Yesterday evening the shortlist was announced for this year’s BIMA Awards. We’re pleased to say that we’ve been shortlisted 4 times, for the This is Now campaign we did with Ford and for our work with Skype, helping them listen and respond in social media.

We’re chuffed to be in such great company, with AKQA leading the field with 6 shortlisted entries, DDB in second place with 5, and us in joint 3rd with LBi, ahead of others like Wieden+Kennedy and Agency Republic. Keep your fingers crossed for us on the evening of the 19th November, when the winners will be announced…

Update: We’ve been shortlisted for the 5th time, this time in the Best Blog category, which is being decided by a public vote.

Twitter is on every lips at the moment: tales of towering growth battle with news of celebs twittering the night away while the rest of the world learns about worldwide events on their Tweetdeck.

So it’s not a very big surprise that the latest marketing campaigns all use Twitter: yesterday Andrew McCormick of Revolution Magazine mentioned the creative WB Harry Potter Twitter campaign, while US TV show Dollhouse has decided to promote the release of the series on DVD with “Twitter-enriched banners”.

It’s no wonder that entertainment brands are particularly active (and successful) on this front. Entertainment is by essence a very social activity, a powerful way to identify and connect with your peers. So when your key-target happens to be Gen Y or early-adopters who are more than likely to be thirsty for any kind of additional experience then the path is wide open to experiment with all sorts of social media tools and engage with followers. Interestingly enough they’re called fans and not customers.

TV shows and bands have been very active on that front, leading the community activation with Twitter character profiles, blogs, forums, online and offline games including ARGs (only last week fans of Muse managed to get the band’s ARG to the sixth most popular trends on Twitter). And when expectations are not met, the backlash can be pretty strong, with rumours claiming that Brüno is facing a box-office drowning due to calamitous Twitter reviews (Update: also see what effect Twitter had on Inglourious Basterds).

Social media activation by the entertainment industry acts as a magnifying glass of what’s happening elsewhere: there are lots of other brands out there, they don’t necessarily connect with their customers by creating a convoluted ARG but they engage daily with their customers, just as we do for Skype.

Charlene Li has just released her ENGAGEMENTdb report which analyses the engagement of company in social media and correlates it to financial performance. Some of the findings are very interesting, especially when analysing the scores by industry. Of course there are some justified reservations (Patricio Robles has voiced most of them). However what I would like to keep from this report is that no matter what solution is chosen, companies have to find the mix of social media that works for them.

Best pratices and reports can give an idea of what’s happening out there, set benchmarks and reassure shareholders, but in the end customers are out there, waiting to be talked to in a human way which will both improve their customer experience and with which they can identify (and not simply for financial reasons). So go out there and try it, you’ll see social media is not that scary

The work we’ve been doing for both Skype and Ford has been featured in the latest Global Innovation Report from GDR Creative Intelligence. You can view a PDF of the article here. Thanks goes to Danni Lee for including us!

Amongst the famous examples of Dell, Ford, Zappos, Skype and the like, Best Buy may not be the first company that comes to mind when thinking about which companies using are using social media well.

They’re also not the sort of company you would immediately assume would be ahead of the curve in terms of social media – they’re the world’s largest multi-channel home electronics retailer (similar to Currys or Comet in the UK) who have recently made moves into Europe with the acquisition of 50% of Carphone Warehouse’s European stores (and with rumours they may go further than that).

However, in reality they’re as advanced as any of the examples I give above – let’s start with a short introduction from Best Buy’s Chief Marketing Officer, Barry Judge:

And then move onto this presentation from Gina Debogovich, Best Buy’s Community Manager:

It’s also worth finding out more about Best Buy Connect, Blue Shirt Nation (a community for Best Buy Employees), how they use customer reviews, their recently launched API and looking at how they use their own forums and Get Satisfaction to support their customers.

Let’s finish with a 4 minute video looking at Best Buy’s internal use of social media followed by a 20 minute interview with Best Buy’s CEO Brad Anderson talking about the issues in detail:

Update: The New York Times covers some of Best Buy’s more recent social media initiatives.

eMarketer have released a new report, “UK Social Media: Joining the Conversation” which is a useful compendium of the latest stats on social media usage in the UK, along with some spot-on commentary and advice from the author of the report, Karin von Abrams:

No commercial enterprise can afford to ignore social media

As part of her research for the report, Karin conducted an interview with me which she’s been kind enough to let me publish here:

Read the rest of this entry »

A few weeks ago Chris introduced you to our fancy new headquarters, but today’s blog post is all about people!

We have a team of five-star account executives that you probably all discovered through our Flickr photostream already but I thought today was a good time as any to introduce them properly.

Ladies first… Melina just joined us last week from Sweden where she studies communications for new media at the Medieinstitutet in Stockholm. Melina previously worked in a PR-agency in Sweden and likes to study social psychology as a hobby. Melina would have loved to be a tattoo-artist but admits she can’t draw so she’ll happily stick to social media. As she loves England, it’s a good thing she’s working for us here in London!

Nicolas and Bertrand actually joined us in February but we were not sure you were ready for them yet. Obviously this day has come and you can now face the full Nicolas-Bertrand effect.

Nicolas has a BA from Paris-Dauphine University and is studying for his master in Management at Audencia Business School. Nicolas has an international background: he lived in Poland, France and in London and takes part in many students associations. He has been working with Peter on Skype.

Bertrand previously worked in an online marketing agency in Paris. Bertrand is passionate about music and shares his musical discoveries on his blog Sunday Mornings. If you want to listen to some brand new sounds, it’s the place to go! He has travelled a lot and worked throughout Europe including Iceland so he knows all about local delicacies like Kókómjólk. Bertrand has been working with me on Ford – This is Now.

So one final word. Despite what you could think of the picture Barack Obama is NOT our new account executive. Nicolas, Melina and Betrand are not convicts and they do not play in a film selected at Sundance 09 either.

Welcome to We Are Social!

It took me and the team three days to recover from organising the Twestival but here we are, back to London and to work so here is our summary of the first ever Twestival in Paris…

Last Thursday morning, as most of us were just waking up in Paris and in Europe, on the other side of the world Nathan (@deliciousmedia) was already welcoming the first participants of the Sydney Twestival. Later on that day, part of the We Are Social team i.e. Robin (@RobinGrant), Chris (@qwghlm), Nicolas (@NicolasKinski) and Christian (@Mehme7) were getting ready to attend the London Twestival whilst Violette (@_vio_), Camille (@CamilleJ), Bertrand (@Bertrand) and myself (@MeToo) were finalising the last details for the Twestival Paris…

As I’ve already mentioned on this blog, blogging is very big in France, and so are bloggers meetups. But this Twestival was clearly one of the first time that Parisian users of Twitter were gathering in real life and that’s what made it interesting. Altogether, we had about a hundred Twitter users joining us at the Hard Rock Café Paris, and we were lucky enough to say hi to our friends attending the other Twestival in London, Lille and Clermont-Ferrand via a Skype video call during the evening. The evening carried on until 1am, with an open bar (of course!), a live concert of the band 1973 (including a backstage concert!) and a raffle with lots of goodies from laFraise, Skype, Moo , Spreadshirt, EBG and Artoyz to win…

We had a brilliant night – although obviously slightly stressful because we were organising it but we met lots of very nice users of Twitter from Paris and the surrounding area, and judging by the number of DMs and emails people have been sending us since, this first Twestival Paris was a great success. So thank you all for attending and helping us raise money for charity: water!

Those of us in the team who were left behind in London are now slowly recovering from last night’s Twestival in London. It was great night, as you can see from this morning’s tweets and the photos:

Here’s the organiser, Amanda Rose, appearing on Sky News yesterday evening via a Skype video call, explaining the event:

There’s also a great write-up in today’s Guardian (and, as befits my status as a Z List Twitter celeb, I made it into their photo coverage).

Thank you @amanda and the rest of the team!

Yup, that is a screenshot of our Twitter account you can see staring at you

The feature article in today’s Marketing, ‘Twitter enters the mainstream for brand communication‘ covers work we’ve done for three of our clients, with the obligatory introductory mention of Stephen Fry and his 130,000 followers, moving on to part of what we do for Skype:

Robin Grant, managing director of social media agency We Are Social, agrees that, if used wisely, Twitter can help reduce negative word-of-mouth online and assist with brand building. We Are Social client Skype, for instance, uses Twitter to ‘respond to people having issues with or asking questions about Skype’, according to Grant. ‘If we can respond, they tell their friends what brilliant customer service they’ve had from Skype.’

And then some of the work we’ve been doing with Ford:

Ford took more of a campaign approach to promote its latest Fiesta. It backed its ‘This is Now’ TV campaign with blog and Twitter activity encouraging consumers to submit photos and art and design-related discussion posts. Despite Ford’s Twitter activity, though, the car marque’s communications manager Lisa Brankin claims Twitter remains ‘niche in its appeal’. She adds: ‘By itself it is not strong enough but it can be valuable as part of a wider campaign.’

Twitter’s growth is heading in the right direction, but as We Are Social’s Grant argues: ‘Brands need to think carefully about what impact any commercial use of Twitter is likely to achieve before investing any significant resources in it.’

The cover story from Fiona Ramsay about Twitter’s plan to start charging brands (subsequently picked up by Techcrunch and others), starts from a quote straight from the horse’s mouth:

Co-founder Biz Stone told Marketing: ‘We are noticing more companies using Twitter and individuals following them. We can identify ways to make this experience even more valuable and charge for commercial accounts.’ He would not be drawn on the level of charges.

Stone said it could also create revenue-generating features to tap into the way brands use Twitter as a hybrid marketing and customer-service tool.

But Bob Pearson, vice-president of communities and conversations at Dell, said: ‘If it becomes complicated and costly, our instinct would be to move elsewhere.’ Robin Grant, managing director of social media agency We Are Social, said Twitter could charge for display ads or to access customer information for marketing.

I had quite a long philosophical conversation with Fiona about this when she was writing the article, and expressed my scepticism about Twitter charging for brands using Twitter normally (which is not entirely summed up with the quote she used, but it least got across the idea they’d look at charging for added value services rather than the standard free functionality). As I said in the comments of the article:

The challenge Twitter will face is that there’s such a grey line between personal and commercial use.

Aside from the celebrity issue, where they are clearly individuals, but using the service for commercial gain, it’s grey elsewhere too.

If I spend a lot of my time on Twitter talking about business related stuff, where does that leave me?

For brands overtly using Twitter, it’s not black and white either. Look at Ford’s Scott Monty for example (@ScottMonty), who uses his personal account to represent Ford. Even the account we run for Skype (@PeteratSkype) is as an individual not a brand (as is the same for most of Dell’s accounts). And of course Zappos famously have hundreds of employees on Twitter.

Let’s face it, one of the reasons that Twitter is popular is because it’s such an interesting mix of both your personal and your business life – in fact, unlike Facebook or LinkedIn, it lets you be the whole you. Twitter will be risking a lot if they try to change this.

Which has since proved to be correct, with Biz Stone publishing this clarification on the Twitter blog:

It’s great that both individuals and organizations are finding value in Twitter and there may be ways we can enrich the experience. In fact, we hope to begin iterating on revenue products this year.

However, it’s important to note that whatever we come up with, Twitter will remain free to use by everyone – individuals, companies, celebrities, etc. What we’re thinking about is adding value in places where we are already seeing traction, not imposing fees on existing services.