A very important part of what we do at We Are Social consists in helping brands engage in social media by having meaningful conversations with people and igniting positive word of mouth. So as I was watching Loïc Le Meur’s video on ‘How to launch a product using your community’, I thought it was a brilliant illustration of why word of mouth is so important. As it’s in French, I’ll try and recap some key learnings here.

According to Loïc, traditional advertising, PR and marketing are all still very valid but are nowhere near as important as the power of word of mouth. He illustrates this by saying that when you are about to buy a product, what you want is to know what your friends think about it before you purchase it. You want to know what your community has to say about that product.

And to be honest, in some ways, this has always been the case. In the past, we would probably have asked our neighbors, colleagues or ‘real’ friends what they thought about product X or Y. Nowadays, those conversations about products and brands alike are happening online. And rather than transiently involving two or three of your friends, these conversations can now potentially reach millions of people and are permanent (as they’ll appear in Google’s results for ever). This is good if the conversation is positive and not so good otherwise.

Loïc adds another interesting point about online conversations: the years 1993-2000 were about static media – i.e. the online environment was a reproduction of traditional media; since 2000, we’ve seen the explosion of what we refer to as ‘social media’ – i.e. people interacting with people but also brands, via blogs, social networks, etc. And now, as Loïc highlights, since the beginning of 2009, the web has entered a new area. People still want to interact with their community but they want to do so in real time, via Twitter or Facebook statuses for example. Which means that when people talk about products and brands, they also do it in real time.

Hence the importance of listening and responding in real time as Robin was highlighting in his interview with emarketer ‘Social Media: Joining the conversation’. And both Seesmic & Twhirl are a great examples of brands who have understood the importance of listening in real time to the community’s feedback, to get insights into what’s good, or not so good about their products. And Loïc is the first one to say that this means sometimes he’s checking Twitter Search at 3am to read about the community feedback and to reply to it. Because Loïc knows that if 1,000 of Seesmic’s fans are convinced about the product, they’ll tell another 10,000 of their friends about how great the product is.

It’s all about ‘micro interactions’ as David Armano calls them. It’s about turning your fans into brand advocates.  And it works – this is how how he managed to get Seesmic Desktop application downloaded 1.5 million times in a few days. This is the power of word of mouth.

The Engagement Spectrum, a useful new diagram from our friend David Armano. A nice complement to Mike Troiano’s concept of concept of ‘scalable intimacy’.

The first time I met Jeremiah Owyang, was in 2007 when I had been invited to speak at the Forrester Consumer Forum EMEA in Barcelona, about the social media strategy I had put in place whilst at Renault to launch the New Twingo. Two years later, I am now working agency side, spending 100% of my time working on something I am passionate about: social media.

As part of developing We Are Social in France, I spend a significant amount of time in Paris these days so I had the chance to meet Jeremiah for the second time last Wednesday, at the #paristweetup he had organised.

During this tweetup, Jeremiah took us through the findings of the latest Forrester report The Future of the Social Web: In Five Eras. If you haven’t read it yet, I recommend you head over to Jeremiah’s blog post.

Since I joined We Are Social last year I’ve been lucky enough to work on what I think is one of the most interesting and engaging social media projects by a brand: This is Now.

In September 2008, Ford were launching the new Fiesta with an integrated pan-European campaign based on the idea of the Fiesta representing the zeitgeist, the moment, aimed at an audience in their mid-to-late twenties (who don’t tend to read either the motoring press or motoring blogs). We were asked to activate the campaign socially by encouraging members of our target audience to submit their own definition of ‘now’ to a Flickr group. Apart from the deal with Flickr, there was no media spend and we weren’t able to incentivise submissions.

After some very late nights and weekends in the office we came up with an approach that turned it into a unique European collaborative art project.

We spent a lot of time thinking about the cross section of online communities that both influenced and reached our target audience and would be interested in the project, and then even more time finding the influential voices in those communities and crafting copy that would get them interested. We also came up with the idea of the This is Now blog, which we’d go on to use to encourage contributions by highlighting some of the best submissions to the Flickr group.

We initially spread the news (and built link equity for the blog) by talking to the marketing community about the campaign. Then, over the last nine months, we’ve reached out to hundreds of influential art, design, fashion, photography, music and cinema bloggers from across Europe, giving them and their audiences a chance get involved by uploading images that define ‘now’ for them.

Between all of us working on the project here, we’ve written over 130 posts highlighting a variety of amazing images that the public have submitted to the group (some of my favourites are Driving home, Four and I want to rock and roll)

We’re using the This is Now Twitter account to extend the conversation around the project. If you haven’t said hi yet, come on in. I swear I don’t bite and we can enjoy a chat about the latest This is Now submissions (or perhaps even about some great new street art in Berlin). We are very proud of the community we’ve built and it’s a pleasure to spend every day following everyone’s updates and the exchanges on many different topics from the latest gigs in London to exhibitions in Paris or Madrid.

We’re also giving participating bloggers the opportunity to share their own vision of ‘now’ by becoming guest editors of the blog. We have had over 50 to date, illustrating what ‘now’ means to them and re-engaging their audiences in the process. You should check out some of the heartfelt posts, including English fashion blogger Aimee Marie, Spanish film blogger Manuel and French music blogger Julien Seveno.

How is the project going so far? Well, we’ve had over 150 blog posts written about the project such as La Petite Nymphea, Cajon DeSastre, or Zimba which together have reached an estimated 1,050,000 people from all over Europe. Over 40,000 images and videos have been submitted and more than 6,000 have been accepted into the group, making it the second biggest sponsored group on Flickr.

But what’s much more important than the numbers, for me at least, is the friends we’ve made all across Europe in a diverse set of communities, friends who’ve really got involved in the project. Without them, none of this would have been possible and the Flickr group would not be what it is today – an amazing crowd sourced collection of images that represent ‘now’ for the people of Europe. One that makes me draw breath every time I look at it….

Photo by Sizemore

Yesterday Robin and I attended media140 along with seemingly everyone I follow on Twitter (as Bash joked: “If you wanted to take out the hard core of London tech/media peeps, now would be your chance”). It was a good half-day of debate, case studies, and proving that Twitter people can interact in real life too.

Pat Kane gave a good keynote on how Twitter enriches more traditional journalism – creating a civic space of proto- or pro-am journalists supporting journalists in researching or reporting their stories. The G20 summit was one obvious example of this communal reporting – Kate Day’s blog post about that is well worth reading; what strikes me about these civic spaces is how ephemeral they are – the crowds that form around a news story are like flashmobs, there for the duration before dispersing. It brings into question who ‘owns’ a story and is the centre of this crowd given there is no permanent social structure in place.

Kevin Anderson talked about this social ‘glue’ and the help it gave him in his roadtrip during last year’s US elections, using Twitter not just to report but to meet people as well. Kevin mentioned how he felt disconnected his audience working for a big paper compared to working for a local one, and how using social media brought a lot of that back. Suw Charman-Anderson noted the differentiation within social media – in her Ada Lovelace Day project, she noted that people on Twitter were more open and more likely to help out than those who just pledged support on Facebook. It was an interesting insight into the differences between the two; in my mind, Twitter’s wider openness and realtime nature allows you to more fully experience the joy of meeting & conversing with random like-minded people. It allows you to join and adopt ephemeral crowds, and then take part in real-time and contribute as much or as little as you like, this fitting seamlessly into your everyday activity. Facebook’s mechanic of join and then ignore for groups is quite clunky and much less fine-grained in comparison, as well as being far less conversational (for more, in Robin’s recent eMarketer interview, he discusses the advantages of open social media over closed social networks).

These experiences reinforced in my mind how the key skill that anyone working in ‘traditional’ media should have with respect to Twitter or other social media: understanding and becoming part of the wider communities where your story might be discussed, creating or finding the transient virtual crowd that form around it, and then transforming that all the social capital and social content (tweets, links, ideas) into content that adds value for both you and them. Nick Halstead was keen to point out how all those 140-character Tweets can help you write up your brilliant 1000-word piece, but the perils of Twitter and unreliability of rumours can torpedo quality journalism if you get carried away. Bill Thompson was more embracing, describing the collective real-time stream of consciousness and how overwhelming it can be yet at the same time utterly enjoyable (a lovely contradiction).

Which leads onto my final thought: in a Twittered-up world, your media property is only as good as your audience, rather than your content. Mike Butcher talked about how social media allowed his audience to become his editors, which I think got misunderstood slightly by some other panellists – I don’t think Mike was saying he had abandoned all editorial control or responsibility, but with their ability to search, correct and feed back in real-time, he was directly responsible to them, and if he ever got things wrong, they would hold him to it. So getting an audience your content deserves becomes very important – and ultimately demands making sure you have skills and capabilities in community management as well as producing great content. The days of journalists relying on niche skills are truly over – and I wonder how quickly journalism and media courses are catching up?

Additionally, there’s some good summaries of media140 out there as well – Kevin Anderson covers the panel on news gathering and Pat Kane’s talk as well. Ewan Spence talks of the “impromptu community” that sprung up around Eurovision last weekend, exactly the kind of thing I was thinking of above, and quotes from Adam Tinworth (who also liveblogged the event): “Around an event like the Eurovision, the main broadcast is in real danger of becoming just a social object that people interact about elsewhere.” Danger makes it sound like a bad thing, whereas I’d argue the exact opposite.

The very final talk of Thinking Digital last Friday was by Tara Hunt, who was talking about social capital in networks as part of her new book ‘The Whuffie Factor’. ‘Whuffie’, a word originally from Cory Doctorow’s novel ‘Down & Out In The Magic Kingdom’, is used by Tara to mean what has been also been described as ‘social capital’ or ‘guanxi’ in discussions of intra-community relations.

Of course in many ways the word ‘capital’ is opposite to its normal usage – whereas financial capital is exhausted by being used, social capital is only exhausted if it’s not used. As Tara put it – “the more you give away, the more you gain”. Online communities tend to be gift economies – but gift economies are nothing new and it’s worth studying their history – an excellent and very readable anthropological and sociological view is Lewis Hyde’s ‘The Gift’ and should be required reading for anyone who thinks social capital only came about with social media.

Of course there’s a natural tension between gift economies and market economies. Giving away everything for free is not the soundest of business models (although Matt Mason, author of ‘The Pirate’s Dilemma’, had some thoughts on that earlier in the day). But gifting time, help and effort to communities and helping the conversations within them, to help everyone’s whuffie grow (not just your own) is the key to proper social media engagement.

There is one quibble I have with Tara’s philosophy on whuffie – and I suspect this may be stuffy Brit clashing with extroverted American – which is her emphasis on being light-hearted. While I’d agree that having a sense of humour is important, being human is more important. And there are many occasions when it’s not appropriate to be light-hearted, particularly dealing with experiences and conversations that are negative. It’s harder to convey emotion in text when online than in person, and you need to be sensitive and respectful as much as you need to be good-humoured in those situations.

Tara’s presentation is at the top of the post – do check it out – although her rapid-fire and engaging presentation style mean it was much better with her speaking over the top of it…

I spent a few days in Brighton last week attending the iMedia agency summit.

It was a great chance to mix with senior people from both media, above the line and digital agencies and discuss the challenges facing our industry (and, let’s be honest, get to know each other over a few beers).

Jeremy Hill did an outstanding job of chairing the event and my thanks go to Gavin Sutcliffe and the rest of the team at iMedia who made the event happen.

PHD’s Head of Innovation, John V Willshire, took time out from thinking about butterflies and bubbles long enough to write up his take on the conference, and leaves us with this question:

We are an industry built around reaching out to a million people in order to affect a small proportion of them for our clients. It’s embedded in the language we use, the business models we’ve created, even some of the ideas we suggest and persist with.

However the opportunity exists to build conversations and relationships with the thousand people we originally wanted to affect in the first place… and if we create a great relationship between our clients and them, they will be more likely to be loyal, enthusiastic advocates of that company and their products.

Which is better for the company and the people. So I guess the big question is what role will the agency play in that world?

Of course, this is the question we setup We Are Social to help answer…

It’s a question we get asked a lot, and despite the temptation to reply with Scott Monty’s (the head of social media for Ford) famed response – “What’s the ROI of putting your pants on in the morning?”, we usually say something more considered. We talk about how, despite the fact that we can measure the outcomes of the work that we do (and that we’re getting pretty good at it) and that we work with our clients to set meaningful KPIs at the beginning of engagements, it is still really hard to map those back to business metrics like ROI.

This is why we’re working closely with the rest of the IAB’s Social Media Council to get our research into the effectiveness of social media at a campaign level off the ground (you would not believe how hard it is to devise appropriate and affordable research methodologies to do so), and also one of the reasons we’re active participants at MeasurementCamp.

However, those that tell you can’t measure anything are wrong. If you’d like to know more, Jon ‘yongfook’ Cockle has a great presentation and accompanying blog post that outlines an approach to measurement that pretty much mirrors our own:

Thinking Digital has been one of the most varied and stimulating events I’ve been to and it’s no surprise there’s been a lot of talk about social media and engaging your consumers.

Alex Hunter (@cubedweller on Twitter), who was also a panellist at the social media masterclass, had a talk of his own at the conference yesterday. Alex is head of web at Virgin Group, and a true social media evangelist. He talked about how he’s reshaping the Virgin Group website and transforming it into a social platform for Virgin’s customers. Much of his talk drew from the Cluetrain Manifesto but wasn’t just a rehash of that; he shared his own thoughts. He emphasised that people don’t want to talk to brands, they want to talk to people – and so Virgin has put people as part of its strategy, helped by the fact it’s one of the few brands already inextricably associated with a person, namely Richard Branson.

Interesting, of all the corporate blogs, Alex regards Digg’s as the best – not just because it’s written by the guys at the top like Kevin Rose, but because there is a multiplicity of voices and they respond to their fans. But then, as a social media site, Digg know the audience they’re blogging for, and as a new brand they’re more confident in experimenting. It’s harder for non-tech brands, so I’d use Digg as one example of good corporate blogging, but not the only one.

Alex was evangelistic about embracing social media in the business word, and made it clear it works for brands big and small (citing Qype and Zappos as examples). We also got some insights in the new Virgin philosophy – they have “labs”-style projects at Explore Virgin, which has produced Virgin Eye a beautiful visualisation of mentions of their brands on the web (from over 5,000 sources).

This isn’t just dabbling, however. Virgin plan to relaunch their website as a social platform, opening up to allow people to talk about their brand and products and upload their own content. They’ve been savvy to link up with Digg and Facebook Connect to utilise existing social media properties rather than reinvent the wheel. They have also put an impressive effort into research – a year and a half listening, researching and creating before launching their new social platform to make sure it fits the people who use it. It was an impressive example to others: not just in how to embrace social media, but how important it is to know the community you want to build around.