I attended a great event this morning at The Ivy for Reading Room’s Digital Conversations No-nonsense Social Media breakfast. There’s lots of insightful comment on Twitter – search for #rrdc

The first presentation was by Kevin Hoy, Head of Web Strategy at Greater Manchester police. Kevin explained the thinking behind #gmp24 – a 24 hour tweeting experiment by Greater Manchester Police in which all 3000 telephone calls reporting incidents that were received in that period were tweeted. The intention was to increase online engagement and build trust and understanding between the public and the police. #gmp24 acquired 17000 followers over the course of the day, and the experiment received worldwide coverage on mainstream media. Bravely (remember Skittles?!) the live twitter feed was imported into their website homepage.

Despite a few ‘operating difficulties’ (including the continued reliance on IE6!) the tweeting experiment has had a positive impact both internally and externally, and two community policemen are now incorporating tweeting into their neighbourhood communications. Awareness has also been raised amongst the public of the sheer diversity of issues the police have to deal with. A number of “spoof tweets” actually turned out to be beneficial once the decision was taken to deal with them in a humorous rather than high-handed manner. Support from senior management was also critical in getting the project off the ground.

The second speaker was Charlie Beckett, Director of the Polis “think tank” at London School of Economics, who examined the social media impact of the British General Election 2010. Clearly is was NOT an “Internet election” – Charlie showed how the TV debates had dominated the campaign, and brought Nick Clegg to public attention for the first time. The newspapers’ response to Clegg’s TV success was to drag up and twist an old story about Nazism to try and smear him. In turn this inspired the #nickcleggsfault meme on Twitter where everything from erupting volcanos to the shooting of JR Ewing was blamed on Clegg. I liked Charlie’s comment that ‘legacy media is the polite phrase for dying media’. He suggested that the modern role of journalism was to add value through ‘curating participation’ rather than breaking news. Despite the example set by Obama, the memorable aspects of social media in the UK election were generated by the public rather than the political parties themselves.

The third speaker was Ann-Mari Freebairn, Head of Communications at the RAF Benevolent Fund which provides support to service personnel and their families. The charity has a number of marketing challenges, namely very low brand awareness, a “stuffy” and old fashioned image, and 70% of their supporters are over 70. Social media was seen as a way to engage with a younger audience. Their campaign 1940chronicle used real stories from the Battle of Britain and wove in fictitious supporting characters. The characters posted on a blog each week to describe what was happening to them, each had a twitter account and there was a masterfeed bringing together the tweets of all the characters. Tweets were pre-scheduled to keep the stories going around the clock. The key challenge was to get the message across about the work of the charity without preaching. Online donations and traffic to the main website doubled, and there was also coverage in the mainstream newspapers and marketing press.

In summary, a very informative morning in a great location. It was also good to see so many Digital Marketing students making the trip up from Southampton

Next week I’m presenting a paper at a Workshop based the University of Chester that Paul Harrigan and I wrote over the summer. The intention of the event is for the editors to choose appropriate papers for publication in a forthcoming Special Edition of the Journal of Marketing Management. 

The slides are below – wish me luck

This week I’ve been busy learning about developments in social media metrics and putting together this new session for my undergrad students today:

Feedback welcome

I hope everyone enjoyed the last couple of weeks with Alan

We have posted a brief video in the Ning community responding to queries about the presentations next week.

My slides for Thursday’s final class session are here:

At the Future of Social Media Conference in London recently, one of the most interesting presentations was from Chris Davies of British Airways.

Chris described how the objective of BA’s recent social media campaign involving the Australian comedienne Pam Ann was to reach a new audience in a less formal tone of voice. The videos involved budding actors and actresses among BA staff who had to audition for a role alongside Pam Ann – as you can see in this example:

http://www.britishairwaysandpamann.com/?destId=full_feature

The marketing team faced a significant challenge in that Pam Ann was not felt to be an ‘appropriate personality’ to champion the very traditional BA brand, and so obtaining internal sign off was very difficult.

However, the campaign was successful and so is likely to be repeated – with over 1,200 links made to the video clips, and significant levels of positive WOM about the unexpected communication style from BA.

Chris’s learning points and recommendations for social media marketing:

• New ways of working may be required, for example sourcing business partners with specialist knowledge
• Get lots of advice from a range of sources before diving in
• Take care re legal issues around managing user generated content and mitigate the risks
• Develop a robust moderation policy
• Engage but don’t dictate the message
• Make it fun!

Technorati Tags: british airways,pam ann,social media marketing

Last week I attended the Future of Social Media Conference in London. There were around 200 people at the event, mainly marketers from traditional organisations looking to update themselves developments in social media and how the tools could be effectively adopted by their businesses.

Rohit Bhargava from Ogilvy was one of the speakers and he made a number of key points from his recent book “Personality Not Included”:

Social Media Optimisation (SMO) is now the holy grail. For example, companies should be using a Twitter search to find out what is being said about their brand online, and monitoring comments on blogs, forums etc etc. Engagement with customers rather than impressions should be the measure of success.

Companies need to assess the quality of an online review (aka Ebay’s star system or, even the basic ‘was this review useful to you?’ question) in order to develop a system of ‘virtual trust metrics’ that contributors can rely on. A product or service rating of 4.3/5 appears to be more authentic than 5/5 – which looks to be contrived.

Suppliers have lost control of the message, because the number one influence on a customer’s purchase decision is now a personal recommendation. Recent research by Universal McCann showed that 8 out of the top 10 sources of trust are in fact word of mouth (4 from friends, 4 from strangers). In addition, you can’t choose who your spokespeople are (think John McCain and Paris Hilton….)

Another inspirational speaker was Will McInnes from Nixon McInnes. Will noted that the future is not evenly distributed – some companies are way ahead of the curve, others are way behind. Ford’s social media newsroom gives away unused professional product photos and shows that they ‘get it’ (see http://ford.digitalsnippets.com/ ) He called on audience participation to demonstrate the current disconnect between the numbers of people expecting to see ratings on a site they visit, while not providing it to others on their own sites….

Martin Verdon- Roe from Trip Advisor explained how his company now has 20 million reviews, up from 10 million a year ago. Major travel industry players such as Tui display both their own reviews and Trip Advisor’s on their website – but the independent Trip Advisor reviews are much greater in number. The next challenge for the company is the introduction of a Traveller Network, which works like a social network where people can sign up friends, and the system will show you reviews from your friends first when you input a particular destination query into the site. Keep an eye on Trip Advisor to see how this develops.

There was also a very interesting case study from British Airways which is worthy of a blog post of its very own….so watch this space!

All in all a very informative and entertaining day…with hardly a mention of the ‘recession’ word

Technorati Tags: FOSM,social media marketing