Carving up the social media budget - Pie Analogy

One of the challenges faced by everyone involved in marketing, branding and PR is measurement. Usually, companies have a number of activities ongoing at the same time - a comprehensive advertising schedule, marketing campaign, PR and social media campaigns. Each department is often fighting for a bigger slice of the budget so how do they prove their worth?

Often, qualitative research before and after a campaign is the only way to know if your particular communication tool of choice is pulling its weight. That's why we're all slaves to website traffic, click throughs and referrals these days.

I set up my blog and twitter around the same time (with my addiction to Quora following soon after) and it's really been a revalation how these things feed into each other. The stats and analysis you get on even the most basic of social media tools is fantastic - where are your visitors clicking through from, which are your most popular posts and what topics get the most traction with visitors.

I'm a little bit too new at this to go showing my hand but I'm very happy to see people DO click through on my twitter links and that I was right - Quora is driving traffic to my blog. One amateur blogger does not a complete research report make but I'll be watching my stats counter with an eagle eye from now on.

Look before you tweet

The ubiquitous nature of social media has an obvious effect on where we go to for our news updates. With increasingly powerful smartphones, anyone can be an amateur news reporter and deliver eye witness reports, photos, videos and real time updates to their online network.

Mainstream media has to keep up with our changing expectations for how news is delivered, often with mixed results. Many journalists find interesting, quirky stories through social media trends. Take for example the story of the iPhone bug where the alarms were not adjusted when clocks changed to mark the end of British Summer Time.

Less impressive is the media's growing tendency to treat Twitter streams as a credible news source, quoting twitter users for 'reaction' and calling it quality journalism. There is a world difference between quoting a credible news source and using information from a source who hides behind an anonymous online avatar. Sooner or later, these lazy shortcuts will come back to bite you.

Don't believe me? Look at how ASOS sparked a twitter frenzy when they declared a 'street style shooting' on Oxford Street where they were filming their new ad. Before long, the story became 'shooting on Oxford Street'. A sensible Sky News reporter eventually cleared up the matter by calling the Police to clarify the situation, but not before several national news sources picked up on the story.

Think before you retweet or you could end up being a lazy hack or reckless retweeter's source, whether you want to be or not.

Friends close, Enemies on your Twitter feed

The best thing about social media is that there's so much of it out there - the good, the bad and the just plain cringeworthy.

Seen a Facebook page where every post gets a chorus of comments? Look at what works and add it to your own social media strategy. Or how about that Twitter campaign that's getting traction for all the wrong reasons? Watch and learn people...

It's all about keeping up with the Joneses these days. The good news is you don't have to spy over the garden fence to catch a glimpse. It's all there, plain as day on the company blog, in Facebook status updates, Twitter streams and on LinkedIn.

Go ahead, it's not spying. They WANT you to look!

Keeping LinkedIn current

For me at least, my Facebook profile is for personal use while I tend to use the rest of my social networks for work. Twitter is for keeping up with professional contacts and the latest news and I'm getting a lot out of Quora's discussions and recommendations.

So, what about LinkedIn, the business-oriented social networking site? I set up my profile years ago with the most basic of details and ignored the updates regularly appearing in my email inbox. I hadn't even bothered to update my career progression or a move to London and a new job, let alone get involved in new group discussions.

So, I've applied some of the recommendations I found online - filling out all my promotions and job changes, updating my interests and preferences, joining groups and discussions and accepting some long overdue requests and recommendations from LinkedIn. The result? I've already added a number of new contacts to my network and have already seen significantly more traffic on my page. I've learned my lesson, LinkedIn all the way.

Automated feeds - what's next? Twitbook?

There are so many applications now available to feed your RSS stream into twitter or to automatically link your blog to your Facebook page. No point in doing the same job twice I agree but it does irk me when a company I follow on twitter doesn't bother to take the time to think before they post.

Look at a company's Facebook page - are they short, sharp company focused posts? Or are they open ended questions looking for fans and friends to engage and comment? If it's the former, they probably use an automatic feed but if it's the latter, they most likely took the time to engage with their social media audience.

Facebook pages where all the postings are less than Twitter's 140 character limit are a dead giveaway. How else can you tell? Zero comments, likes or page suggestions usually.

Similarly, look at news services that automatically post their headlines to Twitter. The headline often trails off mid sentence, or worse, mid word. Companies who do this might think they come across as extremely media savvy, but all it says to me is that engaging with their key publics through social media is low on their list of priorities.

Imitation: Flattery or Fakery?

Does the old adage about imitation being the sincerest form of flattery apply in the social media sphere?

On one hand, we measure the success of social media campaigns in retweets and others posting links to our content. On the other side of the argument, look back to the fierce row that errupted on twiter when a group comedians accused TV presenter Keith Chegwin of stealing jokes and passing them off as his own to see that plagiarism and ownership are still issues in social media.

Wheteher or not  imitation can be called a 'sincere' form of flattery, you know you're something of a big deal when someone has gone to the bother of parodying your creation. Quora parody Cwera was one of the hot topic doing the rounds on twitter last week. Tom Scott got there first, poking fun at the impending tsunami of spam that Quora is likely to become as it grows while most of us were still scratching our heads trying to work out how exactly to make the most of our brand new Quora profiles.

So yes, imitation is flattering when it comes to social media. As long as you remember to credit your sources with a hashtag reference.

Much ado about Quora

With the New Year comes a whole new wave of exciting possibilities for social media in 2011. We've had the first marriage proposal on deal-of-the-day website Groupon, Facebook is overtaking Google as the most visited web page and with newcomers such as Instagr.am, FourSquare and WhatsApp there's a steady stream of engaging ways to interact with our online network.

One of the most interesting topics trending on Twitter right now is Quora, the new questions and answers service on the block. The site is estimated to have half a million registered users and is getting a huge amount of media buzz thanks to $11 million in Series A funding, great SEO capabilities, some heavy-hitting early adopters and glowing recommendations from some major players in the social media industry.

What appeals to me about Quora is that users have to give their full name so there's no hiding behind an online moniker. The site is easy to navigate and has a 'follow' option similar to Facebook making it easy to customize and highly personal. Quality is key to the Quora experience and with a straighforward ranking system the most popular answers to most viewed questions are clear.

With half a million registered users already signed up, the challenge for Quora is maintaining this quality as it expands. Right now there are none of the spam type responses you see with Yahoo Answers which, coincidentally, is still the most popular Q&A website around by a long shot. Now, just for kicks, I'm off ask Quora just what it has to say about that.

Too lazy for location aware apps

I still have my doubts about location aware apps such as FourSquare and Facebook Places. I don't feel the need to tell my online network of friends where I am - the important ones who want to hear where I've been are usually with me! Perhaps I'm a bit old fashioned but I still think it's rude to constantly have a mobile phone out when I'm with other people and becoming 'mayor' of a favourite bar, coffee shop, restaurant or shop is not quite incentive enough.

I was also interested to read Alan Wolk's recent post on The Toad Stool - http://bit.ly/eUN4js - querying if location based services such as FourSquare check need to be real time. While today's smartphones don't have the battery power to have always on GPS to track movement to allow 'check in' at a later stage of the day, I think there must be a way to use these location based apps to better advantage for businesses and personal users.

I see the benefit of localised applications for recommendations and special offers from a trusted network of users who gain credibility through recommendations and suggestions but telling everyone where I am every minute of every day is just plain over sharing.

I'm a late adopter to all social media trends - Hotmail IM, Bebo, Facebook, Gmail chat and Twitter so far. Figures put the number of users between 5 and 8% of adults online but after much hype in 2010, this is expected to jump significantly in 2011. Until the squirrel living out my back garden learns how to use a smartphone and gets on to FourSquare to become Mayor of my London flat, I'm still queen of my castle and that's enough for me.