State of UK Social Media

This is a great video illustrating social media usage in the UK..

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Interesting image illustrating the world of Facebook today.

Source: Visual Economics

Twitter is now a mainstay for events – it is far too easy to find yourself tweeting away and tuning in to the hashtag and getting involved in conversations across the room with people you have never met. In fact it is often useful to monitor tweets for events that I am not even at.

When organising events, one of the requirements today has to bedisplaying those very tweets. Not only do they present live feedback of the event; it also acts as a great prompt for more tweeting and offline conversations. In fact at recent Lyris, I had that exact requirement. I wasn’t really happy with using one of the many Twitter clients out there like Tweetdeck or Seesmic Desktop – they are great outbound tools but not ideal for displaying tweets on a large LCD screen and grabbing attention.

There are several tools out there made specifically for events. They all display the tweets in a way that encourages attention, whilst some also allow moderation – either automatically or with manual intervention.

The tools I looked at recently were:

Visible Tweets
This is as simple a tool as you can get. Go to the website; type in a hashtag and have all tweets – updated in realtime – presented to you in a visually attractive way. Given the simplicity and audience this was the tool I went with. For those who want some added complexity – it also supports Twitter’s search operators so you can refine further by date; sender etc. You can also choose from 3 different animations; though for an event I tend to veer towards the “Rotation” style.

Twitterfall
Not quite as sexy as Visible Tweets; there are plenty more options with this tool. Again you can use a hashtag and/or use Twitter search operators; but in addition you can exclude keywords; change the speed of the animation; exclude retweets and even restrict by location (though I assume that would require everyone tweeting to share their location).

Twubs
Twubs has a fully fledged conference tool – having live moderation as well as a conference display view similar in style to Twitterfall though a cleaner design. It also has the ability to manage question and answer sessions for panels/moderators. Currently it is manual to set up (you have to fill out a request form) and it is currently free whilst in beta.

Wiffiti

I first saw Wiffiti (or something similar!) at a Forrester event recently in London. It definitely grabs attention with the movement of tweets and the automatic display of suitably tagged images from Flickr. It is really easy to setup and there is automatic moderation available so you can choose to show only G or R rated content. Compared to the other platforms; Wiffiti has a lot of functionality – allowing users to send messages direct to the screen using SMS as well as Twitter/Flickr. There is also some reporting available showing total interactions, number of unique users and location based information though I have not seen the actual reporting interface.

In the end I went with visibletweets.com and got plenty of positive feedback from the audience. It was quick and simple though it would be nice to get some level of reporting after. I do like Wiffiti as well though other than the visuals and the reporting I dont really need the additional functionality today – at the time, setup felt more complex but looking at it now it seems much simpler. As a result I might use that next time.

Last month I was invited to participate in a VideoEgg Think Tank about Social Media marketing strategies around the World Cup. It turned out to be a really surprising and thought provoking discussion.

Far too often social media conversations centre on the hype around how it is set to conquer the world of marketing and how it is going to signal the death knell of every other channel. It was nice to have a conversation around how it plays in the wider mix.

So news flash – social media is important but other channels still have their purpose. It all depends on the requirements. Social Media will become/already is a key channel in marketing – just thinking about the basics:

1. Social Media is very much about digital conversations. Bringing those offline conversations that were already happening into the digital world. Lack of conversation about a brand can mean indifference in your target markets. As the old saying goes..  the only thing worse than negative press is no press.

2. Not participating in conversations (in an engaging and relevant way etc) can mean you are only reactive in the social media space – that usually means dealing with something negative.

So what that means is whilst hopefully you already have a core conversation you can have with your loyal followers; you almost certainly want to have something more to talk about. There is nothing like a World Cup year to help with that right? Well sure – but before continuing it is worth pointing out that you really should only be using it directly if there is a fit with your brand. Maybe I am jaded but World Cup sponsorships on their own strike me as a waste of money. It would be better if the sponsoring brands built up more of a story around why they are involved with the World Cup as opposed to just a sponsor. I am not sure I could tell you the various sponsors after the World Cup with the possible exception of Nike. Oh no hang on. They are not actually a sponsor. It is Adidas!  If there is any recent research around sponsorships of big events I would be interested in seeing them.

Anyhow, getting back on track, the World Cup generates conversations and plenty of them. One thing we all agreed on in the discussion – interrupting World Cup conversations is not a good idea. The trick is to identify something that will generate conversations on their own. One great example was the live TV ads that are planned on ITV during the World Cup – I am sure those will generate conversations. One advert that has already generated conversations – albeit for the wrong reasons – was the Nike ad which ITV cut short.

That was one of the key takeaways from the morning – using other channels to help facilitate or create conversations is an excellent way to generate coverage for your brand and hopefully in the process create more brand advocates in the process.

Just to be clear – I don’t mean using things like football hoardings saying “follow <insert brand here> on Twitter”. I mean seriously..

Get your creative hats on.. and thanks again to the guys at VideoEgg.

Related articles:

• ITV investigates Nike ad gaffe (guardian.co.uk)
• Nike’s Awesome World Cup Ad Shows Dwindling Power of “Official” Sports Sponsorships (bnet.com)

The world of marketing is getting more complex rather than less as each day goes by. New channels, more data and now more devices. All these different size screens (mobile, tablet, desktop) may be great for the user (and Apple’s piggy bank) but its a bit of a disaster for resource constrained marketers.

With that said – this post by the guys over at STYLECampaign will reduce some of your time if you are sending a decent chunk of emails to people who read your email on an iphone.

Some of the things looked at include:

1. understanding zoom and sizing

2. Customising the look and feel of the email by device

3. font scaling

There are 2 parts – read them both in full here and here.

I can see the use of device specific templates being something that will be needed more and more in the future. The trick is going to be to do so in a cost effective way.