We’re always looking for new ways to broaden the Social Media Monday offering and I feel excited about the opportunity we have with video since we discussed it at the June event with @FatSand.

At the July event we was joined by video producer Nick Jones who kindly agreed to film and put together some video content from the evening, one is of our audience and some short intros/thoughts, the other of the presentation and the Q&A that followed… We’ll be launching the 2nd very shortly.

To kick us off, I thought it would be a good idea to show you a snap shot of what we’re putting together. (The SMMo team managed to avoid the camera…! Did you?)

Back in mid-May, at our Social Media Monday event in London, John Bottom presented details of The Great Content Marketing Experiment, a presentation come experiment that he was planning to articulate to 200 leading conent marketing executives on Wednesday 19th May at the IDM B2B Marketing Conference – He called it an attempt to ‘convince the sceptics’ that Social Media was a powerful tool in their market. You can download the GCME presentation ‘Convince the Sceptics‘ here)

Since the IDM B2B Conf, John has written a report of his findings and we’re delighted to present it below in the reader or as a download.

Content Marketing Experiment – BaseOne

“Every time you produce good content, you put up an online signpost to your brand.”

“E-books are designed to be visually engaging, using graphical elements to help in the understanding of the words.”

I hope you enjoyed the report.

At the July London Meet Up we will be hearing from Interaction London about measurement and insight in social media.

Sentiment and listening in particular grab my attention when this topic comes round for discussion. Surely it is just common sense? So common sense in fact all the “Social Media will save your business” and “if you are not on twitter you will die by the end of this sentence” people are so far behind they think they are first.

The technology available merely enhances our ability to do an even better job of what we were doing already.

I often find myself crossing swords with traditional sales people who do “cold calling -because that is what works in our industry.”
Really, the only reason they do cold calling is “because that’s what they do”. They don’t know any better because they are so busy cold calling they have not got time to listen to people.
I consistently strongly, passionately and adamantly argue that we should seek human social and interactive behaviour to engage with each other. This means less time wasted, less annoyed people and a more often than not a win / win. Most of you will know this as ‘permission marketing’.

Why I love Meet Up is not so much the technology is it the ‘sentiment, culture and community around the brand. “Use the internet to get off of the internet” is their tag line.

It is very easy to hide behind a phone an advert or a flyer; being genuine, admitting your mistakes and taking responsibility (or not as the case maybe) is more engaging and attractive to people because it removes doubt and develops trust so things move faster.

This is at both ends of the business spectrum. Big brands who try to cover over mistakes end up with egg on their face; or smaller companies and sole traders pretend they are bigger than they are “We work for major brands on product launches”. (You were giving out flyers at a school fete for Tesco you mean.)

My point is that honesty and trust works in several different directions, if we claim we are authentic we are cursed with instantly sounding Inauthentic. However, if we accept and practice honesty with no attachment we get some of the most valuable feedback ever and that sets us on the path to winning. It is easy to muster up compliments from people but takes a braver person or brand to go out and find what is being said and deal with it. While this looks a very unattractive route to take it is certainly where the real gold lies.

Jim Collins uses in an example in his work of how Johnson & Johnson recalled millions of products in the early 70’s from supermarkets in the United Sates and won major brand trust, whereas another company had a similar situation a few months later and only recalled one consignment – this company shut down a few years later.

Building a community of advocates is, quite possibly the most intelligent way forward. Way before we were glued to our Blackberry’s and iPhones the words ‘know like and trust’ were bounded around in business. I would venture to suggest that is even more prevalent in today’s social engagement economy – YouGov surveyed 80,000 UK adults and tagged 25% of them as the N – generation, (this is the subject of a later post) but essentially these people live online and are influencer’s, in a higher earning, disposable income bracket.
Of course you have to meet people to get customers; most of all you have to know what they are saying and how to engage them.
So… meanwhile back in the ‘Cold Calling Hell Den’.
“How many meetings have you booked this week? Any of them this new N-generation thing?”
“I have not got time to find out about that, I’m on the phone!”

Guest post by Bernie Mitchell

So now England are out of the world cup I am back to blogging, hello WordPress, it’s been a while.

Now BP are in trouble at the moment, oil is still spilling into the Gulf of Mexico, their Chief Executive (Tony Hayward) has been grilled by Congress, their share price has fallen by over 50% in the last 3 months and, well, everyone hates them!

Among those lining up to criticise are the social media gurus, pundits and experts who give some interesting advice on how BP should be using social to“attempt to humanize BP” or how it is “not easy to find their social presences on BP.com”. Meanwhile those using the monitoring tools are lining up to give us some valuable insight… namely BP isn’t popular – I don’t think the guys at BP need Sysomos MAP to work that one out! Hell, this even made it into the NY Times which did find some nice samples of content, namely “You can rest assured I will walk before I buy a gallon of your gasoline”. Now TechCrunch is pointing out that “social media has become the message” by discussing @BPglobalPR – a funny parody account.

But really, all the openness, all the humanization of the brand with flip cams (!?)isn’t going to make a difference, here is why:

1. BP’s share price has fallen due to a fear of exposure from large institutional investors who are concerned about how much MONEY BP will lose as a result of the spill and clean up / compensation that will follow
2. You can’t boycott BP and if you do you don’t hurt them – they are a B2B business that sell oil to refineries who refine oil and sell it to pretty much everyone from petrol providers to airlines to guys who make water bottles and other plastic, if you boycott their petrol stations you just hurt the local franchise owner
3. BP has always had an awful rep, they’re an oil company for God sake!
4. But maybe we can make a difference to the politicians, they will listen and then make BP pay, well maybe but Obama is keen to decrease America’s dependency on oil from the middle east, deep water drilling is the only option, he might improve safety standards and this will cost BP some money but no amount of social engagement or social media effort from BP will change that – people died, tonnes of oil was spilt
5. To engage and use social would be contrived and false, BP are bad, we know their bad, they represent everything most people hate about modern business and society, and so they are an easy scapegoat – so whatever they do they will get stick from us lot
6. What the hell would they do with social media anyway? Talk openly to people about how thousands of gallons of oil are destroying the gulf?
7. THE BIG ONE: BP’s customers (refineries) and investors (institutions) are not influenced in their decisions by social media – they are influenced by profit – end of.
8. Openness and social engagement with the public won’t make a blind bit of difference to their revenues, but will cost them money – why bother, the only way they will recover their social rep is by stopping the leak

So what should BP do? Well, fix the leak and don’t waste your time and money on contrived and useless “social efforts” like YouTube videos of Tony Hayward or anything else. Just put the info out there, on your website, make it really easy to find, and get on with your business. Use the usual channels that your customers and investors use to communicate with them and let the lobbyists do the job in Washington for you.

So am I wrong? Let me know…

Guest post by Tom Messett

Why are some brands still not investing in social media? Well, there is no one only reason.

First of all, they may be scared of putting themselves “out there” and “make a fool of themselves”, i.e. exposing the brand to negative commentary.

Secondly, it’s mainly because agencies are not providing them with a convincing measurement model that demonstrates the value of social media. A lot of jargon but nothing makes much sense. Then, there are reports with different numbers, but what do they actually mean? How do they know this can be categorised as success?

Print has been around for so long that is hard to believe how under scrutiny by advertisers is right now, too. But they have their metrics worked out. They have a formula, even if sometimes the numbers don’t add up.

TV is the master of advertising for the masses, having had the trust of all advertisers as being the mainstream medium of excellence. They have their metrics too, despite being based on sample audiences. TV advertising experts are, however, being asked tricky questions by their clients at the moment. Advertisers want to spend their money wisely. They don’t want to throw millions at the box anymore.

The problem with social media is that their metrics are nothing like print or TV and many agencies are struggling to create and re-invent measurement models.

So what are actually the metrics by which to measure your social media activity? First of all, before even thinking about figures, look at your audience’s behaviour and what objectives you aim to achieve.

What do you want to get out of social media?

Is it brand awareness? Are you launching a new product or trying to reach a new market? Then you need to measure:
• your share of voice in social media against your competitors
• the volume of conversation around the brand before and after the campaign (i.e. number of mentions, content pieces etc)

Are you re-launching the brand? Do you want to change consumer’s perception? Then you need to measure:
• Sentiment towards the brand before and after the campaign (e.g. % increase in positive sentiment, what is the brand associated to in conversations etc)

Are you trying to increase brand loyalty? Then you need to measure:
• Engagement: are users engaging with the brand’s programmes and content? Are they sharing it with friends?
• Advocacy: Are users becoming fans of the brand? Are key influencers recommending the brand to their followers/audiences? Are users/key influencers creating content for the brand?

So I say, if you can measure a cat, you can measure social media.

Guest post by Pilar Barrio

We was delighted to have Techfluff.tv join us this month at Social Media Monday in London, they sent their vlogger down to interview a few of us, which was quite well timed as the months event was on video in social media.

From humble beginnings of a networking group set up on Linkedin, Social Media Monday(which actually used to be Social Media UK), has grown to be a regular monthly event – marking the social media and networking circuit in London. Organised by the truly dedicatedBarry Furby (who actually has a day job running Fresh Resources), #SMMo has now got an official website and thriving meetup group of over 700 industry professionals.

This was shot on a Kodak Zi8.

Does “tweeting” mean you’ve figured it out? Does knowing how to “friend” someone qualify you as a modern marketer of the new advertising age? Hardly. In fact, reaching that lofty goal is less about the tactics we employ, and more about our overall approach to the complexities of the modern consumer.

Our jobs are becoming more demanding. Big businesses now operate in a multi-market, multi-lingual, and frequently multi-brand world. A world filled with commercial and cultural nuances. The modern marketers I respect are finding ways to address these nuances by developing cross-market and cross-brand efficiencies. They’re fostering smarter collaboration across teams, agencies, and disciplines, producing big brand ideas that transcend tactical executions and work in markets of varying sophistication, and they’re leveraging their scale to lower costs while focusing their marketing dollars in the right growth areas. All while producing great work.

My personal fascination lies in the fact that digital marketing — and at a minimum Internet based technology — is helping to drive this evolution. Digital marketing is at different stages depending on which markets you are working in around the globe. But in almost all instances, it seems to function as the great connector that helps to bring cross-channel experiences to the consumer.

Digital, once deemed complex and expensive by the rest of the advertising world, actually offers the ability to produce re-usable libraries of common tools that can be shared across markets and brands, empowering them to focus their budgets on brilliant creative ideas instead of unnecessary technology that had been used multiples times in the last year by other agencies and brand teams.

Social media monitoring tools can be set up for enterprise businesses and deliver intelligence to multiple brands across multiple markets at reduced costs while facilitating a deeper understanding of the consumer. Web based collaboration tools are helping to produce better ideas, faster, with equal input from brand agencies, digital agencies, and media agencies.

I’m not discrediting the importance of innovation. I’m the world’s worst culprit for loving new exciting platforms in digital marketing. I just think we need to step back and reevaluate what makes us pat someone on the back for being in a “digital master class” that understands modern marketing. Some of the biggest companies in the world who frequently get accused of being laggards are realizing how scale and digital marketing play VERY well together, and could form the cement in their global marketing initiatives.

In the end, modern marketers are putting their money where there mouth is and, as a result, giving their agencies what amounts to a thinly veiled, but no less justifiable ultimatum: show us results, the analytics to support them, and develop creative in a cost effective way, or we’ll find someone who can. We should all heed the warning. Those who don’t? Well, then they don’t know “tweet” about modern marketing.

post by Freddie Laker

On 30th September 2010, Social Media Monday co-hosts the Social Collective conference. We’ve an exciting line-up of key note speakers along side the #MAPmad debate, here’s snap shot about what its about!

There’s something not quite right with how Marketers, Advertisers and PR folk are using Social Media.

1. It’s fragmented! A tweet here. A Facebook page there. A widget over there and oh yeah! Let’s get a blog in place here.

2. What are we delivering? Followers? Traffic to a specific site? A conversation with a key stakeholder? What does any of this actually do?

3. We’re thinking short term instead of long term. Social interaction seems to be in good shape. We can find the right people. We have access to a plethora of tools to reach the right people. We have community managers chatting up the right people. But so what?

4. Creating real value for business: delivering sales or reducing the cost of business just gets you a seat at the table. It’s what differentiates the Social Media talent from those that don’t quite get it.

Join us at SoCol for the #MAPmad debate. We’ll quickly look at what’s not working before we open up the conversation audience wide as we discuss some potential fixes and collectively try to answer some very big questions.

Take advantage of our limited 50% EARLY BIRD ticket offer, tickets are selling fast and excitement is ramping up about #SoCol

Blog post by Shannon Boudjema

Last week i read Mashable’s How Social Media and the Web Helped Avatar Make $1 Billion, an article highlighting what is a fantastic Social Media case study that we can all appreciate has been a huge success. But what can be more interesting is to learn about the man that inspired the creativity behind the ideas and film making.

Below is a link to James Camerons talk at TED in Feb 2010:

James Cameron’s big-budget (and even bigger-grossing) films create unreal worlds all their own. In this personal talk, he reveals his childhood fascination with the fantastic – from reading science fiction to deep-sea diving — and how it ultimately drove the success of his blockbuster hits “Aliens,” “The Terminator,” “Titanic” and “Avatar.”

Whilst I concede that this isn’t exactly breaking news, but we all love a good stat and Social Media Revolution 2 gives us exactly that, I also concede that many of us are already converted and wise to the powers of social and the value that can gained from relationships and community online (and offline, I love a meetup..!)

The value that Socialnomics bring us in this case is an additional wave of excitement that we can share and pass on to our clients and those dipping their toe into the market, so lets draw some of these wow stat’s and anecdotes out.

-Facebook added more than 200 million new users in less than a year.
-If Facebook were a country it would be the 3rd largest in the world, bigger than the US, Brazil or Indonesia.
-80% of companies use social media for recruitment.
-The fastest growing segment is 55-65 yr old females.
-Gen Y & Gen Z consider e-mail passé.
-Wikipedia has over 15 million articles.
-There are over 200,000,000 blogs.
-25% of search results for the world’s top 20 brands are user-generated content.
-78% of consumers trust peer recommendations, of 14% trust advertisements.
-“Social Media isn’t a fad, its a fundamental shift in the way we communicate”
-“We don’t have a choice on whether we DO socialmedia, the question is how well we DO it.” Erik Qualman

And of course,
-Social Media has overtaken Pornography as #1 activity on the web…!

Take a look, Fatboyslim’s dramatic soundtrack makes #GEEK cool.

post by @BarryFurby