Archive for the ‘social media’ Category

Our colleagues over at RFI Studios in New York have put together a useful little tutorial on the latest social network to be stirring up (p)interest.

So I nicked shared it.

I hope it is useful.

Amid all the discussion over the past few days about search and social referral traffic, I also spotted an interesting piece from Econsultancy showing the site’s growing role as a referral source (client Experian hat tip here) for retailers.

Monetate has also put together an infographic pulling together the latest stats on Pinterest’s journey to become a “social commerce game changer” (see below).

I am playing around with it myself at the moment and from a PR/brand perspective it seems to be more about creating interest through the mindset of a brand persona and then curating content that supports that persona, rather than engaging around product or comms content. But like all social networks, it needs to be brought back into context - what are you trying to achieve, who’s your audience and what do they want?

Get an account and start exploring.

Firstly a disclosure: I have been a Flickr member since 2004, I used to work on European PR for Flickr during my time at Yahoo!. Anyway, how that I’ve got that out of the way I can crack on with the post.

What is Flickr?

Flickr describes itself thus:

Flickr - almost certainly the best online photo management and sharing application in the world - has two main goals:

1. We want to help people make their photos available to the people who matter to them.
Maybe they want to keep a blog of moments captured on their cameraphone, or maybe they want to show off their best pictures or video to the whole world in a bid for web celebrity. Or maybe they want to securely and privately share photos of their kids with their family across the country. Flickr makes all these things possible and more!

To do this, we want to get photos and video into and out of the system in as many ways as we can: from the web, from mobile devices, from the users’ home computers and from whatever software they are using to manage their content. And we want to be able to push them out in as many ways as possible: on the Flickr website, in RSS feeds, by email, by posting to outside blogs or ways we haven’t thought of yet. What else are we going to use those smart refrigerators for?
2. We want to enable new ways of organizing photos and video.
Once you make the switch to digital, it is all too easy to get overwhelmed with the sheer number of photos you take or videos you shoot with that itchy trigger finger. Albums, the principal way people go about organizing things today, are great — until you get to 20 or 30 or 50 of them. They worked in the days of getting rolls of film developed, but the “album” metaphor is in desperate need of a Florida condo and full retirement.

Part of the solution is to make the process of organizing photos or videos collaborative. In Flickr, you can give your friends, family, and other contacts permission to organize your stuff - not just to add comments, but also notes and tags. People like to ooh and ahh, laugh and cry, make wisecracks when sharing photos and videos. Why not give them the ability to do this when they look at them over the internet? And as all this info accretes as metadata, you can find things so much easier later on, since all this info is also searchable.

In terms of numbers:

• 51 million registered users
• 80 million unique users per month
• 3 million plus geo-tagged photographs
• By 2008, Flickr contained some 2.4 billion photographs

But that’s not as big as Facebook, why should I care about Flickr?

The community

Not all unique users are created equal and flickr manages to attract creative types in far greater numbers than ‘me and my mates after 16 pints’ pictures that tend to appear on Facebook. The Flickr community has dune a good job in self-policing against conduct not in keeping with the ethos of the site. These creative types have also advocated the use of flickr by commercial and non-commercial organisations, you can find The Whitehouse, 10 Downing Street and the Smithsonian Institute. So you have a community known for high quality images, this means that this is a trusted source for image search by Google and Bing - making it ideal for search engine optimisation by putting back-links in picture metadata.

It’s creative user base has also attracted bloggers (I use Flickr myself for image hosting on my personal blog). So it is an ideal way of sharing pictures as a kind of online press room for photography.

The technology

The core thinking behind Flickr was to make it open and extendable, so the company has been very good at providing ways of sharing and using images via an API. There is an eco-system of applications out there that do all manner of photo-related things including pulling these pictures into Facebook if you want.

Flickr also embraced location-aware services way before Twitter and Foursquare were conceived by their creators. The geo-tagged information on photographs in Flickr allows Google to use these pictures on their mapping service - providing a PR opportunity for retailers, hotels, spas and restaurants.

Flickr makes it easy to search its photo archive, so brands can use it as a sort of desk social anthropology by getting some idea from the images how their products or services are perceived and used. For example here is a search that I did on the Flickr brand itself.

The creative commons

Flickr has championed the use of creative commons licences, which help facilitate the distribution of content but allowing the author to get credit, options include restricting use to non-commercial uses and controlling the degree of alterations that may occur to the works. This has made it ideal for bloggers looking for suitable images and presenters looking for interesting visual cues.

International usage

If you are doing international campaign Flickr has greater potential reach than Facebook simply because it isn’t blocked in China. The service is available in a range of languages from German to Vietnamese, making it an ideal platform for use in global campaigns.

If you’d like to know more about how you could take advantage of Flickr for your business as part of a wider digital strategy, drop us a line and let’s do coffee.

Our client Experian put out a press release this morning which looked at time spent on Facebook across a basket of eight countries:

• Singapore
• New Zealand
• Australia
• UK
• US
• France
• India
• Brazil

What I found most interesting about the results was that the UK came mid-table  in terms of the average time spent on Facebook based on data from August 2011, but came bottom of the table in terms of market penetration of social networks in general.  This indicated to me that brands need to work harder to grab the available attention of UK consumers than their peers in other countries.

We’ve been working with the Meningitis Research Foundation to promote their campaign for the adoption of a Meningitis B vaccine as soon as it is available. They have launched this video to launch their campaign during Meningitis Awareness week which runs from today through to the 25th.

Watch the video, share it with anyone who you think would be interested and please go to meningitis.org/sign to make your name count.

This is cross-posted from my personal blog. The quote comes from the sole tweet left on the Twitter micro-blog account of LulzSec member Topiary.

It also signals the likely start of something significant. Of the Anonymous and LulzSec suspects arrested by the UK authorities, they all share common traits:

• Middle-class
• Intelligent
• Young

In previous generations, these would have been the followers of Marx and Engels, formed a punk band, they would have joined the International Brigade in Spain, set up a squat / commune or marched across China with the Red Army.

Ideologies aren’t beaten with criminal prosecutions or laws on internet behaviour; but with alternative better ideas. The internet in the West has a number of ideological tectonic plates butting up against each other. Some of these spring out of western values focused on the individual and existentialism, rather than the Confucian value system that permeate East Asian societies:

This butting of ideological tectonic plates is similar to the challenges that pioneers of the Old West faced in a maturing United States. The key difference is that these digital desperadoes are not constrained by physical space and their numbers can be easily replenished.

Whilst the Old West was civilised; the civilising process also penalised many of the big business interests including the likes of Standard Oil, Northern Securities Company (railways) and American Tobacco Company with the Sherman Antitrust Act, and the Morgan family’s banks with the Glass–Steagall Act later on.

I suspect that things are going to get a lot worse for all parties involved throughout the Western world before they get better.

This is cross-posted from my personal blog. I’ve lurked on Google+ as the network hadn’t grown big enough for me to gain much use out of it. And then I started to receive updates from people I vaguely knew directly to my work email address. Basically spam. So I decided to run a trial update myself on the service to understand how this would have happened.

Here is a screenshot of the update that I created. I could see from drafting my update what the problem was, I’ve taken a detailed screen grab of the area just above Peter Cashmore’s head

This box is ticked by default, I guess Google thinks that this is the equivalent of HoTMaiL’s original viral signature: get your private, free email from Hotmail. However it is interesting to note that even early adopters ignore the tickboxes.

This is cross-posted from my personal blog: I was traveling back to London and stopped at Corley service, south of Birmingham on the M6 motorway. After stretching my legs and getting something to eat I checked in on Foursquare.

Here is a screen shot of what I saw. The comment put on there eight days earlier shows a mentality that would have been familiar to the those involved in the hacking community and homebrew computer building back in the day.

Discover new knowledge, and then share how you did it with other people. The real question is, how many meals did Waitrose sell that cost one of the restaurants on site a sale? The key takeout for retailers is that they cannot now afford to ignore location check-ins at their own venue and nearby.

This was originally posted on my personal blog. I have been giving a little thought to Color the location aware picture sharing application that launched recently. My initial reaction was to be impressed by the kind of technologies that the development team had squeezed into it. It is almost magical. Particularly the use of light and sound to guestimate proximity reminded me of Bump Technologies authentication work. So if this iteration doesn’t work out they have the funding and the smarts to do a pivot or two.

What I haven’t worked yet is how it fits into people’s lives. I suspect in its current form that this may need some work as early adopters have already been hacking the location to better pair with friends rather than strangers. I don’t think that its a nail in Flickr’s coffin as it is a different social context to Flickr in terms of the type of sharing and the type of pictures.

I was reading an interesting article from Charlotte McEleny this afternoon about the next steps for social commerce and it got me thinking about my general attitude to shopping online. With the proliferation of retailers embracing social commerce it seems more of a norm than a rarity when you go onto an online store and can interact with others, read reviews and share experiences etc. I would be interested to know however how many of us feel that social commerce really does make a difference to our shopping habits? At the end of the day, yes I read reviews for products online but I will still send an email round the girls at work or to my mum to get a final opinion before I buy. In fact I’m not sure I find the reviews online massively helpful at all - just confusing – as they all tend to contradict each other and I know far too little about these people to know if their intent in buying matches mine and therefore if our opinion on the product will be the same. Do you trust the views of a complete stranger when making a decision to buy or not to buy?

As Charlotte points out, what is missing in social commerce of today ‘is a human element’ – ‘If we can now watch The X Factor or The Only Way Is Essex together online and comment and discuss what’s going on live, why can’t I take my friends shopping?’. We need more than just a static review on a site – we need proper interaction. Recognising this, Dell’s global VP of online Manish Mehta told new media age last year that the company wanted to take the social aspects of high street shopping and recreate them online by letting people interact and have discussions in real time when buying products from Dell’s website.

Perhaps this is also where the new Facebook shops will prove their worth? One of the first companies to announce a fully transactional Facebook shop was Asos in January. With its new application users will be able to buy directly from a brand without leaving the ultimate online social destination that is Facebook.

So what do you all think? Have you been taken in by social commerce or are you waiting for other retailers like Dell to push the technology even further? Do reviews help or hinder your purchase decision? Any and all thoughts appreciated…..