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…

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.

I spent a few days in Brighton last week attending the iMedia agency summit.

It was a great chance to mix with senior people from both media, above the line and digital agencies and discuss the challenges facing our industry (and, let’s be honest, get to know each other over a few beers).

Jeremy Hill did an outstanding job of chairing the event and my thanks go to Gavin Sutcliffe and the rest of the team at iMedia who made the event happen.

PHD’s Head of Innovation, John V Willshire, took time out from thinking about butterflies and bubbles long enough to write up his take on the conference, and leaves us with this question:

We are an industry built around reaching out to a million people in order to affect a small proportion of them for our clients. It’s embedded in the language we use, the business models we’ve created, even some of the ideas we suggest and persist with.

However the opportunity exists to build conversations and relationships with the thousand people we originally wanted to affect in the first place… and if we create a great relationship between our clients and them, they will be more likely to be loyal, enthusiastic advocates of that company and their products.

Which is better for the company and the people. So I guess the big question is what role will the agency play in that world?

Of course, this is the question we setup We Are Social to help answer…

Photo: Phil Sheard

Last Tuesday NMK ran a debate entitled “What Happens to Online PR” – it was packed full of the great and good of ‘Online PR’ and, aside from the debate, it was a great to have a chance to catch-up with everyone.

The evening has already been covered in depth by Roger Warner, Jed Hallam, Jo-Rosie Haffenden, Drew Benvie, Sarah Beavis, Lloyd Gofton and the organiser Ian Delaney, but the point I made in my intervention on the night seems to have been lost.

Much to my delight, the PR industry seems to be taking a very myopic view of the current state of play (as evidenced by PR Week’s coverage of the event). It fails to realise that there is a great game afoot, one that involves all of the advertising and marketing industry, that will be merciless on those that fail to adapt.

Above the line, digital, PR, direct marketing and even media agencies are converging towards the same place, and due to the rise of digital, the battle has been raging for a few years now. Up until recently, the PR industry has been relatively immune from its effects. This will not continue. Agencies of all colours are realising what the future will bring, and are making plans to adapt.

However, just as over the last ten years digital agencies stole a march on above the line agencies by building bigger, better and more motivated specialist teams, thereby innovating faster and developing a critical mass of best practise that accelerated the gap between them and their offline competitors, so conversation agencies will do the same to PR agencies (and, I have to say, to the digital and other agencies also trying to catch-up).

To use ourselves as an example, who else has a team of twelve 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.

To quote from Roger Warner’s write-up of the evening:

The people who will write the book are those who make the first convincing moves and are happy to invest and invent. We’ll be delivering best practises in beta mode whilst Big PR is watching on the sidelines.

Update: PR Week finally wakes up:

PR agencies are facing up to a growing threat from the adv­ertising sector after the car giant this week picked MindShare to handle [...] digital PR and social media strategy.

‘The advertising industry is focusing its guns on PR bud­get, so our industry is def-in­itely at a crossroads,’ said Katy Howell, MD at Immediate Future. ‘We must step up, educate our clients and widen our reach to include marketing and digital departments.

‘If we do not, there is every likelihood that the PR industry will not exist in five years. We will become a commodity within the bigger, more powerful, media and advertising organisations.’

Update 2: Brian Solis has some further thoughts:

By now, many organizations realize that the success of their brands will be determined online. Yet other than this almost universal consensus, little else about digital has been decided. Its scope is constantly expanding and its growth potential has every marketing discipline jumping to adopt some part of digital as its own turf. “There is all kinds of competition popping up [for digital] and it’s putting a squeeze on communications professionals,” says Brian Solis, founder and president of FutureWorks, a digital PR agency. PR, ad, and direct marketing agencies are all looking to carve a niche in digital as their conventional channels become increasingly irrelevant. With traditional ad revenues decreasing in value and news outlets shuttering, the most viable avenue for future revenue is digital. But the race to capitalize on digital has pitted many of these agencies against each other, especially as the boundaries between marketing, advertising, and PR blur online.

Update 3: Campaign, the advertising industry’s bible, chimes in:

Digital advertising and social media are quickly converging and, while PR is reaping the rewards inside this new space, how long will it be before others muscle in? Already, Beattie McGuinness Bungay, DDB and VCCP are among UK agencies fine-tuning PR and social media offerings and others will quickly follow.

It’s been a while since I last wrote about the death of the microsite, but this week there’s been some comment worth noting on the subject. Firstly Martin Kelley on O’Reilly Broadcast:

With the rise of the real-time update streams being popularized by Facebook, Twitter and FriendFeed, users are becoming accustomed to a constantly-changing flow of pictures, videos and new snippets. Even actively-maintained websites seem locked in languid stupor in comparison.

This will change company’s interactions with customers, who will start to expect and then demand real-time interaction [...] The style will shift from slickly-produced mass marketing to a one-on-one responsive back and forth. Smart marketers will think less in terms of selling and more in terms of relationship building.

And then a nice article from Brian Morrissey in Adweek, with this killer quote:

Clients want more of an emphasis on igniting conversation and less on the rich, textured sites that have typically accompanied their campaigns. The goal, as EVB CEO Daniel Stein put it, is to “stop building $1 million microsites that attract [only] 10,000 visitors.”

Advising a client to skip a $200,000 microsite in favour of a free Facebook page or social network built on Ning for $25 per month might be the right move, but it begs the question of whether the agency can make money.

Well, the simple answer is that digital agencies with teams of designers and flash developers to pay have some serious restructuring to do, assuming they even realise that restructuring is needed (after all, they are the ones who advised their clients to build the flash microsites in the first place).

However, those of us whose agencies are built from the ground up to focus on conversations are probably in a much better position to both give their clients the right advice and to profit from it…

Update: More from Steve Rubel in Ad Age:

Digital marketing is still wired for the destination web era. To succeed going forward, we have to change our thinking. “Earned media” through direct public engagement in the venues where our consumers spend time will become the only way to truly influence a behavior change. The greatest advantages will go to the first movers who embrace this shift.

Following on from Mark Cridge’s comments in New Media Age last week, Joseph Jaffe has an inspired rant in this week’s Adweek:

Exactly where and when did the digital space earn the stripes and credentials to tackle the high roads of authenticity, transparency or peer-to-peer collaboration (just to name a few of conversational marketing’s core tenets)?

The PR business is really no better and no worse than the digital one when it comes to social credentials. With its claim of being champions of “earned media,” it tacked the word “relations” onto blogger, lumped it together with “media relations” and “journalist relations,” and somehow went unchallenged.

Whereas the digital space has very little claim to the “physical” world and hasn’t proven itself in the virtual space, the PR industry resides more comfortably in the physical world, with a superficial grasp of the digital space and an anemic understanding of the virtual one.

I’ve seen client after client duped into charging a digital or PR agency with-arguably-the most transformational opportunity we’ve been given in our professional lifetimes and the result is almost always a shambolic disappointment. From Sony or Wal-Mart’s fake blogs to the recent Skittles.com mess, the culprits are almost always digital or PR agencies.

There’s an acute and fundamental flaw in equating “social” with “digital” or “social” with “earned media.”

So what’s the solution?

If you’re reading this, you already know the answer…

Update: In response to the comments below, the title of this post is taken straight from the title of Joseph’s article on Adweek, and it’s pretty clear he’s not questioning the ownership of social media as a whole, but rather what sort of agency is best placed to help brands deal with it.

Mark Cridge, the founder and CEO of glue, is a man who We Are Social owes a lot to, both figuratively – through the example he and the rest of the team at glue have set over the last ten years and quite literally – up until our move last week, he’d been kind enough to let us base ourselves in glue’s offices. He’s also a man that knows what he’s talking about regarding the tectonic shifts that have happened in the marketing and advertising industry as digital has made its presence felt.

So, even though we’ve been talking about social media’s rise as a distinct discipline ourselves (and it was mine and Nathan’s belief in this that led us to found We Are Social), it’s pretty gratifying to hear what he has to say in this week’s New Media Age:

‘If you talked to people the way advertising talked to people, they’d punch you in the face.’ This wonderfully captures the feeling of dismay those in digital have felt when they saw their traditional counterparts wade in, uninformed, and claim, “This digital lark, it’s all just more screens, innit.”

In fact this was a useful argument as the nascent digital industry carved out a role for itself, distinct from traditional advertising, emphasising the need for a new approach, a distinct set of skills that, coincidentally, only a digital agency could provide.

Clearly, as the traditional industry rapidly gets its act together, it would be naive to think this state of affairs will last much longer. It’s interesting, then, to experience a sense of déjà vu as we see social media rise as a distinct discipline, again requiring a unique set of skills and experiences

You can’t simply take the old ways of doing things and apply them to any new medium in exactly the same way. This is especially true within social media, which is as different to the digital of the last few years as that was to traditional channels. Just as digital types complained that traditional sorts shouldn’t treat online as a mass broadcast channel, so the same is true with social media, where you can’t expect the rules and behaviours of traditional or even digital to work in the same way.

This week, the IPA published a report snappily titled Social Media Futures – The future of advertising and agencies in a networked society. A 10-year perspective, the launch of which was covered both by the FT:

Two-thirds of advertising agencies are not prepared for the industry changes prompted by social networks and new forms of digital media

and Campaign:

For agencies used to what one senior executive calls a “broadcast mindset”, the social networking phenomenon and the way it empowers consumers can seem seriously scary. Which makes this week’s warning from the IPA that, when it comes to social media, the majority of agencies “aren’t getting it” all the more disturbing.

The Campaign piece includes some good analysis of the state of play, including this from Mark Collier, Managing Partner at Dare:

Social media should be viewed as a discipline in its own right and doing it properly will require genuine specialists who live and breathe it. But it will need to be closely allied to core marketing strategy and execution if it is to be relevant and effective.

And this from Steve Henry, the former TBWA\London Executive Creative Director:

The current agency model needs rethinking because it’s run out of steam. Remember that a lot of digital agencies are ten years old and you have to ask if they’re flexible enough to seize the opportunities on behalf of clients. Many clients are starting to feel that the agency they need doesn’t exist. That’s to say one that understands the mechanics of social networking as well as delivering the upstream strategy and thinking.

These are the very reasons we set-up We Are Social in June last year (combined with a similar malaise in the PR industry), and I’m confident that what we’re doing addresses Mark and Steve’s concerns head on.

As part of the launch of the report, the IPA also held an event on Monday evening, which Nathan, Sandrine and myself went along to – nicely summed up by PHD’s Dan Hosford:

Essentially, the IPA gathered a group of industry social media champions across agencies & media owners. Then bored them

There’s more detail, if you want it, in posts from Anjali Ramachandran, Graeme Harrison, Amelia Torode and John V Willshire.

Update: The IPA have put some of the slides from the event on SlideShare and responded with a blog post of their own.

Philip Buxton, the former editor of Revolution, has written a great checklist for brands choosing a social media agency:

1. A new approach – since everyone claims to ‘do’ social, look for those seeking to develop new models for approaching it, not those seeking to map on their existing models
2. Technology – everyone claims to have unique talent, to be ‘leading’, to have great clients, and real expertise. Technology, fortunately, can’t be faked, demonstrates genuine investment and expertise, and really can be proprietary and unique. So, which agency has developed/is developing their own technology to support their new approach?
3. Measurement – the true value of real engagement by brands in social media is really hard to measure. I’ll be dropping my bank as soon as I don’t need them anymore because of the way it treated me when I was a student – good social media strategy will have a similarly long-lasting effect. Nonetheless, some agencies are having a very credible stab at it. Just steer clear of the ones who claim it’s that simple
4. Existing credentials – being good at something, in my view, is a transferable skill. Muhammad Ali liked to say that if he’d been a dustman (I’m translating of course), he’d have been the best dustman in the world. I believe him. So, is the agency now claiming to be brilliant at social media brilliant at what it already does?
5. Case studies – trade journalists will tell you that finding people to talk about social media is not a problem. Finding people that have real projects to talk about is a good deal more difficult. What has the agency really done in this area?

My shortlist would be made up only of agencies that tick all five boxes

We would agree with him…