Bart De Waele with some excellent home truths for social media:

Cristina Aced, a freelance journalist and consultant from Barcelona who wanted to know how a social media agency works in London, has spent three weeks with us here at We Are Social. She shares her point of view on the questions brands should ask themselves when embracing social media.

Should a company have a blog? Well, I’d reply: “It depends”. I usually say that it’s not a must to have a corporate blog (or a corporate Facebook profile, i.e.). It makes no sense that a firm has all these 2.0 tools if they are only a tactic. Of course, I think it’s important to monitor social media, in the same way firms follow what happens in mass media, but I defend they don’t have to create a blog just for the sake of it (as we explained in this study published in 2007). Web 2.0 is more than a fad; it should be part of an overall business strategy. The key questions firm should answer are: why do we want a blog?, what are our aims?, how can we integrate it with our strategy?

Yesterday, I was listening to a Spanish radio programme called “L’estiu en un blog” (Summer in a blog, COMRàdio), and they were talking about corporate blogs and how companies use them. They spoke about social media agencies and they quoted We Are Social as an example of best practice. It’s cool to hear the local radio in your hometown speaking about the international agency where you are spending a few weeks (The podcast is available here, but only in Catalan).

Some colleagues ask me if the way of working in social media here in London is different to Spain. I think processes are very similar: the research, the same tools for social media monitoring etc. However, the critical point is strategy. Here, in London, both agency and clients rely on (and believe in) strategy. In Spain, there are professionals able to formulate a social media strategy, but clients still don’t understand the meaning of this. Most of them consider Web 2.0 as just as another tool. That’s the problem. I think I’ll miss the willingness to learn and to understand the new reality that clients have here in the UK. I like the way We Are Social works: brainstorms, working as a team, but most of all, their strategic approach.

I love this 2.0 philosophy, this conversational way of doing things. We Are Social really is a conversation agency, just as they define themselves. It’s my last day here, but the conversation will go on, as the internet breaks boundaries of time and space. Welcome to the age of conversation…

Advertising Age, the 79 year-old journal of record for the US advertising industry, is perhaps not the institution you’d expect to be running the undisputed chart of the world’s top advertising and marketing blogs.

Called the Ad Age Power 150, it actually consists of over 1000 blogs, with a robust methodology and rather strict entry criteria. One of the criteria is that your blog has been running for over six months, so although its seems longer since we first posted here, we only became eligible last month – but we’re pleased to say that when we did, we went straight into the top 150.

The observant among you will have spotted the orange crest that appeared a few weeks ago underneath our Flickr stream over there on the right, where you can see our position in the charts updated daily.

We’re also very proud that we’ve also entered the list of the UK’s top marketing blogs, which is based on Ad Age’s data, at no. 11.

In both instances, we’re delighted to be in such great company…

Update: We’ve also entered the Ad Age Power 150 European top 100 blog ranking in 19th place, and the Plannersphere Top 20 in 5th place.

It was April when Hitwise last released stats on Twitter’s growth in the UK. Yesterday, Robin Goad published the chart above showing Twitter’s continuing rise and had this to say:

Twitter has been the fastest growing major website in the UK over the last 12 months, and certainly the most talked about. The noticeable thing about Twitter’s growth is that the vast majority of it – 93% in fact – has occurred during 2009. If anything, the service is even more popular than our numbers imply, as we are only measuring traffic to the main Twitter website. If people accessing their Twitter accounts via mobile phones and third party applications were included, the numbers could be even higher.

He goes on to look in detail at where traffic from Twitter goes, pointing out that 55.9% is sent to content-driven online media sites, such as social networks, blogs, and news and entertainment websites – a very different profile to Google for example.

On the same day, the Guardian’s Charles Arthur penned this:

Blogging is dying. Actually, no, let me qualify that. The long tail of blogging is dying. I say this with confidence [...] Where is everybody? Anecdotally and experimentally, they’ve all gone to Facebook, and especially Twitter.

He backs this up with evidence of his own – which I have to say matches my intuition into what is happening:

More and more of the feeds I follow [haven't been updated for 2 months]. Why? Because blogging isn’t easy. More precisely, other things are easier – and it’s to easier things that people are turning. Facebook’s success is built on the ease of doing everything in one place. (Search tools can’t index it to see who’s talking about what, which may be a benefit or a failing.) Twitter offers instant content and reaction. Writing a blog post is a lot harder than posting a status update, putting a funny link on someone’s Wall, or tweeting. People are still reading blogs, and other content. But for the creation of amateur content, their heyday for the wider population has, I think, already passed. The short head of blogging thrives. Its long tail, though, has lapsed into desuetude.

So what does this mean for brands? Well, as Charles points out, people are still reading blogs and we would have always have recommended talking to those in the short head (which is still pretty massive compared to the relative scarcity of conventional media) – i.e. those having engaging conversations with the large communities following them. It’s also essential to remember that unlike the transient nature of Twitter and the great walled garden of Facebook, blog posts are effectively conversations that are eternally visible through Google, meaning they have more inherent value to brands.

The fact to note here is that some of the creators (in Forrester’s terms) have moved from blogging to creation in other forms of social media, and this should not be ignored. Your social media strategy should never rest on blogs alone (just as it shouldn’t on any other part of social media) – you should be experimenting with Twitter, Facebook and other channels – and your strategy should be driven by your business objectives, where your target audience spends their time and where you can be most effective.

Of course it’s not just your strategy but the also the way you conduct yourself that counts (as Habitat discovered to their cost this week) – as Robin concludes:

The key to having a successful Twitter presence is to engage the community. Twitter is a great viral marketing channel, and for many users the aim is to have their story ‘retweeted’ – i.e. passed on by other users – as many times as possible. Although all of the newspapers have multiple ‘official’ feeds, these tend to be bland and have very low ‘retweet’ rates. Where journalists themselves are ‘tweeting’ themselves and engaging with the Twitter community, they typically have more success in creating viral stories.

Although we’d probably put it differently, we agree. Success with Twitter, like the rest of social media, is not about mechanistically shouting at strangers, it’s about being human – making friends and having conversations with them.

Last night I was a guest at the Editorial Intelligence seminar entitled “commentariat v. bloggertariat” – a discussion of how newspaper opinion columnists and bloggers coexist and work together.

The versus in the title immediately set the tone for contrast and confrontation; Iain Dale came out fighting for the blogosphere, with a provocative opening: “the fact that the Twitter hashtag for this event is #eiblogger and not #eicomment rather indicates the organisers believe bloggers are winning.” As well as that, he scolded The Times over the recent outing of anonymous blogger Nightjack. Batting equally fiercely for the other side, David Aaronovitch was disdainful of bloggers, boasting that no blogger could ever get an interview with Nobel prize-winning economist Amartya Sen, who he was interviewing the following day, while the Spectator’s Martin Bright said he couldn’t think of a single classic blog post he had ever read.

While it provided entertainment, the confrontational tone and setup didn’t really help bring us to any constructive conclusions. Newspapers are in trouble, it was repeatedly stated, yet bloggers are way down the list of reasons why that is so – the very fundamentals of news distribution and advertising sales have been overturned and will not return to their old state again. When the discussion moved away from the artificial distinction it proved to be a bit more nuanced and interesting – Iain Dale gave the perfect example of a blogger who has crossed over into the mainstream media – himself – while Mick Fealty revealed about how stories from his blog, Slugger O’Toole, would shape the coverage in the Belfast newspapers the following day.

Those in the mainstream media camp gave a less open-minded and concessionary view; all too often blogs and bloggers were conflated with the opinions left in comments on online news articles, or even worse, the ‘green ink brigade’ formerly managed by letters page editors (thus protecting journalists from their audience). Astonishingly, Anne Spackman of the Times suggested that the law on defamation and hate speech was a good enough set of rules for commenting on articles. The law is a bare minimum – what is agreed by the majority of society to be totally unacceptable. To better manage your communities you need a lot more than that; after all, you are only as good as the people who comment on your site – and I find many online newspaper’s reader comment sections to be poor, full of incoherence, poor spelling and grammar and some comments filled with outright spite. No wonder some journalists are utterly averse to engaging more with their audience.

There is more to social media than just allowing reader comments on your articles – indeed, there is more to the online community around your site than people leaving comments. Newspapers and their readers are capable of much more given the right tools and the right community management – such as the Liverpool Post’s crowdsourcing of its front page or the new Help Me Investigate initiative from 4iP. Mark Thompson, who was in the audience last night, and his recent analysis of safe seats and MP’s expenses, is a great recent example of blogs contributing new content and analysis whilst inspired by mainstream media.

With some notable exceptions like the above, there is too much of a culture of antagonism, on both sides in this debate, but especially from some of the mainstream media stalwarts who attended last night. Letting your lawyers, rather than your community managers, be the arbiters of what is considered acceptable behaviour and participation, is just one symptom of this culture; dismissing blogging out of hand or demanding anonymous but lawful bloggers be unmasked. The good thing is that newspapers are, relatively speaking, miles ahead of where they were 5 years ago, and some of the more social media-savvy in this space do get it; I’d love to see some of the more constructive dialogue these forward thinkers could have with the same bloggers who were there last night.

The latest Nielsen report’s “Global Faces and Networked Places” highlights social media as the global consumer phenomenon of 2008: two-thirds of the world’s internet population now visit a social network or a blogging site and social media accounts for 10% of the overall internet time. So much so that social media has now overtaken personal emails as the 4th more popular activity online.

In December 2008, out of every 11 minutes spent online globally, 1 minute was spent within social media (1 minute out of 6 in the UK!). And we’re not just talking about students sharing photos of their parties on Facebook. As social media is becoming more mainstream, the average age of users is also shifting: one third of the Facebook audience is now within the 35-49 years old bracket and one-fourth is over 40. It’s also nice to hear that although Germany arrived quite late to the social media party, they’re now catching up with their European counterparts – good timing for our German website!

As the time spent interacting in social media is growing, the share of time held by other sectors is diminishing and so is the effectiveness of traditional online advertising.

The report rightfully points out that:

Advertising must be a conversation rather than a push-model. The point that social networks members are co-creators of content [...] means advertising should be about participating in a relevant conversation with consumers rather than simply pushing ads on them. After all it is social media. Advertising shouldn’t be about interrupting or invading the social network, it should be part of this conversation.

“Corporate communications have radically changed” says Andy Sernovitz, chief executive of the Blog Council, an organisation for heads of social media at big companies. “It’s no longer just companies talking to the press, and customer service talking to customers. All these other people showed up in the -middle. They may not be press and they may not be customers, but suddenly their collective voice is bigger than the traditional channels.”

The essence of social media is conversation. Rather than a one-way stream of information, where companies make announcements to the press and customers, social media enables a great deal of interaction, where companies are in constant dialogue with the public. “We’ve seen a shift from doing things the old way to now having conversations with our customers,” says Jeanette Gibson, director of new media for Cisco Systems.

The above comes from an article in today’s FT, about as mainstream a business publication as you can get, a sign that perhaps Europe is beginning to hear the siren call of the changes that social media is bringing to business. Again, Twitter is on the agenda:

Companies are using Twitter to douse public relations fires before they erupt. Scott Monty, head of social media for Ford Motors, used Twitter to appease users who were angry after the carmaker sued an enthusiast website that was selling unauthorised Ford merchandise. When fans of the enthusiast site posted angry messages, Mr Monty “tweeted back” to explain the company’s position.

Bonin Bough, who was appointed director of social media for PepsiCo last year, also used Twitter to defuse a brewing crisis after the company released a series of advertisements depicting a cartoon calorie character committing suicide.

We’d not disagree with this – in fact we’ve been pioneering this approach on behalf of Skype since last year (and Scott Monty is a friend of the family, so to speak), but the focus should be on the overall conversation, of which Twitter is yet just a small part – forums and blogs are likely to remain the most significant venues for some appreciable time (this will vary, of course, depending on the sector you’re in – for example, if you’re Sony BMG, MySpace won’t have lost its significance just yet).

However, Melissa Bounoua’s article in Forbes earlier in the week makes a valid point:

Most European companies haven’t even heard of Twitter, and some might think it’s a time waster. A spokeswoman for energy firm Total says that Chief Executive Christophe de Margerie has no idea what Twitter is. British Telecom says it doesn’t have a Twitter account and doesn’t plan to open one. Nestle’s communications manager says using Twitter “just never came up within the group strategy.” In general, experts say Europeans don’t latch on to new social networking technologies as quickly as Americans.

I’d swap ‘Europeans’ with ‘European companies’ – as far as the general population is concerned, Europe is ahead of the US – with a higher proportion of the UK population using social networking and Twitter than the US (and the rest of Europe broadly comparable) and all of Europe but Germany and Austria way ahead in terms of blog readership.

However, despite the FT’s urging, her analysis is sadly correct when it comes to European companies. We are here to help…

An almost unbelievable couple of graphs from Robin Goad at Hitwise, the first showing that 10.09% of all UK internet visits last week were to ‘Social Networking and Forums’.

And the second showing Facebook’s inexorable growth.

There’s some more in depth data available in Hitwise’s UK Social Networking Update from July this year, and it’s worth remembering these sort of growth curves apply across social media, with this graph showing a similarly stratospheric rise in UK blog traffic.

As Robin Goad said at the time:

over the last 3 years UK Internet traffic to out Blogs and Personal Websites category has increased by 208%, compared to 70% for News and Media. Another interesting fact is that the market share of blogs is greater in the UK than the USA: 1.09% and 0.73% respectively in May.

The trend also seems to apply even to Twitter

Again, a nice quote from Robin Goad:

UK Internet visits to Twitter have increased by 631% over the last 12 months, with 485% of that growth coming this year. Twitter is more popular with Brits than Americans: last week the site’s share of UK Internet visits was 70% higher its share of visits in America. Twitter cannot yet be considered mainstream in the USA, but in the UK it’s getting there.

I’d also point out that the Twitter data above pre-dates the Stephen Fry effect (disclosure: Stephen is a client of ours and we helped get him going on Twitter).

Roll on 2009…

Update 21st Jan ’09 – The latest UK Twitter stats.

As I’m attending LeWeb’08 in Paris, I thought I’d share some interesting things I’ve been hearing at the conference. To begin with, an interesting quote from Georges-Edouard Dias, SVP, E-Business at L’Oréal: “brands are part of the conversation”.

Let’s rewind and go back to 2005 when L’Oréal set up a blog for Vichy, one of their brands, to promote an anti-wrinkle cream.

As I mentioned last week, blogging in France is big. So big that France leads the world when it comes to the number of blogs per internet user and it was therefore only natural for brands to identify blogs as business opportunities.

L’Oréal was probably one of the first brands in France to get involved with blogs. The Vichy blog featured Claire, a consumer who was reporting on a daily basis on how great the Vichy treatment was – very quickly though, Claire was identified as a fake blogger, paid by Vichy and it backfired on them. Since then, the “Vichy case” is referred to as a ‘what not to do’ in social media case study, in the same way as the Wal-Marting Across America and All I Want for Christmas Is a PSP examples from the English speaking world.

It didn’t work at the time, but listening to Georges-Edouard yesterday though, it is clear that L’Oréal have learned a lot over the past few years and it’s actually quite refreshing to hear brands such as L’Oréal talking about online conversations and saying that brands have to be sensitive enough to listen to their customers.

Interestingly he mentioned that “we no longer learn marketing in books” but rather by being sensitive, by listening to people online and becoming part of the conversation.

At a time when conversational marketing is still so new, a very inspiring story.