From a brand of this size, this is very significant, for a few reasons. Firstly, because they are acknowledging that misleading practices are widespread – and in our own experience, the beauty industry is at least as bad as any in this respect, maybe worse. Secondly, they are admitting that brands have a role in perpetuating that fraud, by creating the demand that “influencers” respond to.

From a marketing professional perspective, this is fantastic news. If more PRs and brand clients had been making educated decisions about who they pay for influence within the social media ecosystem, we would very likely not be having this discussion at all.

But here we are, and mainly because of the longstanding practice of setting influencer payscales mostly or entirely according to their number of followers, rather than, say, rewarding them with a proportion of any sales resulting from their work. As a consequence, it’s wise to regard any social media account with unaccountably large numbers of followers, or whose every banal uttering on Instagram is met with disproportionate enthusiasm, with great suspicion.

That has had a massive and toxic impact on the whole sector. Clients look at these (literally) unachievable numbers, apparently generated by doing nothing particularly clever or out of the ordinary, and they demand that marketers achieve the same thing for them. Potentially, marketers are put in a position of choosing whether to pay their own mortgages or stick doggedly to doing things the right way – which will pay dividends eventually, but often well after a client has lost patience.  Other social media users ( your would-be Influencers) have to choose between a lucrative push-button option to bulk buy followers, and the slow and arduous route of building a genuine following through creating great content.

Everything gets distorted by those “dishonest business practices” that Keith refers to.  I know we as a business will have lost potential clients in the past, because we don’t have an enormous Facebook following. The reason for that is that we have chosen not to invest in the resources required to build one honestly – ie, ongoing high quality content creation in the social media space. That takes time from good people, and those good people need to be paid, and those costs would have to accrue to the fees we charge our clients. We hope that our potential clients will look beyond those particular numbers, take time to chat with us and evaluate our expertise and approach in a more meaningful way – but there’s no doubt that somewhere along the line, some won’t have done. Is there a temptation to cheat the numbers? Of course there is!

The illusion of widespread but inexplicable popularity on social media itself spawns other scams. People who want it to work for them can’t see any explanation for others’ success, which makes them easy prey for practitioners who claim to have a “secret formula” that they can either teach or deploy at will – for a price.  The truth is, there is no secret formula, and success depends on the same basic factors that have been around since God was a boy – understanding your audience, having a great product, consistently generating good quality content that your audience enjoy, and ensuring that you take best advantage of the opportunities for visibility that each platform offers.  Quite often, this news is surprisingly unwelcome…

So where does this leave social media marketing? The thing is, that none of this changes the fundamental uniqueness of what social media marketing can do. There has never been a single, unified communication platform of the size of Facebook or Instagram, since time began. There are real opportunities for effective marketing and laser focused targeting that can’t be found anywhere else, and at a cost which is very hard to equal through other channels.

BUT

As marketers and as clients, we have to be satisfied with “just” those unparalleled opportunities. Stop trying to believe in the unicorns, and take the word “viral” out of your vocabulary (in most cases, at least).

It’s the first mainstream example of integrating the “real world” with a highly addictive game; Google Map-derived location technology is incorporated into your game experience, so that you have to physically be in a location in order to interaction with the parallel game-world version of that place.

So, getting out of the house and moving around is a key part of the game experience.

Permanent connectivity comes of age

The game itself may or may not stand the test of time, but it does seem likely that this kind of Virtual Reality online / real world integration is just the start. Now that few of us ever leave the house without our smartphones, and decent strength data connections are widely available, there’s enormous potential available to marketers doing a little lateral thinking.  So, this post is going to take a look at how businesses can exploit these principles for marketing purposes.

What we’re going to look at here are two different approaches: some clever ways of “piggybacking” on the popularity of Pokemon Go, and some broader thoughts about the basics of integrating your online presence with the “real world”.

This is particularly valuable for any business that has a passing trade element – where, if a consumer is within a small radius, it’s possible to significantly increase the chances of them making a purchase.

Luring the Pokemon Go consumer

Firstly, let’s consider a few more or less ingenious ways that marketers have used the Pokemon Go craze to their advantage.

The story of the Muncie Animal Shelter’s appeal to its dog walkers has been somewhat over exaggerated online, but the story is still based on facts.  The shelter created some clever marketing,  pointing out that combining walking their shelter dogs with hunting Pokemon was a win win for everyone.

Here’s their original social media post; you can see for yourself by the Share and reaction figures how incredibly successful it was, as the combination of cute dogs and Pokemon took Facebook by storm.

A second example, shared by @ohjefframos on Twitter, may be slightly more tongue in cheek, but exploits the same idea: you need to move around, we need people moving around, why not join us?!

Both of these are entertaining (but highly effective, at least for the animal shelter) examples of looking for overlap between the behaviours that the game encourages, and behaviours that are beneficial to the organisation concerned.

As a more straightforward approach, the game also allows any player to purchase Lures, which for a given period of time will attract any Pokemon in the local area. Any number of players can catch the same critter, so there’s an obvious use of this for bars, coffee shops, restaurants – anywhere where encouraging a consumer to hang out there for a while will likely result in a purchase.

So, the business buys some Lure modules, advertises the fact with boards in the nearby area, and waits. There’s a nice case study of a Pizzeria in Queens achieving a 30% increase in sales, based on $10-worth of Lure purchases, here. Of course, you do need to be in a built up area, ideally a decent sized town or city, for this to work well. But it’s open to anyone using Pokemon Go on their phones, and as a cheap and smart marketing option for retail and food businesses in cities, it’s surely worth a try!

Bringing the Online World offline: other things to try

The whole power of  Pokemon Go is that it integrates the online and offline worlds.  This is something that we talk to businesses we work with about all the time, and it’s still under utilised.

Here are just a couple of ways that you can help consumers to make that link. They may not be quite as sexy as Pokemon Go, but they can be just as effective.

Tell ’em about it!

We’ve lost count of the number of high street type businesses we’ve seen who have a great social media presence – a thriving Facebook page, chatty Twitter feed or inspirational Instagram account – but when you visit their actual premises, the place where the money changes hands, there’s no sign of it.

At the very least, put up some posters. Better still, offer an incentive at a time when consumers are fiddling with their phones anyway – “We’ll give you 50p off of your pizza if you’ve Liked our Facebook page before you get to the cash register”. Even better,  put some cards around inviting happy customers to post a photo or review while they’re there, for a voucher or discount.  With a little Muncie-style lateral thinking, there will be ways of exploiting online social media from within your premises, which will be unique to you and hugely effective.

Lure ’em in

Your retail or food business is registered with Google Maps, right? Good. You’ve got some great reviews? Even better. Now, start sweating those assets as a Lure to draw in passing traffic.

We all have far too many decisions to make each day, and many people will keep going back to their lunch or tea break favourites rather than “risking” trying somewhere new. Or they’re visiting your town for the day, and have to choose between a familiar, predictable chain option and your business.

Here’s one way to make that choice a little easier for them. Put a poster in the window, or a sandwich board on the pavement, inviting passers by to check out your reviews before choosing where they have their lunch or tea break. It’s simple, and they don’t have to take your word for it that you’re serving the best Flat White in town!

Now, put your brainstorming hat on, and start thinking about how you can exploit the Pokemon fad – and use the same principles to skyrocket the value of your social media assets, too.[/fusion_text] ]]> http://www.rosemcgrory.co.uk/2016/07/25/marketing-lessons-pokemon/feed/ 0 http://www.rosemcgrory.co.uk/2016/01/13/when-twitter-hack/ http://www.rosemcgrory.co.uk/2016/01/13/when-twitter-hack/#comments Wed, 13 Jan 2016 11:45:26 +0000 http://www.rosemcgrory.co.uk/?p=3593 Just a quick one today on the lessons to be learned from this week’s reports on Jeremy Corbyn’s “hacked” twitter account.

As ever, the media were quick to throw around terms like “hack” and “hijack” when talking about the incident. For most people, that language conjures up images of a sinister internet ninjas consciously attacking JC, using terrifying but inexplicable skills and / or exploiting “security issues” around social media.

Not too many people seemed to wonder at the time, why those internet ninjas hadn’t chosen to make better use of their access than slinging around what amounted to playground insults (apologies to the sensitive for the language…). Maybe crafted a few tweets that didn’t sound as though they’d escaped from a drunken crowd on a night out, for example.

Anyway, no surprise at all to find out today that the explanation was nowhere near so sinister. The Times’ Red Box email has discovered what actually happened: Mr Corbyn had given access to his account to a staffer, who was staying in a hostel at the time, and had logged on to one of their public computers to post something on his behalf…and then forgotten to log back off again.

What do we learn from this?

1. Either everyone he works with has the password for JC’s Twitter account, or his senior trusted advisors are very poorly paid and don’t have smartphones (hostel computers?!)

2. The media like to grab the scariest possible interpretation of these things. The majority of time the simplest and least scary is the truth (see also: “I got burgled because of Facebook“, translation: “I told my lightfingered mates I was going on holiday via Facebook, and they cleaned me out“.)

3. Human carelessness is almost always the weak link in the security chain.

4. Be very, very careful who you give your social media passwords to. Even if you can trust them to post appropriately and authentically, they also need to have some common sense about protecting the account – you shouldn’t need to tell anyone to be careful about logging out once they’re done!

What the heck are MeerKat and Periscope anyway?

They’re apps, for “livestreaming”. That means they allow you to broadcast from your smartphone, live, in real time.

So you download the app, and at the touch of a button you can be broadcasting whatever is in front of you to the world.

In terms of functionality, they’re quite similar; Meerkat is simpler, which means a shorter learning curve, but Periscope has some additional options. Some of those, particularly offering an “invite only” option to broadcasts, and keeping broadcasts available for 24 hours after the initial streaming, we think will make a big difference in a business context.

Video quality is similar for both. Glitching isn’t uncommon, and of course is also dependent on the quality of the internet connection where you’re broadcasting / watching from. Meerkat offers the option to watch and view in Landscape orientation, whereas Periscope doesn’t; this can make quite a difference to being able to follow a video if you’re watching on a smartphone.

Both apps are integrated with Twitter – for example, Meerkat automatically tells your Twitter followers when you’re broadcasting something, and Periscope gives you the option of whether to tell them –  which saves those with an established Twitter audience from having to start again on building and audience “locally”.

But, Periscope is Twitter’s proprietary app, which makes it highly likely that Periscope’s functionality and integration with Twitter will be increasingly privileged as time goes on. That isn’t necessarily the kiss of death for Meerkat – after all, Instagram seems to be surviving Twitter’s hissy fit after it was bought by Facebook quite well so far – but it’s inevitably going to provide Periscope with an advantage in the longer term, given that Twitter is the key distribution channel for both apps.

Social Features

As well as the Twitter linkup, there are a pretty standare set of  internal social features for both apps that allow you to interact with other users. You can comment on another user’s broadcast, and they’ll see your comment in real time. You can also “like” broadcasts, and tweet out other users’ broadcasts.

Choosing to Follow another Meerkat or Periscope user will activate notifications whenever that person is broadcasting – pretty crucial for Meerkat, where it’s gone if you don’t connect to the broadcast as it happens.

Using Meerkat or Periscope for business

For most businesses, these new apps won’t be a core part of the social media strategy; but they can certainly be employed usefully as an additional way to communicate, without a huge amount of investment or overhead.

The ultra real time, short lived nature of livestreaming may be a big challenge in some business sectors, where you can’t realistically expect your target audience to just drop what they’re doing at a moment’s notice and watch you. Periscope is at a big advantage there, because once the link to the broadcast has gone out, it can be viewed at any time over the following 24 hours.

Providing your audience are likely to be available to watch, though, livestreaming offers a level of immediacy and impact – letting them feel that they’re actually part of the event – that is completely new. When you try using it, you’ll immediately notice the difference between watching a livestream and viewing a finished video that’s been uploaded to YouTube; you just feel a lot closer to the action.

So, for example, if your organisation is hosting an awards ceremony, or launching a new product, letting your customers see that in real time “through your eyes” can be very effective in getting them engaged. Again, Periscope’s Invite Only feature gives it the edge here, as you can choose to offer the livestream only to “VIP clients”.

Things to bear in mind:

At the time of writing, both apps are only widely available in iOS versions (for Apple smartphones), although there is a public beta version of Meerkat released for Android, which has to be signed up for via a Google form. It’s very likely that both apps will have full Android versions available pretty soon, but in the mean time that may be a limiting factor for organisations who aren’t Apple fans.

And just as a final thought, don’t make the mistake of thinking that Meerkat / Periscope is now the best place for any video-related content. They should be used strictly for content that is ephemeral – ie, may be pretty exciting right now, but is unlikely to be of interest in six months’ time.

Anything that you expect to have a lifespan beyond the next 24 hours – a guide to this season’s new products, a training video – still belongs on YouTube where you can go on sending out links to it indefinitely. That doesn’t mean you can’t livestream the launch of your new season’s products too, of course!

Just click if your tired post-Christmas eyes need some bigger font!

The State of Social Media 2013 by Infographic Promotion

Social Media and self esteem

Firstly, the article argues that using Twitter and Facebook is harmful to your self esteem and general mental health. We’ve written before about the phenomenon of social media boasting, and would agree that it’s not good for anyone – the reader or, ultimately, the writer.

Does it have to be that way, though? Of course not. In fact, social media offers any number of ways to positively improve your self image – either as an individual or as an organisation. Making contact with like minds has got to be the big one, but the ability to share your own creations, whether that be a blog article or a photograph on Flickr, with an appreciative audience is also enormously enriching –  and  just about impossible to achieve without social media.

This really isn’t about the intrinsic nature of social media, it’s about personal choices and how you use it. If your online social group spend a lot of time boasting about their lucky career breaks or genius children (or your partner company’s Twitter feed is jammed solid with nothing but new client wins and awards), and you’re sensitive to that, then you don’t need to switch off – but you do need to find a new social group which brings you more interesting and positive interactions.

Fight Club

Social media is, apparently, “a hotbed of bad behavior“. Uh, yes.  Anyone pop out to the supermarket, or get on the Underground lately?! Not exactly bastions of good manners either, are they…and neither is most of the public world. One of the great things about Twitter is that the relative anonymity allows people to be unusually honest and forthright. And one of the worst things about Twitter is…yes, exactly.

Cyber-arguments with strangers aren’t always futile, though; we’ve seen instances of people actually changing their minds about any number of important issues, philosophical or not, following “discussions” on line – although the reference to Godwin’s Law is all too often relevant. Ultimately, a simple “never read YouTube comments or any part of the Daily Mail website” rule will take care of the worst of it.

Within reason, a good online debate can have all kinds of positive results. It makes you think harder about what you do and why you do it. It helps you articulate your thinking in the simplest possible terms, which can have enormous knock-on benefits next time you need to explain something to a client. Kicking  social media into touch and retreating to a little bubble where nobody challenges you isn’t, in the end, going to be beneficial.

Offline is no substitute for online

“Real world” opportunities pass us by while we’re preoccupied with social media, says Ms Henderson. The evidence for this – that only a fraction of  job hunters attend offline networking events etc, but 70-80% of job vacancies are never posted. So, the online job seekers are wasting their time on the job sites. That last part may be true, but it’s a non sequiteur anyway, as the major issue is that large proportion of “under the radar” vacancies.

Social media gives you a much greater social reach than the “real world” ever can – there are only so many business events you can go to, only to find that there’s nobody there even remotely connected to your sector. Being well connected on social media gives you a much greater chance of getting to hear about those unadvertised jobs or great contracts.

Like any other way of communicating, everyone has to take responsibility for their choices and the way they use social media. We refer you once again to the old “Twitter is just full of people talking about their lunch” argument: it’s all what you make of it!

A few of the highlights which particularly spoke to us include:

Twitter gets tacked on to last decade’s comms strategy

Many companies just use Twitter corporately as a broadcast channel…with content consisting almost entirely of references to news releases….it could be a well thought out strategy but is more likely to be because someone in the Press office was seen to “get” Twitter…so he/she got it forever”

This is a really horrible use of Twitter, fully deserving of a deduction of marks rather than a tick for being present on the channel, and the “it’s got stuck in the press office” excuse may be kinder than the companies deserve. It’s not “communicating” with journalists at all, really, it’s just broadcasting at them as if it were 1998 and Twitter is a daily paper. Limiting Twitter use even to proper, thoughtful engagement with journalists would be bad enough, but spewing out press releases doesn’t even get that good.

Confusion and lack of interaction around LinkedIn

Perhaps unsurprisingly, almost all of the corporates had a LinkedIn page. As it’s difficult to tell whether these were autocreated by LinkedIn because of the size of the company though, the organisations have been marked on interaction instead. The numbers here are pretty woeful, with only 20% visibly active on the page. This seems a little more excuseable, though – LinkedIn’s huge leaps in social functionality are relatively recent. It’s taking many organisations a while to realise that things have moved beyond the static page / personal CV stage, and start making good use of the new functions.

The try-hard sectors

Comparative performance across sector groups shows that Pharmaceuticals and Energy (Oil & Gas) are outperforming other sectors by quite a margin. The Finance sector isn’t doing so well with their corporate-targeted activity, which given their recent broad scale bad press is maybe surprising – or perhaps they just have bigger fish to fry right now.

Social media performance related to company valuation

The most headline-grabbing aspect of the analysis, however, is the confirmation of a statistically significant correlation between market capitalisation and certain social-media based metrics. So:

The most valuable companies are the most effective when it comes to using social media. The reverse would also be true“

(my emphasis). So, this could simply be a reflection of the larger resources available to the more highly valued companies – but this seems unlikely as none of the FTSE-100 corporates are exactly operating on micro-business marketing budgets. It could also be that an innovative and agile approach, strong use of communications channels, and financial success are linked.

As a  final note,  the study focused on Corporate communications only. IE,  that content targeted at  investors, other stakeholders, the media and so on. We’d love to know what repeating the exercise by FTSE-100 entity, but looking at the aggregate of their consumer brands and related activity would show – is this purely about making a better impression (or even just getting positive messages across) to investors, or is there a wider value add?

The full report can be found on Sociagility’s site here.

Hoax posts or tweets are increasingly common, and often brilliantly crafted to take advantage of users’ fears, or breaking news situations.  Sometimes they’re fun, other times they’re downright sinister. Either way, if you’re using social media in a official capacity, you don’t want to be called out for perpetuating them, do you?

Why we get so many hoaxes on social media

The fast moving nature of social media sites makes them fantastic environments for spreading a hoax. Sometimes they’re just invented by pranksters wanting to fool people for the sake of it, other times they’re looking to get exposure for a particular Twitter or Facebook account.

Recognise these?

A couple of the latest viral hoaxes are pretty much representative of how many of them get started. You might have seen this popping up in your Facebook newsfeed:

This particular hoax spread so quickly because most users are aware of the “evil Facebook” concept – a critical mass of stories in the media about how Facebook is plotting to steal your data / bank account details / soul and must be stopped. Consequently they’re quick to copy and paste text like this, and think they’re doing their friends a favour.

Unfortunately most of these types of stories are wrong in one of the two key aspects – what the problem is, or what to do about it. In this case there’s some truth to the issue; depending on your Privacy settings,  Facebook’s Terms of Service allow them to make use of  (NB, not “own”, though) certain of your content – but none whatsoever in suggesting that this course of action will make any difference.

The other big trigger for hoaxes recently was Hurricane Sandy. Again this is quite typical – a big news event where everyone wants to be first to share things, is a great opportunity for hoaxers.

Within hours, this image was doing the rounds:

Looks stunning, but is totally photoshopped. That one was gleefully jumped on by skeptical types with wonderful results:

If only all hoaxes were so easy to spot.

Don’t make your organisation look bad

Anyway, here’s the thing. If you’re sending things out from an organisational account where credibility matters, it’s really not that hard to avoid passing on a hoax. Here are three ways to check that story.

1. Mainly for Twitter based scams, check out http://istwitterwrong.tumblr.com/. In fact do, anyway, it’s a fun read.

2. For Facebook, Snopes.com is usually fairly quick off the mark

3. If all else fails, simply try googling the first line of the content if it’s text based (like the Facebook example above), or a few descriptive words if it’s an image. “Statue of liberty hurricane” run through Google would show up pretty quickly that the “Sandy” image has been around for years.

Hope that helps keep your reputation in the clear – and leaves you free to enjoy the more imaginative hoaxes for what they are.

With the largest increase in followers of any brand this month, Cadbury’s have picked up over 35,000 new followers.

As Paralympic fever grips the country, Cadbury’s have  done a fantastic job of capitalising on their Paralympic sponsorship. Changing the name of their main Twitter account  (presumably temporarily), to “Cadbury Paralympics”  will have made absolutely sure that they show up in the vast number of searches for the topic.

They’re also sending out a really engaging mix of content during the event. Recent tweets have ranged from insider “on the scene” shots:

to retweets of the competitors’ eye view:

They’re also running daily contests which tie really nicely in with the Heroes brand, which are fun and appropriate rather than coming across as awkward “push” marketing.

So despite a fair amount of negative comment on Twitter about a confectionary producer being a key Olympic sponsor, Cadburys seem to be making great gains out of the increased visibility.

But before we look at O2’s response, let’s look at how not to do it. Argyll & Bute Council’s response during the enormous outcry that followed the banning of the Neverseconds blog remains a classic of the genre. A quick search on their @mentions that day revealed that they were swimming in questions, pleas, and a certain amount of downright abuse, running into hundreds of tweets. Their response:

Yeah. That’s about as running for the hills as you can get. As far as I’m aware, not one single person who Tweeted them on the issue ever received a response.

O2 didn’t play it like that. Somebody, somewhere, gave their customer service team permission to be human, and to relate to customers on their own level.  There are some great examples from during the network outage itself  in this article from the New Statesman , and you can get a flavour of how they respond below:

In a world where we’re constantly bombarded with corporate blandspeak, it doesn’t take that much to stand out; If I was one of those customers, I think the surprise of receiving a genuine,  humorous reply would probably have bonded me to O2 for life.

With that in mind, here are our three Top Tips for dealing with angry customers on Twitter:

1. Bad language won’t kill you

However you feel about swearing, for a large part of the population it’s part of everyday life and the normal way to express anger. Just because railway companies get away with putting up those signs designating pretty much anything they don’t want to hear as “abuse of their staff”, doesn’t mean you can make the rules on Twitter.  A prissy reply telling the customer off for using bad words is rarely going to be constructive.

2. Inject a little humour

Humour is one of those things that sets us apart from the animals – and from robots. Forget everything you’ve learned about appropriate corporate communications, and let the customer see that you’re a real person dealing with the issues as best you can.

3. Don’t be afraid to apologise

If the customer is complaining about obvious incompetence or failure, acknowledge that. For one thing, they’ll be so surprised that you’ll have a great opportunity to fix things while they’re catching their breath!

Of course, all of this will be of very limited value if you’ve left someone manning your corporate Twitter account in a sealed room, with no support from the rest of the organisation. The tips above will go a long way to making the angry customer > customer service interaction a constructive one, but if the lines of communication aren’t there to back it up, you’re going to run into trouble. Make sure that whoever is running your social media presence has their finger on the pulse and a clear path of escalation to senior management if they need it. Then hopefully, you’ll never have to resort to the Twitter Witness Statement like Argyll & Bute.