Sure data is all good and well but unless you have someone with half a brain who can process that data and tell you why this spike in conversation took place it’s pretty much useless – as useless as giving a caveman a microwave.

I am sure there are loads of brands out there monitoring social channels but not doing anything with the data they get and that’s the most important bit. If you are listening that’s great – now use that information to improve your product or service.

I was running a social media workshop with the marketing team of a well-known global brand the other day and they were saying that the most senior person in their business was regularly asking: “That’s great but where is the money?” Now for a start I do think that is a bit callous. However, let’s be honest here that’s what every business really wants – sales. Social media can be fun, help with traffic and it’s a great form of direct communication with your customers but at the end of the day the client wants to see an impact on their sales.

I have been working for another client for several months now writing and engaging on various social networks and they have regularly asked me about direct sales from social media and often I had to show them the data from the latest campaign but I did struggle to show direct sales from social media. To be honest I helped the client begin from a standing start and although they regularly acknowledged that their website’s traffic had increased by more than 300% and the most popular section of their website was their blog – the client still wanted to know the direct sales impact from running a social media campaign.

Personally, I think this is an education process for us all working in this industry. Social media is about helping the sales process but it’s far, far more than that. It has many more benefits than most other forms of marketing – don’t get me wrong I am not saying it’s not the holy grail to business success but if its executed beautifully and integrated properly with a media relations, advertising and direct mail campaign it can be hugely effective. Thankfully the client I am referring to got a £10,000 sales enquiry last week off the back of a blog post, and the client told me personally, which was nice to hear. I suppose I am saying it can take time to educate but we should all try to do our best.

So for one last time, social media isn’t about direct sales, it’s about building relationships. However, if you build strong relationships the money will eventually follow because people buy from people they like.

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“According to data from Veronis Suhler Stevenson (VSS), a private-equity firm, spending on public relations in America grew by more than 4% in 2008 and nearly 3% in 2009 to $3.7 billion. That is remarkable when compared with other forms of marketing. Spending on advertising contracted by nearly 3% in 2008 and by 8% in the past year. PR’s position looks even rosier when word-of-mouth marketing, which includes services that PR firms often manage, such as outreach to bloggers, is included. Spending on such things increased by more than 10% in 2009.”

This is true I think a certain area of public relations is really starting to thrive and that is the digital PR sector. Three or four years ago when we started to speak to clients about social media it took me and my team about ten minutes to explain to them what a blog was and what it did – now everyone is looking for the next big social media tool to use. The tool of 2010 is without doubt Foursquare with people checking in and out all over the place leaving others who have never used it slightly bemused.

Every day we are seeing new digitial pr or social media specialists springing up, some with experience in public relations and a lot without. My good friend Jed Hallam mentioned it on his company’s blog today:

“I feel like social media is (in the UK, at least) in an odd state at the minute (maybe it’s just hit the trough of disillusionment or something) and I don’t think anyone quite knows what to do.

“Agencies don’t really seem to keep pace with audiences, some clients still see it as gimmicky, big traditional agencies like to hire ‘social media strategists’ to ‘sort out that internet stuff’… The list goes on.”

Jed’s right we are at a bit of cross roads now with social media because clients know what Facebook, Twitter, Xing and Linked-in are. I strongly believe these newcomers who have sprung up all over the place charging clients money to set up Facebook pages will drop off and we will be left with the good PR practitioners who know how to react properly in a crisis and how to use these tools to engage better with an audience and customers. I mean it’s all very well setting channels up when things are going smoothly and it’s all good fun but if something goes wrong and things spiral out of control it must be managed by a trained professional and that is a PR person.

The truth is PR people are often undervalued when compared with the big budgets of the advertising sector but now that the game has changed forever, I think that the perception of PR professionals will change too.

Do you think the game has changed?

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Is the video below the catchiest television advertisement ever? Even if it isn’t, it does appears to have done its job. Yell’s sales have increased by a huge 70% since this campaign started and needless to say it plans to carry it on. I have to admit it I can’t get the song out of my head after watching it just once.

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It’s true that the media has become accustom to reporting headline grabbing stories (that’s its job after all) and it’s rare you can open a paper without any new scary statistics being reported on the credit crunch – or should I say impending depression.

In truth the recession has been the hot topic for newspapers since October last year and, as of writing it still shows no evidence of slowing up in its domination of the headlines. The constant gloomy reminder of the financial problems in almost every area of business has caused us all to be a little more hesitant when spending our cash and this has in turn has helped to stop businesses spending their money and buying services from other businesses.

When customer numbers start to fall companies have to ‘batten down the hatches’ and make cut backs. Many of them choose to cut advertising and public relations budgets first. Whether this is right or wrong is another debate. However, if businesses do decide to stop advertising this esults in advertising revenues for the local newspapers and regional TV channels being drastically reduced.

Drew Benvie wrote an interesting post a while ago in which he discussed how during the week of the Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross saga, the state of the economy was no longer at the forefront of the nations mind, and as a result business improved on a national scale, but this soon fell back once the recession made it back onto the media agenda.

My local paper the Yorkshire Post is just one example of many regional newspapers which were once strong but are now going through tough times and making unfortunate cut backs. To be honest this is a real shame and my colleagues and I have visited the journalists several times recently to show our support on their picket line.

 Jon Sterling who writes the Real Estate blog, considers the fact that times and technology have now changed. How right he is? The internet and social media are certainly contributing to the newspapers decline, there is no doubt about that – we are all getting our news differently today than we did say ten or even five years ago.

Personally I think the newspapers should start focussing on some of the companies which are benefitting from the recession because they are out there. I was listening to a commentator on Radio 4 yesterday stating that a lot of insurance companies have made substantial sums from the crunch. Maybe if we had some positivity in the business media those all important advertising revenues would start to increase again and confidence would return.

What do you think? Is the media is contributing to its own demise?

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I was hugely impressed at how many people had attended the event in Germany to hear him speak. I like Mr Obama and I hope he wins as we need an inspirational leader in the white house after that buffoon. Come to think of it we could do with one at number 10 too.

However, aren’t we all just getting a little carried away with “Obamamania”? Yes he is young, charismatic, interesting and inspirational but he isn’t president yet.

He is certainly winning the battle of the headlines and his PR machine is grinding out results but the election polls still have them both much closer than we would dare to think.

John McCain is so worried about Obama’s media skills, he even made an advertisement implying that he is getting all the media attention. I have to agree with my colleague Sam Oakley that this was a major PR FAIL – why not just admit your losing the battle? Sam has amusingly compared Mr McCain to the late Kenneth Williams who played Julius Ceasar in Carry on Cleo when he said: “Infamy Infamy, they’ve all got it in for me.” 

Are we really going to see Mr Obarma in the white house? Or are we all getting carried away with wishful thinking?

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It seems that British advertisers are still lagging behind those of the US who have been exploiting social networking effectively. My post yesterday referred to me being approached and that was actually by a US company – so they may have a point that US companies are doing it more.

That said, we have been approached by several UK companies attempting outreach programmes recently and some have been done well and some not so well.

The new research has come from TNS. Brand Republic report’s in its article:

The survey, which polled senior management from blue-chip companies such as Sony, Diageo, GlaxoSmithKline and HP, revealed that nearly 50% of those polled in the US agreeing that social media must be grasped with urgency if brands are to keep ahead of the market, compared to just 18% in the UK.

Overseas managements also had a more sophisticated understanding of the social media phenomenon, with 32% of UK respondents saying that they are still at a “learning” stage, compared to a survey average of 18%.”

Apparently the lack of enthusiasm for social media stems from no boardroom support in this country. I must admit with the marketers we are meeting with at the moment there is still a slight reticence to use social media because people don’t understand it yet. However, once we go in and show them how it can work – if done correctly – they usually tend to say they will give it a whirl. And that’s all we can ask!

Also according to the research 36% of people cite a lack of skills among marketing teams and suppliers as the greatest barrier to implementation. This is also true as many people still don’t know how to use social media strategically although there are some good practitioners out there offering good advice if people look hard enough. 

I think Jim Nail, chief strategy and marketing officer at TNS Media Intelligence puts it best when he says: ” We are already seeing the damage done to brands who ignore negative publicity on networking sites — and with hundreds of thousands new subscribers signing up each day, this influence is only going to increase.”

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He reports: “It will reveal that all-important measure known as “the reach” achieved by publications by detailing both month-on-month and year-on-year figures for on-line and newsprint.

“The new “multi-platform monthly report” will also break out figures by geographical region; the UK, Republic of Ireland and other countries.

“The initiative follows requests from advertisers, agencies and media owners because it will undoubtedly introduce greater transparency. It’s long overdue, but I know that ABC has been working as hard as possible to bring it about. Some media companies dragged their heels, I’m afraid.”

I think this is interesting and it prompted a debate here at Wolfstar as to whether subscribers to the RSS feed, will or should be included too rather than just unique users and visits. A website can have a low number of visits one month but still have a huge number of subscribers who are all reading every post or article.

It is well documented that national and local newspaper circulation figures have been affected by the emergence of new media. On a local level here in Leeds, several of the Yorkshire Post’s business team have moved to a new venture called www.thebusinessdesk.com which is doing really well. Check out Seb’s post on it for more details. 

Richard Bailey is attending/hosting an event tonight entitled “Print is Dead”. However, I wonder if all these figures were added together in a detailed report if the title of the event would be altered to “Print is moving”.

Cross posted: Norton’s Notes

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I did the normal Internet research to see which is the best and Humax came out very highly as did the one I purchased.

I already knew the benefits of Sky Plus as a number of my friends had shown me their own systems – so I understood the basics. However, that said, I have to say that the Sharp TUR160HA (see picture) is a great piece of kit and really easy to use.

I thought it would be a major hassle setting it up, reading lengthy instructions, sumo wrestling my LCD but no, it was plug in and follow the on-screen instructions, everything else was fairly self explanatory.

I love watching films rather than normal television and it’s already changing the way I watch TV. No more sitting down in front of the telly on a Sunday with nothing to watch. Now I just go to my library section and I already have about eight top movies to choose from and that is quickly growing.

The Sharp TUR160HA features include:

1. Simultaneous two channel recording – whilst watching another!
2. A 160GB HDD providing up to 80 hours recording capacity
3. Series recording
4. An eight day Electronic Programme Guide.
5. Split Recording, and Multiple/Alternative Recording

I think this is a first class gadget and I am gladly going to endorse this to all of my friends and family. I think it’s time for a bit of word-of-mouth communication here.

If sharp are looking for someone to help with their presence in the online communities I would gladly help them out. I would love to work for a company who make great products. I am always saying to clients that we can do all the public relations and communicating in the world but if your product is fundamentally rubbish it’s going to be difficult.

Anyway if you are looking for a good, easy to use digital TV recorder this is a safe bet…

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Consumers across the globe are now actively using the popular social networking sites such as Myspace, Bebo, Facebook, Youtube to contact their friends and share content in the form of interesting music and amusing videos. However,  these same people, often become confused as to how social media can then be implemented in a professional/business campaign.

I recently held a meeting with a client who was very interested in what Wolfstar do, and they were equally interested in the analysis we could provide but most importantly they were interested in how we could save them money.

As we continue to show people the power of social media, we find ourselves more and more explaining that the technology is pretty much irrelevant now as we (the social media specialists) deal with that and the truth is editorial content is actually the key.

However, although most of our clients have been enthused by this advice, I have also noticed some apprehension as a small number of business people still see social media as an emerging market – similar to that of the dot.com boom in the 90s, which I was unlucky enough to be a part of. At that time I worked in an international public relations agency in London and we watched aghast as our team increased by 50% in two years as the senior directors gladly took the extra funds being invested to publicise the latest website to be launched, all of which were promising to have more than 10 million customers each. At the time we even asked ourselves who is actually going to log onto these web pages but this was all lead by technology and in the end it failed to deliver because we the consumers weren’t interested in the various sites content or we just couldn’t find them.

Social media is very different as this is a fundamental shift in society. It’s true that technology has aided this shift but this is all about how people are now interacting.

We used to read a newspaper or more recently log on a website to get the latest news and information we required. Now we are sharing content between each other whether its amusing videos or useful tips on how to start a new business – people don’t have to type a URL in to find you anymore – if you use social media correctly and effectively, customers and opportunities will come to you and they will want to work with you because your content is what they were actually looking for.

I think it’s right for many people to assume that this is still an emerging market but with more than 70 Million blogs and 120,000 being created every day it’s certainly pretty well established too. In fact, on Monday blogs actually celebrated their 10th birthday. People have been blogging for a decade about everything from serious business topics through to what they cooked for dinner last night.

As public relations practitioners it’s now time for us to help show the technophobes in business that this isn’t about new technologies anymore this is entirely about good quality content and using it correctly.

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Anyway, we have been contacted by Skype and told about a new  competition where you can get your mucky paws on a free one yourself – all through the world of social media.

The guys over at 3mobilebuzz are running a competition with the winner of this contest getting three 3 Skype phones, second place gets two and third place gets one.

All you need to do to enter is tell 3 why you want to win a 3 Skypephone – the fun bit is that you can do this in any way you want! The only stipulation is that it has to be in a format that can be linked to. 

For example, it could be a blog post, forum thread or simple webpage, a picture or a set on Flickr. Here’s one 3 made earlier. Youtube or facebook could also be your tool of choice.

The more creative the better.

So here are the rules 

1. The content needs to be original, not ripped off an insignificant YouTuber (they’ll catch you because you have to tag all your videos 3mobilebuzzcomp1!)
2. The URL of the site which brought the competition to your attention (i.e. this one) needs to be included on the entry email.
3. The deadline for submissions is midday on Monday 17th December. So get going…

Entries must be sent to the hallowed keeper of prizes, enforcer of rules and judge of all, Jack@3mobilebuzz.com

Good Luck!

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