Facebook, YouTube and Wikipedia advisors are briefing Vatican officials and Catholic bishops about contemporary media at a symposium exploring the possibilities and dangers of the internet for the Catholic Church.
But looks like the Pope has beaten them to it…
And in the Facebook page fans head to head, the Dalai Lama proves the surprise loser in the popularity stakes.
Pope Benedict clocks a respectable 76,871 fans versus the Bodhisattva of Compassion’s… 3.
Holy head to head
I commend the Beeb and Rosa Monckton for their grim unflinching documentary revealing the pressures on parents caring for disabled children. These parents are faced with a government that is consistently generous to the idle and unmotivated in society, whilst scrimping and saving when it comes to helping parents who display incredible determination to try and provide a bearable quality of life for their children facing significant problems.
However, it was a little disturbing to watch a teenage boy clearly suffering for Tourettes being labelled by his parents and the documentary makers as having behavioural problems with elements of Aspergers, and being frequently sent up to his room for swearing.
Clearly I am no doctor, but for the duration of my university time I worked at a school for severly physically and mentally disabled children and it is very difficult to confuse the jerky uncontrolled movements and verbal tics of Tourrettes with just “acting up” or an Aspergers diagnosis. I would appeal to any doctors watching the show to try and get in touch with the family and support them and their son, as Aspergers would seem to be a very limited diagnosis for some far more specific conditions. The parents are taking the child for Cognitive Behavioural Therapy which is misguided when he would need specific help with Tourettes.
My only question is when will a similar site be created for Dannyl who strikes me as about as sincere as a used car salesman, instead of these guys who lets face it are a couple of rather eccentric enthusiastic kids having a good time. And good on ‘em I say…
http://www.punchjohnandedwardintheface.co.uk/
So blackberry turned off and battery allowed to run down…
Mobile being turned off…
Facebook will go unlogged onto…
Last blog post…
Maybe just the odd glance at Tweetdeck…
Below is a film shared by my colleague Steve during one of our weekly sessions looking at what is cool in the world of digital… check it out before you decide if me cutting myself off is a good move.
See you post Honeymoon!
My boss was sitting in reception early in the morning the other day and on greeting me he said I heard a great metaphor for social media PR yesterday. If PR is starting a firework display, then Social Media work is starting a bonfire.
And Dave Fleet advises: “Quick wins are difficult in social media and it’s often ill-advised to seek them. Social media works best as a long-term initiative.
We occasionally use (and wreck) a ‘rocks and sand’ metaphor when thinking about social media. You can have a jar full of rocks in it, but there are lots of gaps. To truly full it, you need sand to fill them. Social media is similar – you can have lots of big campaigns, but for your efforts to truly pay off you need the ’sand’ – the long-term foundation that keeps everything in place”.
For me Social Media is the local boozer, you have diehards who are in there every night. Brands are mentioned of course when people buy a drink (Carling, Fosters etc) or watch SkySports, but not shouted about, especially not irrelevant ones. New people sometimes come into the boozer, but they listen and observe until an appropriate topic comes up that they know a little about or can banter about, before they tentatively join the conversation with the regulars. Step by step they become regulars and so a little more confident. After they have been in the pub a few months they might even suggest to one of the old regulars they have got to know well, try the brand of larger which they drink instead of their usual choice. Bit by bit the whole table of regulars and newer regulars start drinking SM Beer instead of Carling and so the effect slow grows step by step.
But if Social Media is like the local boozer it’s bad news if you get your interactions wrong, coming in seeming too loud, arrogant and not relevant…
So this post is inspired by Mrs M, who saw me playing on tweetpic this afternoon (for fun, yes a little bit geeky behaviour in hindsight!) looked over my shoulder and saw my favourites bar that is full of different twitter tools.
She said to me “I bet if you listed all the twitter tools in your favourites bar some people might have a go at using them and find it useful”.
So here they are, explore and enjoy!
And my current favourite twittearth.com…
Measure that! You say you can't put a price on a view?... just do it.
OK, so we all know that we can’t put a monetary value on social media work very easily!
What can we do then? Well, measure social media work in other ways…
Number of contextual links in forums, online sentiment change, increase in branded chatter, increased referrers to a site, content views blah blah blah
In fact this was what “Digital Measurement Camp” I went to today was all about.
Essentially, dodging the question: “But what is the ROI!!?” Not dodging the question because social media work isn’t incredibly beneficial to brands and should be invested in, but because it is hard to measure in terms of a monetary ROI. But… Print coverage is hard to measure in terms of monetary ROI, but heck we do it anyway, even though the results are pretty meaningless.
The simple fact is the offline PR industry agreed a standard to measure ROI and even if this is incredibly flawed it gives a pounds and pence answer. So either we try and change our clients so they no longer want, ask, need monetary ROI results for social media work or…… we give them what they want!
Yes, you heard me, pounds and pence answers to our clients.
But there is no agreed AVE for social media coverage I hear you shout, and any attempt to create one would give seriously flawed results, how can you measure conversation and interactions in social media in pounds and pence blah blah. I agree, ideally you can’t, but maybe we simply must.
So lets make a choice either to create a system to give clients what they need (even if flawed!) or wish our clients didn’t need to justify budgets with monetary ROIs and give them every other form of measurement possible.
What option do you think we should work towards?
BTW Myself and Mrs M got married last weekend, now that ROI for me is off the scale, but don’t ask me to put it in pounds and pence.
Facebook still has not quite cracked how to create a global presence for a brand with a local feel in my mind. Every option has its frustrations or its costs!
It is crucial that international brands, whether they are Unilever, Motorola or Prince’s Rainforest Project should appeal to local audiences with their Facebook profile pages. One-way is building a “Your Area” tab on the brands Fan page. This means fans can view content from their local countries where they will actually be buying the products etc. The page can target normally up to 12 countries with the Your Area functionality, in the relevant languages.
There is know doubt such a page is far more engaging locally that just an English language page – that is not locally specific. For example you can have a News Feed with local content, featuring links, events and promotions. This type of page can also help local stores or promotions target their specific local fans. But the build costs to insert this functionality involve a significant financial investment, it is not just as simple as inserting html boxes onto the page as some brands do, which generally do not integrate local content particularly smoothly or allow for much local interactivity.
The other option is create separate but unified looking Facebook pages for each country whose audience the brand wants to reach, with click-troughs from one countries page to another’s. This is not so smooth, but a hell of a lot cheaper. Global Marketing Directors may like this less as they can’t collate all their brands Facebook users in one place, but the factor that can’t be overlooked is the need to create a genuinely local feel, rather than just a token local offering on a larger page.
New creatures- new philosophies
PR agencies tend to sell themselves based on being the best when it comes to one of the following things :
Creativity
Contacts
Audience (or business sector) understanding
Results (yes I’ve seen PR companies using simply “producing results” as their USP!)
Global or regional expertise
In the last decade PR companies and specialist agencies, which were able to, also sold themselves on the fact they did or understood social media. At the time these were rare outposts.
In fact, someone was interviewed on the news yesterday because her PR agency “advised clients on using twitter”, as if an agency doing this was still an extremely exotic idea.
But now we are entering an age beyond it being a USP itself (in this country) for an agency to provide social media services. So now social media departments, specialists and specialist agencies must speedily work out their key philosophy and selling point- in the way PR companies have evolved their communications philosopies over many years.
If my company’s philosophy is Brand Entertainment as a catalyst for great PR and audience engagement, with amazing creativity at its heart, how does that relate to the philosophy of our social media offerings?
Knowing how great your services are in social media and how talented the practitioners you have working for you, is very different from being able to set those services apart from similar services. And now is the time to do it.
I know the services my team of social media specialists offer is better than other places, because they are better and very rounded social media marketeeers, but that is just me saying that. And I’m bound to. But we all know that in marketing you need to get your philosophy and offering boiled down to a few words or a phrase- clarity is all.
We are now in a period where it is not enough to “do” social media, just like a PR agency needs a guiding principle behind its work, so does a social media offering. Times are changing, but anything that makes clients interrogate social media as rigorously, and treat it as seriously, as other forms of msarketing can only be good, especially if you’re good at it!
We just need to work out how best to sell the fact we are good at it— ideally in no more that five words!
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During a meeting on mobile phone brand Xs online influencer engagement program I got the news that I was an uncle. Needless to say the details of the online influencer program seemed pretty much the most important thing in the world the previous minute- the minute before I received that bombshell, or should I say “birthshell”. There are very few things that could possibly compete with the joy I felt knowing my older brother was at that very moment holding his new baby, my niece.
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