Note- – this was originally published on the Marketing Magazine blog

We live in a world that is constantly updating. It is always on. We are surrounded by new content; hundreds of TV channels, with most of the content available on demand. Thousands of apps for our phones, millions of hours of content available on the web, updated every second with new tweets, blogs and videos of cats.

And in amongst that sea of content, are brands struggling to be heard. They are producing content themselves in huge amounts. Content is king, they’ve been told, and so they’re doing their part. They are churning out blog posts, “virals” and all the while updating Twitter and Facebook with banal salutations of “good morning, how was YOUR weekend?” supported with an unhealthy amount of exclamation marks.

They’ve made a simple, almost forgivable mistake. They’ve assumed that because there is so much content around, so many brands on Facebook and Twitter and producing content online that they need to shout louder, post more regularly, just to be seen. Content is king, and any content will do.

They have become ‘those people’ on Facebook. The ones who feel the need to post about every little thing going on in their lives. The one whose posts you don’t read, whose phone calls you probably ignore the first few times it rings.

What they have failed to realise is that unlike in advertising, volume doesn’t work for social. It’s an easy trap to fall into, and is now so clichéd it has almost lost meaning – they’re broadcasting, and treating social like an advertising channel. In world of mediocre content, only great content will shine through.

Working with brands this year I will be telling them to do fewer things but do them bigger and better. All marketers have limited budgets, especially given the current economic climate. The best advice to deal with this is to focus your efforts. Don’t spread them too thinly. A handful of fantastic pieces of content are of much more value to your audience, and by extension your brand, than hundreds of mindless Facebook updates. A few great videos that are truly compelling over dozens of pointless blog posts. One great application rather than endless puzzle and quiz apps. “Which one of our brands are YOU?” No one cares.

Say NO to filler content. If you find yourself thinking that you have to post something just because you haven’t in a while, stop. Make sure it’s worth sharing. Make sure it’s something other people will want to share and talk about. Because if it’s not, it’s a waste of time, a waste of money, and worse a bad mark against you in your target audience’s mind. If you become the brand that constantly talks about boring stuff, that never does anything new, interesting, useful or cool then they’ll start to ignore you. And once their attention is lost, it’s really difficult to get it back.

Good brands, like good friends, know when to shut up. Does yours?

For more banal updates you can follow Mike on Twitter.

Google+ launched brand pages yesterday to some fanfare and it seems that once more people are hailing it as the next big thing, the Facebook killer. Even people who were but yesterday decrying the death of the social networking site, scoffing at the 50 million users as inactive and essentially calling Google plus dead in the water, another failed Google project. Funny how fickle the social media expert crowd is when shiny new features are involved.

Brands can now create brand pages for their brands. Great. Whilst marketers are now having crisis meetings with clients who demanding to know whether they should create a Google plus page and how it fits into their social media strategy (surely they’re not just creating accounts for the sake of it?), most people are probably thinking, awesome, more companies in my stream.

So what should your brand be doing on Google plus?

If you are struggling to answer that question then perhaps the answer us nothing. And that’s a perfectly acceptable answer.

If you still want to something, like a child with a shiny new toy, then stop and think. Answer some questions:

• Do you have a Facebook and Twitter page?
• Do they have a large fan base?
• Is my audience on Google+? Will they be?
• Do you have enough budget for another channel?
• If you start maintaining a Google plus page, what resources will you have to take away from Facebook, Twitter etc? Time, money, content? How will that affect the users on those channels?
• What can you do on Google plus that you can’t do elsewhere?
• What are you going to use Google plus for long term?

Gimmicks make for quick growth, but once the novelty wears off, if there isn’t a sustainable approach to content you’ll be left with a dead page, and no one likes that.

That’s not to say no one should be creating brand pages on Google, the different feature set should allow some innovative new marketing opportunities for the early adopting brands. Hangouts for example allow for countless opportunities for brand with celebrity endorsements. Pop up gigs for fans, crowd sourced interview etc. And there is certainly some value in the idea that people can over think the strategy, spending weeks and months making a decision. If you can do something awesome and are confident you can follow it up with continued awesome, then a certain line of thinking says do it. Fortune does favour the bold. But make sure it really is awesome. And recognise that you’re not just doing a one off launch stunt. You’re creating a page. A page you’ll have to maintain for the foreseeable future. A Google plus page isn’t just for launch day.

The last question you need to ask is Do you really want a Google plus page for your brand?

Let me know what you think, show off your Google+ brand pages in the comments. And follow me on Google+ here

Automatic posting, or frictionless sharing as Facebook is calling, essentially means Facebook automatically sharing updates of what a person is doing. Whether that activity is listening to a music track or trading an article on a website.

There are two problems with this new approach to sharing. The first is that this essentially equates social networking with life streaming. Facebook goes as far as to rename profiles as timelines. It assumes we want people to know everything about us, that we want our lives to be public, our lives to be lived in the public domain. But not everyone wants their activity broadcast across the web, certainly not all of their activity. Not everyone wants to be a celebrity, sacrificing privacy for slightly more attention. The functionality is, for now at least, opt in. Meaning the user has to allow Facebook permission to auto share, and in the instance of reading updates, the site must also have the functionality enabled.

However it is default behaviour that if a user does opt in, all of their friends will see these updates. And this is the second problem. It assumes that this information is interesting or relevant to other users. It equates activity with tacit approval or even recommendation. Pre-timeline behaviour was that people had to choose what and when to share. A particularly interesting article, funny video or great music track. People picked good things, acting essentially as curators of content. But now just reading an article for 30 seconds counts as a share worthy event, at least in Facebook’s eyes. Every song you listen to, even the slightly embarrassing playlists, are shared automatically. No selection, no picking and choosing, just a constant stream of unfiltered updates.

People connect on Facebook because they are (hopefully) friends. They want keep in touch and up to date with what is going on in their lives. The big events. The birthdays, the engagements, hell, sometimes even the photos from their holiday. But being a friend with someone does not mean you want to know every little update about their lives. There’s no call for Facebook connectivity in everything we do. I for one don’t wish to know when my friend reads just any article, I want to know when they read an article they find interesting, one they find worth sharing. Automatically sharing creates a stream of largely uninteresting sharing precisely because it is frictionless.

The idea that one day everything we do or interact with will have Facebook connectivity is terrifying. It conjures up images of a dystopian future where we are all reduced to our streams, updating whenever you make a purchase or go to the toilet. And nobody really wants that do they?

Google’s latest effort to enter the world of social, Google+ launched today. Possibly the most interesting thing about the launch is the number of people who have passed comment without even trying the service. ”Google doesn’t get social – this will fail” they cry. (Invites certainly are scarce, I haven’t yet had a chance to have a play, hence why I shan’t be going into specific features.)

 
It’s not that Google doesn’t “get” social. It’s that it’s just not social. Not in the same way as Facebook and Twitter. Google make great products that solve specific problems. Maps, Docs, Search. They solve specific problems really well. Social isn’t a specific problem, at least not one that hasn’t already been in large solved by Facebook, Twitter, Skype et al.
For Google to crack social, they need to find a specific problem to solve. And on the surface, it looks like they’ve still yet to find their specific problem. Circles is an interesting step forward, it’s a nice feature. But it’s not a Facebook Killer. No single aspect of Google+ is. As Jeremiah Owyang points out, Google+ offers no reason to leave Facebook.

And sadly, because many people agree with the “Google doesn’t get social” camp, Google+ may never get off the ground, even if the individual features are good with room for improvement. Social networks need people to be interesting, otherwise it’s just like staring at a mirror in the middle of a large room. Wave failed to take off because they didn’t get enough uptake, then they got sued for forcing gmail users to be a part of buzz. If they get the right number, they may be able to do okay. But there’s a very real chance they won’t.

This post was originally a comment, written by me, as a response to [untitled]‘s blog

In the rush the “engage” fans, and grow fan numbers, hundreds of brands are being very quick to give away fantastic prizes in competitions on their Facebook pages. The problem is very few of them actually think any more beyond this point. They get a prize, create a tab with the competition (those have read the guidelines and know not to use the wall etc for promotions) and think their job is done. In the race for fans very little thought is put into how people will find it and why people will actually want to enter this competition if they find it.

Unsurprisingly this results in hundreds of competitions a week being started by brands that only get a handful of entries. I’ve seen competitions giving away cars with less than 1,000 entries, and holidays to New York with less than 50 entries. With a one in fifty chance of winning a trip to New York you’d be silly not to enter.

This glut of competitions is resulting in a new breed of Facebook user, the semi professional competition entrant. They scour Facebook brand pages, hunting down competitions, prizing the lacklustre ones. And they’re doing it methodically, liking the pages where they have to, and promptly unliking once the competition is over. I’ve seen the same names popping up in competitions for a range of different brands. With the sheer number of competitions launched every week, giving away anything from iPads and TVs to holidays and cars these people must be doing quite well for themselves.

There is of course nothing wrong with these individuals (unless they are breaking the rules to try and win), who wouldn’t try and win a TV if only four other people had entered? But they are symptomatic of a broader problem, an obsession of quick wins in social. Want to get some fans? Throw up a competition behind a ‘like gate’. Sure you may get a few more people liking your page, but are they really fans of your page? Until brands start taking social seriously they will continue to put out these kneejerk competitions.

Now if you excuse me, I’m going to try and win an iPad.

UPDATE: Today I actually did win a car on a Facebook competition. Well, the use of one for 6 months. I think at last count I had 11 votes for my entry. I don’t even want the car.

Google unveiled their recommendation service, +1, yesterday. It’s a simple enough system, you can essentially recommend search results in Google with the click of a button:

This service has the potential to be very useful, no doubt. But to how many people? You can only get recommendations from your network who also have (and use) a Google account. It’s only going to be useful to the 10% of the population who have both a Google account and friends with a Google account.  How many of your friends have a Google account that they are signed into when using Google? 90% of my friends don’t have an account. And of the 10% of my friends that do, only a fraction I want recommendations from.

And that’s the second point. The numbers of potential contacts that I can get recommendations from is low, but, they’re all pretty similar. They all have early adopter tendencies; they tend to be up on the latest trends etc. And most of them work in a similar industry to me, follow other similar people etc. Google tools are great, but they are used by a niche set of people. And getting recommendations from a group of people in that niche is only marginally more useful than from just one person in that niche.

The issue is Google never really scaled beyond search. A handle of people have accounts for YouTube, even fewer for Gmail. How many of your friends have a Google account that they are signed into when using Google. Now compare that to how many of your friends have a Facebook or Twitter account. Big difference.

For services like +1 to be useful they have to both be used by a large chunk of your network, and have different types of people from within your network recommending. Otherwise it just becomes noise. Google needs to encourage more users to sign up for accounts, and sadly, this service won’t do that. Google should be encouraging users to sign up when they download chrome, which people have been doing in their millions.

Having said all that, it is very reassuring to see Google launch a tool that I am actually considering using. What do you think? Will you use it?

Credit goes to @steevbishop for the snappy title

There a whole host of articles out there telling you that you need to engage with consumers through social, interact with your audience, talk to them, listen to them. And it’s good advice. You need to ensure that you are adding value with the content you are producing, with the conversations you are having.

But it’s not just about the content, not just what you say, it’s also how you say it.

How you talk, the choice of words you use, when and where you use them, and how often you talk all contribute to how you are perceived by your audience. It’s a hugely important aspect of how you communicate online.

For example, the difference between WE and I has a huge impact on how your messaging will be read. One is more authoritative and suggests a bigger organisation. The other is much more personal, and explicitly tells people that you are an individual.

Language choice can also help you connect with your audience, or make you stand out like a sore thumb. Different people talk in different ways, and use different words for the same thing. I talk very differently to my parents than with my friends, I have different styles of speaking when I’m talking to colleagues and to clients. And I change the words I use when talking to young children.

In order to have meaningful conversations with your customers, you need to speak the same language, and pick your words carefully.

Different companies have different approaches to managing their presence in social spaces. Some entrust the accounts to a single person, others to a group of people, whilst some companies even have teams for single, specific account.

Having multiple people managing a brand’s outposts isn’t a bad idea per se; in fact for many larger brand it may be a necessity. But a user needs to know what to expect when they engage with these outposts. There are two options when you have multiple people managing a single account. You either ensure that these people follow strict rules about how to talk, ensuring that they are talking as the brand.

Or you allow each person to bring their own tone of voice to the account, but you clearly state that users are engaging with a specific individual. This can be as simple as appending their name to the end of a tweet or status update, or having separate accounts for these individuals.

You need to decide which approach to take to ensure you are delivering consistency. A common irregularity on brand accounts is that some individuals chose to say “we” and others chose to say “I”. On a single account this can get confusing, and leaves the audience confused as to whom they are actually talking with.

The solution is simple, clearly outline your approach; decide whether or not your account warrants more than one person managing it. Do some research, how big is your brand currently in social media. Are thousands of people talking about your products but no one from your company is responding? In which case you might to fortify your social media presence with a solid team of individuals. What are your long-term objectives for the accounts? What specifically are you looking to get out of your presence? Is it customer service, brand education, improving relationships or driving sales? How many people will it take to meet these objectives? And possibly most importantly of all, how much can you afford to spend?

Then decide who is best placed to be managing your profiles. If you want to be delivering customer service through twitter, then someone from the customer service department needs to be involved.

Then give these people the knowledge they need to properly run these profiles.

And as always, continually monitor and review your progress. If you are having huge successes on Facebook, but the level of engagement is being marred by only having one person managing the presence then it may be time to re-evaluate. And similarly, if you’ve put together a team of ten people to manage a Facebook page, but the growth hasn’t been quite what you anticipated, it might well be time to scale back.

Ultimately, the number of people you have managing your brand online depends on how active your consumers are in the social space, and how active you want to be with them. Getting the balance right can be tricky, but the first and most important thing to get right is to have a clear approach as to how you want to be represented online.

A brand is a company’s most valuable asset. It is what sets them apart from competitors. It defines who they are, what they value and how they act. And in a world where people can quickly and easily connect with brands online companies should be incredibly careful how they manage their brand online. And yet countless brand profiles across social media are being managed by people who are wholly unqualified to do so.

Print adverts have to follow visual guidelines; TV and radio adverts have to conform to tone voice; websites are carefully designed to represent the brand digitally. All communications should be entrenched in brand guidelines. After all, it’s the brand that is talking, and a brand should have a clear personality, a set of values, and a way of speaking.

So then, why do we think we can ignore this with social?

We let interns speak for us. We hand over profiles to junior account execs, with no training, experience or qualifications. Few if any are given direction, let alone clear guidelines on how to represent the brand online.

Countless brands give away control of their online voice to their agencies, entrusting them to stand for the brand, its values, its way of thinking, under the at times misguided belief that they are best qualified. Very rarely are the agencies given brand training by the brand.

We wouldn’t let these people craft copy for adverts, or developing messaging for a television campaign, and yet these people are trusted to engage with consumers on a daily basis, acting as the official voice for the brand.

As social media matures, and companies are seeing its full potential they have to also recognize the huge dangers the face by trusting the wrong people to be their voice in social spaces. Companies need to carefully pick their brand guardians, lest their brand suffer the consequences.

When it comes to marketing and communications planning, there’s a lot of talk about how brands can’t just broadcast messages out anymore. We are living in a brave new world where the consumer has the power over the brand conversation, and the broadcast model doesn’t work anymore. That’s all good, and you won’t find many people arguing the opposite.

But it’s not just stopping the broadcasting; it’s about recognising that your target audiences are actually people. We need to talk to people, not just key demographics. The reason the broadcast model doesn’t work anymore is because the way people consume media is fundamentally changing. We need to look at the shifting consumption habits when we think about how best to engage with these audiences.

The second you start seeing audiences as actual people and not just an age range then you realise that isolated channel thinking is ridiculous. How many people consume content from one channel in isolation these days? I watch live TV, read the newspaper and talk to friends on IM. And more often than not I do it all at once.

This is the reason that few social media campaigns work really well when they have been considered in isolation. People don’t consume media in isolation. The most effective campaigns are the ones that are delivered as part of an integrated effort. It’s effective because it allows people to seamlessly move through channels, engaging with content when and where they want to. It’s effective because it’s a much more efficient approach to marketing, maximising the reach of your content through multiple channels. Social media needs to be considered in the broader communications planning, not in isolation.

Because others are always more adept at being concise than I am, I’ll end with a quotation, from the ever succinct Nick Gill, that essentially sums up my somewhat rambling post into a lovely sound bite (it’s less than 140 characters too):

Consumers don’t separate their consumption; why do we continue to separate our marketing responses?