Blog

The internet was kind to us last week. Here’s some of our favourite nuggets of goodness.

More Gymkhana madness

Part five of Ken Block’s (DC Shoes owner and rally driver) Gymkhana series. This time we’re taken on a visually stunning tour of San Francisco, where he shows off yet more of his utterly insane driving skills.

Lego Builders of Sound

To promote the new Lego Star Wars range of toys, a ‘barrel organ’ was created completely from Lego bricks and characters. When the barrel organ is turns, it plays the Star Wars theme.

How far will you go for a free snack?

Australian brand Fantastic Delite wanted to find out. So they built a vending machine dishing out various tasks for the public to perform in exchange for a tasty treat. From hitting a button on the machine 100 times (which eventually rose to 5,000!) to standing on one leg and dancing in the street, it seems people will do nearly anything for free swag.

The V Motion Project

Hook up a Kinect to some music production software and what do you get? Something like this…

More behind the scenes info here.

Perfect Curve’s Digital Strategy

“Digital is one of the most crucial things for a modern brand manager to get right, so the pressure is on for Siobhan to explain her strategy”. Who else has heard industry folk making just as much sense as this? ;-)

O2: Relaxed Community Management

O2 had all sorts of network problems last week. But it seems they loosened the reigns on their Community Manager, providing us with some entertaining tweet exchanges. Nice work shifting the focus onto O2 lols and away from having no phone signal!

Read some of the best tweets here.

Time for our weekly roundup of digital talking points that had the office nattering around the water cooler…

Thunderclap your tweets

Submit your tweet to Thunderclap. Get people to ‘back it’. Then, if you reach enough support during the time limit, everyone tweets the same message in unison increasing its reach and viral potential.

A simple concept that’s still in its beta phase, but effective nonetheless.

Social media with a conscience from Smirnoff

A fantastically innovative idea from two students of the Miami Ad School. Buy your friends a cab ride home to stop them drinking and driving, and earn rewards in the process.

Boys with toys

Handheld projection mapping? Where do we get our hands on one of these for the office?

Dove bring the positive

Dove’s Ad Makeover campaign finally lands in the UK, converting negative, self-conscious and deprecating Facebook ads into positive, motivational ones.

A touchscreen with buttons?!

Tactus technology promises the feel of real buttons without sacrificing any of the functionality of a touchscreen. Could this be the future of modern smartphone and tablet technology?

It’s not every day an account we’re working on gets voted one of the top 100 social brands in the country. Actually, make that one of the top 20 social brands in the country. Oh, and make that two accounts we’re working on…

Yup, according to top social agency Headstream – who published their second annual roundup of the UK’s most socially effective brands this morning – both Lurpak and Cravendale have exploded into the top 20, beating off such giants as Ford, Marmite, Google and last year’s no.1, Dell.

What’s more, this represents two out of only five FMCG brands in the top 25 results, with no other dairy brands even breaking the top 100! Needless to say, we’re very proud.

The Social Brands 100 list was drawn from an initial crowdsourced pool of 300 nominated brands, with the final results calculated using a combined ‘data score’ from social media monitoring firm Brandwatch and a ‘panel score’ from a panel of top industry judges. This panel included Twitter’s UK head of sales Bruce Daisley, and judged each brand in a number of key areas such as their success in creating a credible community and their prioritizing of fans’ needs over the brand’s own.

A huge thank you goes out to all our staff working across these two accounts and everyone else who helps make Outside Line one of the top social agencies out there.

Next year we’re aiming even higher, with even more of our brands in the top spots. Make sure you come and join us…

While we’re on the topic of conferences, it seems like a good time to mention that our director Lloyd is also due to appear at this year’s Social Media World Forum next week.

The event is one of the highlights of the digital marketing calendar, so we’re very pleased to be a part of it. Speaking on the topic of ‘Social TV’, and the opportunities offered to marketers by the rise in internet connectivity among today’s audience, Lloyd will be explaining how to bridge that increasingly important gap between the worlds of television and digital. Important stuff in these fast-moving times…

Representatives from LG, Orange, Zeebox and Samsung will also be appearing to give their input on the subject, making this an all-star cast of speakers that’s not to be missed. There might even be free cake.*

The event itself takes place on Tuesday 27th March at Kensington Olympia, and Lloyd will be speaking at 9:40am.

To book a ticket or find out more details, simply click here.

Come along. You never know, you might just learn something…

*Free cake not guaranteed.

It’s generally accepted that social media changes the way organisations interact with their customers, but without the right expertise it’s not always obvious how to make the most of this.

How exactly should a company go about dealing with its customer base in an environment that is, by its very nature, public and intended for sharing? What is the best way to go about rewarding loyal fans, and what areas need to be addressed in the event of a crisis?

These are all tricky questions, and ones that are vital to get right if your organisation is to succeed in the social media universe. Thankfully, finding out the answers needn’t be a stab in the dark.

On 29^th March, our director Lloyd Salmons will be speaking at The Social Customer 2012 – the UK’s leading conference on social customer engagement. Appearing alongside British Gas Social Media Manager Laura Price, Lloyd will be discussing the best ways for large companies to tackle the issues of customer service, digital marketing and social CRM in the modern digital era, and you’re all invited to come and join the party (and by party, we mean interesting and informative e-business conference).

The event is being hosted by renowned social media consultancy blog Our Social Times, and takes place from 9am – 5pm at Prospero House, London, SE1 1GA. Also speaking on the day will be representatives from BT, Citibank, M&S and CapGemini, among others, making this a great day of talks that’s sure to bring a new insight into the online workings of some of the UK’s largest companies.

To see the full program of talks or to book tickets, head over to the event’s official website.

We’ll see you down the front.

You remember the first time you swapped your old Nokia for a smartphone, well… this is nothing like that. This is, if you will excuse the obvious analogy, more like switching from iOS to Android. Which is better? It’s possible that WWIII is going to be started by someone saying “iPhone sucks” and cities will crumble to the chant of “Android rulez” so I might skip over that.

You would have to think after Buzz and Wave bombed this is probably Google’s last try at entering the social space, it’s getting a little embarrassing it feels a little like watching a friend strike out with every girl at a party. But you know what they say… the third/fourth/fifth time’s a charm! And from what I’ve seen this time they may just have done it right…

Ask yourself a question… when was the last time that Facebook had a major update that felt like you, the user, were the driving force. It’s been a long time. This is a fact that has, obviously, been keenly observed by Google: “We’d like to bring the nuance and richness of real-life sharing to software. We want to make Google better by including you, your relationships, and your interests”

So, onward to the features:

The main feature of Google+ is Circles. Based around the idea that people do not want to share everything with everyone and the word ‘friend’ does not mean one thing, it encompasses lifelong friends, university friends and people you barely know so why would you treat them all in the same way.

What is really refreshing about Circles is that you don’t have to be a Google+ member to take part, if someone adds you to a circle you can still interact via e-mail. There’s not a ‘Like’-gate on everything.

With Sparks, Google delivers a feed of content to you based on your interests. Allowing you to read/watch blogs, sites and videos from across the internet and share it with your circles.

I’m unsure how useful the Hangout feature is but it’s certainly very cool and at least based on a real life concept of meeting up with a group of friends unplanned and simply hanging out. “By combining the casual meetup with live multi-person video, Hangouts lets you stop by when you’re free, and spend time with your Circles. Face-to-face-to-face”

With Google+, mobile hasn’t come as an afterthought, it’s built into the core aspects of the project with features specifically designed for mobile;
Location: With Google+ you can add your location to every post, but only if you want to.
Instant upload: While taking photos on your phone they will automatically be stored in the cloud, so they are always available and ready to share. Again this will only be done with your permission.
Huddle: Huddle is a group messaging service connecting you to your entire circle immediately.

And here’s some initial thoughts from our team:

“This is a pretty exciting development but will surly move towards its full capacity when the Android OS is full optimised to support it. The massive growth in Android phones will give Google a fantastic platform to promote this ‘social network’ as well as the huge audience who already live online through the multitude of Google products.” – Welton

“In all, I think the more Google services one uses the better this will work. Your searches, bookmarks, contacts and people you regularly email/text/chat will more than likely play a huge role.” – Adam

“Initial reports are really interesting and it sounds like Google have put an immense amount of effort into a wide range of areas.

I’m excited by the prospect of it being far easier or quicker to share particular things with different sets of people as opposed to discovering something and then having to log in to Facebook, find a friend and post to their wall or inbox. It sounds like it might be easier to interact with different types of contacts rather than having to get bogged down in Facebook’s limited profile and privacy settings to maintain your social boundaries online.” – Tony

So your next question is… where do I sign up? right? Well slight problem like all of Google’s ventures you’ll need to sign up and wait for an invite, in the mean time you should hit up any friends who have any connection to Google whatsoever to try to get an advanced invite (oh and send one my way while you’re at it!).

There’s a debate that constantly bounces amongst our team here regarding ‘tone of voice’ on Twitter and Facebook, and most of the arguments revolve around overuse of the exclamation mark.

You may or may not know this but many brands, when they issue instructions to agencies about what they perceive their company’s ‘voice’ to be and how it should be relayed, categorically state that they are against the use of smilies. Smilies are the lingua franca of normal internet conversation and the most expedient way of ensuring that your tone is not misinterpreted when hammering out bite-size communications at high speed.

Of course, one of the most important things about conversational platforms, like Facebook and Twitter, is that they are exactly that, ‘conversational’, as opposed to simple broadcast mechanisms. And one of the characteristics of most conversations is that they’re informal.

So what’s a writer to do when they’re required to conduct informal, quickfire conversations with large numbers of complete strangers, yet are not allowed to use the normal techniques, in this case smilies, that offset this weird dynamic?

Well it seems that the default position is to use the humble exclamation mark. A lot.

By way of, (completely non-scientific), research I did some quick back-of-fag-packet analysis of 15 well known UK brand’s Facebook pages, from magazines to toothpaste to chocolate bars. The data was surprisingly consistent across all the pages. Around 2.5% of all words ended in an exclamation mark! Which may not seem like a lot! But when almost 100% of contributing punctuations are typed by the brand (almost every status update!), the overall effect can be quite overwhelming! A little like CCTV cameras, once you start noticing them it’s very hard to stop!

Try it! Pick the Facebook page of a brand and see how frequently their tone is one of excitability! How relentlessly upbeat! How… exclaimed!

The thing about this emphatically constant positivity is that it’s a bit inhuman. It’s unnerving in the same way that those fixed grins and glassy eyes you only find on fundamentalist Christians are unnerving. It’s indefinably creepy.

I’m reminded of the Uncanny Valley Theory, which, in case you’re not familiar with it, describes the sudden dip taken by our sense of empathy when confronted with something that’s almost human but that has something about it that reeks of inhumanity. The uncanny valley explains why we’re able to anthropomorphise and empathise with a non-humanoid robot while a much more sophisticated and lifelike one may inspire revulsion.

“The uncanny valley is a hypothesis regarding the field of robotics. The hypothesis holds that when robots and other facsimiles of humans look and act almost like actual humans, it causes a response of revulsion among human observers. The “valley” in question is a dip in a proposed graph of the positivity of human reaction as a function of a robot’s lifelikeness.”

“The uncanny valley may “be symptomatic of entities that elicit a model of a human other but do not measure up to it.”If an entity looks sufficiently nonhuman, its human characteristics will be noticeable, generating empathy. However, if the entity looks almost human, it will elicit our model of a human other and its detailed normative expectations. The nonhuman characteristics will be noticeable, giving the human viewer a sense of strangeness. In other words, a robot stuck inside the uncanny valley is no longer being judged by the standards of a robot doing a passable job at pretending to be human, but is instead being judged by the standards of a human doing a terrible job at acting like a normal person.”

Think about your brand.
Is it coming across like this?

Or more like this?

And which of them would you rather be?

There are now enough brands and agencies who have been typing in this hyper-enthusiastic way for long enough that it’s become a micro-culture unto itself, much like the bizarre linguistic inflections evolved by aircraft cabin crew over the last fifteen years.

But do we really feel that people who connect with brands on these platforms are so dim-witted that they need to hear the enthusiastic tone of a children’s entertainer to keep them engaged? Are we such untalented writers that we’re incapable of communicating a pleasant and professional tone without channeling Adrian Mole-esque punctuation? Is using smilies really such a bad thing? These are genuine questions by the way, not rhetorical. Maybe the answer to all of them is ‘yes’.

Between constant changes imposed by platform owners and consumer behaviour adapting, as people are bombarded with volley after volley of marketing messages, the social media landscape for brands is changing on a virtually daily basis, and the skills required to…

a) be sensitive to it and
b) linguistically adapt to it

…are demanding, to say the least.

While we continue to thrash out the [over]use of the exclamation mark round our table, ask yourself if your brand is slipping into the uncanny valley or whether you’re still a cute and likeable R2D2!

Until next time!

After failing miserably at my A-levels many years ago, I attended South Bank University. One of the most interesting subjects for me was always Organisational Psychology (every Tuesday morning), it’s probably called something far more fancy now. Here we touched on all aspects of how individuals, groups and organisations interact.

Browsing the raft of information from social media experts, I’m always struck by the sheer volume that is written. The shocking aspect, given this volume, is the lack of real debate on any given strata of social media and the subsequent theoretical norms that are created because of it.

I’ve been reading blogs for a while now and, in the main, I ignore the comments. I can’t recall the last time I saw a lively debate or a commenter adding anything of worth to the subject being discussed.

Here’s how it goes… blog post is made, comments fill with people nodding sagely saying that they said the very same thing on their blog (grabbing a bit of link equity and reflected glory). These kinds of replies run into the hundreds on some posts. This is where the Tuesday morning lecture reminiscence kicked in, bear with me.

Irving Janis had a theory that concerned how groups come to poor decisions. He concentrated mostly on US foreign policy – Cuban Missile Crisis is the most (in)famous – analysing the dynamics of the groups’ interactions, coming to a conclusion that poor decisions which seemed ridiculous to an impartial onlooker (i.e. let’s invade Cuba) were, in these cases, borne out of Groupthink. He defines Groupthink as:

“A mode of thinking that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive in-group, when the members’ strivings for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action.”

Where Groupthink occurs the outcome is poor decision-making by the group. I decided to apply this theory about how groups interact to the social media debate. Janis used an eight-point symptom test to determine the presence of Groupthink:

1. Illusions of invulnerability creating excessive optimism and encouraging risk taking.
2. Rationalizing warnings that might challenge the group’s assumptions.
3. Unquestioned belief in the morality of the group, causing members to ignore the consequences of their actions.
4. Stereotyping those who are opposed to the group as weak, evil, biased, spiteful, disfigured, impotent, or stupid.
5. Direct pressure to conform placed on any member who questions the group, couched in terms of “disloyalty”.
6. Self-censorship of ideas that deviate from the apparent group consensus.
7. Illusions of unanimity among group members, silence is viewed as agreement.
8. Mind guards — self-appointed members who shield the group from dissenting information.

Clearly the social media debate consists of a massive group, so applying this directly has issues but looking at these eight points some really do hit home when applied to the social media debate, or my perceived lack of.

As an agency we’ve been working in this field for over 10 years now – back then we managed fan clubs, message boards etc, and it was called community marketing. So I’m not here to deride the industry that we’re intrinsically part of. What I think it lacks is any real debate about the key issues. Saying “yes, I agree” and putting a link to your blog in the comments serves no-one other than yourself.

Over the coming weeks I’ll be touching directly on some of the eight points above in individual posts and adding some quantitative analysis so feel free to disagree. No, really, please do.

By Tony, Social Media Manager

This week I tried out a new Twitter tool, TweetLouder, which analyses your iTunes and Last.fm playlists to provide you with a list of your favourite artists that use Twitter.

As a big music fan, I was drawn in and within a few minutes had followed over 20 of my favourite recording artists. Which was followed by an evening of un-following as it quickly became apparent that what makes a great songwriter doesn’t necessarily equate to an interesting tweet stream.

Whilst Twitter is great for reading the ramblings of extrovert rappers and opinionated songwriters, it’s not so attractive to serious musos who would rather dust off their rare B-sides than discover what their favourite artist is having for breakfast. (“Steak & eggs and a belgium waffle w berries and whipped cream….goodnight….” – cheers for that @asherroth)

This is indicative of a brand’s need to consider the appropriateness and direction of their social media activity. Different personalities, services and products require different channels, tones and frequencies. What makes a great washing up liquid doesn’t necessarily make for an entertaining friend you want daily updates from.

How many examples do you see each day of brands who are inappropriately using social media channels? Do you think their fan base is really after a regular, deep and meaningful relationship with their hoover or lawn mower, or are they really just there for the freebies?

This is by no means to say that brands shouldn’t use social media, a lot of brands use social media effectively. There is a place for the majority of product categories and services across social media in some shape or form. But as the murmurs from the boardroom increase in volume to “do social media”, it’s essential that someone, somewhere asks the question “why?” at every decision point. If someone, and often it should be the experts (i.e. us), doesn’t question in this way, a brand can end up with a Facebook wall, blog and/or Twitter stream drenched purely in outward noise, little interaction and lots of miffed faces come project review time.

Here’s some of the better follows resulting from my TweetLouder experience:

@rootsmanuva This pioneer of UK rap is as reliable for tweeting links to frequent U-Stream DJ sets or new releases on his Banana Klan album as your nearest student union is for playing Witness The Fitness tonight.

@Dolly_Parton The queen of country music hits the Twitter frequency as impressively as those high notes on stage with just the one tweet per day, be it her famous philosophical musings or glittery tour updates.

@SalaamRemi is the lesser known (and far superior) producer behind Amy Winehouse’s global success. He’s also helped the likes of The Fugees and Nas along their ways. Whilst he packs a good dose of tweeting into his day, you’ll get humorous jokes, relevant rap re-tweets and video links to his brand new material.

@carlbaratmusic is a must for fans of the Libertine who pops up once in a while to announce a new gig or release, share a photo or just to let his following know he’s still standing.

@ChemBros is a resourceful stream of information, be it news of The Chemical Brothers’ forthcoming releases and gigs, or simply the set they’re about to, or have just played.

I was recently asked to contribute to a piece on customer service and social media measurement for the IAB Social Media Handbook. As usual my piece went way beyond the 500 word limit so you can see the abridged version here or the full one below.

The Customer Service ‘Iceberg’

Consumers are using social media to share, complain, praise and recommend on a daily basis. The vast majority of customer service issues occur and are dealt with via “closed” channels such as the phone, email, etc. These issues are below the water line where the wider public and media can’t see them, and this is where companies currently fix their gaze and resources. This is natural and correct. Who wouldn’t put most of their resources where the majority of the activity is taking place?

However, there is a large opportunity for companies wanting to tackle the above the water line (tip of the iceberg) issues that occur in the “open” channels of social media (Twitter, message boards, blogs etc.)

Publicly helping consumers with issues not only serves the individual, but the positive viral effect to their network and beyond can be tremendous. Most companies, however, are some way behind their consumers’ behaviour. There are several intertwined reasons for this disparity:

1. The plethora of social media channels where a consumer might express an opinion means companies require a tool to capture this conversation and an understanding of each of the media to enable them to converse effectively with customers.
2. Even with an understanding of the breadth of media, getting people to work across departments and tying new customer interaction data in with existing legacy systems still poses significant hurdles.
3. The vast majority of the interaction between the consumer and company happens in the public domain. The enforced transparency and openness of communication forces company cultures to be customer-centric rather than simply say they are. Cultural change takes time to permeate.
4. Customer service as a function has long established metrics and can be input/output driven. For some reason, people are letting social media muddy the waters. Return On Investment (ROI) in this instance is actually fairly simple.

When answering consumers via social media it’s key to remember the dual audience you are playing to. The primary audience is the person with the issue that needs to be addressed. The secondary audience is the network of the person with the issue. With mainstream news consistently using social media for content, this network extends beyond their immediate friends and can be vast in size and impact.

Setting Appropriate KPI’s and Benchmarks

Customer service is not always about handling complaints. Each interaction with a customer is an opportunity for the company to engage and influence, so the objectives of the activity can be varied.

All KPI’s should ideally start with a business objective; something requiring change that intrinsically affects the company’s performance in some way. Without this it will be difficult to make the activity relevant to the wider company.

Below I have placed some typical objectives in relation to customer service in social media, common associated metrics and some ideas on possible benchmarks, these being the key to making the data meaningful within a company, especially within social media. This is not supposed to be an exhaustive list but it should provide a framework to relate your own experience to.

When reporting on any activity it pays to remember who the report is going to and what their frame of reference is. Senior management will want to see the business effect of what you are doing, whilst the PR Manager may be more inclined to see the narrative of conversations. Jeremiah Owyang does a great job of explaining this here.

Customers increasingly prefer to rely on their own networks for advice and recommendation. Instant answers from people they trust being infinitely preferable to a telephone call to a scripted, non-empowered environment. This is a trend exacerbated by the interconnectedness that social media propagates. The key for the company is to replicate this helpful, friendly, open and empathetic approach to their customer service whilst proving its worth in hard financial terms.