Wondering what to buy your friends for Xmas? Wonder no more. Simply zip over to this Etsy page and see what they recommend you buy for your friends, based on their Facebook profiles. Besides being way cool, why is this significant? This week a study showed that more than 50% of web surfers arrive at websites, signed in to Facebook, but very few use the wealth of information that comes with this kind of web visitor like Etsy does. In related news Spotify's paid customers base are up by 500,000 since September, partly due to closer Facebook integration.

Oink is pigging out on users

Three weeks ago, Kevin Rose, the father of Digg, launched an app that allows people to tag objects that they like by location. This works well for products in stores, and especially took off in a big way for dishes in restaurants. In the three weeks since, the Oink iPhone app has amassed more than 100,000 downloads, and more than 100,000 objects have been tagged! So many services and apps launch every week, but few make it. Might this one be one of the few successes, like Instagram?

Google+ is starting to add up?

Much has been said about Google+ lately, a lot of it quite negative, especially after they launched brand pages. Things are starting to take shape, however. Apparently 61% of the world's top brands already have Google+ pages. This week, Klout announced their Google+ support. So, does this mean all the negative criticism is unfounded? That still remains to be seen, but maybe the ReadWriteWeb is right when they claim that Google+ was never meant to be a Facebook competitor? They do however succeed in capturing the social graph data they need.

Facebook introducing ads to the News Ticker

Love it or hate it (which probably depends on whether you're a brand or an individual), Facebook has confirmed that they are planning to push ads in the News Ticker soon. Can they manage to do that in an unobtrusive way like Twitter has done with Promoted Tweets?

Crossing the freaky line – when sharing is too easy

Is Facebook's new frictionless sharing ruining sharing? As is often the case, Robert Scoble this week managed to articulate both the potential and problems with Facebook's new feature, which turns things like listening to a Spotify song into a feed of content into your friends' news feeds. Some already say this will impact what songs we listen to and the argument is made that curation is best done explicitly. This post is good food for thought for the weekend.

Earn your keep

We don't like to navel gaze but the identity crisis in marketing is now impossible to ignore. Now that content marketing is all the rage, apparently every agency needs an earned media director says Ad Age. At media agencies, EMDs help clients better understand which social platforms will produce the most sharing for which campaigns, and how to strategically use paid media to increase the reach of earned media campaigns. At creative agencies, EMDs help direct the full creative process from concept to execution, ensuring that campaigns incorporate the right social triggers and content to generate maximum earned media.

Putting the public relations back into PR?

Talking about identity crisis: in the US the PR industries main body is looking to solicit opinion on "a modern definition for a new era in public relations", and they aim to do this via crowdsourcing. Cynics say PR stands for Press Release but attempts at a new definition in 2003 and 2007 only managed to come up with "Public relations helps an organization and its publics adapt mutually to each other." The New York Times points out the quest was precipitated by a series of mishaps by the industry and the rise of new terms, like earned media, word of mouth marketing, content marketing, social media marketing and more.

Creative of the Week – Fol Chen

If you're a band, why bring out a static album if you can release the source and get it remixed by your fans? Actually, why get it remixed, if you can build a machine that lets your fans manipulate your music in real time? That's exactly what Fol Chen, an art pop band from LA, did. Together with weird instrument designers Metronome, they developed a wooden, pyramid-style sound toy called Tetrafol, which lets fans mess with some Fol Chen pieces through motion and speed. Hand-made, open-source and limited edition. What more does one want for Christmas?

The impact of Social Media is so wide ranging that it encompasses elements of all of these erstwhile marketing silos and even some outside of marketing.

Most marketeers quickly grasp that social media is a tool to create positive brand awareness, even on a massive scale (see the Old Spice campaign).

Social Media - hard to pin down?

And PR? Puuuleaze!!! Social Media is about relationships – tick. Crisis management – tick. You can’t do crisis management properly today without doing it through social tools. And Social Media – possibly even more than PR – is very much earned media. People don’t share sub-par stuff with their friends.

Direct response? Dominos have announced a 29% rise in profit partly ascribed to FourSquare. Social coupons through services like Groupon are driving sales in unprecedented levels. Facebook has social ads that drive traffic to F-commerce websites.

Digital? Social tends to be digital by its very nature. In fact, most good and successful uses of digital tendto be social. (You can probably tell we’re not big fan of typical banners, skyscrapers or brochure type micro-sites.)

SEO these days often only means one thing, so-called Linkbait. Linkbait is just a technical word for remarkable (but not necessary on-brand) content that attracts in-bound links and builds PageRank. Good social media – like an informative or entertaining blog post/ video – can drive links too.

And then there’s the not so small matter of customer care. That could be social too.

In some companies, proper application of social could even impact product development in a massive way. You might recall that the best way to get people to talk about your business is to ensure you have a remarkable product.

So business is waking up to the need to take Social Media seriously. Yet while this hurdle has been passed there is a new hitch, precisely because social pervades almost all aspects of business.

Most brands have budget lines for brand advertising, PR, direct response and digital/ SEO, but not for Social.

The simple answer is that brands need to get with the program and add a Social budget line, a catch all for all of the above. Or is it?

Some companies will create new Social Media budgets that will cater for these things. In others Social Media will become part of the way existing departments do things.

But not only that, PR is not countering. The industry has not moved into doing lucrative SEO either. Philip Sheldrake put it eloquently:

Has the PR industry missed the boat on the optimisation of web content to attract the attention of Google, more commonly known as search engine optimisation? The emergence of the multi-million pound search industry during the last decade suggests that may be the case.

Search agencies are increasingly packaging planning, content development and analytics, into a payment-by-results model. It’s a compelling proposition for a marketing director that is seeking guaranteed outcomes.

Now search agencies are starting to use PR tactics such as press releases, bylined content and wire distribution to drive their campaigns prompting the scrutiny of the role of PR versus SEO.

Are PR and the SEO industry in fact playing the same field?

A distinction was made by Kelvin Newman, Creative Director at SiteVisibility (an SEO company), between technical SEO and link building SEO. The former, I have argued on this blog, is actually dying a slow death. When I repeated this assertion yesterday, it was greeted with nods and disagreement in equal measure.

The point was made that SEO is the science and PR the art of using content to build reputation. And as such, said Wilson McInnes, Managing Director of NixonMcInnes, they come from two very different perspectives and even appeal to different kinds of people. PR was strategic, while SEO was merely tactical. PR was concerned with brand, SEO was not.

Good and small agencies are starting to offer an integrated solution. But all this was academic, was a consensus of sorts. Clients, particularly big ones, still have separate budgets for PR, advertising, SEO, digital. And until this changes, agencies will have to pitch specific services, even if there is a lot of overlap.

Still, it was felt that SEO in particular was moving in to eat PR’s lunch.

In that respect social media and PR are much closer related than PR and the SEO industry me thinks. Social media is about brand too. It is strategic, not just tactical. Because good integration of social media into a business is likely to fundamentally change the way the business operates.

So why are we starting a social media training course? We’ve been asked about social media, a lot.

Meet The Media Guru | Cory Doctorow by *Meet the Media Guru*

We’ve developed social media strategies for the World Economic Forum. We’ve given talks and training at Ketchum PR, Kroll, the Salzburg Global Seminar and Open Road PR. And recently we’ve been asked to give meta training – training at a company that does training.

Not long ago we wrote a blog post about new roles in communications. Social media will not only change marketing practise, it will impact the very structure of your business and organisation.

We have something unique to offer, which is a little different from all the above said courses. And what is that?

Strategic

We have a deep understanding of the historical trajectory of media change. Or put another way: we’re in the midst of the democratisation of media. Who knows where it will end?

Only knowing one tool like Twitter won’t help you spot a new one like Foursquare. We’ll impart to you the principles that will help you navigate and anticipate what might happen next.

We’re into creative practise

Don’t confuse that with zany or brooding. We’ll help you think outside the box, but deliver practical solutions.
What is a good example of digital creativity? Matt Cutts of Google explains in this video how you can get your website seen and linked to by spending only $100. That’s geeky and useful creativity for you.

In short, we think our courses will enable anybody with a passion for communication and an open mind to explore social media for themselves in a focused way.

When creating our course we looked carefully at what is out there already.
As a result we ended up creating three courses:

1. One course is social media for PR people. Of the old media marketing configuration (PR, Advertising,…) we think public relations is best placed to do social media. In our experience many PR practitioners lack insights about why social media works and how to actually do it.
2. One is social media training for leaders, like CEOs and Entrepreneurs. This is a strategic course about how best to manage social media in a world where everybody is a media outlet.
3. And then we have a hands-on practical in-house social media course. Because ultimately Social Media is best done by organisations themselves.

We welcome any feedback on these courses and anticipate adapting them over time.

London Blogger Katie

But in the current media climate – do you know how to get it? Ah yes, bloggers are a sure fire way to get good targeted eyeballs. But have you tried approaching them?

RAAK built a social media ready SEO enhanced website for fashion brand WHERE (Full disclosure: Their designer Laura Villasenin is my partner). It’s a new fashion brand that needs all the exposure – awareness and word of mouth – it can get.

But we knew we wanted it to be featured in one of the huge fashion blogs. They can drive massive amounts of traffic, increase your Google Pagerank, and a blog recommendation carries a lot of weight.

A blog like Stylebubble would be perfect. But Susie of Stylebubble is a very busy lady these days.

But then we read Brian Solis’s piece on the so called magic middle bloggers:

The best communications strategies will encompass not only authorities in new and traditional media but also those voices in the “Magic Middle” of the attention curve, because they help carry information and discussions among your customers directly, in a true peer-to-peer approach. The Magic Middle is defined as the bloggers who have from 20-1,000 other people linking to them. It is this group that enables PR people to reach The Long Tail, and its effects on the bottom line are measurable.

Brian made the point that the star bloggers of this world – are so busy, so famous – that they are no longer approachable. And even if they feature your product its often a once off. This is because they are also hard to build a relationship with. And building a relationship with a blogger can take you so much further. Especially if it’s a blogger on the up.

So we went for a magic middle blogger – and it worked big time.

Now I have to confess that RAAK actually did very little in this instance than provide some good advice. Laura did the rest herself. Here is how she got blogger relations spot on:

1. She did her research and found an up and coming fashion blogger – Katie that writes What Katie Wore.

Katie’s blog is popular, she routinely gets 20 plus comments on each post – times that by at least 100 to get an idea of how many visitors she gets to a post. But she’s not in the league of Fashion Toast (yet).

2. She followed Katies’s blog and Twitter account – and listened.

She liked what Katie did, and thought her sense of style was a good fit with her designs. she found out they lived around the corner from each other. Match!

3. She contacted Katie herself. There was no agent involved.

Bloggers don’t want to be approached by marketing and PR types that are far removed from a brand. They want the real deal. If you’re a fashion company the designer is as good as it gets. If you’re a company like Hewlett Packard that make electronics goods, and you’re blogging about photocopiers – it’s probably the photocopier product manager that you want to speak to. Why? Bloggers want knowledgeable people that are close to a product or service. They wan’t a marketese free environment. This is supposed to be a conversation remember.

4. Laura had a good product which she sent to Katie to check out.

A nice face and a great personality might get you far, but if your product is a lemon, don’t waste your time. This is word of mouth media, and the recommender’s (In this case Katie) reputation is on the line.

5. She had a website that could cater for the inevitable traffic rise that a blog would send, and we tried to maximise the viral effect – a social home base.

The site had WordPress’s Super Cache installed, just in case it was hit my a Tsunami of crazed shoppers. And we installed Tweetmemes Tweet this button. Ride the social wave.

And hey presto, look at the result!

And not just in one way. In two.

In a previous life, we built a website, blog and e-commerce solution for WHERE, a new and exciting (ethical) fashion brand. And last week they asked us to advice them on an ongoing basis on how to use the right social media tools.

Good on them. Good for us.

So now we make sure they have access to the right tools, use them well and that their website is in great SEO shape. We also double-check their blog posts and tweets if needed. And listen for them. That all makes it easy for them to be up-to-date, found and be part of the conversation.

But as with most new things, it was a particularly interesting exercise in how to quantify this service, a problem that was also mentioned in Jason Falls’ very decent blogpost about the culture clash between Social Media and Ad agencies and in Jay Bear‘s comments on that post.

It’s not that straightforward to bill or staff for.

Because Social Media is about knowing the brand through-and-through-and-through. And through.

And, ideally, about being part of a brand 24/7, because your crowd doesn’t stop talking about you. Which means that even reacting quickly to a crisis can be a bit late – as Domino’s Pizza recently discovered.

Thirdly, it works best when you have the power to make day-to-day decisions without having to go through layers of sign-off procedures.

Based on those thoughts, I can see two models working:
1. A retainer model (we prefer to call it the ‘plug-in‘ model) where you’re really close to the brand (or the organisation) and you guide them on a day-to-day basis. This is more suitable for small to medium-sized companies, who can’t afford to hire a full-time person and trust you to do what is needed.
Will this be easily scalable when the brand becomes bigger? Possibly not. Option 2 might then make more sense.

2. A training model, which aims not only at consulting, but also at teaching key people at various levels. Those key people could be CEO’s as well as Brand & Product Managers. It could be someone from the Marketing department, a customer service rep or even a developer. Anyone who’s into and understands the medium and is keen to take on the role of ‘Social Media Administrator’.

Importantly, this training course should not only be on a strategic level, because Social Media is about ‘doing’ it. In other words, how you write a blogpost, what keywords you use, how to craft a Tweet, how to produce good audio for video. The list goes on.

For now, we use option 1 for WHERE. And we’re currently developing option 2 into a workshop about ‘Social Media in PR’, about which we’ll write some more soon.

Exciting times! And we’ll see if these options still stand in a year’s time. Or even in a few months.

Yesterday however, the importance and role of experiential marketing hit home to me.

Everything we do, we do within a framework of our understanding of how digital media has opened up the media landscape to everyone. One of the obvious conclusions for some time now is that word-of-mouth marketing and therefore by extension, product, is key. This is especially true online. Google beat Yahoo!, Altavista and Lycos to be top dog because of their product, despite their competitors’ massive marketing spend.

It turns out that this principle holds true in a wider sense as well. We recently met Jonathan Baskin, ex-brand manager and author of Branding only works on Cattle. He argues that even brands like Nike were first built around superior product before anything else. Digital media just throws this truth in much sharper relief.

Anyway, Gerrie and I were in Brussels yesterday where we dropped in at Demonstrate (their website does not do them justice) under recommendation of Stefaan, copywriter and blogger behind Knotoryus. Demonstrate is one of the largest experiental marketing ‘agencies’ in Europe.

They occupy a huge warehouse on the northern outskirts of Brussels. One part of which is just that, an area called The Platform that’s full of props, toys and gadgets – the tools of their trade. Half a football field of the stuff. I kid you not.

And then there is a creative hub, off to the side, where strategy, account management and the creatives reside.

But what we found truly interesting was the chat with Kate Stockman, Demonstrate’s creative director.

Kate speaks fast. No need for her to ponder or um and ah, because she’s been there and done it.

“We don’t do PR stunts for PR stunt’s sake. Publicity is not why we plan an event or an action. We plan it around customer experience. “

If it generates publicity, it is not an unwelcome by-product, she ads. But it’s not the aim. The aim is to get the customer to try the product. If it’s a drink, get them to taste it. Simple.

Or it could be added value. She explains how they rigged a mobile bar where punters could learn how to pull the perfect pint.

On the web all the talk is about how to move away from advertising to product or if not that to content, i.e. offer some real value and sponsor it. Is this not exactly what Demonstrate is doing in the streets?

Also consider this. Online, music and video are ubiquitous. It’s easy to copy information and content. Being there -  the live experience – will become more important and not less.

US study of PR hiring – knowledge of social media, blogs SEO, now as important as traditional skills http://bit.ly/En6rF

…and this one

@MajorPlayerJobs: RT @DanGoldgeier PR agencies poaching creatives? ;- Interesting trend, see my take here http://tinyurl.com/lm5pq4

…and this one today…

@TessNeale: Is it time for companies to hire a Social Media Administrator? http://is.gd/3kOTl | by @dmscott – we have, and highly recommended it.

The holy grail: Creative technologist Aaron Koblin

Media guru Jeff Jarvis predicted a short while ago that the upheaval that has beset journalism will also hit advertising and public relations. That process now seems well on its way.

“Advertising is failure” he says.

I myself produced a presentation, now a year old, which asked – Will PR inherit the social media earth? (Included at the end of this post)

Because if PR is about public relations (and not press releases as Brian Solis puts it so eloquently) then it should be the part of the industry geared to make most of these social technologies that lie at the heart of digital media.

But this outcome – the paramountcy of PR – has been all but certain. Simply because of inertia. Many organisations never change until they have to. And then it’s too late to change.

The problem is part generational. I have been asked to speak at large PR firms on social media and PR (what I thought was a detailed analysis and compelling argument why PR must embrace social media), only to hear the head of brand PR state: “We can’t believe what we read on the internet!”, and “We Brits will never give up on newspapers, we love them!” Ahem! I had to take two steps back and start again.

But it’s clear, underlined by the tweets above, studies and blog posts doing the rounds now, that some are asking the questions about the best way to staff the agencies, businesses, and organisations of the future.

The agency model in itself is coming under pressure, as the internet does not like middlemen. In the one link above David Meerman Scott elaborates on Jim Stewart’s idea and explains the need inside companies for the role of the social media administrator.

…there is a need for this new role, much like in the late 1980s we developed the need for a System Administrator (Information Technology department people responsible for computer networks) and the 1990s brought Webmasters (responsible for company websites).

I see the Social Media Administrator not as someone who develops content and participates in discussions on social media (although they could certainly have a business related personal blog or twitter stream).

This is not the senior leadership role for social media in an organization but rather the coordination point for company activities. The role would be someone who manages and provides consistency with an organization’s social media presence. Of course, to be done well, the skill set of a Social Media Administrator would need to include deep knowledge of tools like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and blogs.

I think this is wrong. The social media person inside needs to be senior. How else could they get things done?

But I digress. I will deal with the slow decay of the agency model in another post. (We, by the way, don’t call ourselves an agency, we plug-in to you.)

There will still be a need for advice and cutting edge development and production skills. There is a role for PR and Ad people if they embrace the change brought on by digital media.

But why are PR firms hiring creatives from ad agencies – as one tweet alludes to – you may ask? Should they not be looking for a spotty programmer, or even better – the glamorous spotty programmer 2.0, aka: the social media expert? (We’ve also come across the term creative technologist recently. Presumably a ruby-on-rails genius that moonlights in an electro band and directs music videos when he has a spare moment. Aaron Koblin springs to mind).

Lorraine Barker, Head of PR at Major Players – a big marketing recruitment firm in London – claims that PR is looking for the ad creatives:

In the last 18 months we’ve seen a substantial increase (200%) in client requirements for Planners and Creative Directors (At PR agencies)…

To keep from being drowned out in an increasingly crowded media space, PR agencies are evolving. Creative Directors are being drafted in to inject fresh thinking and bring a new dimension to campaigns, while Planners are delivering consumer insights and developing rigorous strategic frameworks to underpin the big idea. The result is a focused PR offering that stays on brand, on tone and most importantly – makes people stand up and take notice.

So they are looking for archetypal coke snorting ideas factory & story geniuses with a certain je ne sais quoi?  Turns out no.

The newer roles are different from the traditional planner or creative you might find in an advertising agency and while some PR agencies are happy to consider above the line candidates, many don’t want the chin-stroking musings of the storyboard creative.

We’ve found that the most successful among those we’ve placed are candidates who have had a high level of involvement in the creative or strategic planning process – not only candidates from account planning, but account handling, research & insight and new business. However, it’s equally about the candidate’s hunger and passion for all things media and the latest comms channels, trends and cultures.

Mmm… ok. It seems the PR agencies are looking for content producers, experts, researchers and social media fundis?

Brian Solis – who has written extensively about the need for change in PR – defines his future roles for a new media team:

There is no doubt in my mind that eventually all PR agencies and consultants will follow suit and transform from publicity firms into New Media marketing and communications firms rich with in house and contracted content producers, digital sociologists, research librarians, community managers, digital architects, connectors, and industry experts or strategists.

Brian goes on to define what each of these roles would entail, it’s worth a read.

The reason why researchers, trend watchers and industry experts feature in both Brain Solis and Loraine’s list is easy to explain. Digital is bullshit allergic. You have to know your client’s business inside out. You have to keep up with the medium.

You can’t tweet for a client if you don’t tweet yourself.

PR ranks social networking, blogging skills highly

But of course the other categories Brian mentions will be key as well, including the content producers and what he calls digital architects (creative technologists).

Now research – also mentioned in an above Tweet “Study: New PR Hires Must Blog, Tweet & Use SocNets” confirms what he said:

In what marks a dramatic shift away from a mainstream-media approach to public relations, PR hiring managers in the US now say it is nearly as important for prospective hires to have social media savvy as it is for them to have traditional media-relations skills, according to a survey by iPressroom.

All very exciting, all very scary.

What we can be sure of is that come September 2010 neither PR nor advertising will look the same as now.

At RAAK we have done quite a lot of thinking about how we can help our clients and partners. And what we need to be to be able to help our clients.

“We need to rethink our role as intermediaries between the companies we represent, authorities, and ultimately the communities that determine our place in the market.”
- Brian Solis on the state of PR.

We don’t call ourselves an agency, we call ourselves a plug-in.