BAA baggage handling

Someone might tell BAA that it sometimes rains at Gatwick in may which makes customers baggage soggy when thrown on to the back of an open truck.

And anyone can photo their practices and blog about them in near real time!

The statistics that say you must take social media seriously

Image via Wikipedia

I have been working through a range of statistics that show how significant social media is for PR and marketing.

While UK internet users are all saying they want to hear from brands and companies on line, with rare exceptions, marketers and PR people cant quite make the leap of faith to do it.

Perhaps this list of links will suggest to them that it is their inhibitions that are the problem and not whether this space is commercially important.

Perhaps this too, will suggest that online PR is a great career move. Perhaps this will show the Universities they need to be able to teach this stuff.

So here goes (and if you want to add any... help yourself)

• London School of Economics Reports: a 7 per cent increase in word of mouth advocacy unlocks 1 per cent additional company growth.
  http://tinyurl.com/aohth

• Internet usage growth out performs all other economic activity worldwide.
  http://tinyurl.com/6aaxc2

• National statistic office report six in ten Internet users go online dail
  http://tinyurl.com/5sky8a

• IMRG Capgemini e-Retail Sales Index. Online retail sales in the U.K. grew 54% in 2007 over 2006, reaching £46.6 billion from £30.2 billion http://tinyurl.com/62ee4x

• IMRG Capgemini e-Retail Sales Index. 15% of all British retail sales took place online last year. http://tinyurl.com/62ee4x

• 40,362,842 UK Internet users in Nov/07 http://tinyurl.com/6255h5

• 66.4 % penetration, of the population http://tinyurl.com/6255h5

Growth in social media

• Britain's blogging army is now 4m strong http://tinyurl.com/2uzh2k

• YouTube is now the most popular social networking website in the UK http://tinyurl.com/26h7vo

Social Media affects consumer behaviour

• Social media is affecting audience behaviour. According to research by Hitwise (Hopkins, 2006) , social networking site MySpace is responsible for more Traffic flow into the HMV.co.uk music portal than both the Yahoo and MSN UK search engines. http://tinyurl.com/58coe9

• UK visits to Facebook
  http://tinyurl.com/yt6ax5

Top Brand mentions in social media

http://tinyurl.com/5av73g

• Reasons for people going online

(Source: National Statistics Office)

What people do online

• 5.7 million users were browsing via mobile devices in January of this year. http://tinyurl.com/4xn2z9

Social media affects every stage of the shopping process

• A study by DoubleClick shows that the web is the most influential medium in shaping consumers’ purchasing decisions, with shoppers using it at every stage of the shopping process, from first awareness to final purchase. http://tinyurl.com/58coe9

Should be % of marketing spend

• Internet advertising has again buoyed the UK advertising industry with above-expectation 41.3% year on year growth in the first half of 2007. This takes the sector to a half-year high of £1,334.3 million – compared to £917.2 million just a year ago – lifting online advertising’s market share significantly, to 14.7%. http://tinyurl.com/2xg2kr

• Where is Internet advertising going?

http://tinyurl.com/4czrbx

• Audience engagement in online advertising is 18 per cent more effective than its print equivalent, and people are also 15 per cent more engaged in magazine articles online than in print. So much for print advertising. http://tinyurl.com/4kzf3c

• But is advertising the answer? Nope!

New research into the effectiveness of different advertising mediums has revealed that advertising on social networks has had very little impact on consumers so far. http://tinyurl.com/657yj2

• Since July 2006, Topshop has seen more visitors to its site come from its pages on social networks like MySpace than from search engines. Advertising don't work involvement does http://tinyurl.com/5tgpfm

• Over 90 per cent of marketing departments are planning to launch a social media campaign in 2008 http://tinyurl.com/66pq63

• A survey, conducted by LEWIS PR at PR Week’s New Media Conference, revealed that 75 per cent of attendees are planning to use a blog as a social media asset in 2008 – an increase of 50 per cent on 2007. The number of firms planning to use social networking is tipped to increase from 33 per cent to over 70 per cent. http://tinyurl.com/66pq63

• What Web 2.0 is most effective for US companies http://tinyurl.com/57xrgh
  

Online v’s print media (popularity, growth etc)

• Average Time Spent on Social Nets 3X Longer Than News and Media Sites

http://tinyurl.com/5qxxqf

For any target demographic there are numbers;

What sites are 18 – 35 working women visiting? (not just media)

• In all countries except the UK and the US, more men than women use the internet. In the UK, the split is equal (50/50), while in the US 52% of internet users are women, with 18-34 year-old women being particularly active in both countries (Ofcom).
  

• Women outnumber men for the first time among UK residents going online. Females between 25 and 49 spend more time online than males the same age.” http://tinyurl.com/3lac2o

• 18-34 age group is where women spend more time online than men (57 per cent compared with 43 per cent). http://tinyurl.com/2pms2u

Importance of social media

• Two thirds (66 per cent) of 18-35 year olds in the UK are actively engaged in social networking and almost two in five (38 per cent) are members of two or more online forums or social networking sites. http://tinyurl.com/5qoksh

• Negative comments posted on online forums and social networks put off customers. http://tinyurl.com/5qoksh

• Nearly 1.5 times as many 18-35 year olds would rather accept a friend request from a brand than have banner adverts on a social networking profile page. The best way to get users to accept friend requests was identified as through offering special offers and discounts (60 per cent) http://tinyurl.com/5qoksh

• In a survey in 2006, 1000 women were surveyed revealing some extremely interesting insights:

• 70% are 25-44 y/o. 70% are in long term relationships, 83% are employed over half full time.

• 28% 'couldn't do without it'

• More important that TV, magazines and radio

• Internet is six times more than nearest rival (TV)

• Compared with other media the internet is regarded as the most important, achieving a 37% share. TV followed and only managing 24%. 63% of those surveyed ranked online first or second in terms of importance and 45% considered the internet “very important to me” with 28% of women going as far as to say they couldn’t live without online!

• 67% regard the Internet strong on community. That three times greater than magazines!

• 92% of women identified shopping with their use of the internet, over nine times as much as its nearest rival. Buying fashion online is now as important as booking travel, with 63% of women claiming to do both.

• The convenience of being able to research products and services before purchase online or in the high street is also valued with 75% of females identifying this as important. The internet is enhancing women’s lifestyles. 67% of women considered the internet to be strong on community, with 84% using the internet to keep in touch with friends and family.

• 55% of all British users of social networking websites were women. Similar research by Nielsen Online shows that women aged 18-24 account for 17% of all users of the social sites, while men in the same age group account for 12%. http://tinyurl.com/22tlp8

• A recent poll by Game-Vision showed that 30% more women bought computer games in the six months to July 31, 2007, than in the same period in 2006. The survey also found that there were more female owners of Nin-tendo’s handheld DS console in the UK than men (54% against 46%). http://tinyurl.com/22tlp8

• "Video streams at broadcast network TV websites were nearly two times more likely to be viewed by women age 18-34 than men, who accounted for 22% and 12% of streams respectively. http://tinyurl.com/67qjxu

• Different types of products are likely to be best advertised on different types of video websites.
  For instance, a female products brand may have better luck effectively reaching its target audience through a network TV website than through YouTube. http://tinyurl.com/67qjxu

Corporate site important but declining

http://tinyurl.com/4fvadf

How regularly do folk go online

• 88% of women who use the internet aged under 44 use the internet daily.

• Most adults (59 per cent) who had used the Internet in the last 3 months used it every day or almost every day, with the age group 25 to 44 using it the most (63 per cent). http://tinyurl.com/46u4wc

Where are client target audience currently reading about the brand online?

Its easy to see how far the client has got: Only 16 in Blogs, 26 videos, 288 mentions in MySpace, 14 people and 14 groups in Facebook. A profile in Wikipedia and was last updated 17 days ago (five changes). But it does not figure in Twitter. There are 26,400 indexed pages that refer to the client in Google (Budweiser has seven million).

We cab see where the online communities are active. e.g. Social Networks are the most popular social media for this client.... But how active are they in other media?

Who’s doing digital well?

• The web continues to drive sales at PetMed Express. In fiscal 2008, e-commerce generated 65% of sales and accounted for 83% of growth. http://tinyurl.com/437p8
  
  

What are competitors thinking of doing?

• More than three quarters of company respondents say that the importance of online customer engagement to their organisations has increased in the last 12 months.

• The most frequently cited benefits for companies implementing customer engagement initiatives are 'improved customer loyalty' and 'increased revenue'.

• More than half of respondents say their companies are either using or planning to use web-based widgets to engage with their customers more effectively.

• Around two thirds of respondents say the mobile channel will be 'essential' or 'important' for customer engagement in the next three years.

http://tinyurl.com/25e5ay

Here are some examples in the public sector campaigns:

• Ministry of Justice - BarCampUKGovweb was an idea for an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment.

• National Health Service - The Our NHS, Our Future activity is putting a lot of weight on its online engagement components.

• Foreign and Commonwealth Office - when David Miliband arrived, engagement shot up the agenda, particularly online. Not content with just the Secretary of State blogging, staff from across the FCO were invited to get involved too.

• Government Communications Network - the Social Media Review and associated activities led by GCN.

• Downing Street - it’s use of ePetitions

• Communities and Local Government - the CLG rebuilt its corporate website using community software.

• Defra - the software that runs the CO2 calculator, complete with government data made freely available under general public licence. Google has used it in its carbon footprint widget.

• DirectGov - according to the ONS, 6 in 10 of the UK’s web users have accessed government services via DirectGov.

• Ministry of Justice - Digital Dialogues, which is in its final phase, has been putting data about government blogs, forums, webchats etc in the public domain.

• SS/SIS - a bit of a Is involved in a range of interesting developments.

Do we know or have an idea of how much other brands are spending on digital activity alone?

I hope you enjoy the links.

There are zillions of them and they all point one way.

Seven Strategy Steps for modern communication

I thought it may help to examine how organisations can develop strategies. This is at the beginning of the thinking and in no special order but its a start and I only have seven considerations.

I guess the place most people will start is that place of record. The company or brand web site.

Strategically, for a corporate web site we can imagine it as the place where the most visitors come each day to engage on corporate matters. For an etail site it is the flagship store and the trade site is an invitation into the biggest and busiest warehouse and so forth.

Strategy consideration 1

So our first strategy action point is the examine investment at a level that reflects the opportunity. For example there is significant evidence that corporate web sites are extensively used by financial analysis, investors, prospective employees, NGO's, regulators, vendors and many other stakeholders. Equally, if in general, retail sales on line are 15% of all retail activity, does the etail site offer an opportunity to access this business and will that be incremental business, will it enhance sales at bricks and mortar sites, will the return on investment be recovered at a lower cost to deliver added bottom line profits. All the indication suggest this is the case.

We now have available a lot of information about who, why and how people visit our web sites.

For example, the research is telling us that prospective customers come to a web site for a whole range of reasons through the buying process including, according to the Enquiro study, awareness, research, negotiation and purchase and, one can add, to reconfirm and justify the decision after purchase.


Strategy consideration 2

Our second strategy is to consider each of these instances and have relevant content for each of the visitor's needs. The strategy will set out to resolve the requirements for why people should search for, explore, find information and save it ready for the next visit.

Of course, as part of this process, the strategy will include SEO and will ensure that every page of the web site reflects the relevant company values which will be both obvious to the visitor and to the semantic algorithms used by search engines.

Strategy consideration 3

Our third strategy consideration is one of access.

In an era of user created market, and social segments that change and morph all the time, it is important to maintain an interest in the wider adoption of online media to create access.

Is access only to be through a PC or laptop or will it include games consoles, USB ports, mobile phones, kiosks and the panoply of devices that are available across the market?. How do people keep engaged with the company, product or brand? Is it one device or many and, for the time being, never mind the volume of people or even the number of visits because should the devices engage enough and is interesting for people at different stages in relationship building the pay off will come elsewhere.

For example Twitter. We have some good figures about the number of people who visit its web site But we don't have a clue as to how many people use tools like Twirl, mobile phones and Blackberrys to engage through Twitter. These dispersed metrics are going to be ever more diverse and difficult for the traditional marketing person to manage.

Strategy consideration 4

My fourth strategy focuses on content and content management. Lets take the case of a new product launched in California at 10 am local time. Of course, it missed most of Europe because they are enjoying an aperitif and, by the time the news cycle reaches Stonehenge, the story is so old there is not a journalist on earth who wants to cover it. No, the content strategy has to start at some point and as it goes through the time zones it needs refreshing with new and relevant insights, references to comments about it and to give a reason for bloggers and journalists and Susan and her friends swapping the news in Bebo. At what point in this cycle are employees engaged and those many organisations that work for the company (like consultants, vendors, and commercial partners)?

Strategy consideration 5

This content strategy also has to be able to serve many channels for communication. Can the strategy encompass words for twitter, bloggers, newspapers, feature writers. Does it have capacity for associated pictures, interactive AJAX graphical content, news updates and other mashups or widgets. Is there, strategically, room for video, podcast or an interactive second life avatar that can be controlled with a Nintendo Wii? Does this story warrant its own social media microsite, wiki, poll or user evaluation?

Strategy consideration 6

The sixth strategy are those management imperatives such as rules of engagement for employees and other organisations closely associated with the organisation.

Strategy consideration 7

The seventh strategy consideration encompasses both risk management embedded in the approach and crisis management capability - because we are all professionals.



Of course, there will be other versions. I welcome comments.

Agnostic evaluation of media content

Image via Wikipedia

This weekend, I have been playing with a sentiment engine and thinking about people's perspectives.

This one does not take sides. It is agnostic. It decides if a press story is positive or negative from a neutral perspective.

All you do is past text into a box and it analyses the content as positive or negative and shows the structure of sentences that leads to this conclusion.

You can try it here.

The returns it makes is an academic minefield. It challenges your thinking about truth.

It has a first cousin, that can add perspectives. For example, it can make similar decisions from the perspective of the actors (company, person brand etc) which is why it was invented but the returns with no perspective are very interesting.

Sometimes this programme gets it wrong but not often.

It is able to glean content that is negative but which contributes to the positive side of the article and you can see how it does it.

I have tried news articles, book chapters, reports and even client presentations to see where the sentiment lies.

So where is the beef?

This kind of development is useful for analysing sentiment of news articles, blogs and other content, which is its primary purpose but it also has applications in evaluating style and and bias all of which are very useful to the PR industry, regulators and watchers of political sentinemt on and off line.

Try it out and be challenged.

Touch the virtual

I have a new word for everyone Realtuality.....

Massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) and virtual worlds, such as Second Life, "EVE Online," Habbo, MapleStory and "World of Warcraft" are the next step in "network intermediated" social and economic interactions according to Andrew Burger at Linux insider.

But he missed a significant element. They are now combined with the Nintendo's Wii. Wii adds a physical element.

These developments are easy to dismiss and put into the PR no go area of Games.

As you may know, this has never been my view. Games are a form of communication and online games now allow players to interact with millions of other players round the world.

But the Wii is different. The players can interact, not only in the virtual world but in a mashup between the virtual and real dimensions.

A movement using the Wii from Stonehenge can be transferred to a movement on a screen in San Francisco and in real time and in the existing, simulated or game graphic renderings or virtual world.

David Stone, an MIT research fellow claims the motion-sensitive controller is "one of the most significant technology breakthroughs in the history of computer science." He offers the Wiimote as a key to building realistic training simulators in Second Life.

Add to the Wii and virtual worlds a huge mass collaborative development effort and you get where I am coming from.

Take Nancy Smith, president of the Sims label, who says Sims attracts creative people of all ages and both genders and have a track record of 4.5 million players visiting the Sims site monthly, and 70m downloads of player-created content including user created avatars and environments.

These are pretty big numbers and pretty active communities and they are not alone.

Corporate investment in post 2000 technologiesis already interesting. Disney bought Club Penguin for $700 million in 2007 and has at least nine more developments in train.

A study by Virtual Worlds Management, a Texas-based research company identified $184.2 million this year pouring into companies that run virtual worlds.

You can bet these will be very different and will need to include Realtuality, with its physical dimension to compete.

Intel add fuel to the flames. It say that the next generation Wii will not need controllers. Camera technology and sensors will mean they are obsolete.

The pent-up capability to create applications, the technical advances and money is now converging. The breakthrough cannot be far off.

Virtual offices, virtual homes, virtual friends and all interacting with real offices, real sports, real homes and real people stretches the imagination and yet is not far off.

Does this mean that the press conference is acted out by real people in virtual worlds or virtual people in real environments. Yes to both.

Does this mean the end of the travelling salesman, yes it does, and is supermarket shopping now a case of really walking but down virtual aisles, yes it does.

But these are pretty ordinary transmogrifications. What happens when we mashup email, twitter, VoiP and that old fashioned place of record, the website and add people being both themselves and their alter egos in dynamic activities in dynamic environments and physically involved too. Now add millions of people doing all this in full-on creative mode.

Well... Facebook is, by comparison, dull. Even the announcement by Peekaboo Pole Dancing, the company behind the Carmen Electra pole dancing kit, that they seek a partner to license a pole dancing game for the Wii is tame.

Development of new markets, new inventions and new societies already happens all the time in microcosm in these emeging worlds and at a pace that makes following twitter seem sluggish. But as these people bridge the gap to what our generation believes is mainstream, the effect will be astonishing.

Building relationships between organisations and their publics in existing games has a very new dimension and is culturally very different. Second life using a Wii is different again and adding big bucks investment and open tools and open source to both is a daunting prospect.

And what is going to drive this revolution?

I think fun and sex. These environments are novel and fun and they open up whole new opportunities for romantic interaction.

Millions, of people using open tools and open software backed up with significant investment by business angels will begin to deliver products that make the exponential growth of YouTube look sluggish.

The commitment to life in these environments will drag people from television, the cinema and night clubs to the next mashup generation beyond today's Wii and big home screens, games and virtual worlds.


The first shops in these environments will soon become the biggest mall anyone ever walked down.

Today, we think we are cool with our corporate blogs, wiki's podcasts and social media involvement but perhaps we should now begin to think of the next digital generation.

News in the making

The telegraph today. The political editors hard at it

The new telegraph HQ

Today, I was given a tour of the Telegraph new editorial centre. Its 67,000 sq ft of open plan editorial space.

My host was Chris Lloyd Assistant Managing Editor ( my nephew).

He has been with the project from its inception and was both a charming host and brilliant in his outlook for where the internet is taking publishing.

The Telegraph has shown thousands of people, including competitors, from all over the world round this amazing facility.

With its extension of My Telegraph due soon and raft of well known bloggers not to mention the growing capability and range of content at Telegraph TV, the evolution fom print to all media is a revelation.

The BBC and Guardian are both creating new centres now.

The big issue now, is can the PR industry raise its game to support these new capabilities?

The pic is Carl Courtney (Chairman of Publicasity - for whom I work three 50 hour days a week), sitting at the editorial hub in this huge centre.