Update: We’ve posted an updated case study

One of the projects we’ve been busy with recently is the launch of a new, stronger variant of Marmite for Unilever. We’re very proud to be working on such an iconic brand, and really pleased our work has been so well received by New Media Age and that it has been included in Contagious Magazine’s Most Contagious 2009.

Here’s an overview of the strategy we developed to launch “MXO” exclusively through social media by engaging with the brand’s most passionate fans. Bear in mind that the launch is still in progress – in fact you have until midnight on Wednesday 16th December to make your application to join The Marmarati.

One of the exciting parts of this project is the way we were able to use social media to help Unilever develop the recipe for the final product – hats off to the Marmite team for making this happen, and enthusiastically joining in the theatrical experience. It’s great to get brand advocates actively participating in the product development and packaging design, as well as creating content for the launch campaign. And of course getting involved in the conversation.

We’re excited to be working with an innovative new food and drink festival called Towards a Fluid State. What is it exactly? Good question. As described by Urban Junkies:

Imagine a futuristic farmers’ market getting hit by a science lab and a truck full of the sexiest booze and food on Earth.

It’s presented by The Tasting Sessions, who’ve been creating unique and immersive experiences that are unconventionally radical compared to a traditional ‘tasting’. It’s an approach that generates plenty of conversation: not only about the events, but also the products that they showcase.

We’re big fans of the concept, especially as many of the principles apply to our work at We Are Social. Getting a group of interesting, influential people to learn about something firsthand in a memorable and immersive environment is a great way to get people enthusiastically talking.

A few weeks ago, a press and blogger briefing previewed some of the food and drink to be featured at the festival, with their trademark “slightly surreal, informative and lots of fun” attitude.

Photo by Jacqueline Chang (@jacquelinechang)

Some of the more ‘guerilla art’ marketing activity has been amplified into social media via Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr, whilst the festival blog serves as a hub for the online activity, and a platform to present the various food, drink (including whisky, gin, cognac, sake, beer and wine), art and performance that are part of the multi-sensory and interactive journey into the Fluid State.

If you head to Dalston for the event (and we recommend that you do!) you’ll be better off getting your ticket online beforehand. As the Londonist puts it, this “upstart extravaganza” is “an especially tasty opportunity to have some fun”.

In typical style, I submitted two panel ideas to SXSW Interactive and have been too busy to write a blog post to ask you to vote for them. As the deadline is Monday, I figured I better pull my finger out…

So, ladies and gentlemen, without further ado, I submit for your appreciation and possible affirmation, the following:

The Death Of The Microsite And The Rise Of The Real-Time Web

Think about what you’ve spent your time doing online in the past week. How many microsites did you visit? How many branded flash animations did you watch? Calculate the mean answer for the entire world and you’ll probably arrive at a figure close to zero. But it’s a fair bet that you’ll have spent a significant proportion of time in social media. In the places that people choose to spend their online lives, constant interaction is the norm. But where does this leave the traditional model of brand websites?

Lost In Translation: The Nuances Of European Social Media

Europe is ahead of the US in terms of the consumer usage of social media, and yet little attention is often given to the nuances of what is on one hand is the world’s largest economy and on the other a collection of 48 countries with very different cultures. Find out why the blogging scene in Paris is 2 years ahead of the US, the Brits are all a Twitter, the Dutch prefer Hyves to Facebook and the Germans will take any chance to give brands a hostile reception in social media.

Click through to see more details, including who I’m intending to have on each of the panels, and if you feel they are worthy, give them the thumbs up. If you’re interested in other British panel submissions, Sam Michel has put together a comprehensive list, and while you’re in a voting mood, We Are Social could also do with your help in the the people’s choice of “Most Admired Agency”…

Last Wednesday we hosted our second MeasurementCamp. It was very much a last-minute affair – we stepped in to host it after an appeal on Twitter the day before. Given the late arrangement it was a smaller crowd than usual, but at the same time it was intimate and very much like the first few MeasurementCamps – with fewer people we were able to hold it as a single discussion session.

I presented a case study on our recent Dunlop campaign, with a measurement-focused angle. The key learning was what we ended up measuring was different from the KPIs we had agreed at the start, owing to a change in circumstances – and that raw numbers don’t tell the whole story. For example, the audience for our Twitter activity in setting the record straight was in the tens of thousands, far less than the total audience for the blogs, but it was important to target them as they were in a chatty, lively community where misinformation has the potential to spread quickly.

We then had a breakout session where we talked about specific metrics, and how best to classify them. There was a consensus that different campaigns and clients need different metrics, but the question was raised of how to select them.

So we thought publishing this framework might be useful. The first classification – ‘traditional’ v. ‘social’ is relatively easy to make, but even then a ‘social’ metric varies from viewing a YouTube video to blogging about it. We then rate the metrics in terms of both engagement (how much effort a user puts in to an activity) and longevity (how long the effect of that activity it lasts):

Out of this you can start seeing how one might go about selecting the right metrics to best reflect the difference your work can make. If you are working on instant incidental awareness or viral spread, you can focus towards the bottom left, and if you’d push for a longer relationship-focused then you’d go for the top right where the numbers are smaller but the time and dedication greater. Of course, there is a lot of extra context that fits around this – sentiment, enthusiasm, trust, and existing relationships, which numbers alone cannot account for – but still we hope it helps frame better the different metrics out there and their relevance to your work.

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.

Photo by Bash

Last weekend I spent the day at SocialMediaCamp London 09 – organised by the tireless Vero Pepperrell and stacked with a variety of interesting discussions.

Vero herself led an open discussion on “PR agencies want your soul”. Most of us there were on both sides at once – being bloggers ourselves while also working with bloggers on behalf of our clients. Some of the stories that came out were amusing and horrifying at the same time – PRs using Facebook to stalk bloggers they wanted to get in touch with – and some good discussion from what to do if you’re a blogger who received a bad pitch; do you ignore, name & shame in public, or email back and tell them how to do it right? Kerry Gaffney covers it in a lot more detail.

Not that it was all agency-talk. Like social media it was very diverse and the topics abounded from discussion of the fun of LARPing to the perils of moderating adult user-generated content.

Of course, it wouldn’t be a social media gathering if there wasn’t a lot of discussion of Twitter. Kai Turner‘s talk on the genesis of Smack My Tweet Up, the anonymous Twitter Valentine-sending app designed as a bit of fun, was an eye opener. It took only 48 hours from idea to going live, and got several thousand hits by word of mouth alone. I liked both the idea and the turnaround, showing how easy it is to develop quick, fun and useful apps in social media; just like how conversations can be spontaneous, bright ideas can be turned into functioning social applications in the blink of an eye.

One good question asked was how Smack My Tweet Up prevented misuse (but as it was taken in good faith they only had one complaint, this wasn’t a major issue) – and this was a theme that wove throughout the entire day. Perhaps as a sign of the way the social media space has matured there was no worrying or fretting about the lack of control over social media, but a lot of positive discussion on how to make the most of the debate and conversation out there.

Joanna Geary and Lucia Adams discussed the ethics and judgement involved in moderating a liveblog, as they did for The Times during the G20 summit, giving us an insight into how moderation is as every bit an art form as creating content. When there is more than one user submission every second, what do you include and what do you filter to prevent overloading your readers with information? Managing criticism and dissent on your own site while also representing a diversity of views fairly is hard enough when you have time to think about it, let alone in real-time. It also serves a reminder that moderators and community managers are human, not robots, and their judgements need to be treated in that context.

Getting a feel for what a community’s needs are is important, as Lauren Fisher pointed out in a cerebral discussion of Habermas’ public sphere and how it applies to social media. We discussed what happens when those in power or the mainstream media act against the norms of the social media sphere and the backlashes that can result (such as the Brian Cowen nude portraits controversy) and whether social media is a representative reflection of the public sphere in wider society (Answer: probably, and it’s gettting better as social media moves beyond early adopters).

Finally, there was a talk & session on trolls and griefing given by none other than myself, on what happens when someone turns up to the party with the intent of causing mayhem, and how we need to plan and adapt in future.

It was a great afternoon – although some have lamented the low attendance rate and the fact not everyone seemed keen to present (Kat Neville and Michael Litman provide arguments for each side, and Neil Crosby has a good suggestion on microtalks). The fact that only 56% of people who bought tickets turned up is a real shame, but even though not every slot was filled with a speaker, I have to say I was spoilt for choice for a lot of events. I missed some things I regret not seeing, including James Whatley on being the voice of a brand and keeping human, and the guys behind Social Innovation Camp talking about their work.

In short, the day rocked. For more SMC stuff be sure to check out the #smclondon tag on Flickr, Twitter, Qik and Slideshare. Big thanks go to Vero and all the volunteers who helped make it such an engaging and informative day and I look forward to the next one!

On Thursday the week before last, we were proud to host MeasurementCamp on its one year anniversary (if you’re interested in the details, Jordan Stone and Kevin Maguire have written up the event)

Billed as ‘an open source movement to make sense of social media measurement’, it sprung out of a panel discussion on measuring social media where Will McInnes and myself crossed swords on the subject, but unfortunately without bringing much enlightenment to the audience. Will, as he often does, decided something needed to be done, and MeasurementCamp was born.

As you can see from the photos above, we’ve come a long way since the original Measurementcamp last April, hosted in room above the Coach and Horses pub in Soho. This time, we invited our friend Josh Hallett of Voce Communications who was over from the US, and as result it looks like MeasurementCamp has now turned into a global movement. We think that’s a pretty fitting birthday present…