever have actually recently just picked a winner. In fact, they were so blown away by the quality of submissions that they’ve taken more. They were planning to reward one print campaign and one TV campaign, and actually now are rewarding three and paying out more money that they had originally plan.

But, again, without the social media input on to this brief, I don’t think we would have gotten the level of submissions we had. Also, how we actually ended up choosing the idea, we looked to our community in terms of what process we would use to vex(?) and control those ideas. So, making sure that they were both along with us in the process.

And, that’s me, thank you very much, everyone.

Good Afternoon, everybody. My name is Andrew Gerrard.  I’m a social developmental media and consultant. Much of what were hearing um, at the moment is all about outbound social media marketing. I’m also interested in exploring the internal company culture of um, social media. And companies that are creating cultures that get social media, and, and use their staff and employee base to um, actually help promote their businesses. Um, that’s me, um, some of you may not be able to read this at the back, but it’s really just to kind of illustrate that, that companies really are already social today. I mean, whether it be around the water cooler, whether it be around the social club or the work outings or even just getting together for a drink on a Friday afternoon after work.

Companies are already, quite social in their very nature. But the problem is, that companies just don’t realize it. And they have these people who are starting to use social networking. And um, this kind of also illustrates the point about how there are people out there using social networks that tell them, doing it without the company actually knowing. And as you can see few of you I’ll read that for you, “ I knew a kid like you once, arrogant cockshore, thought you didn’t need to join a social network, then one day he just stopped existing.” And it kind of says, the point really, that companies have people who are starting to use social networks.

Whether you allow it, or whether you would embrace it, or whether you won’t be actively doing it or not. And, and this comes as a little bit of a shock to ah, the company, the corporate environment. Um, this is just a bunch of old dudes, um, saying, “hey, you know, what is this, um, Facebook and this Twitter, are you sure this is really gonna happen?” and um, the future man saying, “sorry to burst your bubble dudes but you asked yes, that’s the future.” Um, and companies really have to try and start to understand that their employee bases and their cultures have to start embracing social media internally, in order for them to actually be able to start externalizing it.

Little bit of more of a complicated cartoon for you. Um, Dilbert, I love Dilbert, and um,  “ Some of the Tweeter stuff that I’ve been doing is absolutely great.” Effectively what this is saying is that, um, you know, these two guys, um Dilbert saying to the boss, “hey look, why don’t you try Tweeter, so that we can follow you and we can be part of what you’re doing. Keep us updated with your very movement.” Of course, the payoff in the end is that um, they’re asking, “Where is your boy now? In the parking lot. No need to look busy yet.” So it kind of says, you know, that you have to be able to understand what your employees are doing, what your company culture is all about, in order for you to start getting the most of out it. And, and to start doing that, I started talking to clients and to people about finding the sweet spots. Finding the evangelists, the internal practitioners.

People who are using social media, not just for um, their personal life but perhaps they are starting to use it for business as well. Just a month wide organization rather than just going to marketing or the PR department and saying, “you’re responsible for doing social media, now go do it.” This is about trying to find the um, the hotspots within an organization where people are actually ready, willing and able to go out there and start doing um, some social media. Because eventually what happens of course is um, the organization as a whole would get it and the employee base and the cultures within will actually start to generate and feed your business. And you’ll start to feel part of the brand. Um, the culture that you generate for your company actually becomes a part of what you do. If you’re not just externalizing through social media, you’re actually embracing it internally. And your employee base would turn into a field of [inaudible.]

Um, some of you may have seen this um, particular graphic before, it’s the, it’s the blog, um, the post that the US Air Force used, in order to um, just check and find out whether or not you know, a blog is worth responding to, what kind of interaction people within the US Air Force should have with particular blog posts. I put this up as an example; really just to say actually they are some very surprising organizations out there that are starting to address this very issue. And it’s quite in sophisticated and material ways. And these by no means, are the only organizations. Um, I have actually got a list of social media policies and guidelines in a blog post.

It’s not mine, actually. I’ve got the um, I’ve got the URL, which I’ll be tweeting out for you on the hashtag of social governance, which lists out social media policies and guidelines. If you want to go and check those, um, and take a look at them and find out whether any of them are appropriate and modify them for your own purposes. Um, finally, um, a counterpoint to this is not to embrace it completely and to throw the doors open and just let’s start, start using Facebook and Twitter and Linkedn and whatever social media tools and channels they want to use. There’s got to be a balance between freedom and corporate governance.

I mean it’s quite easy to imagine that some types of organizations will probably more regularly embrace social media than others. Uh, you know, I’m not sure GCHQ would take too kindly to saying to their employee base, “Go use youtube and start uploading videos of what we do at work everyday.” I’m not sure that would work um, too well. And, and then the last point that I’m going to make before I finish is, that whatever the tools and the channels of social media are that were using for both external outbound marketing, internally this works as well.

So, I’m starting to encourage clients and organizations to start building internal social media platforms that they could then give to their users and say “hey look, here are the tools, here are the channels, here are the technologies, but it’s up to you to use it. It’s up to us as an organization within our culture to start using social media. And to start using it to promote our brand and our products and our services in a much more socially oriented way. Okay, that’s um my last slide, just um, to finish on. I have actually sent off a tweet string with the uh, the key points from that slide show. And the slide show is already up on Slideshare. If anyone wants to go and take a look at it, but I think um, it’ll be up from mash up, anyway.

OK. So, I’m Giles, I’m from Ogilvy. I’m a digital strategy guy and I work across the whole of the Ogilvy Group. We’ve got 17 different companies within the Group, and that’s everything from to Ogilvy PR to Ogilvy Advertising, OgilvyOne which is direct marketing, a health care, and a bunch of other stuff. (Is it the middle button? Here we go.) The reason we do that and the reason I work across all of those companies is that digital for us is not silo and it’s not a separate company or a separate discipline but it’s actually fundamentally part of everything that each of those companies do. So, just as you can do brand building offline, you can also do it online. Just as you can do reputation management offline, you can do it online. That’s exactly the same for whether it’s mobile or whether it’s social, just as you can use social tools to do brand building, again on and offline. [xx] screen, so you can kind of drop me into some sort of adventure, [xx] you cannot do that. OK. So, the way that we kind of approach both digital and social and mobile, and all the other kind of channels that haven’t necessarily been invented yet, is we have kind of a discipline head. So, it’s the discipline that you understand and the business [xx] that you’re looking to achieve, but you do that very much with a digital heart and with a social heart. So, understanding how people are changing and how digital is fundamentally changing the relationship between brands and their audiences. Then, you execute that against multiple channels and multiple techniques. So, we’re saying that an approach is that social is not a channel, it’s actually much more of an attitude. Therefore, we need to define how brands need to behave in the social media. Now, at the moment, that tends to be slightly separate of how they behave traditionally and through traditional channels, but they will come a time when actually they’re going to be exactly the same thing. The way that brand behaves will be both social and across all other channels. And then we think about how we deliver the brand socially, and this is a kind of evolving construct, it hasn’t been designed particularly well. But, we have kind of five key pillars, and what we’re saying is social can be applied across the whole of the marketing funnel, it can be used against every single discipline. But pretty much, all of the techniques and all of the things fit in to this structure. A few people have kind of talk about these techniques in various different ways. The first is that kind of passive listening, so that’s obviously monitoring online conversations to gain insight, to help inform your strategies and your product development. The next stage is active listening, going out and asking people what you should do, what your campaign should be, what your product should be. The next one is identifying the key influences and influencing them, kind of a big part in the middle is about campaign amplification, so using word of mouth to accelerate traditional advertising campaign. And then the final piece is social as a destination platform, it’s your own platform whether that’s on something like a Facebook or a YouTube. So, what we’re finding is social media, all of the activities that we’re doing, kind of fits into this construction one way or another, or it currently does. But what I want to talk to you about was one particular example that use a number of those pillars, and that was for Lenovo. Lenovo, for those of you who don’t know them, are a Chinese company that bought the laptop and PC business from IBM a few years ago. They’re a big sponsor of the Beijing Olympics and they wanted to go out and kind of announce the fact that they were a clever company, they want to make people aware of their new products that they were coming out, but also to give very much a kind of human face to the corporation. Question: [xx]. Speaker: [xx] I think, it’s something, don’t worry. So, when you think about doing a campaign to announce this in, possibly the kind of most restricted media environment of China and one of the most tightly regulated kind of events in the world. The Olympics has actually becomes quite difficult to think about how social can kind of play a role, especially as they got access to a number of the different platforms that we will traditionally use. But what they did do is, early in 2008, they say, “Actually, we’re going to allow the athletes to blog so they connect with their families and tell their families what they’re doing.” So, what we actually did was rather than go out there and say, “This is Lenovo, and this what we do, and this is how we do it,” what we decided to do was to empower Olympic athletes to talk about their experiences at the Olympics. We [xx] this whole campaign which is called “Voices of the Olympics,” we identified and selected a hundred Olympic athletes, we reached out to them and said, “We will provide you with the training and the technology and these fantastic new laptops and mobile phones and cameras if you will talk about your experience at the Olympics.” So, I think, we had 25 different countries, 27 different Olympic sports, and eight different languages. We reached out to these guys, we trained them in everything, and then we kind of let them loose. What kind of came out of that was an incredibly authentic and unmanufactured version of the Olympics. Until the Beijing Olympics, actually, all Olympic coverage had to go through the broadcaster or the partner, or in fact, the Olympics themselves. So, what we’re able to do was give people a brilliant insight into what it was all about. We did a number of things. We, obviously, set them up with their own blogs, their own Flickr channels and YouTube and various things like that, but then we also aggregated all of the information. (I’m not going to get the video online, damn it). There’s a link up there to the video, it does a nice kind of synopsis and case study along with the statistics as well. But, we aggregated all of these information and then we looked to amplify that. We amplify it with paid media, but we also looked to identify key bloggers in a variety of different areas and contacted them with the campaign as well. Pretty successful, we drove over about 10 million social media impressions, we got 1.4 million people going to the Lenovo site itself. We had about 10,000 pieces of original authentic content generated. So, incredibly successful campaign that actually tapped into pretty much every single one of those five pillars. Before, we mentioned that they’re using social media internally as well as externally, and [xx] kind of a fundamentally changing how we do business and we’re using social media to do that. We’ve kind of beta testing this at the moment, which is Ogilvy BrainZ, where we have connected all of our offices globally, every single company, and across kind of multiple disciplines. Someone post up a problem on them, we crowdsource solutions from inside our own company, which is incredibly efficient. We’ve also got a black book, which is a black book of supplies, and we have [xx] fair of supplies. We have all the details on them and they put out the campaigns that they have done, but we also write them. So, if someone has gotten his job [xx], it’s a viral seeding company, they find one and they find that, actually, they’ve done a brilliant job and here’s the report. So, we’re using social media to kind of fundamentally change, not only what we produce, but how we go about producing it. The one that we need [xx] is the 80/20 rule, that’s what we tell our clients. A lot of them are very skeptical about going to social media and trying innovation and new things. McKenzie came out with the structure 80% of the time he do the things that he know work and work well, 20% of the stuff is about well-structured experiments. That’s where a lot of social media fits currently for our clients, as soon as you prove…

Okay, so off we go. Hold up your hand if you said wait please. Half of you sure, I have got a job today here. Right so how does it work guys? [some one enters] Okay, so who am I, I have got a few personal tags; I made that after studies today. I am the Founder and Chief Executive of the company called Brand watch Repulse Monitoring Company. We have been doing, we have been around for about 4 years for the product launched 2 years ago, 2 years of R&D before that. We monitor the web and we analyze what we were saying in the social media and in the news. …. and I am getting attached to November, and I am really regretting it in a big way. But if you want to sponsor me, please go to November and search for me. Okay, so over there, over there , sentiments so why…I would talk about sentiments ……sentiment analysis …part of it we do at Brand watch so I reasonably qualified to talk about it. Why is it important? It’s important if you imagine internet is the world’s biggest focus group. People have said this before. Lots of people communicating, talking, throwing comments out there, if you could figure out what they were talking about and understand it, it would probably be a very useful resource and also you know asking them questions just kind of listening which you say is biasing, biasing it….in particular if two people ..I just picked up a couple of …this one is going to be interesting …This is Gordon Brown speech last year, ..Before and after in social media, before and after in professional media. Basically professional media news there was an increase in positive sentiment…and with social media there was an increase in negative sentiment which is going to be interesting. (01:42) And I think that reflects the way we feel about Gordon, we are not really that kind of warmth towards him already, but in view seem to be more so…also companies like it because its predictive this is a chart we do for Edge online games magazines, biggest jump this was a few years ago now [xxx].2010. and sure enough [xxxx] 2010 was the biggest seller, couple would say so, so I am not saying it, it’s absolutely predictive but is definitely a measure. As Robin was saying first thing in the morning that, historically people talked about attitudes driving behavior actually does, his argument was the other way around behavior drives attitude which I think is probably true to an extent but I think attitude do drive behavior. You only will have to look at word of mouth marketing, review sites and more people saying about various things you ask. You have to get online and take a look at what other people’s experiences are and their attitudes tends to drive your behavior. So I think, I think sentiment and attitudinal data is pretty influential. So what I am going to do is I’m going to take a deep dive, which is the phrase of one of our clients … (02:55) I am really ….I am going to talk about simple analysis and how it works … take a deep dive which is one of our American customers use\age phrases I am going to use it much more in conversation. I think I will add something to that…to my…..inter sentimental analysis…first of all I am going to hopefully …with that is a little bit technical try and make it more….but…I’m going to say some stats we have got might be interesting here is the…. where is my picture ? …there is an image; there is a beautiful picture which shows … the web is 58% neutral…. Am so that’s we marked up and manually looked over 4 hundred thousand web pages in the last few years… cross section of different things …1000 different things people…places, politics, brands, products companies, and 58% of whole content is neutral. (04:00) 24% is positive and, sorry 28% is positive and 14% is negative if I remember correctly, which shows that we are as a kind of a race…as a population….this is in English language. Twice as I say something positive is negative….which am, which isn’t the case of news, right you don’t see that on the news [xxx]so interestingly when we talking in social spaces, we are more positive than we are than negative…. Which I can’t say that’s interesting. But when it comes to sentiment analysis there is a little bit subjectivity involved…same school….john on the left there and somebody else from…on the right, so same result same data, different take on the sentiment.,. and we did a so there is an element of subjectivity we all do…and we are going to test where we give a thousand pieces of information to two people and two native English speakers and variety of different topics ..So wasn’t just about one thing. The one person may be more positive about and the other…..it was a kind of broad reasonably, I think reasonably scientific controlled test and we found that people agree with each other 85% of the time when it comes through three. Three bucket sentiment things positive, negative and neutral so there is some, that is interesting…here is some stats that we pulled out of the system yesterday ….over here we have got the volume of conversations…October, English speaking web, the volume of unique mentions ranked by the top to bottom, see who comes on to top [xxx] that’s surprising [5.44], European Union edging ahead Barrack Obama he would probably be too pleased about that… Windows.7 jumping right up there…and if you add in volume…sentiments. So this middle column takes a count of the sentiment of the posts…Google still coming on top, Microsoft amazingly jumping from fourth to second. Microsoft would be pleased about that. Sony jumping too from eight to third, eBay doing pretty well Barrack and EU drops to the bottom probably because of a lot of; Beatle is unbelievable they are still coming in the top 15… And if we look at just center … this is the average sentiments score and it goes up to ten. For everything on the web (Bridgton) comes on top. which is kind of interesting hurry up probably because we say fabulous…most right … [xxx] comes out for fifth, which seems completely wrong and I will come back to that in a minute. I so it little….you think ….that’s my favorite add [xxx] pointing up in the air. .I just love that…so… I found that last night… how you measure as I said I am going to get boring now. How do you measure the sentiments of millions of web pages, you could get crowds of it, you could go to ….Mechanical Turk.if you go to there is some other…..doesn’t want to be part of the crowd…and you can get people….you can give them bits of text and you can make them say negative, neutral positive….in our experience you have to pay reasonable amount money to do that (07:18) We tried it we offered 5P for people to mark up a paragraph as positive negative neutral with respect to a particular brand of keyword and we found that we we got…pretty shabby results back because 5 P wasn’t enough so people just kind of clicking everything. So you got to pay reasonable amount it’s slow, it’s inconsistent you got to you are using different people around the world …train them potentially and is expensive. So by calculations 10,000 articles will cost about about 2 grant, which is part of money so can we use machines well…..yes we can we do… and reliably, kind of and how to do. Okay you use artificial intelligence you use software called machine learning software basically you teach the software, you teach the program to do what you do…to do what I should be doing with you….so you decide what text to feed in. and of course if he has got a web page which is talking about different things, which I’ll show you in a second…and you have got to make decisions which part of that page to feed in to the machine to ask it to do some sentimental analysis you got to train it you got to basically tell the machine, show how to do its job before it does itself and you got to keep doing it again and again it is not quick, it takes a long time. So here’s a page, this is just a random page that I pulled off last night, talked about the iphone loss .so if I was doing sentimental analysis on the iphone.,.,,. I probably put that whole page in. There is some bits here which don’t necessarily talk about it but I think that is probably all about the iphone, whereas this page is a forum and there is a few little mentions down here and this page goes on and on and on. so making a decision about which part of that page is talking about the iphone is a lot harder. (9:01) How do you then train machines, one minute, half minute, 20 secs, Jesus Christ! So you basically have to get somebody to do it first…also take this machine to millions of [xxx] and then it gets reasonably good at it and you can’t do a foreign language this is all about statistics. We have done it we have got 6, 50,000 mentions that we marked off across 60 different industries because the language which is in different industries is very different.. online games is different…it is very different, insurance for example and you cant get roughly 75% accuracy figure…that is bloody hard. So finally two things, the small volumes[xxx]because you can afford to pay for it…the larger volumes has got a big data set you have to do sentimental .analysis on it….you can use machines but is you can get the top 5% and you can look at it even better…so it’s a bit of a recap… and in the end we have got new product coming up…At the end of this month we are giving Away 50 [xxx] accounts so if you want one go to there are sign off[xxx]/4 . thank you very much.

Audio: .

Slides: Swine flu social media monitoring

Transcript:

So I’m sure you all remember the swine flu, there were alot of hysteric headlines in the press. But we had to make sure that there problems and messenging were getting through, the write messages to the public and it wasnt really reflecting these headlines and it wasnt reaching the right people in the right town. So we launched are comm strategy on the 24th byte pro and it includes its content across the major sites involving the nhs choices business link, and also the right activity like search mapped……(Sorry bulletpoints) But we decided to take swine flu and put a media on the trend…we wanted to highlight issues of concern that people were talking about online. Just to see if people were worried about swine flu in schools or were people worried about pregnancy and swine flu effects, or people with underlying conditions, or were the worried about it at all even. And we waitied to gage image response to our communications. So your all probably aware of the advert and things like that, so we were attracting things like that. And it was also good to counter miss information kinda around different media tunnels, like rumors circulating about the vaccine, that we’ll talk about a bit later. And it also helped discover new uses of data and other things from people around the social media space for an example there was quite a few good websites for swine flu, and things like that. And also gave just insight into general pandemic flu in relating to topics who helped to shape our? We covered these reports out daily and a mamber of our team at COI uses a report to produce the daily headline report that we circulate to give to our key state ? around government so thats people at the health department and health people at direct gov. And we look at sites like twitter blogger, and social networks. To see what people express so we see what people are talking about. It was a couple of tweets there that you probably cant read wondering whether they should get the vaccine and what’s going on with that. And all the tools we use are free, we don’t use any paid services, so we use like netvibes dashboard were we get rss feeds from relevant searches on twitter. And sites like trends wish provide great stats on websites like twitter. And also other sites like social mention and addictamatic. Ok, so what we’ve learned it’s helped to find stories before they’ve broken the mainstream press. For example a rumor started to circulate about the swine flu vaccine contianed a toxin that had been linked to gongunfon syndrome, and it doesn’t by the way. And that was first noted on US blogs on Aug 3. And it hit twitters and blogs in the UK within a week. But it didn’t hit the main press unitl Aug.23 and that was a story in the daily express. So we’ve been able to compile a list of vaccine myths, wicht the Dept of Health so they could then redefend their own press office or their websites. And I know in the campaign there was alot of chatter in the social media space about swine flu and pregnancies, and the Dept. of Health looked at what people were saying and they got the health secretary to do a quick chat on Moms net where he cauld answer some of those questions in the space were people were asking them. And in general it’s helped us keep our site up-to-date and relevant. So the Dept. of Health has learned that the monitoring accurately guages the public moods and it could done quickly and cheaply with the right tools. Social monitoring media on this scale has gotten people in my organization and working and its got people doing it on a much wider scale, using a range of different tools and its helping make our c? more effective. The monitoring parts have also made policy makers to take social media seriously, because we have been able to prove that news is breaking their first and not on the mainstream press and maybe and maybe traditional press offices see it. And most of all social media accurately reflects the public moods alot more than mainstream press does. So for example you say all those crazy headlines in the press about masquarades and all that, bloggers and twitters were actually alot more calm aboout the whole situation. And accuse the press of hype and hysteria. So alot of people kept a cool head and there was actually alot of swine flu jokes which you problem can’t read. Things like Yea I called the swine flu headline to do but all I could get on the line was crackling and things like that. So it’s certainly helped me keep a sense of humor. So that’s what I learned,…so ok.

Thanks a lot. You’d be pleased to know, I didn’t go to a public school and my name is not Charles. So social media isn’t all public school. You know, where’s the Charles’s in the world? Also can I ask is PR Uptley still here? Is he still here? Raise your hand? Oh, cuz I was gonna give him the award for Most Retweeted phrase to play. You definitely guess that one you know, old media: stick a celeb, on an ad. New media: Stick a celeb on the web. And was it social media? Stick a celeb on Tweeter. So, I thought was, I thought that deserved an award. I was gonna say “If you here, you know, round of applause for that” probably last which is, and I also realize I can’t compete with Robyn White cuz I watching the back channel, everyone is been talking about Robyn White’s clothes and as you can tell, there’s no point in me even trying to compete with that.

What I am going to do is talk about Social Media in Government. Quick straw poll: Who works in the public sector? Or has anything to do with the public sector? Ah okay, a few, so, this may come as a surprise to the rest of you, which is, that actually, possibly the UK government get social media. And that’s what we’ve heard so far, just from the ah CRY talking. And also, you know, the UK government in some ways as shocking as it may, may sound have been early adopters of social media. The reference point being Tweeter, Number Ten was on there way before most of us were, if we were honest and they now got a million and a half followers, their number Forty Nine in the global list of the top ranked Tweeter sites. That is higher than any other political site other than, other than one individual, which is Barack Obama.

Um, so they’ve done incredibly well. They’ve got you know, very, very good stats. If you look at their stats in terms of usage and they were really early adopters. So, political government do actually get social media. This is probably one of my favorites, I should say I have nothing to do with this, um, but I really like the way NHS direct Tweeter. Um, they do really timely kind of tweets. And they, and You know so this one, we’re here all night, sleep well, would come probably about twelve o’ clock at night or one o’ clock in the morning, cuz if you’re sad enough like me just don’t be online. They send you a little tweet, things like “what’s keeping you up at night?” Again that’s one that comes late at night, because they recognize the people are there.

They respond to individuals and one at the bottom there for the morning after the night before we’re here. That came on a Saturday, ah no a Sunday morning I think it was, after the Saturday night. So, what they know is people might have been out, had a bit too much to drink and they blurrily checking out you know, their, their tweeter feeds and NHS Director just basically saying “We’re here.” I think it’s just a very nice use. Anyway, you heard a lot today about the use of social media to communicate. What I wanna to do very briefly is talk about whether or not you can deliver services using social media. And here’s an example, of delivering services to parents, which is something that my company did. The public has been helping the Department of Children’s School and Families to do now for a couple of years.

So, this was before Two Thousand and Seven, I think, I, I don’t wanna characterize it too much but certainly the department, the bigger the department we were working with, which is the families bit in the department was, if you needed some help as a parent, and anyone who is a parent, would know at times, we all need help. Um, but if you needed help, the way that they would fund that was to get people to pickup the phone. Um, and you know, sort of, you know, they would fund thirtex organizations and they would say okay, you know, “you can telephone help lines, just pickup the phone.” However, one of the things that they realized is that the world has changed. It’s one of those ubiquitous kind of shots you see about social media. But the social media landscape has changed. And the other thing they realized is that actually, some groups of people don’t like picking up the phone and asking for help.

And again, I don’t wanna make a sexist statement, but men generally are harder or find it slightly more difficult to ask for help then perhaps women do. If you disagree with me, I would like for you to consider the last time you went driving with a man in a car and got lost. Because women, and I, I would say you could call me sexist, but in my experience a woman has, finds it slightly more easy to roll down the window and ask somebody, “Excuse me, where are we?” But a man who will insist that they know how to read a map and I don’t know all the sense are gone wrong or whatever else it is. And what they found is, that overwhelmingly, of about ten million parents who we got in this country, about ninety thousand people were using the telephone help lines. So, that’s not a lot. And most of those people were mothers, not dads.

Partly because, it’s harder for a dad to admit that you need help, which is why we worked through the department this sort of thing.  Well, actually, how can we develop new social media services, which would allow dads to access them in a way that’s just slightly more anonymous. So, we launched the Innovation Fund. One of the things we didn’t do was say to the department, “You know what? Social media is really cool, why don’t use setup a website, DCSF, help parents, and kind of do this kind of stuff and really engage with them, cuz what we realize, is that actually, not a lot of parents actually want the government to tell them how to parent.

They might want help and advice but they don’t necessarily want it directly from the government. So, we did it, we said, “Why don’t use launch an Innovation Fund? Why don’t you talk to the people, you actually already have contacts with parents.” And we launched the Innovation Fund, and we said to the third sector, and we said to the private sector, “come together, you third sector people that all know how to engage parents. You private sector people are doing social media, “ come together,” here’s the segments that we’re interested in. We’re interested in particular groups like BME, families, or it might’ve been you know, uh, parents of teenagers, and all this kind of stuff we said, “ this is what we think we know about the way they use media, go experiment.” So, we launched the Innovation Fund.

And we worked with some familiar names; many of you would have heard of uh, Mitt Mums. And Mitt Mums is you know, a forum that was setup by mothers themselves. It wasn’t funded by the government, and it was setup as a peer support network. How many people actually use or are members of Mitt Mums? Oh, not many, okay. Well, I am, even though cuz dads can sign up too. And what they found was actually parents would support each other, “I have a problem with my kid, I don’t know what to do?”Dadadadada. But every now and then you get a mum coming up to the phone and going, “ I wanna kill myself, or I wanna kill my kid.” And they’re not donkeys, they’re not like, “I really wanna kill myself.” As in “I really do wanna kill myself, I really don’t know how to cope.” And other mums would just kind of go, oh, ah, “you really need to talk to somebody.” Because they’re little bit out of depth for a normal forum. So, one of the things that they do, is we funded them to do this, lent mums parent supporters, which basically, put, health professionals online so that when those kind of really serious issues came up in a forum there was someone who is professionally trained who could respond to that issue. And this was an idea that we didn’t, you know, great to say, you know, “we are the clever guys who came up with it.” We didn’t. Net mums came up with the idea. Based you wanna work your partnership and, and deliver this thing and we thought “fantastic idea” and we funded it.

We also went with organizations like uh, Paramount Plus who setup a new site, this was a new site called Got A Teenager, in which they started from scratch. And within a year, they beat the targets that were set in terms of how many people to contact it, by three hundred and fifty one percent. So, they showed that there was a demand for these kinds of services. I might’ve worked with some people that you might not have heard of, but this is an organization, again a thirdex organization called SPAN (The Single Parent Action Network.) They setup a social media site and they got a hell of lot of people using it. So, did it work? Yes it did.

Ninety thousand parents are accessing support services before. Within a year, two point four million parents have been reached. And of that lot, seventy four percent have never accessed parenting support before. This is what they told us. So, we carried out evaluations. And seventy two percent of the dads were new users. So, the demand was there, it actually worked. But not everything worked. We setup a couple of pilots using SMS. We thought that might work, text message support, actually we found it didn’t. A whole of reasons why it didn’t work, I haven’t got the time to explain. But we tried it and it was an Innovation Fund.

And when you try some things, some things work, some things don’t. And we’re still learning, we’re launching new [inaudible] channels, we’re using old media, we do booklets, and we do new media, we produce DVD’s, and we syndicate content to the places where parents go. So, we’ve launched thirty-six films and syndicated out GMT Online Presence on all kinds of places, targeted to where parents go. Um.

I’ve been given this crazy title to talk about, Engagement in the Real World, and it’s quite a fuzzy title, so I thought I’d come at it from a different angle. Last night I was watching one of those late night television shows, those compendium shows which seem to be running twenty-four, seven on Dave, Deja Vu. And it was looking at, the look back over the nineties, the two thousands. And I thought, my goodness, we’re almost at the end of 2009, where has the last ten years gone? Ten years ago I was back in Australia getting ready to watch the fireworks from Sydney harbor for the Millennium celebrations. Ten years ago I was working for Telstra trying to get people to understand that the Internet was a great thing. In fact, who here is old enough to remember this noise? Brings back some bad memories, doesn’t it? But just ten years ago. Shush. But just ten years ago we were hearing that noise and being frustrated because that meant that we were going online. I even remember doing a webcast, which probably four people watched in Australia, about why you would have ADSL and you’d be always on and always connected and why businesses would benefit. But a lot has changed in ten years. And even two years ago, if I had a problem with a brand or a service, I would tell my next door neighbor, I might write a letter to the editor and hope that it wouldn’t offend his or her publishers and they might print it. Today, and we’ve seen it now, I can tweet my dissatisfaction from where I am. I’ve been spending the last twelve months really talking about the value of mobile, and one of the benefits of mobile is, it’s available at the point of creative impulse, which also means, when I’m upset, I can tell everyone about it. When you’re on hold to a call center, no one hears you scream. When you scream on Twitter, everyone hears you scream. And that is absolutely fragmenting and turning a brand world upside-down. And many of you are here, either because you’re interested in social media or because someone has sent you because this social media stuff is really starting to influence the way we do business. The other problem we’ve got is that no one is going to University and doing a social media degree. I know that, because my local Starbucks barista, Laura, is doing her MBA and out of interest one day, I said, Laura, are you learning social media subjects. And she said, no. Not surprising. She has two years to go. So even when she graduates, she’s learning the old way of marketing and advertising. And last night, for a joke, I pulled out my old MBA marketing textbook. It’s about this thick, it was covered in dust, and I was looking at all the ways that you market and advertise to people. And for a brand, or an agency in some cases, marketing advertising is all about shouting and telling you why our product is better than the other one. And that is wrong. Social media interrupts that massively. And so you have to look at it in a different way. And we know that. So. I always show a cartoon by Hugh McCloud in my presentations. This is my favorite at the moment. You’re a social media specialist. Wow, I’m one too. And the thing that really upsets me is that everyone is saying they’re experts and no one can be an expert in this space, because no one has been taught it. And we’re only starting to experience it. People say social media is hard. Social media is real life. After the next two presentations we’ll go out and have a drink. You watch what happens. We’ll form into groups. People we know, we’ll gravitate towards. People we think we’d like to talk to, we’ll gravitate to, and we’ll form all these little groups. And some of us would like to influence our product or service on them, so we’ll go and seek them out and talk to them. This is the real world. And so, when a brand says, we’re going to start engaging and influencing, they’re not trained to do that. So, this is why it’s hard, and this is why a conference like this exist. The other advice I have is that, if someone is coming to sell you social media, check them out. Have they ever worked for a company of your size? And, have they ever held a role that you hold? The reason, being, is, you need people that feel your pain. This morning I was with a very large financial company. I should have said, also, I’m now working for a company called Visible Technologies, that do social media listening. So, I’m actually talking to brands about these problems. And this financial services company has some massive issues around compliance, what they can and cannot do. They keep running into the legal department. At Telstra, we call them the business prevention department. Sorry, if you’re here from legal. But they, their job is to make sure that people don’t get sued. And social media is a massive headache for internal compliance people, and people like first direct, because they have to go through all the hoops. So I feel your pain. But it’s important, if someone is going to help you through, that they also have to have felt the pain before. So it just annoys me sometimes that people that haven’t been through it are saying it’s just easy to throw up a Twitter page. Easy. Yes is it. But then you have to engage. And that’s where, we’re going to talk about that today. So, why are we here? A guy called Dave Edwards has this three sentence explanation of social media. And I want to read it out, because it, when I read it, I just read it three or four times. It absolutely solidifies what social media is and what the challenge is for all of you. Marketing sets the expectation. Marketing creates demand. Marketing helps the consumer differentiate why one choice is better than another choice. That’s a given. Operations delivers. That’s your customer service, that’s your outbound people. That’s the people in the trenches, at the front high street store. The people that engage with the public. I have yet to see a lot of negative tweets about that latest marketing campaign. Oh, the lighting was awful, the color fuchsia wasn’t used properly, but, boy oh boy, when you have a problem with Vodaphone, or O2, or BT, or your financial provider, you tweet about it. So what we see is that any gap between the two drives the conversation on the social web. And I think this sums up, where we are today with social media, perfectly. Because you’ve got all the brand promise, it’s fantastic. And the poor guys and girls in the front shop have to deal with all the problems. And that’s what we blog and tweet about. So, in a way, you actually want to spend more money here and enamoring your troops to be able to respond and engage. And that’s the hard part, because there are lots of people that make great TV, and I’m not suggesting we ever stop doing that, but we need to support the guys and the gals on the front line. And with social media it becomes a lot harder. It becomes a lot harder because you need to look at, sort of, four rules. And I look at them as: listen, learn, engage, and integrate. I went too fast there. Listening. Now, listening is hard for a brand, because they’ve not been trained to do it. It’s not a criticism But all those people like me, I’ve been through marketing courses, were trained to broadcast. And, if you put an ad on ITV during X-Factor, lots of people will see it. Maybe not the right people. Then they’re going to talk back to you. That is the hard part, because brands are not trained, yet, to properly respond. And that’s where we need to help each other do that. So we need, first of all, to listen. What are people saying about us? And we’ve talked today about monitoring tools and those sorts of things. Even simple free tools tell you what people are saying. And every time I show a client what’s being said about their brand online, one hundred percent of the time, they go, I didn’t know that. Or, that’s my staff, what are they tweeting about? When you start listening, it’s going to get ugly, because for the first time in a long time you’re going to hear comments that you normally get back through market research. [?] it’s a six week cycle. And I’ve got two minutes left. Which is great. Because I’ve got about two minutes left to go. So, listening is really hard. And, for example, I plug into one of our tools. Orange iPhone, yesterday, when the iPhone launched. Just a random selection. Someone said that no one was in the Apple iStore [?] and it was a PR failure. Someone said, how long will the queue be? Someone said, they’re going to switch. These are things that, to a brand, can be quite challenging, because people are now throwing bricks back at them and they don’t know how to handle that. So we need to learn, what are they saying, and why are they saying it. Did we muck up in the campaign? Did we let them down in customer service? Did we under-promise something that we should have done? And then, engaging. And that’s the hard part. But I liken it to, I liken it to, in fact what we’re showing here, just quickly, is influences. How do we find who to engage with? And the experiment is, when we have drinks out there, you will naturally find who the influences are, who you need to talk to to get your point of view across. That’s a natural reflection for human beings, but for brands, they don’t train to do that. It’s just like real life. This is a picture that could have been taken tonight. You’ll get in groups and circles and you’ll gravitate. You watch tonight how it happens. This is the real world. Social media is the real world, just there aren’t a lot of rules around that. So brands need to learn how to talk back and engage, and that is not easy, but if you get it right, the blogosphere, the twittersphere, will reward you. And that will tell you how great a job you’re doing. And I can give you hundreds of examples over drinks. The final thing is integrate. Social media will become part of every company’s DNA, just as email is. Two weeks ago, our corporate email was down for a day. It killed us. What do we do without our email? What I’m suggesting to clients now, is asking, can you give us your social media credentials. Can we tell you your Twitter name. And, if I know why you’re going to use it, I’ll give it to you. Two months later, and I ring to complain with Vodaphone, who are one of my suppliers, found, ah, that’s Andrew Grill, who’s also @andrewgrill, we’ve seen what he’s been saying. So, I think those that start to integrate what’s going on, with what you know about your customers already, will survive. And, guess what? That’s it. Thank you very much.

Audio: .

Slides: Social Media Monitoring Tools

Transcript:

Okay.  So what we’re going to talk about, quite simply, is, I’m not going to talk about why
social media is useful, what it can do, what it can’t do, how negative or positive messages
can spread, you know, virally, over the Internet in a matter of hours.

More specifically, I just, actually, want to, just, you know, I know a lot of companies are
here that talk about, sort of, services they offer measuring sentiment.  Talking about, you
know, tracking the number of blog mentions et cetera.  And, the truth is, they, a lot of
them do a very good service.

However, when I set up the company, it must have been about two years ago now, I
wanted to start tracking certain trends.  But all the companies out there were, to be honest,
charging quite a lot of money for what was, you know, for my small business, we couldn’t
afford it.  So I started to search, you know, what ,actually, is out there which is free and
also monitors things, perhaps not as thoroughly, but can certainly give me useful snapshots
about what’s being said about my brand and issues I’m interested in.

So, with that in mind, I just put together a, sort of, list of, essentially, the tools which I find
most useful, and all of these are free.  They’re open source.   I’ve got all the links there.
So I’m just, basically, going  to talk through a few of them and just tell you why I think they
are good, and, you know, why I think they can benefit your brands.

Okay.  So, starting off with the tool ScatterBrand overview.  I’m not going to dwell too
much on this.  If you haven’t already set up a Google Alert, you’re sort of missing a little
bit of a trick, but those of you who don’t know about it, quite simply, put in a few keywords
and you can get a comprehensive, sort of, daily email digest of brand mentions across the
Internet.  A very, sort of, top level, you can set up for once a week, or once an hour, even.

Similarly, social mentions, you know, sort of, very much, sort of a top level monitoring of
what’s being said about whatever keyword search terms you put in.  But, pretty much
across all the major social media spaces.  It searches, I think, over eighty plus platforms at
the moment.  And also, on the left-hand side, you can see, it, sort of, shows sentiment.

As I said, nothing as thorough as the sort of thing you can pay for, but it can give you,
relatively, sort of, a interesting idea about keywords associated with your brand.  However,
I wouldn’t go too much, and look too much in terms of what I said about whether what is
being said is positive or negative, because, to be honest, it isn’t particularly accurate.
However, it can give you a very interesting overview, and this is of where people are talking
about your brands.  You know, the first thing, as you’ve probably heard many times today,
before you have any social media strategy, you’ve got to listen.  And that’s because you
need to understand, where are people talking about your brands.  If you’re going to, for
example, talk about, you know, white vans.  You know, you work for Ford, you want to
sell white vans.  Are you going to set up a Twitter page?  Probably not.  Probably not
really typically your whit van man goes on Twitter.  So using tools like this, before you
start to implement anything, can give you a real idea as to where it is people are talking
about your brands.

To look at bit more at what they’re saying and a little bit more specifically into sentiment, I
use various other tools.  Of course, I do use some paid ones, to calm everyone’s nerves
whose trying to sell something.  But there are a few that can give you a bit more detailed
analysis within specific forums.

So moving on.  This is a relatively new search kind of engine.  It’s called Who’s talking.  I
really like it for searching networks.  It’s based on keywords, again.  You can put in the
name of your brand.  Use the example Microsoft there.  And it will, basically, mention any
kind of group or open, sort of, messaging on all the, kind of, typical, most popular, sort of,
social networks like Bebo, Facebook, Myspace, et cetera.  And, Tweetbeat, similar to
Google Alerts.  If you haven’t got one of these set up already, I’m sure you will shortly.
Same sort of thing, put in a few keywords, you’ll get a daily, or hourly, or weekly digest
of mentions of your brand on Twitter.  A very nice way to, basically, get information that
affects you without having to go to a different service.  It just comes directly to your inbox,
and as I said, all totally free.

Now it’s actually probably one of my favorite tools, it’s slightly buggy sometimes, but why
I really like it, is because you put in the name of your brand, use Sony there as an example,
and you can track, over time, whether it’s twenty-four hours, seven days, thirty days, ninety
days, or a hundred and eighty days.  And you can track the amount of Tweets that
keyword has got over that period of time.  In addition, you can actually focus in on those
certain days, so you can see, when there’s been a spike in interest in your brand on Twitter,
what were the Tweets that were being, you know, what were the Tweets of that day.  So,
for example, you know, in the Sony example, you can have a look at the Tweets underneath,
and it’s all, sort of, Beyonce and Lady Gaga’s video phone, apparently.  So, you see, that
was the theme of the day that made, that led to the spike in interest in Sony.  Likewise,
going out to Traffic Guru, for example, if you run it through this, you will see a massive
increase on a certain day, and in a certain hour.  And it allows you to see, essentially, what
was the main Tweet that led to a spike in interest in a brand.  So it can be a pretty useful
tool.

Moving on, just, very simply, to search Blogs.  There are various Blog search engines out
there.  I personally like this one, because it’s quite simple to use, very engaging, and, also,
the way it categorizes a search of blogs is based on the number of in-bound links which
works in a pretty similar way to Google.  So it just gives you a very, sort of, nice idea of,
if people are blogging about your brand, you know, what are the major Blogs which are
talking about it.  And this is a, also search Blogs, Trendpedia.com.  Search also will give
you a search list like Technocrati, but I don’t find it quite as useful because it categorizes
them by date as opposed to popularity, or the number of in-bound links.  But it does give
you the ability to compare search terms.  Or, you can put your brand in and that of a
competitor and see the number of mentions.  It won’t give you sentiment, but it does give
you a pretty, sort of, interesting overview of your brand in terms of number of mentions
on Blogs.  So have you seen there, put in David Cameron and Gordon Brown, as I
mentioned, not particularly popular, however, he is getting a fairly high level, number of
blog posts.  Of course, not so are positive.  But, anyway, interesting to note that he is in
the news.  Well, I assume he would be, he’s the Prime Minister.

Another one.  Forums and message boards.  And this is quite interesting, because forums
and message boards, really a sort of, I always sort of, finishing?  One minute.  Okay.
Forums and message boards, one of the oldest, sort of, types of social media.  Sort of
thought of the old bulletin days.  Anyway, still high, you know, still used by a lot of people,
personally I find them frustrating, but people use them and they do use them to talk about
brands.  You know, similar to the other searches, this tool basically allows you to track
conversations, in forums, about your brand.  And from the list it will create, it can allow
you to track a whole thread, a whole conversation and debate about a brand.  And it can
be really interesting to, you know, it gives a real valuable, sort of, market research into
what’s being said.  In addition, it allows you to run up to three search terms on the number
of mentions on forums about your brand.  So I just chucked in a few example there.  And
you can track anything up to, I think it goes back six months in time.

So, that’s pretty much it.  I just wanted to do something quite quick and just to give you
something tools.  You know, there are thousands out there.  These are just the ones I,
personally, find really useful and which are free, that is.

Audio: .

Slides: On the horizon of a real-time networked society

Transcript:

So, I’m going to talk a bit about the real time web.  Which is, sort of, what everyone is
seeing up here.  Everyone talks a lot about the social web, where you actually look at
individual relationships and networks relationships, and it’s great that people have talked
a bit about sentiment analysis, because that means that I don’t have to get into it.

We can see that we’re real-time, so those who are at the back can actually read the slide
[?], on the slide show.

I think the really great thing about the real-time web and about what’s going on now is
that it’s going to involve different business models than we’ve ever seen before.  Certainly
different business models from what we had in the twentieth century.  And, actually, if it
means we lose books like this, where it talks about dominating your market one Tweet
at a time, then it can’t come fast enough for me.

I don’t think you should dominate conversational media.  Sadly, I’m dominating here,
because there isn’t an opportunity for you to talk back.  Social media and the real-time
web are all about talking back.  So, let’s forget these crazy things about domination.
And, if we forget about these things like domination, then we may well lose the idea of the
six-bladed razor, which, actually, only really exists, because there’s this, sort of, arms race
between product and advertising all the time.

I, actually, want a much better future for the real-time web than thinking about how you
monetize it throughout.  I don’t think ads are going to be the interesting thing there.

I also want to get rid of this concept that a Emir [Haq?] talks about so really well, which is
the Zombie Economy.  Which is talking about making products that nobody ever really
needs and then persuading them that they do.  I think what we can start doing is building
a better world.  A better world where companies, actually, look at what they have inside
them, as assets, and they work out how to monetize those assets really, really easily, be
they [?] assets or others.  A place where charities are made more out of the people who
give money and do things for them than the grand PR plan.   And, a, sort of, place where
manufacturing companies can see if people want the things that they are going to build
before they build them, and, actually, know they have orders for them.  It’s not far away.

And what’s driving it is this massive amount of data.  You can see that we’re generating
data all the time here and the amount of it is enormous.  So there’s about four thousand
tweets per second on low day, on Twitter, generally.  And there are these massive fire
hoses of data that geeks like me can go and play with and stack up with things like
sentiment analysis and other algorithms and start mining them for interesting conclusions.
And, so, it’s a really unprecedented time.  We’re generating more data on a daily basis
than the majority of broadcasters and newspapers have ever done.

And, whats really fascinating is the thing that’s driving this data generation is this concept
of social.  It’s making things which are amazingly impersonal, like city life, into things that
are amazingly personal.  And if you dive down deeply enough, what you find is that this
social media we talk all about is, actually, very much like real life.  And it’s a lot more like
village life than it is about, like, city life.

And what you find is, that if you look at each of the individual social graphs that you saw
up here on that set of slides before, is that they’re about the same sort of size as a village,
they have similar relationships in them to a village.  But they’re a very unique village,
because they are a village that revolves entirely around you.  But I’m not so interested in
this particular village.  What I’m interested in is the sort of thing where you start zooming
away from the village.  So if you imagine you’re, sort of, pulling away from it, in sort of a
Google map style and you’re just looking at clouds of feelings and sentiments, this is the
thing that fascinates me.  And I think that it’s going to be the future in terms of how we
monetize this space.

So let’s take one really good example.  I’m really glad that nobody has shown this today
because I was rather scared.  But everyone knows Traffic Guru and the Guardian being
gagged.  And everyone has probably seen this image tons of times before.  But the thing
that really excites me about this is actually the things the Guardian couldn’t talk about, and
couldn’t talk about for a week or so after the gag was lifted, are talked about here.
Dumping, toxic, Minton, the Minton report.  This, on wiki-leaks, that the Guardian couldn’t
even mention for a week later.  And it’s being talked about on social media far faster.  All
you needed was a broadcaster to shine a light on corruption and people started finding
things.  And they do this for this very important point that Tom [Coates?] says really well.
We live in the age of ‘point at things’.  And that’s what social media is about.  It’s about
pointing at things: people, brands, concepts, organizations.  And what’s fascinating is to
flip that and start to understand what you can do with all of those pointers.  It’s a really
rich amount of informatics.

This, for me, was one of my favorite tweets from the day of [Cart Iraq?], talking about
media history being made in real-time, media censorship being futile.  It’s a lovely brave
new world.  And what we see all the time if you sit in an organization that has lots of these
tweets pointing at you, like I do in, sort of, parts of the week, when I’m in the Guardian,
is you almost see flocks and migrations of people through these social spaces re-tweeting.
We’ve seen it today.  And so what we really need to do is, sort of, try to understand how
we harness this and how we reflect it back out in terms of data that people can use and
monetize themselves.

What I really want to explore is, actually, what starts happening when we have the
real-time in the real world, because all of us carry around these things.  Most of the people
in this room do.  It’s not ubiquitous yet.  Not everyone in the country does it.  About one in
seven has a smart phone.  But you actually have a really unique collection of resources
within those phones to talk about sentiment and place and time.  And so you start to,
actually, be able to think of the world with a smart phone and the world of data as a world
where, actually, every individual citizen within that world starts to be a part of a sort of a
big, sort of, sensory organ.  It is a city.  It’s a kind of an abstract concept.  But we all
exhibit one sort of particular tendency, which is that we all exist in place and time, at the
same time.  And it comes back to me hoping that the future of lots of these services isn’t
advertising, because we could do wonderful things with being able to tell people about
where we are and how we feel.  But those wonderful things don’t normally involve getting
a voucher for a, sort of, restaurant that’s right next to us, sent to our phone.  That, to me,
is a bigger invasion of privacy than somebody knowing where I am.  But we can start
building wonderful things that are different from that.

I think a lot of interest comes from striping away, when you’ve got, sort of, geo-data, so,
data that comes from your phone.  So, I think, one of the next trends going forward is geo
and social together.  And start looking at phones like this as data objects rather than as
people.  It’s just a thing that I carry, it’s not me.  And one of the ways that I really like to
think about this is, is think about objects that also talk.  And one of them is ships.  So this
was a view out of an airplane window the other night when I was coming back from
Stockholm.  And these are all ships moored outside some of the ports. And I thought
wasn’t it fascinating if ships could talk.  And actually they can.  There’s a lovely sonnet
where all of these ships tell you about their GPS positions all the time.  They tell you where
they’re going. They tell you where they’ve been.  They tell you about what cargo they have.
If you can do that for a city, then, actually, you start getting really interesting things to do
with urban design.  The, sort of, whole idea of cow paths that you get through fields,
where people choose their easiest route through, you can start doing with the data that
comes through social networks and on phones.  And people are already starting to do this.
This is [? Thorpe], from Canada, who’s looking at people, saying, I’m arriving at, and then
an airport name, on Twitter, and he looks for their city of origin and then he can plot their
route for the world.

But you can do it another way.  You can tell Lufthansa what your Twitter ID is and what
flight you’re on, and they’ll then tweet for you when you can’t be there.  It’s kind of
interesting, this dichotomy of me tweeting as a thing or a thing tweeting as me.  And so,
I was kind of interested, a bit, about how you become a data thing.  And since I’m a geek,
and since I like walking, I decided to do it.  And I set up a different Twitter account and
I made up a mobile phone app that sent my position back up into the cloud all of the time
and I decided to raise some money for charity, a really lovely called [?].  And I said where
I was going on these walks and then I started telling the story of it.  And I told it semi-
anonymously.  I set up a different Twitter account.  And I sent back pictures of it.  Most
importantly, I sent back my positions all the time.  Why did I do this?  Well, I think there
are lots of situations where we do things very transactionally in the online world.  It’s
very binary, naturally.  And one of those is fund-raising.  Also looking at things like the
marathon and stuff like that.  And if you get a data-feed of this stuff, you can start to tell
your supporters where you are, I think you’ll actually do a lot more.  So I’d really want to
play with the marathon data now.  And it also comes down to a lovely thing which Matlock
said recently, which is that data plus time is story.  And we’re creating amazing stories
here.

So.  And people said some lovely things about how it could bring a trip abroad into your
living room, and also about how you could follow along.  And it’s very moving that it
became very bi-directional.  I was telling my data story and other people were encouraging
me when I felt tired.

So, coming back to my original thinking about wanting to look at places where organizations
were changing through this real-time web.  One of them is the Guardian, which is now
selling the raw materials of it’s articles to developers like me to make things out of.  It’s not
selling an entire newspaper.  It’s not selling a digital facsimile of it.  You can buy individual
bits of data.

There’s also a thread list, that we heard about earlier, which is taking submissions and
then only making things when it’s got a market for them.  Which is really important from a
sustainability perspective going forward as we run out of resources.  There are lovely
charities like [?] itself, that makes itself totally out of it’s supporters.  It lets them tell the
important stuff about what the charity does and how it does it.  And then there are
interesting things to do with swine flu trending.  There’s lots of leftover data on the web.
Places where people will search for things.  And if you start mapping where those searches
are, like Google can, you can see where there are potential trends to do with swine flu.  So,
actually, I think this new world is pretty much there, or is certainly just around the corner.

Thank you very much.