Social Media 09 - big budget noise, but where's the innovation?

New firm Run Marketing started up recently with an excellent website for digital marketing advice for small business. Hatch PR associate Chris Lee, director of Run Marketing, attended the Social Media 09 conference last week in London and posted a good summary of what was on offer.

I have to admit, I was a little disappointed to hear the agenda was dominated (apparently) by big budget examples of brands using social media for integrated campaigns. For a start, the London conference schedule is rammed with shows like this and I wish they'd taken a different stance with this new show. Where are our grass roots, innovation on a shoestring examples? Small business showing how clever marketing doesn't require huge dollars? Isn't that exactly what social media is all about?

After all, how much is a Twitter account? Free. Creating a Facebook group? Free. Conducting question and answer sessions over LinkedIN? Free.

But many a 'digital media' agency seems to be perversely charging clients big sums for creative and innovative social media campaigns. If ideas have been the bread and butter for PR for a longtime, the 'value add' that comes as standard with every programme but doesn't have its own price tag attached, shouldn't social media be the same? Traditional PR requires some use of tools and resources that cost overheads. But social media doesn't. So why should social media cost a lot to implement?

Like Run Marketing says, we want to see examples of grassroots social media campaigns. They are more interesting, less error-prone (thinking about the Habitat debacle with that comment) and far more 'viral'. That's more effective, in our book.

Recession '08-'09 Baby Boom - you heard it here first

In PR one of our jobs is to second guess media trends. We want to tip you off early on the Recession Baby Boom - because it's just a matter of time before you start hearing whispers in the mainstream press and PR campaigns start targeting the burgeoning baby products market.

Like all good media stories it may sound counter intuitive. People should have less money now, right? And we always talk about how expensive babies are. In fact, in the US it's a generally accepted fact that a baby currently costs its parents $250,000 from conception through to age 18. If you're the type of mom who accommodates her son well into his 30s, subsisting on your laundering abilities and meatloaf, your cost could soar well above that figure.

But, taking an extremely unscientific survey of friends, family, and Facebook contacts ('cause you gotta) there is something we have heard over and over again lately: "I'm pregnant." Why? Well, these declarations have come thick and fast a few months after we heard the same thing over and over again from female, working friends: "Since the economy is shitty right now, and I might get made redundant, we may as well just get pregnant. It's not like I'm going to get anywhere in my career in this climate."

So people started taking their frustrations on the poor economy out on more fruitful, fun, bedroom-focused, endeavours. And the babies are starting to come screaming into the world.

The first concrete evidence of the Recession Baby Boom? Leading baby and maternity retailer Mothercare released its earnings today - moving onto the FTSE 250 leaderboard and Q2 sales are up 7 per cent. The stock has risen 65 per cent since May.

You heard it here first. If your company can find a way to weave a Baby Boom message into its PR strategy over the next three to nine months you won't suffer for it.

I'm worth $1m, how 'bout you? Valuing web's latest thang

On the eve of Forbes' declaration that Faceback founder Mark Zuckerberg is worth $2 billion, investigative industry rag Silicon Alley Insider ponders whether MySpace is "now worthless" and whether it was even worth buying on the part of Rupert Murdoch. (He paid $580 million for it, which at the time was considered a steal. But that was back when people used the site ....for actual social networking rather than just to look up bands).

How quickly the tide comes in, and goes back out, in the internet world.

Let's consider the valuation of some of web's social networking trends, shall we? It's a fun game which a lot of industry sources like to play at - with no accepted formula and no right answer.

*Facebook - the social networking giant has been popular for awhile now, yet advertising revenues are still abysmal - the last valuation was published in May 2009 at $10 billion

*Twitter - arguably the web's latest 'thing' - currently valued at $1 billion - but no one knows if that figure is anywhere even close to accurate, since the company doesn't make any money and has no business model

*MySpace - currently valued at $500 million to $1.2 billion

*Friendster - remember them? they lost all their business to Facebook yet claim to have a handful of fans left in Asia - currently valued at $210 million

Again there is no right answer in this game, and perhaps this is what makes it so fun to watch. The only accepted truth is that once the site becomes unpopular, the valuation dips. Oftentimes this has no relation to the actual revenue the company is making. If only businesses in other sectors were valued on these vague, cloudy formulas! Just imagine a world where your bank was valued based on 'hype' and 'promise'!

Suggested reading: Ray Valdes at Gartner has posted an interesting and more educated viewpoint on how valuations happen and what they imply.

Will Spinvox get its vox back?

It wasn't a good day for Spinvox, the voicemail speech-to-text company which was accused in a BBC article penned by Rory Cellan-Jones of some very serious data protection breaches.

Allegedly, rather than having ground-breaking technology that listens to spoken voicemails and converts them to text, the company has been paying countless call centre staff in South Africa and the Philippines to listen to at least some of the messages and translate them manually. Obviously this raises some eyebrows in terms of privacy implications and whether it meets the data protection act.

At the time of writing, Spinvox was radio silent, though the story was also picked up by Sky and is all over the Twittersphere.

Spinvox has no choice in this situation but to go on the offensive and prove the credibility of its technology. And it needs to be specific about how its algorithms work. Ambiguity will get the company nowhere at this stage.

There isn't much else to say at this point until they respond, but a point worth making is the age-old 'any PR is good PR' thinking. Many people who didn't know what Spinvox did, now do - and some of them won't care about Rupert on the street in South Africa hearing what their spouse picked up at the supermarket for dinner that night. Most of us receive voicemails so dull they would probably put the call centre staff to sleep rather than incite drama, though staff apparently claimed in Facebook group posts to hear death threats, sexual messages and all sorts.

Waiting to see what transpires.

UPDATE: According to Sky news Twitter correspondent Ruth Barnett, someone from Spinvox will be be on Sky News channel 501 at 7pmish tonight to talk about the issue. This is one interview we won't miss.

Recipe for the next Twitter

As Twitter becomes less and less conversational and more and more "one-way broadcasting" we think the time is nigh for a next Twitter to barge into the scene.

If you don't agree with me that Twitter is becoming pretty one-way broadcasting in nature, rather than what it is at its best, a two-way conversational tool, consider the latest big Twitter stories that were covered in mainstream press:

-Iran conflict - citizen journalism to get the word out when 'real' journalism was stifled - one way broadcasting

-MJ death - yeah, sure, a lot of people Tweeted about it. A blog still broke the news, just like what would have happened with a big news event 8 years ago

-Habitat's horrendous attempt at a social media advertising campaign, highjacking stories of human suffering to push furniture - one way broadcasting on crack

-Ashton Kutcher's one million followers tirade - if he thinks it proves that he wants to converse with a million fans, rather than just broadcast to the world how 'special' he is, his ego has damaged his ability to reason

Finally, maybe it's just the people I follow, but I find that about half the Tweets coming up on my list are one-way thoughts rather than conversation starters or links to interesting stuff. And more importantly, when an interesting two-way conversation does come up between two of my followers, I have to click into one or both profiles to see what they said first, then click back for the next comment, then so on. I get lost and distracted while trying to trace a conversation.

A lot of early Twitterers were worried that as Twitter became more mainstream, it would somehow 'get worse.' I'm starting to believe it is getting worse. But I don't think the primary reason is that it's becoming mainstream.

The thing Twitter is doing wrong is not improving and evolving its UI to amplify the two-way conversational tools and steer it away from the one-way broadcasting direction. I still think Twitter is a breakthrough tool and I'm still a fan. And some of the one-way broadcasting, like the Iran conflict, is hugely important. But in some ways the UI is clunky and lacking basic functionality - especially for people who use it primarily as a two-way conversational tool. The stats are unclear about how many Twitterers use only the web UI and no other applications like Tweetdeck, but it seems to be at least half, if not the overwhelming majority. [Source for statistics: Hubspot, thanks to @handlewithcare, and Nick Burcher's blog, thanks to @crispyducks] Sorry to be harsh Twitter, but you are one of the most talked about technologies on the market today and your UI still needs a Tweetdeck for people who want more? Houston, we have a problem.

In my opinion, by not evolving the UI, Twitter has allowed a door to open for the next big thing to stir things up.

Here is our recipe for The Next Twitter - a groundbreaking conversation tool. If we had time to develop this ourselves, we would, but given how many proverbial pies we have our fingers in at the moment I'll give it to you as a freebie so someone brilliant can get it done:

1. Take the easiest web interface you can find, and make it interoperable with mobile (similar to what Twitter has done - we applaud them for their mastery of simplicity)

2. Shamelessly copy the follow / unfollow brilliance of Twitter. It's subtle and it works

3. Make search absolutely central to the tool. Don't confuse 'simple UI' with 'featureless' and don't kid yourself that any feature is more important than search. Twitter got this wrong in the beginning, and it still hasn't righted itself completely

4. Combine microblogging with elements of old-fashioned message boards, being the best of both, minus the annoying elements. Give people the ability to see entire conversations in a single glance on one screen, using plus/minus buttons so you can dig further into the conversations you want to see, and minus out of the ones you don't care about - all without having to navigate to a new screen. This seems technically hard to do, but I saw some truly innovative declarative UI programming technologies recently at our client Nokia Qt Software, and I have faith that techie geeks know how to do it and fit it all tidily on one screen

5. Initially, focus on convincing people how they can use it for their jobs and hobbies - Facebook's already got the masses' personal lives in the can

6. Excite and engage the media and PR scenes (much like what Twitter has done) to get the word out most quickly

7. Shamelessly market yourself as the thing that will unseat Twitter. The technology business world needs to take more lessons from athletes when it comes to bold, brash, super competitive statements

8. Be really strict with bots and spammers to keep them firmly out

9. Shake up the above ingredients, don't stir. Stick it in the oven and watch the world take notice

Do you agree with our recipe? Have other points to add? Let us know. We are dying to see this mystery tool be developed as we want to start using it now.

Don't forget about the Facebook land grab

Facebook's 'vanity URLs' became available on Friday and the land rush ensued. Facebook has taken measures to keep poaching at bay, however. You can only reserve one bit of 'URL real estate' per registered Facebook user and it's only available for accounts that have been running since May. So you can't create an account to grab space. And if you want to grab your company's name, well, you have to link it to an individual and since I use Facebook for both personal and business use, that didn't seem realistic. So Facebook has really put the kibash on any sort of branding possibilities, in my opinion. Or maybe I'm just being shortsighted with that observation.

I clicked on the right place (here) to create my vanity URL today. Facebook puts on the pressure by informing you that once you select your URL, you cannot change it. This is always the moment where I feel least creative - under pressure!

After trying several iterations of my name to no avail (there are apparently a lot of digitally-savvy Emily's out there) I finally settled on emily.live. I thought it sounded better than my boring, samey samey name. It's kind of corny, but then again, so am I. Good luck coming up with your vanity URLs - and report back what you've chosen! :-)

Letter to Facebook: have you lost your mind?

Dear Facebook,

I used to be a big fan, but my love affair is waning very fast. I sheepishly admit that in the early days, I may have even called you 'FaceHook' on occasion. But now, things have changed fast, and I worry you've lost your mind. And here's why:

1. You aren't Twitter. Some say you are trying to Tweet-ify your homepage and jump on the microblogging bandwagon. Note: that's what your newsfeed, which you've unceremoniously killed, used to achieve. This new mishmash of updates/wall conversations/posts is ugly and disorganised. I long for the old newsfeed.

2. There is already a Twitter, and it's doing just fine thanks, given its growth statistics.

3. You used to be an experience site where one could store little pieces of life and show them around to ones' friends. Now, I can't even find pictures, groups, others' profiles or the other little things that made my experience better. Now, you just seem to be a weird cross between an RSS reader, microblogging and mess.

4. "New Facebook" amplifies your worst feature - the one your biggest fans hate - applications that do nonsense things like vampire fighting that annoy and take up space on one's computer.

And here's why I fear losing your mind could result in your death:

1. I no longer recommend that people in my mom & dad's generation will 'get you' and benefit from joining. My mom would have been just about OK on the old Facebook, but the new one? She won't be able to make heads or tails of it. She shops online, so I believe her computer skills are average or above average for the 60-70 years segment. Wasn't that your biggest growth segment previously? You've screwed that one up royally.

2. I will no longer put my pictures on your site and chose Flikr from now on. Once people stop posting their photo albums, you're not even living up to your name "Facebook" anymore.

3. Your users revolted about the new T&C's to the point where you had to retract them. You planted the seed of doubt in users' minds that you are about to infringe on their rights and privacy (bringing me to my next point....)

4. You have apparently been emailing people's non-member friends that they recommend they join. (This happened to me, despite me a. not saying that was OK with me and b. not even wanting the recommendation passed on.) If you carry on infringing on people's online rights, your users will desert you faster than Friendster.

Please, Mark Zuckerberg, I implore you to rethink this strategy. It ain't working, and 94% of your userbase agrees, from the recent vote. If you wanted to create a new service, you should have kept the happy Facebook bubble, named the new thing something else and given users the choice to upgrade, have both, or stay happily where they were.

Sincerely,
Emily

Future of the ad industry? My Golden Age argument.

Another Monday, another grim news day for the advertising industry. The media is bent on ensuring it's not a happy day for 'mad men.' One article talked about spending on social networking being impacted by the recession far worse than projected - growth figures cut by at least half. And last week, in an anticipated move, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer closed its print edition due to shrinking ad sales.

From my dealings with Xtract I've become more equipped to vocalise, in a more eloquent fashion, some things I'd already started noticing about what's wrong with ads, from a consumer viewpoint. Funnily enough, the act of getting married last year taught me a LOT about the advertising industry. Everyone wants to target someone with a budget of £20k-odd to slosh around.

Here are some lessons that the ad industry appears to still be learning:

1. No one will ever click on a sidebar ad unless it's totally relevant to them. If I'm planning my wedding in Rome and Facebook delivers up an ad for a great DJ in Rome, I'll definitely click on it. If it's about a dress shop in my town, I'll probably click on it. If it's about boxing, a sport I'm not into, I definitely won't.

2. Online ads have their place, and in some cases online ads can kill print ads. (E.g. ads on Gumtree and Craig's List crippled the classified ads market). But there are good reasons behind this evolution and it doesn't mean every digital ad has the ability to kill every print ad. A lot of people make this false assumption. Print ads absolutely have their place - when you are trying to reach a targeted, captive audience, magazine advertising is still brilliant. Newspaper advertising might be more difficult to justify and I don't think anyone has the answer to papers closing down because of this (I sure don't).

3. Mobile presents an even better platform for providing close, personal ads than the web, due to the personal nature in which we use our phones.

4. A lot of people Everyone hates spam.

5. A large proportion of people would be willing to provide small pieces of information about themselves online or via mobile to trusted providers, to ensure the ads that they're targeted with are more relevant. For those who don't want to disclose any information, opt-out clauses are critical and should be legally-enforced.

6. For any of the above themes to work, the ad industry needs to learn to cooperate with the right technologies that can make good things happen.

I could go on, but in a nutshell, if digital means via web and mobile can create personal, relevant ads, and stop the blanket advertising that results in end-scenarios such as junk mail and spam, the ad industry could face its Golden Age - a much nicer, and much different, outcome than death. Now, let's see if ad execs can wrap their heads around this concept. The new generation in advertising agencies 'gets it' - but do their bosses?

Disclaimer: Though I mentioned Xtract in this post, these views are completely my own.

Is there a 2.0 creativity sap?

I was looking for comedic inspiration on YouTube last night and it struck me that it could be renamed CatShow.com. The 'most viewed' tab is always chock full of people doing stupid things with their cats at home. Or clips from the news. In other words, boring, uncreative videos.

I'm guilty, too. I put up a video last year of my cat playing fetch to show off his skeelz to my parents back in the US. Admission made.

But this brought me to ponder the question - now that 2.0 has been around for awhile, are we starting to experience a creativity sap? Do web-philes only have so many creative ideas in them, and have already used them up during the first few years of the 2.0 revolution? I feel as if I haven't seen many creative bits of content lately on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. But I'm only talking about content, not about startup business ideas, where creativity has abounded in recent months, potentially as people have lost their 'real' jobs and gone off to start the company they've spent years imagining. One great source of this type of inspiration is KillerStartups.

I know that in PR, when things get really busy and I'm asked to churn out sometimes ridiculous amounts of content in the form of snappy, sharp writing, in short spaces of time, my 'snappiness' gets seriously sapped.

Or maybe it's just the winter doldrums.

If I'm wrong, please prove it to me by posting comments of the most creative content you've seen in awhile. Would love to see it. Would love to LMAO at something today.