Our friend Nick Burcher, Head of Products / Partnerships EMEA at Publicis’ VivaKi, drew me a diagram last time we caught up for coffee outlining his social media world view, which he’s since written up. I think it’s a valuable perspective (although there is something missing, which I’ll come to below):

The Destination
Traditionally marketing efforts have focussed around ‘The Destination.’ Ad space is bought to push people to a main site / microsite and this could be anything from Paid Search to TV to Print. It’s all about ‘go here now!’ There is a direct correlation between ad spend and ‘Destination’ traffic. Generally increase in ad spend = increase in traffic and decreasing ad spend results in decreasing traffic.

This is changing though. New ‘Destinations’ are being created, it’s no longer just a main site or a microsite. Facebook Fan Pages are being used as an activity hub with paid ads driving traffic. Alternatively the Destination could be a YouTube channel or other social platform.

The social web is also providing new traffic driving opportunities eg Facebook Engagement ads, sponsored Diggs or socialmedia.com social banners but the biggest change to the internet landscape though is the emergence of ‘The Conversation.’

Web 1.0 was a one way street. Users went to a site and consumed information and advertisers served messages somewhere along the way. The publisher published, the consumer consumed, the advertiser advertised . On the social web the distinctions between these three areas have all blurred and changed marketing forever.

The Conversation
If advertisers can successfully participate in the Conversation then it becomes less about paid pushing. The Conversation is about engaging rather than broadcasting, and if done successfully it changes the equation. Instead of having to pay to recruit every visit, consumers can be co-opted as brand ambassadors who then will freely relay the advertiser message with consequent Destination traffic the result.

Activity targeting the Conversation needs this ‘kickstart’ to give it initial momentum. This is where new disciplines like blogger outreach and video seeding come in. This is where marketers need to think of taking content to the consumer, rather than expecting consumers to come to them – and make it easy to share using ‘Blog This’ buttons, Facebook Connect and more.

Nick is right to point that it’s no longer just about ad spend, that Destinations no longer need to be microsites (if they ever did), that the Conversation is about engaging rather than broadcasting, and that traffic can flow from the Destination to the Conversation. But what the model doesn’t take account of, is the fact that it’s the Conversation, not the Destination, that’s important, and that in some cases there doesn’t need to be a Destination.

The Conversation itself sometimes can fulfill your business or marketing objectives without reference to a Destination, creating demand by driving awareness, consideration and/or engagement through far-reaching word of mouth – whether that be through simply getting the product into the hands of bloggers and generating reviews, through viral seeding where the vast majority of the video views happen out there in the conversation cloud or through a myriad of other ways.

More progressively (and effectively), you still have a Destination, but it’s designed to facilitate, support and amplify the Conversation, and success is measured not in traffic to the Destination, but in the reach, sentiment and engagement with the Conversation itself.

So I’ve been banging on about the death of the microsite for quite a while, but I’d never spent the time to fully articulate my position.

When Contagious magazine offered me the opportunity to articulate it to the world at large, I jumped at the chance. Although only normally available to their subscribers, they’ve kindly made my article available as a PDF (the article itself is on page 5).

The rise of the real time web
What have you done online in the past week? How many microsites did you visit? How many branded Flash animations did you watch? Calculate the mean answer for the entire country and you’ll probably arrive at a figure close to zero. Read on

Back in 2005, as I was first experimenting with social media with my personal blog, I was convinced that I was pioneering social media usage within my network of friends, family and colleagues. Looking back now, I realise my younger sister had actually started using social media a few months before me. At the time she was pregnant with her first child and I remember her mentioning she wasn’t sure how she would have got through her pregnancy had it not been for the Internet and the community of supportive mums she found there. Of course, at the time, I hadn’t put a name to what was to become a few years later one of the fastest growing social media phenomenons: the “connected mums” or “digital mums”.

A recent survey conducted by parenting site BabyCenter found that the use of social networks by mums has grown from 11% in 2006 to 63% in 2009. Mums increasingly use social networks to search for information related to pregnancy, to find tips and information on parenting, and to get recommendations from other mums.

More recent research by Forrester highlights that the Internet is the main source of information for mothers when it comes to making an informed purchase decision. Even more interestingly, one of the findings is that although they spend a considerable amount of time online, mums don’t tend to trust banner ads or search engine ads.

You can see where I’m getting at: if you’re a brand willing to engage with a group of individuals who have less time to spend with media than the average consumer (32 hours per week versus 36 hours), see the Internet as their main source of information, but don’t trust online advertising, and are noticeable users of social networks (31%), surely social media is the answer?

The Forrester research also found that 25% of mothers read customer reviews online, 19% use comparison sites and last but not least, 50% tell their friends about products they’re interested in. Online word of mouth at its best.

As Siobhan Freegard, co-founder of popular UK mums network NetMums puts it:

Mums are a desirable target for many advertisers [...] but please don’t be tempted to patronise us with fluffy nursery-rhyme adverts. If you want to impress us, remember that as well as being mums, we are grown up, intelligent women.

Sites like Netmums, BabyExpert.com or Bounty.co.uk are all very appealing for marketers, but don’t forget, it’s all about engaging in conversations with mums in an interesting (Susanna Scott, the founder of British Mummy Bloggers reports she receives 10 product pitches per week) & ethical manner.

The hype around Twitter doesn’t seem to be slowing down, however few research papers have been published so far about it. So it’s with a gleeful smile that I welcomed the results of the academic study of the phenomenon published by Professor Jim Jansen and his team at Penn State University. They analysed nearly 150,000 tweets to understand how brands were mentioned on microblogging tools like Twitter.

I will focus this post on the results, but feel free to check for yourselves the methods that have been used, they’re very well detailed in the report paper.

Around 19% of tweets mention an organization or a product. Of these:

• 1 out 5 tweets express a sentiment or an opinion, either positive (for 52% of them), negative (33%) or neutral (15%)
• 4 out of 5 tweets are not associated with a sentiment, they are mostly questions and answers. People are seeking details missing from their usual source of information and helping others with their findings.

This latest data is additional proof that brands and products are at the heart of online conversations. Conversation strategies are a requirement for brands and it should be part of an overall strategy. A conversation strategy can be used, for example, to understand why a product is more popular than another, and what could be improved as far as service and customer relationship are concerned. It might also help to discover a problem with a product already on the market and identify what remedy could be taken; users generally have very insightful inputs that should be taken into account.

Listening and responding are even more important, in that they help brands greatly when they want to start a conversation with their customers, or any other people out there.

If most of the tweets about a brand are questions, brands themselves can provide fast and reliable information, which I have no doubt will have a positive impact on the prospect/brand relationship, and then on the client/brand relationship. That’s what Robin was saying when he explained that it was important to “engage in conversations in social media”

Furthermore, the study shows that there can be a massive swing in sentiment from a studied period to another.

It’s probably obvious to all of you who are reading this, but conversations need constant monitoring, whether they happen on Twitter or elsewhere. It doesn’t stop at weekends: buying patterns and therefore exposure to corporate messages evolve constantly, and the strength of a brand is its ability to identify these variations and adapt to them. When We Are Social work on conversation audits for our clients, we often analyse the reactions of individuals to a brand at a precise moment, for example after the launch of a new TV ad campaign.

With the rise of microblogging, clients and individuals are exposed to a constant stream of information and opinions and it doesn’t seem to be slowing down. These are rarely monitored by brands, so it’s high time for them to have a look and engage!

Twestival by Jon Cartwright

After speaking at NMA Live’s Twitter for Brands, the IAB’s Travel Forum and Simon’s keynote on measuring online political behaviour, all in the last few weeks, it seems we have an even more relentless schedule of speaking engagements coming up over the next couple of months. On the off chance you might actually want to tag along, I thought it worth telling you about them in advance…

ad:tech, London, Tuesday 22nd September
I’m participating on an IAB hosted panel at ad:tech looking at “what to do when things go bad: the power of reactive social media” alongside Nick Jones, Director of Interactive Services at the COI and others. This is free to attend, so get yourself down to Olympia for 3pm tomorrow.

Drinks and Digital Marketing Summit, London, Tuesday 22nd September
The impact of social media on the drinks industry is up for discussion on a panel with wine bloggers and drinks marketers that I will be part of at the The Charlotte Street Hotel. It’s rumoured that Oz Clarke will be in the audience, so get yourself an invite and I’ll see you there at 6:30pm tomorrow.

IPA Social, London, Tuesday 6th October
Ok, so we’re not actually part of the line-up, but Nathan, Sandrine, Leila, Simon, Seb and myself will be there to contribute to the debate (as we were last time). The evening has the potential to go down in history as the moment adland woke up to social media. Whatever happens, you don’t want to miss it.

Silverpop EMEA Client Summit, London, Thursday 8th October
Silverpop’s Client Summit is invite only, if you are going along, I’ll be speaking in the afternoon

Social Media in Business, London, Friday 23rd October
I’ll be part of a panel debate on “The Future of Social Media” towards the end of the day, but the sessions they’ve got on beforehand look great – so grab a ticket now.

Media140, London, Monday 26th October
Gareth Jones, Revolution’s Editor and Mel Exon, Managing Partner of BBH Labs and I are on the opening panel, “Can you change a brand in 140 characters?” . If you can at all make it to this event, I’d advise you to – the previous Media140 conference was brilliant and this one looks even better.

Understanding Digital Creative, Dublin, Thursday 5th November
I’ll be heading to Dublin to speak at Understanding Digital Creative, an evening event that forms part of ICAD‘s Design Week, alongside the chaps from Agenda 21 and Folk Creative.

Monitoring Social Media 09, London, Tuesday 17th November
At Monitoring Social Media 09 I’ll be talking about how we helped Skype set-up and run their real-time social media listening and responding programme. This is the first conference in Europe dedicated to this topic – it will be good to delve deep into the issues…

Account Planning Group Sweden, Stockholm, Wednesday 18th November
The Swedish account planning community invited me to Stockholm for the evening to sprinkle a bit of the We Are Social fairy dust as part of their series of events on planning in a digital world.

Interactive Advertising Festival, Madrid, Wednesday 25th November
I’ll be in Madrid for IAB Spain‘s Interactive Advertising Festival, running a 100 person(!) workshop on Social Media (let’s hope their English is good, as my castellano is non-existent).

The Battle of Big Thinking, London, Thursday 26th November
Sandrine is a contestant in Campaign and the Account Planning Group‘s Battle of Big Thinking, up against people like Jonathan Mildenhall, Coca-Cola’s VP of global advertising strategy and creative excellence, Guy Murphy, JWT’s worldwide planning director, Rick Vlemmiks, British Gas’ marketing director, Robin Wight, chairman of the Engine Group and Will Harris, Nokia UK’s marketing director. As you can see, she’ll be up against some formidable opposition – however it pans out, you’re guaranteed “a year’s thinking in a day”.

I popped along to give the keynote speech at a symposium on measuring online political behaviour yesterday organised by Royal Holloway University‘s New Political Communications Unit.

In keeping with true keynote style I only managed to get along to the afternoon sessions at the event, but I still managed to catch a couple of interesting presentations: one from Rob Pearson at the UK’s Foreign & Commonwealth Office examining the evaluation of its G20 London Summit web presence; the second from Simon Bergman from strategic communications outfit, Information Options.

I was presenting findings from some research I’ve been conducting into the use of online monitoring by the UK’s three main political parties: The Conservatives, Labour and the Liberal Democrats which is an area without any in-depth study to date.

I’ve embedded my presentation above, but be warned – it’s text heavy (hey, it’s tricky articulating research findings using fancy images) – but here are some of my main findings:

• All political parties report that they track online influencers qualitatively (e.g. Iain Dale, Guido, Political Betting, etc) but they also reported that they engage with these blogs to help set the national media-agenda (which nicely supports my earlier research). Equally, all online or influencer monitoring by parties is performed informally – that is, not using paid for or third party tracking tools.
• One respondent told me that monitoring is about “a gut feeling about what’s going on” and also the UK political blogosphere is small and well organised. In my opinion, using influencers this way suggests that parties are perhaps only scratching the surface of influencer engagement. In my day job I would advise clients to establish a conversational position within influencer networks and build trusted relationships.  This is key to developing successful long-term engagement programmes – arguably the only real way to change behaviour.
• Parties do engage directly to a limited extent with individuals online, particularly at a local level. However, The Labour Party appears to be closest to participating in real-time within online networks by engaging non-political networks, e.g. marketing/PR and media networks to leverage news or content.
• Interestingly Labour also use quantitative tracking to identify popular or trending issues and content on the Labour Party website and to identify ‘content gaps’ on the Labour website. This insight is used to create new content to meet demand.
• The Liberal Democrats use qualitative monitoring in a different way altogether: as an internal communications or customer service tool. By reading and staying on top of what Lib Dem campaigners and activists are saying, thinking and doing, the party can help out or resolve any issues that are emerging at a grassroots level. Really interesting use of monitoring.

My presentation also tried to force these findings into a critical framework based on the work Manuel Castells has completed in mapping and analysing the Network Society.

I started from the position that political parties monitor online networks to ensure they can engage effectively with the aim being to exert influence influence in the network.

One of the most important measures of influence – or more accurately – power in networks is defined by Castells as “networking-making power” = that is the ability to establish and control particular networks.

This ability is further categorised into two processes: programmers and switchers.

1. Programmers have “the ability to constitute network(s), and to program/reprogram the network(s) in terms of goals assigned to the network”
2. Switchers have “the ability to connect and ensure cooperation of different networks by sharing common goals and combining resources, while fending off competition from other networks by setting up strategic cooperation”

Based on my findings I hypothesise that the Tories are Programmers while Labour are Switchers:

• Conservatives – early political online networks in the UK were (and still are to an extent) right-wing or anti-Government. This meant that the Conservatives were able to program the network and assign goals that were largely identical to its own. This would potentially explain why the Conservatives focus online engagement with influential nodes in the network rather and not primarily engaging in wider debate around issues.
• Labour – Labour are Switchers as they are seeking to cooperate with strategic partner networks through shared goals. For example, identifying media networks interested in specific issues and leveraging them by combining resources.

Anyway. Those are my main findings. Feel free to challenge, share, agree with, etc. As always, they open up more questions for further examination than they answer. But that’s the beauty of research.

Bubblino by Roo Reynolds

This Saturday, I joined many of London’s smartest geeks and creators and took a break from the Internet to attend the third annual Interesting 2009, convened by the tireless Russell Davies. While there was plenty of backchat on Twitter and photos on Flickr, it was also refreshingly un-digital in many respects – seeing what happens when the digerati apply the same enthusiasm, creativity, curiosity and gregariousness in their day jobs as elsewhere. Topics abounded: live biohacking of yoghurt, the colour violet, how to conduct a symphony orchestra, nuclear weapons in Indian mythology, photographing bullets at the top of their trajectory, ponies, why we say “cheers” and how to win at Monopoly – the best of the action is summed up by Roo Reynolds.

That’s it. No real deeper message about social media or the power of the web in bringing people together, but just a testament to the variety of hobbies, interests and obsessions that drive some of the people behind what’s so great about the social web today. I’ll leave you with this video for the new astrotags site for sharing astronomical photos:

Another great presentation from Paul Isakson…

So this week’s edition of PR Week has hit desks and if you haven’t read it yet then you will have missed the news that I’ve joined We Are Social. The news is awesome for a couple of reasons, both personal and professional.

First the professional: I’ve been watching We Are Social grow over the past year and a bit and have been impressed by both the clients they’re working with and the work they’re doing. Seriously. Now I’m on the inside I continue to be blown away by the briefs that come through the door and the work that goes out.

That may sound overly sycophantic but it’s a genuine response. The work that’s being planned and delivered at We Are Social is the kind that you don’t believe exists working on the PR agency side. Clearly brands and organisations want to understand social media and its impact on their reputation. But it seems they aren’t turning to their PR agency to deliver this work, instead seeking out a team of people that live and breathe social media every day. Which on reflection, is no surprise

On a personal level I’m really happy to be planning and delivering real, juicy, smart, social media campaigns, rather than bolting on digital tactics which was often the case when working to a PR brief.

Add to that the fact that I’m tasked with growing the public sector, NGO and not-for-profit work that We Are Social does means I’m working with sectors with which I have a deep personal affinity (in case you aren’t overly familiar with my LinkedIn profile I started out in PR working for NGOs). Moreover, social media comes to the fore when empowering organisations and individuals to deliver issues-based campaigns and citizen engagement.

So that’s the news. I’ve joined We Are Social. I’m excited. You can see it in my tweets. I’m going to Twestival. I’ve started blogging again. I am, as Manuel Castells might say, back in the space of flows.