Yesterday Econsultancy published their Social Media and Online PR Report, produced in association with bigmouthmedia. It’s certainly worth a read.

The first thing to point out is that the scope of the research is nothing if not impressive. They received over 1,100 respondents representing 458 client-side organizations and 522 agency / suppliers. One might assume then that it paints a fairly accurate picture of the industry, and of the UK market in particular as Brits made up the majority of respondents.

I’ve been through both the report and presentation and assembled a few thoughts on some of the findings. As we near the end of 2009, it seems that the industry has a way to go:

• Just under half of companies (46%) are not yet using reputation or buzz monitoring tools to understand what is being said about their brand. Not even free tools? I find this slightly worrying, as there is virtually no barrier to entry and no shortage of free tools online.  For instance, here’s a list I’ve helped compile on the Measurement Camp website.
• There’s a large gap between personal and organisational attitudes towards social media. Whereas 61% of respondents personally see a tremendous opportunity for social media, less than a third (31%) say that their organisations as a whole have this same positive outlook. In fact 44% say their organisations are not fully convinced of the value (but are open minded), and another 19% consider social media a major risk.
• The three most common reasons for not investing in social media up to now have been lack of knowledge and understanding (59%), company culture (41%) and lack of senior buy-in (41%).  It would seem that change needs to start from the top, and agencies of all different stripes have a role to play in educating their clients.

So there are some definite challenges ahead, as social media/digital engagement still appears to be a long way off being something that businesses take seriously. However, it’s not all doom and gloom:

• The majority of companies (86%) expect investment in social media to increase in 2010.

Surely that’s good news?

Get the report here.

It’s time for We Are Social’s Monday Mashup, our pick of some of the web’s finest research, news and case studies.

CMOs: Consumers Are Connected. You Need To Be, Too
The prolific Jeremiah Owyang penned this article for Forbes magazine, as a guide for CMOs who are currently putting the finishing touches on their 2010 marketing strategies. Though most CMOs now recognise the need to put more resources behind social media, many more need some suggestions about how they might develop a solid strategy.  As such, Jeremiah assembled his thoughts under the following headings:

• Social marketing affects all digital marketing channels
• Customers don’t care what department you’re in
• Technology is cheap, yet soft costs are high
• Develop a pragmatic approach
• Social marketing affects the whole organisation

Read on for more detail.

Losing To The Social Web: Visualized
If you like visuals, then read on. This post from Unmissable blog looks at the decline of the ‘destination web’ (a topic we’ve covered here in the past) and suggests that the sun is setting on branded websites and microsites as social media swallows up a greater proportion of traffic on the web.

Unmissable has assembled graphs for some of the biggest brands on the web – Dell, Adidas, BMW, Quicksilver, Sony – and what you’ll immediately notice is “ websites and portals have been loosing unique visitors hand over fist for the last 3 years.”

This stands in sharp contrast to the graphs assembled for social networks, which show traffic rising ever higher over the same period.

Off-site content distribution like RSS, and the fact that social networks have become far more relevant to consumers are cited as the main reasons branded websites are suffering. The lesson here is that agencies and brands need to work out how better connect with customers online, and deliver relevant content and experiences where they are spending a growing proportion of their time online: in social media.

Measuring Engagement of the Social Web: ‘07-’09
An interesting post from the Postrank blog, which looked at various measures of ‘engagement’ since 2007 and identified a few trends worth paying attention to for content publishers. In sum:

• In absolute terms, more people are participating in the social web
• Conversations and discussions about the content are increasingly happening off the publisher’s property, fuelled by the growth of the “share and like this phenomenon which is sweeping through Facebook, Twitter and dozens of other social hubs”
• The widespread adoption of more pervasive communication tools like Facebook and Twitter is actually increasing the lifespan of a typical story, with engagement taking place over a longer period of time as the story gets passed around more widely

Twitter to launch paid-for corporate accounts this year
It been rumoured for some time and is perhaps one of the few ways in which Twitter could derive revenue, but at last Twitter has confirmed they are planning to launch ‘paid-for commercial accounts’, according to founder Biz Stone. Don’t panic though. What this actually means for brands and agencies who help them online is that Twitter will remain free for corporate and personal users, but would now offer companies additional paid-for services to help manage and analyse conversations online.

Bloggers strike back at Buscombe
Last week it was reported that Peta Buscombe, the chairman of the Press Complaints Commission, had ambitions to regulate bloggers. As one might imagine, it was not well received. Sunny Hundal, one-time winner of The Guardian’s blogger of the year award, has set out in detail why such regulation would be wholly incompatible with blogging practice. Read the letter in full.

Social networking sites criticised for failing to protect children

The head of a government body responsible for keeping children safe has criticised social networking sites for not doing enough to protect youngsters.

Whereas Bebo has recently introduced a “Ceop report” button for users to log abuse, no such mechanism currently exists on Facebook or Myspace. Here’s to hoping social networking sites follow Bebo’s lead in order to make the web a safer place for young people.

Other notable stories:

• Burberry attracts 200,000 to its social network
• Salesforce.com tries to bring social networking to the workplace
• STUDY: Most Fortune 100 Companies Don’t Get Twitter

A nice presentation from Mike Arauz:

Mobile technology is making every experience both digital and social. That means that the experiences that we previously thought of as happening “off line” now play by the same rules as online experiences. The same principles that make things spread online now need to be applied to real world experiences to help them spread in the digital space.

Photo by Paul Clarke

Yesterday, while Robin was wowing the audience of Monitoring Social Media 2009, I attended the 140 Characters conference at the O2 in London, part of a series of conferences under Jeff Pulver‘s care and attention.

Twitter conferences have often been derided as being populated by agencies and other die-hard converts telling each other how great they are – and yet while of course there was an agency presence, 140 Characters was far more memorable for the police forces, teachers, aspiring filmmakers, cattle ranchers and DJs there – all discussing how they love talking, sharing and conversing on Twitter.

Agency-wise, the Brands & Twitter panel (starring our very own Mauricio Samayoa along with James Poulter, Jennifer Cisney, Mike Mathieson and Rachel Fellows) was a standout for agency-land, with some well-placed questions and debate on how to provide brands a persona in social media. Central to this was the question of how to position – do you have a single ‘brand personality’ online or devolve to your employees to represent you instead? There was no sure answer to this and it was good to see nuance in the panelists’ reasoning – it depends on the resources available, the kind of service you wish to provide, and how bold you want to be; while it’s good to get as many Tweeting as possible, in the end it’s better to have some presence in the conversation rather than none at all. It was good to see that the temptation to treat Twitter as a channel with a one-size-fits-all approach was being clearly eschewed.

One example of how to stagger this process, comes not from the private, but the public sector. West Midlands Police have embraced Twitter & other social platforms, using it both to gather information about crime and public order, as well as outreaching to critics and public information – particularly important given the corresponding decline of local newspapers. West Midlands Police have gone from a force that 18 months ago banned using social networks in the office to one that’s now enthusiastically using it under a official profile, and they are now discussing a proposal to let individual officers Tweet as official representatives. It’s a classic case of establishing a voice on Twitter first, gaining confidence, skills and social capital to support it, and then devolving your voice out to staff once you’ve established your presence. As for the question whether staff can be trusted with being a brand voice, as Lauri Stevens, a co-panelist put it – “if the police can be trusted with tasers and guns, they can be given Twitter as well”.

Those on the fringes of the debate provoked food for thought as well. Andrew Keen, as expected, gave a contrarian view on Twitter, and what he saw as the dangerous seductiveness of authenticity (or rather false authenticity); Keen predicted a day when someone charismatic would be able to create a following that they could use for evil purposes rather than good. However, this warning seemed to be based on the assumption that Twitter’s appeal is solely in charisma and social standing, with no thought to conversation and values; in his view, people will be influenced by what Stephen Fry says because of his persona, and not because they might hold the same values as he does. But as Stephen Fry himself put it in his speech at the conference, if he urged his followers on Twitter to vote for a far-right party in the next election, it’s unlikely many, if any, would follow purely on his saying. Influence in social media is more than just someone’s sheer force of personality.

Regardless of Keen’s warnings, for the most part the Twitterverse has been able to use its powers for good, and not because of charisma but because it’s possible to make a difference. For example, there were three 19-year-olds from @BuyACredit promoting their social media fundraising for their film production. Plenty of people, including Jeff Pulver, referred to them as ‘kids’ or ‘boys’ but this was doing them a disservice; they know far more about social media than many older than them, and have been using it for a far greater proportion of their lives, so good luck to them.

In the same vein, a panel of young musicians and DJs talked about how they used Twitter; the music industry is in flux, and tellingly, there was still talk of “conquering Twitter” and of using street teams and other practices relating to an older style of marketing. It’s clear the industry is still having trouble fully getting to grips with social media’s realities. The musicians’ habits however, were more revealing than their words; they said how they followed artists because they were friends or they like their music and style, not because they’re important; ‘important’ figures such as @iamdiddy were ignored as he overemployed the hard sell. Without realising it they were rebutting Andrew Keen’s talk of Twitter being a mere personality cult.

Finally, it’s worth looking at some hints for Twitter’s future. On the Venture Outlook panel, Jeff Pulver, who disclosed he is an investor in Twitter, mentioned that he had profiled over 50 realtime search services but had invested in none, suggesting it is a problem that had yet to be properly cracked; he also tellingly speculated about how realtime search and breaking news analysis is of value in the financial sector to inform investment decisions and arbitrage – just how much could that search and information be worth?

Twitter’s future isn’t just about the people in it, it will also be a network for objects. Kevin Slavin gave a fascinating talk about how plants, bridges and washing machines are Tweeting their status updates – in a way it’s like the web’s come full circle (remember the Cambridge University Coffee Pot?). Things on Twitter are replacing old-school advertising mascots and are talking to us right now – how long before we will be able to talk back at them? Just how will Twitter look then?

The irony was that although 140 Characters bills itself as a conference on the ‘state of now’, for the most part now wasn’t really the most interesting thing on offer. The most interesting and more diverse conversations there were on what the future has in store. 140 Characters helped show the best of Twitter’s ability to help us not just in communicating, but organising, co-operating and creating – and these are all forward-looking activities. Perhaps the next one in London should be about the state of when rather than now.

Dr. Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University, a pioneer in digital ethnography and the man who brought us Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us and Information R/evolution presents an anthropological introduction to YouTube to the Library of Congress:

I know you’ve been shown this video before, but have you actually watched the whole fifty-five minutes and thirty-three seconds of it? I did last night, and all I can say is that you’ll be wiser for it.

It’s time for We Are Social’s Monday Mashup, a quick round up of research, news and case studies that caught our eye over the last week and we thought were worth sharing. Here’s our pick of some of the web’s finest.

Crowdsourcing advertising – can it work?
A fine post by Amelia Torode about Peperami’s decision to crowdsource their latest interactive advertising campaign. It calls into question the monetary reward being offered, the inadvertent creative role that Idea Bounty has taken in vetting a manageable number of ideas for the client to chose from, and the implications for agencies:

Maybe it just troubles me as the logical conclusion of an initiative like this is that you don’t need agencies anymore, you simply crowdsource the creative ideas cheaply and then partner with production houses.

The post kicked off a lengthy discussion in the comments section, so get a cup of tea and start scrolling. It’s worth the read.

Trouble At Twitter: U.S. Visitors Down 8 Percent In October
Twitter’s explosive growth of 1271% from October 08 – October 09 was bound to slow down eventually, but recent numbers from comScore have demonstrated that last month “the number of people who visited Twitter.com from the U.S. actually declined for the first time by 8 percent month-over-month”.

Twitter has been working furiously to make its website better by rolling out the new Retweet button, Lists, and Geolocation features. As Twitter loses ground in its home market (and Facebook keeps moving ‘further and further ahead’) the question is whether the new changes will be enough to reverse this downward trend?

LinkedIn works with Twitter, and vice versa
Last week LinkedIn and Twitter announced a partnership that allows your LinkedIn status to show up as a tweet when you set it, or for a tweet to also appear as your LinkedIn status.  The rationale? “Because when you’re trying to get something done, you want Twitter and LinkedIn to work together”.

In effect, the move is meant to save you time while you promote your professional identity across the web and cut out having to login on multiple platforms to share the same status/message.  And crucially, you can be selective about what appears in your LinkedIn profile i.e. you can set LinkedIn so that all your tweets appear, or only those with the hashtag #in.

SideWiki changes everything
If you haven’t been keeping up with Google’s SideWiki innovation, this post is a good place to start. PR guru Mark Borkowski considers the impact that SideWiki will have on reputation management and PR on the web.

Few people in PR, it seems, have considered the way that SideWiki will change the lives of beleaguered PR folk. In time, this tool will significantly change the way brands strategise, think and exist. SideWiki is going to challenge PR by providing the masses with the tool for the ultimate expression of people power, something uncontainable that will need constant monitoring.

A sweeping statement? Yes, but read on.

Did CoTweet just take Twitter’s business model, and future customers?
Twitter’s usefulness and exceptional growth are as legendary as its lack of revenue stream and business model. The key question here: “what happens if Twitter takes too long and third parties take over the market?”

CoTweet might be doing just that, and the startup has recently launched a paid for service to allow clients to “reach and engage customers using Twitter.” Econsultancy examines the diminishing market opportunity for Twitter, as 3rd parties like CoTweet develop direct commercial relationships with brands and advanced tools for them to manage their relationships online.

People open to marketing in social media
This is reassuring news for those who, say, work for social media agencies.

Performics conducted a survey of more than 3,000 U.S. consumers, which “comprised 100+ questions to determine how various segments of consumers use social networks in their daily lives, specifically in regard to finding out about different types of products and in relation to other media channels”.

The study found an immense opportunity for gaining customers and growing sales so long as marketers “communicate relevant messages in consumers’ language and on their terms”.

The Connected Brands Index
Last week iCrossing introduced the Connected Brands Index, some research out of the US designed to measure a brand’s effectiveness online “not just on their own properties, but also across search and social media”.

According to iCrossing, a successful online brand is made up of five key attributes – visibility, usefulness, usability, desirability, and engagement – which can be measured by looking at 65 different metrics.

This research does not tell you what the most connected brands on the web are, but looks at the top 10 global brands according to the Interbrand study and should serve as future reference for benchmarking. Download the full research here.

Monitoring Social Media 09 is taking place in London this coming Tuesday. The organiser, Luke Brynley-Jones, talks about the inspiration for the event and what it aims to achieve.

In the dying days of the summer, Asi Sharabi wrote a late night rant about the state of social media monitoring. He directed his anger squarely at the many social media monitoring services that have emerged in recent years, highlighting dodgy results, issues with data, limitations in sentiment detection and often somewhat overblown claims of what can be achieved.

As it turns out, Asi wasn’t alone in his frustration. His post struck a chord with people that resonated across the blogosphere. The debate began and is now up to 50 comments on his original post. Suppliers, agencies, brands, bloggers and data-heads: everyone seems to have chimed in with their views, gripes and come-backs. It was this frenzied discussion that led me to believe there was room for a conference that focuses squarely on social media monitoring, it’s goals, it’s potential, how it works, whether it works, it’s impact on organisations, it’s costs and how to gauge ROI.

Tuesday’s MSM09 will not be a typical social media conference. We won’t have a spew of incumbent-funded sales pitches. We aren’t beholden to any particular viewpoint. In our lead Panel discussion “What’s Wrong with Social Media Monitoring Services?”, Asi will be joined by Amelia Torode (of Compare the Meerkat renown) to debate the issues with the CEO’s of two leading monitoring services, Mark Rogers (Market Sentinel) and Nick Koudas (Sysomos).  Equally we won’t have any long, self-obsessed presentations. Our speakers get just 20 mins to make clear points and recommendations before the mic is wrestled off them.

While our focus is on monitoring and measurement, we also plan to cover important related topics, such as: the truth about data (sources, quality and accuracy); monitoring for reputation management; and “beyond brand”, i.e. how to implement monitoring as a key business process. One of the things I heard repeatedly during my consultation process was the need for experience-sharing and case studies, so we will also have a number of “live” case studies on the day and be providing attendees with a pack of case studies to read through (or watch) afterwards.

One of our “live” case studies will be provided by We Are Social’s very own Robin Grant. He will be spilling the beans about their work with Skype – explaining how they helped Skype to set-up and run their own real-time social media listening and responding programme, which tools and methodologies they used and how this helped the world’s leading VoIP provider contain a major crisis. Other “live” case studies include, Chris Thomas from The Conversation Group – who will present a social media-driven competitive analysis of the launch of the first Google Android phone – and Celia Pronto, Marketing Director of STA Travel, who will demonstrate how her team embraced social media monitoring and reaped the benefits.

Lastly, we will have a bunch of tools for attendees to try out. Visible Technologies, Brandwatch and White Vector (to name a few) will be showing off their wares in the break-out room. Hopefully, at the very least, we’ll save a few people the tiresome process of beauty pageants by getting these guys in one room. Hope you can make it!

Luke has kindly offered We Are Social readers a 10% discount on the MSM09 £195 ticket price, by entering the discount code MSM0910 when buying a ticket direct from the MSM09 site.

I’m trying to not make a habit of doing this, but as well as being shortlisted in four of the main categories in the BIMA Awards, thanks to you, we’re also up for the Best Blog Award, which is being decided by a public vote.

So, I’d like to ask a very small favour, assuming you think we deserve it – could you:

1. Go to their voting page
2. Select ‘we are social blog’ (we’re right at the bottom of the list)
3. Hit submit
4. Ask all of your friends and colleagues to do the same (OK, we realise this may be stretching it a bit!)

We will of course be eternally grateful and will endeavor to continue making you think we deserve it…

This week we’re kicking off what we plan to make a semi-regular feature for your Monday afternoons on the We Are Social blog. A quick round up of research, news and case studies that caught our eye over the last week and we thought were worth sharing.

Social Media: The Next Great Gateway for Content Discovery?
New research released from Nielsen suggests that social media is starting to become the primary vehicle for content discovery:

We continue to see that social media has not only changed the way consumers communicate and gather on the Web, but also impacted content discovery and navigation in a big way. But how? …In a nutshell, there is a segment of the online population that uses social media as a core navigation and information discovery tool — roughly 18 percent of users see it as core to finding new information. While still a smaller percentage than those who use search engines or portals like Yahoo! or MSN, it is a significant figure.

‘Socializers’ (i.e. those who spend 10 percent or more of their online time on social media) cite too much information on the web as one of the main reasons why they turn social media in order to hunt for information.

The study found that these socializers actually use social media as a filtration tool, trusting recommendations and content from their friends and family to wade through the sheer volume of information out there.

Marta Strickland asks some interesting questions about the research which are well worth reading.

How should Neal’s Yard Remedies have responded to comments?
PR Week revisited the Neil’s Yard debacle from May, where an explosion of critical comments for the company on the Guardian’s ‘You Ask They Answer’ series were left unanswered when critics began to grill the company on its homeopathic remedy, and not ‘organic skincare’ as they believed.

Is it realistic to expect to be able to put boundaries around online discussion? Should Neal’s Yard have never taken part in the first place?

As Facebook Ages, Gen Y Turns to Twitter
Recent findings from the latest report from the Pew Internet and Internet Life Project demonstrated that the median age of users across several social networks has been changing over the last year:

Today, Twitter is now the second-youngest of the top four social networking sites. Its median age is 31. MySpace’s is 26, LinkedIn is 39, and… Facebook is 33.

Despite past reports to the contrary, Generation Y now also appears to be moving to Twitter in great number. In fact they’ve more than double their numbers: “37% of those 18-24 now use Twitter when only 19% did back in December 2008.”

Twitter – Retweet Limited Rollout
Last week, Twitter announced that they have activated the retweet button on a small number of accounts. Though its long been possible to retweet posts using third party applications such as Tweetdeck, it hasn’t been possible to forward particularly interesting tweets to your followers through the web interface. According to Twitter:

The plan is to see how it goes first with this small release. If it needs more work, then we’ll know right away. If things look good, we’ll proceed with releasing the feature in stages eventually arriving at 100%.

This move is another step by Twitter, who a just over a weeks ago released their ‘Lists’ feature, to improving the web interface in order to make things easier and more efficient for users.

FEED: The 2009 Razorfish Digital Brand Experience Report
Razorfish published their Digital Brand Experience Report today, which surveyed 1,000 ‘connected consumers’ about how the web affected the way they engage with brands and make buying decisions. As you might expect, the research revealed that digital technology is indeed altering consumer attitudes. Some key findings:

• Consumers are largely engaging with brands to receive exclusive promotions or discounts and of those who follow a brand on Twitter, 44% say that access to good deals is the main reason.
• 65% of consumers say a digital experience, either positive or negative, changed their opinion of a brand. And in that group, almost all (97%) indicated their experience influenced whether or not they eventually purchased that brand.
• People who actively engage with a brand digitally–from participating in a contest to downloading a mobile application–are substantially more inclined to purchase and recommend that brand to others.

The full PDF is available for download, along with a pack of charts.