The “mummies on the bus go chatter, chatter, chatter” sound familiar?

Research released from Neilsen in the UK shows that women (over 35) are the fastest growing demongraphic on sites like Twitter and MySpace as reported by The Times:

Figures gathered for The Times by Nielsen, the market research firm, show that just over half of all social-networking users in the UK are women. But almost 59 per cent of females “consume the content” of these sites — a jump of almost 10 per cent since last year.

Not surprising really is it? Social networks are merely just another social arena, so it was only time before women caught up with the latest place to have a good chat and gossip.

But what does this mean from a marketing and corporate communication perspective?

Mommy Bloggers have long been on the radar as Darren Rowse (@problogger) wrote some time ago about Five Reasons why Mom Blogs are the Blogs to watch.

Corporates must be careful though: Nestle recently tapped into this influential group of women only to have it backfire on them according to an article in The Age last week.

Only a miniscule 64 PR companies participated in the UK’s PR Week digital survey released yesterday which showed the majority of clients (83%) are now expecting a digital element to PR campaigns, but what was also interesting was the range of budgets for those highlighted as the best campaigns - they ranged from ‘no direct costs’ for the Henry VIII Twitter campaign using @IamHenryVIII to almost $300,000 for Cadbury’s Red Licquorice Allsorts love story using Facebook.

A panel of experts from agency and client side highlighted what they thought were some of the best UK digital campaigns here.

We’d love to hear your thoughts on how this compares here in Australia? Is digital now expected in a PR campaign or it still distanced from PR efforts?

Everyone in the world has heard about the best job in the world’ by Queensland Tourism but what do you think is the best digital PR campaign in Australia so far?

I am very much looking forward to speaking at the Sales & Marketing in Travel European Summit in Prague next month ( details ).

I am going to be talking about how travel organisations can realise value from Corporate Social Networks. Specifically we’re going to look at how you can  develop a social media strategy, and part of that is going to include building an active listening plan.

As per our post to the Social Media In Travel LinkedIn discussion group, we’re looking for a couple of volunteer organisations actually whose brand / profile / market place we can look at live ( a bit like this example ) during the event.

Anyone like to volunteer their company or specfic idea / market?  Comment us below if you’re interested.  See you in Prague.

We were talking to a potential client yesterday about a b2c social campaign, and the Moonfruit Twitter campaign was one of the examples we discussed. This reminded me that at the time we did a quick social snapshot of the buzz the campaign generated, and thought it would be cool to share.

Full story here on mashable (under the title “Twitter Promotion done right” ) if you missed it. The basic premise was that if you tweeted #moonfruit, you had the chance to win one of 10 Macbooks. As you can see by the number of mentions (until Twitter somewhat contentiously pulled it as a trending topic, see Moonfruit’s own blog here ) this was -whatever your view on the rightness / wrongness - a very cute savvy campaign,  generating over 100,00 conversations (or at least, tweets)  over a couple of days.  The tag cloud, right, shows mentions for squarespace, who ran a similar, earlier campaign.

Interesting article in The Age today claiming Facebook will be merely a footnote in social networking’s history and for those who doubt the impact social networking will have, those who are are “just waiting for this social media fad to pass” and “making sure it proves itself before we get involved”, this video I saw on Craig Wilson’s post this morning about this video from Socialnomics might be of interest (nb sources aren’t quoted but maybe they are in the book?).

It’s quite long so if you don’t make it to the end, here’s some highlighted stats:

Radio took 38 years to reach 50 million listeners

TV took 13 years to reach 50 million viewers

Internet took 4 years to reach 50 million users

Facebook in 9 months added 100 million users

25% of search results for the world’s top 20 brands are links to user-generated content

>200 million blogs / 34% post opinions about brands / 78% consumers trust peer recomedations / 14% trust advertising

more than 1.5 milion pieces of content (web links, blog posts, news stories etc) are uploaded to Facebook daily

I recently spoke at the British Library on the subject of developing a social media strategy with a focus on social recruiting for the social media in recruitment event

Thanks to those of you who attended the event and participated in the debate afterward.

For those who didn’t I include a copy of the pres below, outlining our 10 x point plan.

It doesn’t mean a great deal without the accompanying commentary, so here is are the key points of nos 1-5.  The rest will follow next week….

1. Are you ready?

In his excellent blog, The CounterIntuitive CEO (a must read for anyone in management) Colony (Forrester CEO) equates social media to sex : i.e. you can read about it as much as you want, but it’s only when you start doing it that you actually get it.

This is sound advice.  Taking it one step further, for us, social media isn’t about having a Facebook fan page or a twitter account; there is way too much tokenism / box ticking right now in this space.  The organisations that are really benefiting from web 2.0/ social utilities are embracing the values that underpin them - transparency, openness, authenticity, conversation. If your organisation isn’t really ready to act in this way, then you’re not really ready.

2. Listening

We’ve written lots of post on this before, and indeed social media monitoring / online reputation management is a key part of the Carve proposition.  We basically used a slide showing 2 ears and 1 mouth as a reminder that it’s critical to listen first. Who is saying what (customers, employees, past employees, potential employees, partners, etc), Where are they saying it (Facebook, forums, blogs, niche communities, etc) and What are they saying? Typically we recommend a full social media audit (about which Jeremiah Owyang blogged recently) if you’re serious about understanding you and your competitors corporate social networking environment.

3. Identify objectives

What do you want to achieve? Get more customers? Get closer to your customers? Give them a better service [think crowd-sourced CRM. If you've no idea what that means look at http://twitter.com/comcastcares then get in contact] In corporate recruitment it might be to attract the top graduates, develop external talent communities for your pipeline;  for recruiters it might mean finding new ways of engaging passive talent,  offering new services to your clients, etc.
Sounds obvious, but without it you’re not building a strategy.

4. Choose your platforms; Decide what you’re going to say

Often your business might want to do everything:  Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Xing,  (Europe’s leading business network if you’re not in the know) YouTube,  a private Ning community… all, you know, like, yesterday.  We advise that (following points 2 and 3) you identify the key platforms for your audiences and make them fly first.

Equally important is - seriously - what the heck are you going to say? There must be a million blogs, twitter accounts, Facebook pages and LinkedIn groups all set up - and all saying nothing. What is going to be your USP? What reason are people going to want to read you / retweet you / quote you / engage you in conversation?
Your organisations thing might be perhaps thought leadership… or the best insight into the market.. or using these tools to encourage peer to peer communities... or to give the deepest insight to the latest jobs… or to help your customers become prosumers and engage in your R&D process… or.. well you get the idea.

A good touch point is the 3C’s - community, content and conversation (as picked up by Recruiter in fact who covered our presentation )

5. Develop a Roadmap, build a team

Having chosen your platform, you need a roadmap for that platform, which a beginning, an end and attendant milestones / KPIs along the way. Here for nothing is a version we’ve developed for LinkedIn from the perspective of  a corporate recruiting environment.

Then build a team.
Do you know the first thing we strive to do when engaged to help an organisation or recruitment firm develop a social media /  corporate social networking strategy? Its to identify an internal champion - someone who really is passionate about dialogue, your customers.  They don’t need to be an expert on Facebook - but they do need to be able to enthuse their co-workers about the whys / wheres / hows of doing this. Secondly, you’ll need someone from your management team involved.   Get corporate comms on board, HR, legal.  And (perhaps) hire yourself a Twinten.

Points 6-10will follow next week. Please find the embedded presentation below.

The FT just published a good article on how brands market themselves on Twitter. The article notably compares how Twitter created a hugely successful viral campaign for KFC’s new grilled chicken, whilst Habitat is still suffering from the backlash to its “#MOUSAVI Join the database for free to win a £1,000 gift card” campaign. To be fair though, the KFC campaign was to get Oprah Winfrey to direct viewers of her show to a web page with a coupon for a free KFC meal. And what happened then? People spread the news furiously on the Twitterverse, bumping KFC to the top trending topic at the time. More than demonstrating KFC’s proficiency in marketing itself on social networks, I think the story here is really about the potential that Twitter - amongst other social networks - shows for brands who utilise the site in the right way.

As Twitter continues its amazing growth, more and more brands are jumping on the ‘Twitter bandwagon’. And whilst it’s all good brands now realise they can’t ignore social networks and have to find a way to work with them, it’s all the more crucial they think long and hard how they’re going to do it. The top down approach: ‘let me evangelise you about my brand’ isn’t working in a web 2.0 environment. If brands don’t start by listening to their customers first and foremost, there is absolutely no way they are going to be able to engage in a conversation the way these customers want to nowadays. Make sense?

We hear more and more about companies hiring ‘twinterns’ - one of these elusive Gen Y that live and breathe social media like no one above the age of 25 can really pretend to. Great step I think, if only for the educational process for c-level managers, as demonstrated by the story of 15-year old Matthew Robson, the Morgan Stanley intern last week. Unfortunately, ‘twinterns’ not managed properly can lead to the Habitat disastrous story.  As Forrester’s Jeremiah Owyang tweeted yesterday (@jowyang):

Spoke to a social media strategist at large tech company. Some brands give strategy to interns (native to social) but there are dangers

Interns, while creative, heavy in social, and not ’soiled’ from corporate culture are great at tactics –but may not know business side

I’ve heard from a few brands where energetic bright eyed interns are paired up with slower seasoned executives –to teach each other

Food for thought, surely?

We’re very pleased to have been recently appointed to devise the social media / search marketing strategy for http://www.UnionView.com

UnionView.com presents completely free independent film footage of all the top Universities in the UK, with insight into accommodation, courses, location, student union, academia and more - a university guide for the 21st century.

The beautiful entry page for your delectation below - but check out the site and let us know what you think. More soon.

In answer to a question we were asked by a client recently, I found an interesting article in Tech Guardian that pulls together some of the reseach we’ve read - and our findings - about contributors / consumers of content in online communities.

The Guardian article, under the headline “The 1% rule“ records the oft repeated mantra that “..if you get a group of 100 people online then one will create content, 10 will “interact” with it (commenting or offering improvements) and the other 89 will just view it.”

Antony Mayfield on his Open blog (http://open.typepad.com/open) a while back looked at YouTube and worked out the “creator to consumer” ratio at just 0.5%

What about Wikipedia? As the Guardian reports from the Church of the Customer blog (http://customerevangelists.typepad.com/blog/).
“..50% of all Wikipedia article edits are done by 0.7% of users, and more than 70% of all articles have been written by just 1.8% of all users”.

Our experience in web 2.0 technologies (our clients’ communities and blogs for examples) is that typically only 1-5% actively participate (by posting comments) - so 99-95 people in every 100 just consume and pass on by. However, the participation figure goes up to 10-15% if there is already 2 or more comments.

Is this is because the blogs that attract comment contain more compelling / note-worthy content? Or because viewers of already-commented-upon-content realise that this is a conversation that they’re actually invited to participate in?

Probably a bit of both.

Augmenting our successful Blog Relations solutions, we’re now able to offer real-time social media analtytics and alerts.

Using our own bespoke methodologies coupled with tools like Radian 6, we track conversations about your organisation in social spaces and online communities. By tracking dialogue around your products, brand names, executive team, competitors, and industry sectors, we help define:

� What is being said about your brand and products, and the markets in which you work
� Sales opportunities
� Reputation threats
� Brand penetration, campaign �buzz�
� Competitor perception and activity
� Investment community dialogue
� What the market thinks of you as en employer
� What existing and current employees are saying about you

As well as covering blogs, articles, comments, news, reviews and forums, we track tags. Tagging is the way in which videos are described on YouTube.com, social bookmarks are categorised on the likes of delicious.com, presentations on slideshare.net, documents on scribd.com, photos on flickr.com and so on. Tag tracking therefore give us real-time, granular insight into the multiple channels in which people are discussing / engaging with your brand in the web 2.0 world.

A couple of screen shots below of some of the outputs we get - one showing an overview of the Online Recruitment market, one of conversations tracking the US Presidential race. Full details to follow on our new website, but get in contact today if you’d like us to run a free preliminary assessment: reputation@carveconsulting.com