Gary Andrews

All last week, the excellent Darika Ahrens at Grapevine Consulting posted a series of pieces on why PR was losing the social media battle. They were an excellent analysis of why PR could be owning the social media space, yet continued to make basic mistakes.

Darika also asked me if I’d be able to contribute and, er, well last week didn’t happen mainly because I was excessively busy and also because it’s so hard to add anything to her excellent pieces.

One thing to briefly say, though, is while social media has moved on, and PR and brands are more willing to engage, general attitudes are still stuck in the past a little. If these attitudes can change, then we could see a real shift in thinking. But it requires organisations and senior people to face up to this and make a conscious effort.

The two biggest social media attitude problems, and they’re not mutually exclusive and can frequently be found it the same office, is that social media is an area of specialised PR that only need concern a few digital people, and that it’s quick, cheap, and easy. Often the first assumption informs actions on the second.

First off, social media may have been specialised once upon a time, while those of us beavered away understanding niche bloggers and communities, but it’s no longer part a different world.

Social media planning should be built into the start of any good campaign. If you insist on separating out digital from regular PR (and I personally think the lines are blurred enough for the distinction to be nearly meaningless) then for heavens sake, include the digital team from the start, rather than realising you’d quite like to do something on Twitter a few weeks beforehand. If nothing else, you’ll get a greater sense of what’s realistic.

And therein follows the second part. Any campaign that has poor social media planning often seems to throw things together late in the day. I still get “Can we push this out to bloggers” a week before hand, as do, anecdotally, many others, it seems.

Darika says she no longer takes short-term pitching to blogger projects, and you can understand why. These are the ones that are cobbled together at last minute, often with ludicrous targets and expectations, and invariably require so much work around them with so little return that they’re more trouble than it’s worth.

If you’re building a strategy around bloggers – and it’s also worth asking ‘what is a blogger’, given that so many mainstream outlets are just as likely to stick it on their blog as in the paper – then these things take time, money and no small amount of effort. You would throw together a major plan for print media the week beforehand. Why do the same with bloggers?

None of this is rocket science. And none of these need be done at the expense of other media coverage (another traditional mis-assumption). It requires the same thought and discipline as any other campaign.

It’s nothing that can’t be fixed but, as Darika says, we have a long way to go.

written by Gary \\ tags: fixpr, social media, social media PR

Sometimes shows that you’re interested in pass you by. Had it not been for idly flicking through the Saturday TV listings while waiting for my toast to, er, toast I’d have completely missed The Virtual Revolution on Saturday night. And even then, I only Sky Plussed it on a whim, given that I was recording football that night as well.

This is a rather roundabout way of saying make an effort to seek it out and watch it if it’s passed you by as well. It’s an excellent and illuminating exploration of how the internet has changed our world. It’s especially good if you’re new to social media and want an overview that doesn’t assume knowledge or patronise. Absolutely fascinating and probably one of the few non-sport related programmes I’ll be making an effort to watch.

I also suspect some of the themes in the second programme are ones I’ll touch on when I finally get around to writing my Peru / social media post.

(Yes, I know it’s generated a lot of buzz online. I’ve missed it, ok. I’ve been busy with other things, and when that happens, TV tends to take a back seat)

written by Gary \\ tags: BBC, social media, The Virtual Revolution

There’s a horrible temptation, not just in social media, but in all walks of life, to see something that works, think “Oh, that’s ok then,” and leave it there, while all the small cracks slowly grow ever larger. You wouldn’t forgo an MOT just because your car appeared to be working. The same’s true for social media.

So, just because a well run Twitter-based campaign worked well for one company, it doesn’t mean that it’ll work for another. And, crucially, it definitely doesn’t mean that you can repeat it again a few months later for the original company. Everything is different.

Here’s an example from my own work. On ITV.com, we’ve started running live chats around various shows and Q&As with producers and the talent (Dancing On Ice is the one currently running on Sundays). We’ve done this for various shows and events for several months now, and not one show is exactly the same.

After initial successes with football and I’m A Celebrity, it would have been tempting to say: “That works, let’s roll it out.” But we’d have done so at the peril of alienating our communities. Whereas one group would treat the chat in a knockabout way, another was deadly serious, whereas a third disliked us doing something we’d happily done with no problems in other chats.

These lessons can be applied to anywhere in the social media sphere. It’s all to easy to fall into a basic, easy way of doing things that achieves decent results but ignores the community. But by listening to that community and tuning into their likes and dislikes and individual quirks, you have a chance not just to cater to their needs, but to listen, learn and improve across the board.

It’s a principle that good online journalism adopts as well. The better you know your audience, the better you’ll be able to serve them (even if this involves taking a contrary position to stir up a bit of debate in the comments).

Taking big conversations and great ideas and listening to them at much smaller levels may not seem like a priority, but it’s not hard to do, and the benefits far outweigh the time you’ll put into it (which really isn’t that much in the grand scheme of things).

written by Gary \\ tags: conversation monitoring, online campaigns, social media

Yes, I’m still on a sabbatical, but wanted a quick mention of Google Wave, which I finally got round to signing up after having the invite sit in my inbox for a week.

First impressions… yes, well.

On one hand, I like it. There’s a lot of potential there. In term of work collaboration it could be very useful indeed – kind of inbetween a wiki and email. Certainly for small group based projects with plenty of distance between them there’s a lot a potential. I think Chris and I can both see it working with the twofootedtackle podcast as well.

On the other hand: what the hell do you actually do with it. About 75% of my Waves are currently conversations with other people as we try to figure it all out. I’m also not a fan of the lack of an ‘undo delete’ option (unless I’ve just not found one).

At this stage it’s a bit pointless jumping on the naysayers bandwagon or the sliced bread enthusiasts bandwagon. With the fanfare of the announcement and launch, it was always going to be a tad underwhelming (especially as it can’t actually slice bread). But that doesn’t mean it’s pointless or rubbish. We just probably haven’t found the best usage for it.

Not that I necessarily think it’ll have the same impact as Twitter, but there were similar comments around Twitter when that first started to enter the public consciousness (although it’s worth noting that Twitter is one hell of a lot easier to master than Wave). Twitter, and indeed Facebook, are now quite different beasts from when they first started out.

Wave, I suspect, will be the same. There’s probably some incredibly clever usage of Wave that will be developed a year or so down the line that will make users wonder how they ever lived without it. Or it may die on its arse. But the former’s probably more likely.

Interestingly, there’s a couple of people in my Wave contacts who have very little to do with social media. The industries they work in (mostly the financial sector) may just find more of a use for it. Just because the early adopter / social media sector have  jumped on it, doesn’t mean it’s the sector to get the best usage out of it.

Me, the best thing I can see with it so far is sharing and altering recipes and food pictures. That’s been kind of fun. Live Wave cookalong anybody?

Anyway, if any readers of this blog (all 7.5 of you) want to add me on Wave I can be found at garyllewellynandrews [at] googlewave [dot] com.

Right, back to the silence.

written by Gary \\ tags: Google Wave, sharing, social media

If, in the future, we’re all going to be sat at our desks blogging, Tweeting, Flickring and whatnot, for the rest of eternity, we’ll probably need e-numbers to get through it.

Whether or not that was one of the reasons behind Skittles taking their home page all social media-like, we’ll never know. But they are one of the more high profile brands to experiment with the various tools online. Whether it’s worked or not is another matter.

To recap: anybody logging into their Twitter last Monday would have probably found a slew of tweets with the hashtag #skittles. These were then fed into the Skittles home page which was updating all mentions of the sweet on Twitter.

After a while people started cottoning onto this and includes tweets about paedophiles and the like to watch them get onto the home page. Social media types are a nice bunch, but we do have a somewhat borderline/evil sense of humour.

Regardless, Skittles were THE trend on Twitter that day, even if it’s difficult to say if this takeover was a good or a bad thing. In the short-term, it definitely worked. The brand was being talked about and I’d imagine there’s a high chance consumption of the rather icky sweet went up among users of the mircoblogging tool.

But there’s still one nagging question here – just what exactly were they hoping to achieve?

Yes, it was a bold move. Yes it was reasonably innovative for such a mainstream brand. Yes, it got them talked about for a short period of time. But, to be blunt, what for? And what now?

Currently their homepage brings up their Wikipedia entry. Which is nice but, um, what precisely are we meant to do with it? Sure, it’s more informative than a garish flash page, but if I wanted to find out about Skittles on Wikipedia I’d, well, go to Wikipedia.

At Econsultancy, Patricio Robles is similarly nonplussed:

“What exactly did Skittles reinforce by turning its homepage into a Twitterstream? That’s the $64,000 question the people in charge of the Skittles brand should be asking themselves because the truth is that buzz doesn’t build, reinvigorate or reinvent brands.

A coherent message does.

I think that’s something marketers need to keep in mind when they experiment with the ever-growing world of social media. If brands see social media as little more than a cheap tool for getting some short-term attention, they might as well stay home. Branding is a long-term game.”

And that is really the problem a lot of brands or companies have with the internet in a nutshell. Most media people have probably been in at least one meeting where somebody asks “Can we get this on the internet / blogs / Twitter?”

Even if it’s the kind of thing that fits well with any given social media site, the ‘what now’ question remains. Skittles have got some great short-term publicity and have shown a lot more social media savvy than a lot of other brands, but now that they’ve got Skittles out there in social media, what do they intend to do with it?

This may well be part of a slow strategy to get Skittles out there bit by bit. If it’s just doing it for the sake of, well, doing it then they’ve got their buzz and then, a few months down the line, everybody will have forgotten about it.

Building a social media presence, be it for your own work, a brand, a personality, a TV show, or whatever isn’t just a case of putting it out into the internet and leaving it.

Sometimes this does work, admitedly, but this usually means you’ve got a simple little thing that users love and start doing their own thing with.

But more often than not, the brand is thrown out in a great blaze of glory and is then sadly neglected when it’s this second step on continual engagement that can yield the greatest benefit in the long run.

And on a slight tangential note, if you want an excellent guide on how to pitch your brand across Twitter, Kai Turner’s post on Mashable is one of the best possible pieces you can read.

written by Gary Andrews \\ tags: brands, skittles, social media

Bobbie Johnson from the Guardian has had it with social media. It’s easy to sympathise.

“Listen. I have blog. I use Twitter. I idly flick through lists of people I’d forgotten I ever knew on Facebook. I’ve even got a MySpace page, although I don’t like to talk about it. They are great ways of connecting people, and they’re very exciting when you start using them, because they allow virtual contact in ways that are analogous to – if not the same as – real life. You know, communicate with people. That old thing.

…

Nobody talks about people down the pub laughing about Bale’s expletive-laden bullying as a “social drinking sensation”. They don’t call people giggling about it on the phone as a “social telecommunications sensation”. They call it joking, or they call it gossip, because that’s what people do. Whether they do it online or offline, down the pub or on Facebook doesn’t matter. “Social media” is mainstream – we don’t need to claim any more victories for it.”

Quite so. I’m at a point where I roughly agree with Bobbie as well. I’ve probably spent as much time as anybody hyping up ’social’ media tools. It was a convenient term, much like ‘new media’ was back in the emerging days of the internet.

It has now crossed into the mainstream. That, I think, we can safely say. But, as Bobbie points out, having Christian Bale’ s rant pinged around Twitter doesn’t act as proof that it’s taking over the world (such proof, for what it’s worth, is pretty easy to accumulate elsewhere).

Wadds wrote last week about the change that was coming in Twitter and other forms of social media (I’m still using the term as it’s convenient) and I think we’re seeing it now.

Now, unless I’ve completely misread his column, I don’t think Bobbie’s calling for the death of social media; rather that he wishes social media people would stop banging on about how great social media is on social media sites.

Christ, I feel incestuous just writing that last sentence.

There reaches a point where, in any technology or movement or whatever you want to call social media, where it edges onto the mainstream and suddenly everybody is an expert on it.

And, as ever, with any kind of new, erm, thing (sorry, I’m casting about for words here and can’t find the right one) there is a lot of bullshit. And a lot of people who get involved for little discernible purposes other than to self-promote their usually overhyped wares.

We’re probably at this stage now.

Now, this isn’t a post where I run screaming at Twitter yelling “YOU’VE CHANGED AND I DON’T LIKE IT” on my part either. But the site – and many other bits have become a mite trying at times. Largely because of the jargon and the self-promotion and the self-satisfaction and God alone knows what. [Insert your own examples here. I'm tired, ok].

Let’s take a step back for a moment. Social media is still important. It is, and will continue to, make an impact on our lives – how we view, consume and engage with both the media and the world in general.

But the likes of Twitter et al are also communication tools. And just as we all use our mobile phones to communicate in different ways, the same could be said for these assorted sites. They are a way of communication. No more, no less. How you choose to use them is up to you.

So, with that in mind, it’s not a surprise that PR (and journalism and the like) is naturally drawn to Twitter. After all, PR is a communications industry.

And, just with any new development, there will always be people in an industry who cotton onto it quicker than others. I guess you could call these people experts.

Whatever title you give them, these will be the people leading the way in training, enthusing and helping their colleagues or industry get the best out of the new technologies.

What’s quite interesting is some of the best people I know in this area have gone quite quiet over various social media outlets (God, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I can’t stop writing the term. I’ll stop it soon, I promise). And that’s probably as good an indication as any that social media’s moved into the mainstream.

It means that they no longer need to shout from the rooftops and are probably getting stuck into work and training and other such things. They’ve not moved on, they’ve just got more on their plates as every area tries to get a piece of the action. And this is a good thing, probably.

No doubt there will now be a slew of blog posts in the coming months claiming social media is dead (we’ve already had this with blogging). It’s not. It’s evolving.

Those who start proclaiming the death of social media are probably either trying to get attention or acting like the cool kid at school who spends ages raving about a band only to disown said band when everybody else realised how good they are. This isn’t the same as fatigue or frustration, which is what Bobbie appears to have.

I still love many aspects of social media. It’s integral to a lot of what I do. Twitter is increasingly useful for work, del.icio.us is a daily essential, I’m using wikis a hell of a lot more and I’ve only just realised how useful Tumblr can be.

But this does not mean I need to run around letting the whole world know I’ve just created a new wiki (although I’m as guilty as anybody of pimping my blog over the assorted networks).

This probably comes across as quite a jumbled post, but I think that’s a reflection of where things are at currently.

Social media tools are being absorbed into the mainstream but the principles guiding them are not new. Gossip is gossip, news is news, no matter how it becomes so. And talking about these wonderful new tools is easy. Doing something with them is considerably harder.

Twitter – and other sites you can lump under the SM umbrella – is useful, fun and interesting. Going around declaring yourself an expert in this probably isn’t. I removed the phrase social media enthusiast from my profile a week or so ago because I realised it made me sound like an utter wanker. And, frankly, I don’t need any extra help in that department.

I’ll finish by lifting Kat Hannaford’s comment from Bobbie’s piece, because it’s delightfully ranty, and pretty much spot on. And she’s one of my favourite, funniest Tweeters:

“Twitter and all the assorted other social networking brainfuckery has sapped the joy right out of the internet in recent months, and it’s taking all my willpower not to tell people to sod off, stop embarrassing themselves, and crawl back to the nook at Shoreditch House that they crawled out of.

Now if you excuse me, I’m going to go look at pictures of cats to reinstall a glimmer of hope within me about the benefits of the internet.”

Amen to that. Pictures of cats will still be popular no matter what stage of the web we’re in

written by Gary Andrews \\ tags: Bobbie Johnson, hyperbole, social media, Twitter

Chris Applegate posts a list of 20 familiar signs that a company really doesn’t want to get engaged in social media. It’s brilliantly funny, if not also a tad depressing (but then isn’t all the best humour) as it’s instantly familiar to anyway working in a social media sphere who’s had any of the 20 conversations.

Suw Charman-Anderson follows up with an internal version. Both are spot on. And while the web geeks amongst us giggle, they should also be compulsive reading for anybody or company thinking of getting into social media.

I’ve come across all these comments over God knows how many years in all walks of life. I’ve spoken to a few people who are so enthusiastic about social media but work for companies who take about six months to take any kind of decision on it. I’m quite thankful mine’s pretty proactive and willing to try new things.

Social media isn’t like other popular areas where you can just wade in go “hey, we’re great” and leave. What worked before offline won’t necessarily work online.

The best thing anybody can do if they want their company or client to get into social media is read and listen. Engagement also helps, but I’d honestly say just immersing yourself in blogs, wikis, pods, Twitter and forums and getting a feel for how they work will do no end of good.

If a blogger has a pop at your company, chill. Maybe it’s better to understand the reason behind the rant than panicking or getting worked up about the contents of the post. People say bad things, it happens.

Viral videos are called viral for a reason. If it’s something you’d want to send your mates at a slow day at work, then you’re onto a winner. If you struggle to watch it through, it won’t.

And while mass emailing bloggers may seem like a quick and efficient way to work, it probably won’t generate that much positive coverage. Certainly not compared to if you’ve taken the time to read, engage and see what’s relevant to this particular blog.

It’s not hard to do, but I suspect these won’t be the last conversations Chris and others have on this topic.

[I'd also quite like to add 21. Client puts something on the internet with no links in or out and wonders why nobody visits.]

written by Gary Andrews \\ tags: Chris Applegate, engagement, social media, Web 2.0