Now this is how to make a video!

For some, this has meant setting out a specific timescale – blogging Tuesdays and Thursdays perhaps. For some, this means blogging at least once a day, without fail.

“Yes, regular thought leadership – that’s what my blog needs!”

The huge rise of people blogging on a regular basis has undoubtedly changed the web. In terms of content consumption and generation specifically, I now read more content from bloggers than I do from ‘mainstream’ media.

However, with this rise we have begun to become a race of selfish writers, with many forgetting how to give back to the blogging community. Successful blogs began not just producing great content, but linking and communicating with other blogs alike. However, the bloggers of today seem content with simply writing and publishing their own content, without a consideration for the blogging community as a whole.

This draws bloggers dangerously close to the thin line between being the really interesting guy at the party, and being the one who just won’t stop talking about themselves.

When talking amongst a group of people, you may bring up a topic or two, but you may listen to five. So why not reply to five posts from bloggers you favour, before blogging yourself? If someone has already blogged about a topic you were about to write on, consider replying to their post rather than blogging yourself.

This has two benefits. Firstly, it’s likely that they will check out your blog, and return the favour soon. Secondly, a lot of blog commenting platforms allow you to hyperlink your name back to your blog.

I’m not suggesting you go around spamming blog posts with links to your site, which are likely to be deleted and blocked. Rather, spend the time giving back to the blogging community, and you will start to benefit yourself.

What goes around comes around!

So this year, my new year’s resolution isn’t to blog more. It’s to comment more. Let’s start to give back!

A simple site that monitors consumers bad mouthing brands on Twitter has recently launched, courtesy of three Australians, James Aviaz, Julian cole and Ryhs Edwards. Simplistic in its design, Twantrum uses Twitter’s API real time search to pull out mentions of consumer brands with anger-related keywords, and displays them for all to see.

Twantrum ranks the consumer ranting in four categories dependent mostly on the profanity used by the person complaining. These go from mild, to restrained, to angry, to Mel Gibson, which tend to feature all caps, a huge amount of profanity and a whole lot of anger.

Whilst Twantrum is for now just a bit of fun, it also highlights the very serious need for brands to be monitoring what people are saying about them on social channels, and to proactively engage with them.

The importance of reputation management

Research from the London School of Economics found that a 2 per cent reduction in negative word of mouth will directly boost sales growth by 1 per cent. Whilst this may not sound like much, dependent on the size of the company, 1 per cent can represent a huge amount of money.

Equally, Dell’s own research found that the average detractor costs the company $57, whilst the average promoter generates only $37.

Social media has enabled customers to discuss brands with a much wider audience, and the potential for a detractor to cause real financial damage is huge. Countless studies have highlighted that consumers trust the opinions of other consumers significantly more than marketing messages. Brands absolutely must be aware of who is talking about their brand online, of any complaints customers may have, and must proactively seek to create a positive shift in the mentions of their brand online.

Failure to do so is a risky mistake.

We often have clients approach us with tainted views of social media marketing, with the opinion that it is immeasurable, that it cannot drive quantified sales leads and thus is a waste of their time.

However, more often than not what we eventually find is that their experience with social marketing has been nothing less than experiential, and lacked the solid foundations needed for the marketing campaign to succeed.

The most important thing to do prior to implementing any marketing campaign is to first define your goal. Having a clear business objective is key to delivering a campaign that provides a measurable return on your investment.

Once the business objective is clear, consider how social media marketing can support this goal. Measuring the effectiveness is actually the easy part! One of the benefits of social media being digital is that, through the correct use of website analytics you can track back online sales to find what originally led the consumer through to the site in the first place.

Social media marketing is measurable and quantifiable – and both myself and the team at Receptional can help you realise just how social marketing can help meet those objectives of yours. But you absolutely must have a business goal in mind before you jump in.

The President of the United States, Barack Obama has joined Google+.

Actually, Obama’s presence is in fact a brand page run by his campaign team as appose to the President himself, but his arrival is no less prominent.

If the Obama election campaign of 2008 taught us anything, it was the power that social media marketing can have in an election campaign. Social media allows politicians to get in front of the demographics who wouldn’t necessarily watch the usual channels – question time, or party political broadcasts. We’re no doubt in a new age of communication, and politicians (much like brands) need to learn to adapt to reach their audience.

I thoroughly expect to see a great deal more social marketing from all UK parties in the next election. Each major party in the UK all have dedicated marketing teams, but neither David Cameron, Nick Clegg or Ed Miliband are using social media marketing to its full potential.

Google+ and Politics

The most exciting potential for politicians to interact with constituents in my view is through hangouts – an ideal medium for politicians to show an unscripted, and thus seemingly more truthful conversation. Perhaps a hangout with Cameron and Clegg discussing solutions for the housing shortage, or other key topics?

Social marketing provides a platform for politicians to show a personal side to voters, and reach constituents directly. Whoever takes full advantage of this will be in good stead to win the next UK election.

Via TheNextWeb

The panel highlighted the sad truth that there are a lot of PRs who don’t appear to understand basic human communication, evident in their contact with bloggers. Unfortunately, this is the sad truth within the PR industry as a whole. To be any good at PR does require the very highest level of communication skills, something I will write about in the near future.

In reference to some of the best practice tips the panel highlighted, I do have a few thoughts to add.

I agree with the need for bloggers to be open and honest with their traffic statistics, but only if the blogger is either being paid, or receiving something in exchange for writing. There are a number of great tools that can provide backlink information and traffic stats, such as Majestic SEO*.

I don’t believe that PRs need to get to know bloggers on a personal level, but they are right in that, much the same as if you were to target a journalist, you need to know the publication or blog, its content and its target audience before contacting them.

I agree again with the need to tailor the angle of the story, something that agencies should naturally be able to do when selling into any publication, always answering the question of why is it relevant to their audience. However, there is the argument that as writers, bloggers should be able to add their own angle to the story, as long as they are provided with as much information as possible.

The debate of to pay or not to pay stems down to finding that middle gap. Yes, there are some blogs that receive a much greater level of traffic, and if the prize is not of high enough value, a monetary value for posting the competition should be attached. Whether it be a blog or publication, as the readership increases, so too does the value of advertising within that publication. Likewise, not all blogs should be able to demand a placement fee outright.

In an ideal world, you would reach a point where the costs and benefits for both parties are equal. Upon analysis of the costs of the agency’s time spent on pitching, as well as the value of the prize and the quality of the placement their competition will get, accompanied with the blogger’s increase in traffic and thus the increase in net worth of their blog, a middle ground should be reached.

This is, of course, the ideal world scenario. Unfortunately, not all bloggers are experienced journalists or really understand agencies and what they need to achieve out of their work. Likewise, not all agencies are any good.

If there is one thing that needs be taken away from this, it is that people really do need to start focusing on basic human communication, recognising that it is in fact a human on the other end of the telephone or email that you are dealing with, reaching that middle ground where both parties are gaining from this relationship.

*disclosure – Majestic SEO are a partner with Receptional, and a client, but they do have the world’s largest commercially available backlink data index, so I’ve no problems with recommending them here!

Background

At the turn of the millennium, BMW posted sales of $33bn, a slight decrease from 1999. Afraid of further loss, they turned to long term advertising partner Fallon Worldwide to come up with a new campaign to prevent further decline.

Through extensive consumer research on their typical customer (46 years old, £80k income, 2/3rds male, married with no children), they discovered that 85 per cent of their customer base used the internet prior to purchasing a new BMW.

From this, the automotive manufacturer and Fallon put together what I believe was the greatest ever social media marketing campaign, to reach out to their new, internet savvy customer base.

That campaign was The Hire.

It’s not surprising how many people have not heard of this campaign. Not only are there more than six times the amount of people with access to the internet today than there was ten years ago, but many of the social networking platforms that would have helped this campaign to spread virally, such as YouTube, Facebook and Twitter had not even been invented yet. Social media was in its infancy, but this campaign was a worthy competitor to today’s greatest efforts.

The Hire

The Hire was a series of short films produced solely for the internet in 2001 and 2002. Some of the world’s greatest directors, including Guy Ritchie (Lock Stock, Snatch, RocknRolla), Tony Scott (Man on fire, Top Gun, Unstoppable), John Woo (Face/Off, Mission Impossible 2), Ang Lee (Crouching tiger, Hulk) and Alejandro González Iñárritu (Babel, 21 grams) were brought in to direct each film.

The plot of each of the shorts differed, but each one starred Clive Owen playing ‘The Driver’, a suave character behind the wheel of multiple BMWs, hired by various people to act as a transporter for their various needs. The short films also featured a multitude of other famous actors, including Madonna, Forrest Whittaker, Gary Oldman and Mickey Rourke.

Typical ‘Hollywood’ methods of marketing were used, such as billboards, broadcast spots and free posters. With budgets similar to those of high end commercials, Fallon had flipped the traditional advertising equation upside down, by spending 90 per cent of its budget on production, and only 10 per cent on media. At the time this was seen as a huge risk.

Outcome

The initial cost of the first five films in 2001 was an estimated $15 million. Due to overwhelming web traffic, industry praise and BMW’s bottom-line success, an additional three films were produced in 2002 coming in at around $10 million.

The series won numerous awards, receiving praise across the board. From a marketing industry perspective, perhaps the greatest accolade of The Hire was winning the first ever Titanium Lion at the Cannes International Advertising Festival.

By June 2003, more than 45 million people had viewed the films, overshooting the original goal of 2 million by a long shot. To date, views are well into the hundreds of millions.

However, the real success came in sales. In 2001, BMW sales increased by 12.5 per cent, surpassing the 200,000 mark for the first time in the company’s history. The following year, sales continued to rise an additional 17.2 per cent, outselling Mercedes and placing BMW in a firm second in the luxury car market behind Lexus.

These results, for any marketing campaign are incredible. But it is easy to forget that these were produced ten years ago. The use of the internet as a marketing medium chosen over television was a real innovation. It was also one of the first digital campaigns produced at this level used to build the brand image, rather than sell a single product.

Finally, the video was shared through word of mouth and online via email at levels many digital marketers today can only dream of.

He who dares…

Through the extraordinary risk taking, and high quality production that mirrored brand values so well, BMW had created the ultimate social marketing campaign that delivered real bottom line results, and helped shape the future of social media marketing. In my view, it was the greatest campaign in history.

Here, for your viewing pleasure, are the eight films

“We don’t get a chance to do that many things, and every one should be really excellent. Because this is our life.”

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