As such, the industry tends to suffer from buzzword mentality, jumping from one buzzword theory to the next. One term in particular that has stuck is community marketing, upon which many other loosely developed theories have been built. In fact, the term has become fundamental to how many in the social media industry think about their work and sells it in to clients. “You need to engage your community!” self pronounced social media experts (read social media douchebags) decry, probably because someone writing for Mashable has told them so.

The problem is most brands don’t have communities. Some brands have amassed large numbers of fans on Facebook, but the mere act of becoming a fan of a brand on Facebook does not mean that the user wishes to participate in any community or join in with any conversation about that brand. A Sausage Roll fan page with 10,000 fans does not mean there is a Sausage Roll community; it simply means that 10,000 people are saying they like Sausage Rolls.

Regardless of how many fans it has, a simple Facebook page is not a community; a community is made by its members and the sense of belonging they create for themselves. The real problem, of course, lies with marketers. They have taken the term, raped and abused it so much that they have stripped it of the connotations that first attracted us in the first place: a group of likeminded individuals brought together by their shared interests connecting with each other, and, hopefully, with the brand.

Marketers are using this watered down term and using it to raise the hopes of their clients, telling them that community engagement is the key to success. Clients need to have their reality checked. The problem with clients is they are their brands’ own biggest fans. They think their brand of toilet cleaner is the best, and are willing to shout it from the rooftops. And that’s great; they need to be that enthusiastic in order to sell the product. But as marketers we have to manage their expectations, make them realise that no one else is going to give a crap about their toilet cleaner, even less want to join an online StainBeGone community. They but the product because they want their stains gone, not because they want a relationship with the brand. Sure, they may become a fan on Facebook, (probably more for novelty value than anything else) but don’t misinterpret the signals like a socially awkward teenage male thinking that’s there’s a relationship just because the girl you’re into acknowledged your existence.

This is not to say that online communities don’t exist, or that a Facebook fan page cannot be home to a community, just that as marketers we need to more realistically manage the expectations of our client. Community marketing is not a one size fits all, saviour for brands. There are some great examples of organically grown communities being improved by the brand carefully entering into and becoming a part of the community, such as the Harley Davidson fan club. In these cases the communities already existed before the brand joined them, and so the leg work was already done for the brand.

There are also great examples of brands developing their own communities by facilitating the communication between fans, and with the brand itself, such as the work done with the Guitar Hero community.

The moral of the story is not that it is impossible to create, or join an engaged brand community, but rather that when the social media come knocking at the door telling brands you that “you need to engage with your communities” take it with a pinch of salt.

The information allowed companies and brands to build relationships with their customers, no longer just pushing out one message to all with huge mass marketing campaigns, but rather target their core customers with messages directed to their habits, wants and desires. A new field of marketing was born, Customer Relationship Management, or CRM for short.

However, marketing is undergoing another shift and it is again driven by technology. In recent years improvements in availability of broadband communications has allowed Internet access to become ubiquitous and improvements in technology have provided customers with access to more information about companies and brands than ever before. Knowledge of the information being sought by customers can also provide essential data to the companies in terms of honing their messages.

It used to be that information flowed one way, from the company to the consumer. Companies were very careful about the message they sent out, they spent huge amounts of money on slogans, jingles and advertising campaigns, all to provide the company mantra to the consumer. The conversation with the consumer was one way.

Professor Urban of MIT’s School of Management argues that “marketing is changing from the push strategies so well suited to the last 50 years of mass media to trust based strategies that are essential in a time of information empowerment.” (Urban 2004)

The Internet has allowed people to share their experiences and opinions of brands online. The role of consumers online has definitely changed. The Internet is not just a tool for finding information; it is also a tool for communication.

Jake Hird, (2009) referencing a recent study by Netpop Research argues that that with the increase in popularity of sites such as Digg, Twitter and Facebook, users are discussing their brand experiences online with their friends and other contacts. This kind of communication obviously happened offline before the Internet, but talking about a brand with 2 or 3 people around the water cooler or with the family over dinner is a vastly different scale to posting a message that is then available to several hundred contacts.

The power of the individual has never been greater, with almost immediate access to their entire network “consumers can openly challenge brands in an environment where there is scope to make a massive amount of noise.” Hird (2009) argues that brands cannot simply ignore these users, nor can they gag them. The users have taken a large chunk of power, and they aren’t likely to want to give it up any time soon.

It is this shift in power that is driving the revolution in branding and marketing. Companies are no longer able to control fully the message of their brands; the breakdown of the traditional broadcast paradigm (Moore 2005) is forcing companies to change tactics.

We see brands doing this with varying degrees of success, with Dell famously responding to a slew of customer complaints, most notably blogger Jeff Jarvis, by creating a dedicated a dedicated corporate blogger to engage directly with customers. They were pioneering engagement in a new era of socially networked communications. And they learnt a lot in the process, speaking at a Lionel Menchaca described how the game has changed:

• Customers are in control. Work with them and learn from them.
• Real conversations are two-way.
• Think before you talk—but always be yourself.
• Address any form of dissatisfaction head on.
• Be aware that any conversation can become global at any time.
• Size doesn’t matter—relevance does. Just as one journalist can trigger a newscycle, one blogger can do the same.
• Don’t be afraid to apologize.
• Develop direct links to customer community (IdeaStorm for Dell), listen for how we can improve.
• One customer is part of many communities.
• Teamwork, transparency and frequent consistent communication are key in this new world.
• No shortcuts are possible. Implementing business change requires much effort across departments.

David Armano describes the process of moving towards a Social Business Strategy as “the intentional creation of dynamic and socially calibrated systems, process, and culture.” In other words, companies now must learn to engage with their customers and enter into the conversations they are having. By doing this, they eliminate the middleman of advertising and can enhance their business by actually listening to, and engaging with their customers’ conversations in the social sphere.

Now Facebook is rolling out a new feature; more detailed stats on a per post basis, allowing you to see the number of impressions each post has received, and the percentage feedback, which appears to be simply the total impressions divided by the total interactions. This is actually very useful data. It quickly allows you to see which posts have been more successful than others, information which is very useful when developing your content strategy.

At the moment the roll out seems to only be for pages with a minimum of 5000 fans, and doesn’t work for every post, some posts simply stating that the data is not available at this time.

Have you seen the new feature? What do you think? Will it help you improve the content you push out to fans, or is it just a nice gimmick?

The BBC Radio 2 site, which gathers messages, or “tweets”, from presenters such as Chris Evans, Jonathan Ross and Alan Carr, has no followers. The BBC Radio 5 Live site, run by presenter Victoria Derbyshire, has just two.

The mistake they made was to confuse followers with following. Both accounts have follower counts in the thousands. It’s a really bad mistake that a major newspaper should have noticed. Especially when the article was written by TWO journalists. This fundamental lack of knowledge is concering. Two journalists writing for a newspaper clearly don’t have enough knowledge of Twitter to know the difference, which is concerning in and of itself. But the fact they didn’t even bother to research it properly? Unforgivable. UPDATE: What’s even worse is that whilst they clearly recognise that they have made a mistake, instead of admitting this and apologising they have simply removed the article, showing a fundamental lack of knowledge about social media. You can’t just make a mistake and try to ignore it by deleting things any more. Especially not in the era of Google Cache. Thankfully it is not indicative of all mainstream media. The BBC, which, contrary the Expresses clearly bias article, actually uses Twitter very well, with different accounts for different types of content. What do you think, do you know of any of cases of the mainstream media just not getting it?

It’s easy to see why they are doing this, the more friends you have on Facebook, the more likely you are to log in and the longer you are likely to spend using the site. The bottom line equates to more page views, and in turn, more advertising revenue.

Whilst this tool will likely be popular with those new to the site, looking to find friends they have long since lost contact with, it could prove annoying to long standing members who are already annoyed by Facebook suggesting friends for them, or suggesting people user’s don’t want to be friends with.

So, what are your thoughts, did you appreciate the suggestion box? Or did it annoy you?

First impressions can make or break a branded outpost. We all remember those times where you’ve visited a site your first impressions were “Yuck” or “Woah that’s a lot of orange, my eyes, they burn.”

Bright colours are, in general, a bad idea. There are a few designers who can pull it off by teaming it with well placed balancing tones, but for the majority of us, neon green probably is an unwise choice for a background.

Ensure people know what your outpost is about. No for certain outposts this will be a given, for example Twitter pages, it’s fairly obviously when a person is looking at a Twitter or YouTube page. But that doesn’t mean you can’t use a well designed background to improve the user experience. You should design your site so that it is not only comfortable for regular users, but also so that it’s not confusing for new comers.

There’s a lot to be said for a clean layout on your outposts. For sites where you have control over core functionality, such as your own blog, a simple, non-confusing navigation system is a must. Readable fonts are essential. Whilst mind blowing graphics may look great, it’s easy to go overboard, and actually distract people from the content. Good design should act like a frame to a picture, it should complement the piece, not distract from it.

Try to get an objective view, what would you HONESTLY think about your site if you had come across it for the first time. Would you stick around to check it out? Or would those flashing gifs probably put you off?

But of course, you designed the site, so you can’t exactly be objective. Try asking someone else, preferably not someone who will lie in order to not hurt your feelings. The first key success is a successful first impression.

It demonstrates that we are shifting phase in the social media marketing roll out, from the trial phase, where companies dip their toes in the social media ocean, to the strategic phase, where companies begin to integrate social media into to their core business. It is important to note that in the trial phase, companies are concerned with learning what works, largely by trial and error. As we move in to the strategic phase the focus shifts to proving the value of social media activity through quantifiable ROI, among other success measures.

The report shows that the success measure that marketers were most concerned about was simply an increase in web traffic, followed by increased lead generation and sales revenue:

What was interesting is that improving brand reputation and awareness were much lower on the list, coming in 5th and 6th respectively. Even lower on the list were improving public relations and customer support.

The reason for this is obvious, these objectives are much harder to track and measure, as the report points out, when selecting objectives it is essential to be able to ties them to metrics:

Defining specific objectives for a social marketing initiative is only half the battle. The other half is aligning those objectives with corresponding metrics. This alignment is important because it enables an organization to measure its progress in achieving the objectives and proving ROI.

Sources: eMarketer and Marketing Sherpa

From: Leam-Taylor, Holly (UK – London)
Sent: 08 December 2009 11:50
Subject: Deloitte First year analysts Christmas Awards :D

So girls….

It’s been nearly 4 months at Deloitte so I think we should have some sort of Xmas awards ceremony for us ladies about the stuff that really matters at work i.e. gossip/ the boys! This probably massively violates the HR equal opportunities policy, but never mind! It’s all for fun and a bit of a laugh.

Ok, so the categories are below, please get your votes in asap, I’ll send out the results on Friday 18th Dec (that is all I will be doing that day as I will be SO hungover from the ball!) Any comments as to why you’ve picked a certain person that are particularly good/hilarious can be included, anonymously, of course ;)
1.) Fittest boy – looks
2.) Fittest boy – body
3.) Best dressed boy
4.) Boy most likely to sleep his way to the top
5.) Best piece of gossip you’ve heard so far this year
6.) Most attractive “older” member of staff (i.e above analyst grade)
7.) Boy with the best personality
8.) Most hilarious/embarrassing moment a girl has had
9.) The official Deloitte First-year Analyst Girls “Man of the year”

Enjoy thinking about it!
Much love to all

Holly xxx

The email has been forwarded through all the major financial institutions in London, and from them, major companies in the world. In just two days. Now the girl in question, Holly Leam-Taylor has taken down her Twitter and Facebook pages, probably trying to shy away from her new found internet fame. Just need to search google to see why…

One of the reasons that Facebook has proved popular was that it was a walled community. It was a place for you and your friends, not the strange guy who lives down the road. Facebook has been continually opening itself up, and in the process been alienating users.

The problem is that even if you follow someone of Twitter, no real information is given away. People don’t tend to add much personal detail to their Twitter profile, largely because they can’t. But Facebook is different. People share photos of their friends and family, they share personal information about their lives.

Sure, there are people on Twitter who post the intimate details of their toilet habits, but, the key difference is the atmosphere in which the content is published. Unlike Twitter, which is designed to be a public life streaming tool, and is used as such by the vast majority of users, Facebook has always tended to be more personal, there is a veil of personal security that you have when you upload to Facebook – you are sharing with your friends, not the world. By changing the default options, Facebook is eroding this sense of security. Whilst before you had to manually open your profile up to let other people see it, you now have to jump through hoops to stop complete strangers seeing what you’ve posted.

Facebook says that the reason they have decided to encourage users to make their content public is to encourage sharing, searching, and learning about people you don’t know. The problem with this is that people do not join Facebook to learn about people they don’t know, they join to keep in contact with the people they do know, and find the people they used to know.

It’s obvious why Facebook has decided to take this action. By opening up content to the public, they also open it up to search engines, and they can begin to play an important part in real time social search. And secondly, they become more like Twitter, which, in my opinion, they’ve been trying to do ever since they failed to acquire them back in 2008. In fact, to date, I’ve not seen a single major change in Facebook that hasn’t suggested they are trying to be more like Twitter. You just have to look at the massive shift in design to emphasize status update to recognise it.

The problem with Facebook trying to become more like Twitter is, most Facebook users never wanted to use Twitter in the first place.