Social Media is a conversation. That seems to be one thing that we all agree on

Last week, Nathan, Sandrine, Leila, Simon, Seb and I went along to the launch of IPA Social, where Neil Perkin presented their 10 conversation starters:

You can read all 10 in full here (which I highly recommend doing):

1. Mark Earls – People not consumers
2. Le’Nise Brothers – Social agenda not business agenda
3. John Willshire – Continuous conversation not campaigning
4. Faris Yakob – Long term impacts not quick fixes
5. Katy Lindemann – Marketing with people not to people
6. Neil Perkin – Being authentic not persuasive
7. Jamie Coomber – Perpetual beta
8. Amelia Torode – Technology changes, people don’t
9. Graeme Wood – Change will never be this slow again
10. Asi Sharabi – Measure and evaluate

As the IPA’s President, Rory Sutherland says:

At a time when the population of Facebook is now greater than all but three countries in the world, and when BT is delivering customer service via twitter, this is an area which forces us to question many of our ingrained assumptions about advertising, brands and intangible value.

and from Mark Earls’ scene setting essay:

For all the excitement today around the Twitters and Facebooks, the tougher problems for the advertising industry to get to grips with are all rooted in the way social media – the stuff that connects humans with other humans – changes the game for our clients and society at large.

IPA Social is an admirable initiative, one which we’ll continue to participate in, and their 10 principles are an excellent overview of how brands need to come to terms with social media, representing the thinking of some the greatest minds in modern advertising (all of whom are good friends of ours). The launch event was also a great evening, focused on starting conversations rather than presenting a revealed truth.

However, it still was very focused on traditional ‘advertising’, with a large proportion of time spent hearing about VCCP’s Compare the Meerkat campaign. We split out into groups towards the end of the event and in the group I led, we discussed whether campaigns like Compare the Meerkat are really social media campaigns. Although the campaign has rich presences in social media, we’re weren’t sure that was a factor in it’s success. We felt it was the strength of the creative idea and the media spend at work here – and the fact that Oasis’ Rubberduckzilla has substantially more fans than Aleksandr the Meerkat on Facebook, despite no attempts to engage with social media helps re-enforce this point. It was felt that real social media campaigns are ones where the conversation itself drives the success of the campaign (like our This is Now campaign for Ford).

I also couldn’t miss joining in the discussion about which types of agency were best suited for social media. The point I made was as follows. Over the last ten years digital agencies stole a march on above the line agencies by building bigger, better and more motivated specialist teams. This let them innovate faster and develop a critical mass of best practise that accelerated the skills gap between them and their above-the-line competitors. Specialist social media agencies will do the same to digital and other agencies. To use We Are Social as an example, who else has a team of twenty experienced practitioners, entirely focused on innovative, creative and effective social media marketing and communications? Each day and each new hire widens the gap between us and those in pursuit.

Overall, I left feeling comforted that the specialist agencies’ lead in social media was safe for some time to come…

Another great presentation from Paul Isakson…

Hot on the heels of Wave 4 of Universal McCann’s Social Media Tracker, Forrester have just published their third annual Social Technographics Profile.

The exact stats vary, of course, but both studies confirm the overall trend of higher numbers of internet users spending an increasing amount of time in social media environments. The Forrester blog mainly comments on the landscape in North America, however Forrester’s Rebecca Jennings has a separate report looking at Europe. She notes in this excerpt:

Online European usage of social networks such as Facebook and Bebo has grown significantly — around 30% now engage with social networks regularly, up from 18% last year. Overall, more than 60% of online Europeans now engage with social media on a regular basis.

The Wave 4 Social Media Tracker report shows an increase in most types of social media activity, as the graphic excerpt below indicates:

The rapid growth in some types of activity has slowed as many markets reach saturation point, though there’s no specific stats for microblogging, or of bulletin board usage, which is heavy in many Asian markets.

Apparently we’re all uploading fewer video clips, though looking at the country spotlights, this seems to be based on a decline in the UK, Germany and Korea – emphasising how important it is to  consider local market differences when developing a social media engagement strategy.

However I’m not convinced this is a long term trend: as video-capable devices and mobile internet usage proliferates, it’s becoming easier to upload, not less (the quality of these uploads is another matter). Could it be the case that some respondents under-reported their uploading habits? What do you think about these stats?

Our friend John V Willshire has been developing the analogy that “if advertising is a firework, social media is a bonfire”. We think it’s a good one, and very useful for simply explaining the difference between advertising and social media.

And for our non-UK readers, you can find out more about Bonfire Night here.

Update: As a counter argument, read Asi Sharabi’s On bonfires and that.

Is Social Media a fad or the biggest shift since the Industrial Revolution?

From Socialnomics, where there are references for all of the stats used in the video.

Henry Jenkins, the inspiration behind the idea of transmedia planning, gives his thoughts on convergence culture – like Clay Shirky before him, a must watch.

A nice reprise of the the classic What’s Next In Marketing & Advertising from Paul Isakson.

If my post on the purchase funnel and the consumer decision journey was a little too academic for you, then meet Dave, and follow his idealised journey from initial consideration to becoming an advocate:

With all the talk of teenagers’ online habits in the news, we got our most knowledgeable man in to blog on the matter. 17 year old Adam Bernstein is an A-level student currently on work experience with We Are Social, and here are his thoughts.

It’s been the buzz of the social media sphere this week: how Matthew Robson, a 15 year-old intern at Morgan Stanley, had written a report which had shocked and dazzled city bosses in equal measure.

The trouble is, as another teenager – admittedly a slightly older one – Robson’s arguments do not hold true. There is much value in Robson’s report – it does provide an interesting insight into how one particular teenager consumes media. But there is a danger in taking isolated examples and extrapolating them to be indicative of society.

Robson’s report is supposed to be focussed on the teen market, yet too often he ignores important economic & social factors. For example, the argument that teenagers don’t buy newspapers because they’re too expensive is an interesting one. But this argument is based on one assumption which underscores Robson’s entire report: teenagers are independent of their parents. But this simply isn’t the case – most people I know who do read a newspaper read it because it’s in the house. Teenagers probably wouldn’t pay 80p a day for a newspaper but it’s not an issue because in many cases they don’t have to.

If Robson wanted to know the real reason teenagers don’t read newspapers, it is more about content. Teenagers will consistently have their lifestyle treated with derision in the papers; but how often will a viable alternative be offered? With the continual damning of teens in the papers, it’s no wonder teenagers don’t read them.

But it was Robson’s claims about Twitter which were the most ignorant: “Twitter is pointless to teens” screamed the headlines. It’s true to say that teens (on the whole) don’t use Twitter but his fixation on the costs of texting missed a crucial point: only 5% of Tweets are made via SMS – the success of applications such as Tweetdeck and Twitterfox show how it is really used.

The reality is that teens don’t use Twitter because of demographics: to make a broad – and somewhat unfair – generalisation, teenagers use Facebook, whereas Twitter is used by older people. Essentially, teens follow other teens so it’s inevitable that most of the age-group stays away from Twitter. Twitter’s relevance to the younger market is diminished because many perceive a ‘tweet’ as being the same as a Facebook Status Update – they don’t see the need for both.

Robson’s report is useful for the many truths it does contain: Teenagers doing all they can to avoid advertising is an important point which the ad companies will be trying hard to counteract. But Robson’s suggestion that teenagers are motivated above all by cost is a spurious one: teenage consumption of media probably does have something to do with money; but most teens don’t have a full-time job, many are in full-time education and are supported by their parents – it is they who pay for everything so his argument that costs are the most important thing to teens is wrong.

But, as Suw Charman-Anderson notes, the main problem with Robson’s report is that he thinks his experiences are emblematic of teenagers as a whole. The reality is that there is much greater diversity in the teen market than Robson suggests. Teenagers are an eclectic bunch – and Robson would do well to remember this.

Update: I’ve just come across an interesting report by Forrester about this exact topic (for those interested in US rather than UK data, there’s also a good presentation from the Pew Internet & American Life Project and Nielsen’s recent How Teens Use Media report). Robson’s argument that all teenagers are always listening to music, particularly free online music, is kicked into touch:

With its findings suggesting socio-economic factors are unimportant in how teenagers consume media, Robson’s arguments that costs are the primary factor in deciding what teens do is shown to be false.

But what is most interesting for companies is that teenagers are using social media for the same reasons as the population as a whole. Possibly this means they don’t need tailored advertising; more probably, it means that in time teenagers will drift over to Twitter – Facebook was originally intended for Harvard University students yet is now used worldwide.

Having said all of this, the accuracy of the report does have to be considered – speaking to 261 13-19 year olds and making assumptions that this data covers society as a whole is questionable. But at least it’s more accurate than Robson’s report which was simply the findings of one person.

Update 2: Dubit have also added some stats into the mix with their How UK Youth Really Consume Media Report: Newspapers & Magazines and Twitter