I was recently invited to share my insights on social media at an unusual new event in Leeds.

I say unusual, but in reality Cultural Conversations was just a different format to what I am used to – a format that really reflected the nature of social networks.

This wasn’t an event where I spoke to a captive audience, rather I helped facilitate conversation ‘hubs’ and hopefully shared some useful insights. It was a really refreshing process that I felt not only reflected the structure of social networks, but also provided a really effective way of communicating ideas.

Usually events of this kind are dominated by one or more speakers who either fascinate or bore you silly. The structure of Cultural Conversations, and the great turn out (around 70 people) meant that attendees could gravitate towards conversation groups where issues or topics were discussed for around 30 minutes.

These then fed into a final session with all delegates where topics of interest were developed further. This organic approach, which closely follows the way conversations spread on Twitter (check out this project, called revisit, for a brilliant visual representation of Twitter conversations), was intuitive and engaging.

So why don’t more events adopt this intimate format? It’s often said that the most interesting elements of conferences take place away from the main halls, when delegates get together and talk. In my opinion there’s a lot to be said for flipping the standard event format on its head and enhancing what people feel is most useful. What if break-out sessions were the main focus and not an afterthought?

I’m not an event organiser. I don’t have the skills or energy to put on a major event. But if I were organising any sort of business event I’d think about going back-to-basics and consider how people communicate, both online and offline, and shape the event around that.

Social networks have afforded us considerable insight into human communication (this is a great presentation by a Google usability expert on the topic),  so why are we not always harnessing those insights offline?

A story popped up this week that made me think hard about why it is important not to put all your eggs in one basket when it comes to online marketing.

An American-based Facebook fan page owner saw his page and its 47,000 fans disappear overnight. The page, called The Official Real Estate Referral Group, was started over two years ago and was unilaterally removed due to copyright issue surrounding its URL.

While this is an extreme example of how powerless individuals can be when dealing with faceless (excuse the pun) social networks, it is symptomatic of the problems Facebook page owners and developers for the platform come across all the time. Features disappear, functionality is lost and those who make a living out of Facebook are left looking stupid and powerless.

I myself struggled with a bug last week which originated over a month ago and has yet to be fixed. In this instance i’ve found a work around, but the fact that no one at the social network has even deemed it important enough to respond to is part of a worrying trend. A trend that was typified by the temporary disappearance of custom landing tabs for Facebook pages that didn’t spend big on advertising or have hundreds of thousands of fans.

Social marketers are increasingly working in a proprietary environment in which we relinquish some control. As users increasingly experience the internet through social networks, we are increasingly dependent on the platforms we use being stable and reliable. Unfortunately while Twitter continues to break (fail whale anyone?) and Facebook moves the goal posts, that is simply not the case.

So do social networks have a vindictive streak, do they enjoy making those who use them for business struggle? The obvious answer is no, but I would argue that while they benevolently believe they know what is best for users, they can (perhaps unwittingly) have a strongly negative impact.

I think the lesson in all of this is that you shouldn’t rely on one platform or channel too much. However successful your Facebook page or Twitter profile is, be prepared to accept indiscriminate changes to the platform and spasmodic outages. And more importantly, don’t expect an immediate answer to your complaints or messages, in fact, expect to be largely on your own.

But despite my gloomy outlook increased integration of different social networking platforms, and their spread into the wider online ecosystem (e.g. Facebook’s open graph protocol) has improved matters by allowing you to communicate through more than one channel simultaneously.

While things are becoming more linked up, i’d say the old adage involving eggs and baskets still holds true online.

Photo credit: Jronaldlee

One of search engine giant Google’s priorities is to improve user satisfaction by quickly delivering the desired result for every search term entered – for every user, every time.

As part of that it is constantly looking at ways to index the entire internet. At the moment though there is one barrier to Google achieving that goal: Facebook.

Facebook presents a real challenge to Google as the majority of activity by Facebook’s 500 million users stays on the social network’s servers and cannot be indexed. This has the search giant seriously worried, as status updates alone are estimated to amount to more than ten times the number of words written on blogs worldwide (thanks to AllFacebook for this and other excellent reporting on this topic).

The ‘Like’ is released

Google’s concern over this issue runs in parallel to Facebook’s recent launch of the Open Graph Protocol, which extends the ‘Like’ function outside of the network. It allows webmasters to install Like buttons on their sites and lets users share their ‘Like’ (or vote of approval) for content outside of Facebook on the popular network.

Despite Google’s concern about Facebook’s ‘hidden’ data this all seems reasonably inconspicuous. That would be unless external content wasn’t showing up in Facebook search…which it is.

Thanks again to AllFacebook, who reported this was happening earlier in the week for certain TripAdvisor listings:

These results pop-up as ‘Pages’ in Facebook search but are not pages on the network. Instead clicking on the link takes you through to the TripAdvisor listing.

This is fascinating stuff and makes Facebook’s future plans a really compelling mystery. In one move it has effectively produced a brilliant way of indexing content. And if they can keep spamming under control this could well become the people’s search engine.

Facebook is clunky and so is its search function

While the potential for this is enormous there is a real danger that Facebook is trying to run before it can walk in the search game.

Its current internal search function is truly appalling, with pages regularly disappearing out of search altogether.

More fundamentally, Facebook has to figure out how to describe the search results generated through the Open Graph if it is ever going to meet Google’s ability to satisfy users. What are these results? Are they a product of the people’s search engine I described above? Or simply a popularity contest that is therefore both unreliable and biased?

Links are just one measurement that Google uses to rank content in search results, Facebook needs to identify other ranking factors that will balance out the ‘Like’ and make this form of search credible.

Battle lines are drawn

These questions do need to be answered. But in the meantime we can be in no doubt that Facebook is squaring up to Google and wants ‘Like’ to become the new link.

Another big question is how Facebook will move out into the wider internet over time. It is still largely a closed system. To compete in the search world data from the Open Graph will have to be available and searchable outside of the network.

Alternatively, Facebook may become the homepage of choice (some would argue this is already happening) and form a portal or conduit to the rest of the internet, with the ‘Like’ search engine an integral element of that.

So what should you do?

There is really only one thing to do right now, and it plays perfectly into Facebook’s hands. Any webmaster with a busy site would be stupid not to implement the company’s Open Graph Protocol and to see how things play out.

If you haven’t already, then also definitely create a Facebook page for your organisation or company, as it is likely they will also form part of the ‘Like’ search engine in the future.

Other than that, just pull up a chair and watch as two of the internet’s titans go head-to-head in a battle that will shape the way we use the internet.

Photo credit: richkidsunite

Joel and I were fortunate to hear some inspiring speakers, meet some interesting people and pick up lots of new tips and ideas. This isn’t so much a review of ThinkVisibility – plenty of in-depth reviews have already been posted – but over the past week or so we have had the opportunity to begin turning notes, thoughts and talk into action. So I’d like to share some  the tips and ideas that are already proving useful in our day-to-day work at Tinderbox Media. It is my intention that in the future, Corporate Blogger will be covering some of these in greater detail, but here’s the overview of our favourite takeaways:

1.  The value of citations in Google Local. (FYI: citations are distinct from links. They are online mentions or references to your company.) Tom Critchlow, the head of search marketing at Distilled, drew upon plenty of real-life examples to show us how citations improve results. One of his top tips? Add an address to your company profile that is 100 per cent identical to the format and structure of the address in the local search listing. Hey presto: whenever that profile appears online, Google recognises it as a bona fide citation.

2. How to increase our productivity by making use of online project management tools. Sarah Carling of Bloom Media gave a talk on SEO project management and introduced us to Tom’s Planner. This is an online scheduling and collaborative working tool, which ticks all our boxes (quite literally). It is shiny and new, still in beta (which also means that for now it is free) and we are already putting it to use.

3. One of my favourite talks of the day came from Andrew Burnett, who spoke about building a website’s presence on social news websites. One of the reasons why I enjoyed this talk so much was because I came away with a fresh perspective on some of my everyday online haunts. You know what it’s like: you spend so much time on certain websites that you stop really “seeing” them, or viewing them as sources of inspiration. I am in the habit of reading every single UK newspaper online on a daily basis (hangover from journalism days), so I sat up straight when Andrew showed us some of the ways in which these publications successfully showcase their “golden posts”, encouraging clickthroughs and submissions to social news sites.

Oh, and I came away determined to find a WordPress plugin for thumbnail images to accompany related posts. This being ThinkVisibility, when I mentioned this mission to a fellow attendee at the after-party, it turned out that he had recently made a plugin that did just that. Result!

4. Another takeaway from Andrew’s talk: an app called trak.ly. It is like bit.ly, but with added benefits – especially if you’re a Digger.

5. Using your company’s USP as linkbait. Paddy Moogan , online marketing campaign manager at Pin Digital gave an overview of various link-building techniques, with a particular emphasis on those links that are hardest to get. His talk was packed full of interesting gems, but Joel’s brain began whirring when Paddy mentioned the how a company’s USPs could provide excellent linkbait. An example of this could be a company with strong environmental credentials, held up by ‘green’ bloggers or websites, as an example of best practice.  Seems obvious really, but the obvious is often overlooked.

6. 1.5 million businesses search on YouTube every day. Just one of the points raised by Iliya Vjestica, online marketing manager at Magnitude, that left us with food for thought. We are doing increasing amounts of video for B2B clients; it looks like we’re heading in the right direction, which is reassuring.

7. Paul Carpenter, of Bronco, spoke about how to use Google News to improve online visibility. Thiswas one of Joel’s favourite talks of the day; there is too much here to summarise, so we’ll let Paul’s slides and notes do the talking.

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Our favourite reviews of ThinkVisibility3:

David Towers liveblogged throughout the day. Brilliantly.

“It’s in the North – we can’t all attend SXSW or SMXWest so to have something like this on the doorstep is a joy.” – Sorbet Digital

“It is different from a usually conference in that it is held on a Saturday – so you tend to attract a crowd who are genuinely interested in their work.” - Pin Digital

“The event is a pretty intimate affair, with around 150 people attending.” – Dan Harrison

“I really liked about the conference were the afternoon slots when you get to see people who haven’t spoken before.” -  Piggynap

“As well as the sessions themselves, Think Visibility provides a great networking opportunity and it was great to see some familiar faces” – Zath

(Thumbnail image credit: sk8tegeek)

Does social media have a part to play in business-to-business marketing?

Many observers say it doesn’t, and that social media marketing is only a useful marketing discipline for communicating with consumers. So are the naysayers right?

Are Twitter, Facebook et al useful platforms for communicating with businesses?

One of the major problems in forming a cogent argument for social media in the B2B marketing mix has been the dearth of decent case studies. There are some good resources (socialmediab2b.com is a blog that offers some great thinking and insights) but until recently there have been few examples to call on that demonstrate its value. Certainly not in the same way that Dell and Zappos have shown the power of social media in talking to consumers and generating sales.

Well maybe that’s all about to change. In recent months several B2B case studies have emerged and now the world’s biggest technology company, Microsoft, has released a short whitepaper chronicling the success that Microsoft Advertising division has had in reaching a business audience.

The first thing to recognise in highlighting this case study, and using it to champion the role of social media when marketing to businesses, is that the Microsoft Advertising team have been largely preaching to the converted. They haven’t faced a challenge in finding users online because the division’s customer-base is largely made up of digital marketers who spend most of their lives online and embrace every new social network and development.

That said you’d be hard pushed to find many people who don’t spend at least part of their time online these days, and most people experience the internet through the prism of a social network. Whether it’s an office worker logging in to Facebook at lunchtime, or a bored exec checking their Twitter feed during a meeting – increasingly people experience the internet through social networks. And the link ecosystems that social networks create guide many users through the billions of web pages out there.

Back to Microsoft Advertising though, and quite openly and honestly the division recognises that it first took interest in social media (and founded a community team) to tackle negative publicity surrounding the launch of adCenter in 2005:

At its beta launch, adCenter was met by the search engine marketing community with some consternation. It seemed that excitement at a potential rival for Google Adwords, coupled with an expectation that Microsoft would deliver a

comparable user experience right out of the gate, led some detractors to start writing on blogs and forums that Microsoft didn’t know what it was doing, that it was subversively forcing advertisers to use Internet Explorer as adCenter was not compatible with rival browsers, and that a software company could not possibly compete or react quickly enough in such a fast-changing environment, given its background in 2- to 3-year cycles of product releases.

The Microsoft Advertising community team was born out of necessity in some ways. But that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. They knew very early on that they weren’t just shamelessly plugging their products and that they had to enter a dialogue with users to help them understand the value of adCenter, help answer their queries and challenge any misconceptions.

So what came next? Well, let’s remember this was back in 2006. Twitter didn’t exist, Facebook was just finding its feet and likewise LinkedIn wasn’t the huge phenomenon it is now. So the team created its own platform by launching a blog:

We started our blog back in 2006 as an official voice, our calling card, if you like. If you wanted information or news from the most credible source, the adCenter blog would be where you’d find it first. It served as a tool for telling our story in a world where marketing-speak sometimes just doesn’t wash, especially if the tide of opinion is against you. It provided valuable data in the form of comments and links from other posts, which we could collate and feed back to product and marketing teams to show what the real pulse was out there in the marketplace.

A Twitter profile and Facebook page followed when the time was right as the team recognised another important social media lesson – not everyone will come to you, you have to go to them. Finding the right context for conversations with your customers is just as important as what you say.

Sitting side by side with context is ‘content.’  The mantra ‘content is king’ still holds true but there is no point in generating content if no one consumes it. And likewise there is even less point having a load of different social media profiles that are not updated. Content and context are both equally important – an observation the team picked up on:

It takes time to build a community on each and every platform, and the web is littered with stale Facebook pages and dormant Twitter accounts because a marketing department saw social media as a quick win, a viral excuse for hard graft in engaging customers in an authentic and timely fashion. If you’re taking your message off-site, you have to budget for some extra time, education and execution to keep that conversation alive and ongoing.

Another important point to draw from this excerpt is that social media is not a ‘quick win.’ There is a tendency to equate the real-time nature of social media with immediate results.

The community team saw this was not the case. But despite the indulgence of a multinational corporation (the whitepaper says that before the explosion of social media ‘our team was seen as a support function, very much a “nice to have”.’) and all the time and resources you could ask for, the team did think hard about measurement.

And in thinking about how to measure social media engagement they derived  two very interesting conclusions; that time spent answering customer queries online is cheaper the alternative, and that online activity is ‘earned’ and therefore a lot cheaper than conventional advertising:

We track and monitor all clicks on links in our Twitter feed, learning what is most popular for future reference, and multiply their number by our call centre costs. Add incremental revenue to that number and you have significant cost savings.

Tallying up how often our content is shared and putting a realistic monetary value to how much that exposure would cost in the press is one way of demonstrating the value. Our Twitter following is more than 8,000, but regularly our reach grows to more than 50,000 internet marketers when our followers deem something we’ve said as worthy of sharing.

I think these are the two most interesting elements of the whitepaper. Both are bold steps and give social media legitimacy as a measurable, cost-effective B2B marketing channel

Of course Microsoft is a huge corporation, and one that spends as much, if not more time talking to consumers. But how many marketing departments in companies around the world wouldn’t sit up and take notice of Microsoft Advertising’s experiences? I’m guessing very few.

By making that leap from measurement to return on investment this whitepaper joins the dots and moves the debate on a long way.

Perhaps most surprisingly it has come from Microsoft, one of the most maligned tech companies around. In many ways this illustrates the transformative powers of social media marketing – even companies with poor reputations can pick up the baton and start having open and frank conversations with their customers again.

Joel Turner is an account director at digital PR specialist Tinderbox Media.

Dairy Queen is the American chain of ice cream parlours. I have been reading a great case study about the company’s use of social media, over at Michael Fruchter’s Social Media Marketing Strategies blog. Michael is a digital strategist with Pierson Grant, a PR firm across the pond.

It is all too easy, when you cast your eye over these lavish descriptions of big bucks companies and their tip top achievements online, to overlook the potential “learns” and benefits for companies of all sizes. If you read this particular case study in full – and I recommend that you do - you will find plenty to pore over. You will also note that Dairy Queen, despite its size, hasn’t been “doing” social media for long. Its corporate blog, for example, is just five months old at the time of writing.

Let’s take a closer look at what Dairy Queen has been doing. Nothing here is going to blow your mind – and I mean that as a compliment! Forget the budget; forget the bells and whistles. Ultimately this is a strategy that draws upon straightforward, considered tactics to generate brand awareness, engagement – and lashings of goodwill.

1. Dairy Queen Blog.

• Launched February 2009.
• Contributors: seven Dairy Queen employees, including the company’s Chief Branding Officer.
• Aims: “to ignite conversation and have fun with a brand that has been around for more than 70 years”.
• Has already attracted more than 50,000 visitors and 560 comments, according to Michael.

I like this blog. It is easy to navigate, is regularly updated and has a personal feel – just look at the header. So many corporate blogs have the company logos stuck in the header and come off bland and dull, because they don’t have any “faces”. The content here includes podcasts and video clips – one clip features Warren Buffett in a local DQ, talking shop with girl scouts – and in general, strikes a good note. It stays on-message, without shoving that message in your face. Contributors are willing to share personal stories (with a DQ twist, of course).

I note that the seven employees are all based in Dairy Queen’s communications department. I would be interested to hear less from comms, and more from the counter and from employees in other areas such as R&D. I also notice that on average, posting takes place once per week. More frequent posting would help develop rapport between visitors and bloggers, and would also encourage Google to crawl the site more frequently (which helps to boost search engine rankings). Overall though, it looks good to me.

What is most impressive about the blog is the traffic and engagement (comments) that it has attracted in just five months. I would like to learn more about the blog marketing methods that have been put to good use here. What we are told sounds good: in addition to Dairy Queen’s Twitter account, the PR team behind this venture reached out to other bloggers by devising a creative competition. Bloggers were asked to write about the “sweet deals” they would make, in order to try the chain’s new Sweet Deals menu for free. The tasty prize: free Sweet Deals every week for a year.

2. Facebook.

• Official Dairy Queen fan page launched in May 2008.
• At the time of writing, 163,112 fans.

The Facebook page doesn’t sit there, gathering dust. In the past week the page has been updated several times. Events, initiatives and products launches are publicised, as are video clips and blog posts. Fans are encouraged to contribute their own thoughts and images. It’s an active page; no wonder that several hundred new fans join daily.

3. Twitter.

• Dairy Queen Twitter account launched in February 2009.
• 2,013 followers at the time of writing.

The Dairy Queen employee tasked with the company’s Twitter account does a good job of it, in my opinion. He tweets a few times a day, answering customer queries, conversing with customers, linking to new blog posts and publicising Dairy Queen initiatives. The follower count is relatively low, compared to the level of fandom that has saturated the blog and the Facebook page, but this Twitter account hasn’t been running at full steam for very long and does not appear to be underpinned by an aggressive, follower-grabbing strategy. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing; when it comes to Twitter followers, quality trumps quantity.

3. Pending.

• Mobile. A new app has been developed, to enable iPhone and iPod users to locate their nearest Dairy Queen store. Mobile apps can swallow a significant slice of a marketing & PR budget, but this one is fairly simple and straightforward. No flashy gimmicks here! Instead it does what it says on the tin, connecting people with branches of DQ.
• FriendFeed. This is a real-time feed aggregrator; users can stream all their social media content – their tweets, their latest photos on Flickr, their latest blog posts and so on – onto one page. Users can also customise their feeds, and comment on one another’s items. Dairy Queen’s FriendFeed account has 22 followers and streams the company’s updates from the blog, Twitter and YouTube. However, Michael suggests that Dairy Queen’s presence here may be developed further. As he notes: “It’s a passionate community of users who conversate around the content. FriendFeeders are also Dairy Queen customers, so it’s only fitting that Dairy Queen joins the conversation.”

That Dairy Queen has made such strides, within a relatively short space of time, shows how a simple social media strategy can also be a solid one, irrespective of a company’s size.

As Michael concludes: “[Dairy Queen] got off to a late start with social media, but that’s irrelevant, what’s relevant is that they recognized it, embraced it, understand it and use it.”

Image credit: geocam20000.

My day-to-day work and social media are knitted together, but even I’m surprised to find that a Google image search for social media diagram churns up 164,000 results. Together, they form a bewildering array of bubbles, boxes, circles, words, arrows, connections, colours, logos and spider charts, all criss-crossed together. The “social media mess” (above), Tom Cunniff’s mash-up of a few of these diagrams, sums this up pretty well.

As he explains:

I’m not putting down anybody for trying to make sense of social media. On the contrary, it’s important work…What I really AM saying is that when media fragments into this many teeny pieces, it’s confusing as hell.

I’d go further. I’m sure that all of these diagrams were conceived with the very best of intentions; on a practical level, however, I find many of them to be of little or limited use. Web 2.0 may be leaping onwards and upwards but right now, when I meet with clients or prospective clients to discuss social media strategies, it be the first time that they have seriously considered shifting their marketing budgets in this direction. They are busy people; brevity, keyword-rich coherence and compelling arguments are prized qualities. Many of these diagrams – especially the larger, more tangled ones – are just plain daunting, and would require a lot of explanation. If I stuck one of them up and attempted to talk around it, you would be able to feel the hearts in the room sinking, fast.

Of course, not all these diagrams are intended for “social media beginners”. However, there is one that I do draw upon. It is featured in the mash-up above, and I like it a lot.

This is the Conversation Prism, free to use and share, which was created by American PR thought leader Brian Solis some time ago. There is a newer version available, but I actually prefer this one, because of its simplicity. True, it doesn’t visualise the layers, relationships and “connectedness”  that loom large within social media, but I’ve found to be a great starting point for those who are new to social media’s possiblities. It’s clear (i.e. jargon-free), it’s concise, it’s eyecatching and it requires relatively few oodles of explanation. In short, it’s accessible.

Sometimes, the oldies are the goodies.