A colleague of mine @RichardSedley tweeted about Fuselab’s Montage the other day. ‘Montage’ is a new ‘web-based service that makes it fun and easy to create and share a visual album of the web on the topics you care about’. So I decided to give it a go and create a ‘montage’ or ‘A visual social customer care primer‘.

The value in doing things like this is that it forces you to make decisions about what you consider to be important in a particular topic. What took the longest for me to decide was not choosing which videos or images, but actually what aspect of social customer care to depict and how to depict that in a visual way.

After a few iterations, I finally came up with the idea of a ‘primer’. And then it was simply a matter of choosing who some of the major figures and companies were, the events (okay, disasters) and tools that have shaped the use of social within customer service.

Through making the most of the huge audiences on social networks including Facebook and Twitter, Diabetes UK successfully launched a ‘challenge’ site which resulted in massive increases in fundraising donations and visits to their website. This clever use of social networks provided an excellent example of the viral effect that social networks can have. Friends were encouraged to challenge each other to tasks, which would result in sponsorship if successfully completed. This project followed a user-centred approach, where the interests and expectations of end users were completely understood prior to launching the site.

Speakers from Youth Net also demonstrated a hugely successful project that utilised digital media, including online video and imagery in an art based competition. Since Youth Net is not a sponsorship based organisation, their objectives were very different with the primary aim to drive traffic to an area of their website. Again this project worked fantastically, utilising social networks including Twitter, to spread the word of this competition.

This conference demonstrated the huge potential that the digital space has in generating awareness and fundraising opportunities, at a fairly low cost for charities. The projects that were presented were all success stories, which were perfectly suited to their target audiences. However, this didn’t happen by luck. The user-centred approach that was undertaken was integral to ensuring that the digital tools used were most effective for the target audience of each charity.

Digital fundraising provides an amazing opportunity for conferences of this type, where knowledge and experience from case studies is shared and provides an excellent place for not for profit organisations to learn from, and inspire each other.

The uproar has been entertaining: one group created a “Crap logo” website (now taken down) where you could create a new Gap-logo using any other word instead of “Gap”. As had happened with BP earlier this year, a fake “Gap logo” Twitter account was created, with the bio as “I have feelings, too. Jerks.” This has been broadcasting tweets such as this:

“I’m not a size zero logo anymore. I can’t help it.”

“What we really need here is a social media strategist. No, an entire TEAM of social media strategists. For what? I have no idea.”

“Stare at the gradient long enough and it turns into a unicorn. Don’t see it yet? Keep staring. Seriously.”

“The square fades like our jeans! I kid, I kid. Cold water! Tumble dry! “

“If you people think I’m part of some sort of sanctioned, planned “social media strategy” I have some PREMIUM 1969 jeans to sell you.”

“Lego, the office pitbull, has been staring at the logo since yesterday afternoon. I think he’s finally seeing unicorns. Someone alert R&D.”

Gap has been active in Social Media, using Groupon and Foursquare this year, so it was inevitable that they show awareness of the conversations and engage. Their Facebook post reads “Thanks for everyone’s input on the new logo! (…) We know this logo created a lot of buzz and we’re thrilled to see passionate debates unfolding! So much so we’re asking you to share your designs. We love our version, but we’d like to … see other ideas. Stay tuned for details in the next few days on this crowd sourcing project.”

Some commentators have gone as far as suggesting The Gap released a “bad” logo on purpose (“The @GAP logo cost millions of dollars…? I thought it was a quick put-together for this controversy…?”) in order to a) create buzz and b) crowdsource a new logo. And actually, the new logo is currently not being used on the new European website, which undermines the idea of a global rebranding.

Others have suggested the crowdsourcing idea has been floated in response to a rebranding gone wrong. It is indeed unclear whether this is part of a well thought out social media strategy (“is @Gap new logo a PR #fail or pure genius?” posted one Twitterer), or whether it has been provoked by the negative sentiment expressed across the Social Media space (“More bland than a rice cake smeared with tofu” said one; “Releasing the worst logo design in recent history isn’t going to be fixed by a pathetic plea for free work via social media.” said another)

What is true, however, that in earlier times, it would have been much harder (and expensive) to gauge the reaction to a rebranding effort in such a short space of time (the logo was launched on October 4th). Moreover, the “buzz” has inspired some to post alternatives for the logos, such as here.

Whether or not it was all part of a plan, Gap has certainly managed to generate a lot of noise. Will it have a positive impact on its flagging sales? Only time will tell…

Social networking and technology, such as mobile and computers, are very much an item these days but it’s still not clear exactly who ‘wears the trousers’ in this passionate relationship. The rise in popularity of social networking is fundamentally changing the development of technology. But in its turn, emerging technologies are continuing to shape the ways in which we communicate and use social networking.

According to a report by Pew Internet and American Life Project released in Feb 2010, more than half of all internet users use a mobile, wireless connection, such as a laptop or mobile phone. Wireless internet is higher amongst younger age brackets, including laptops slowly replacing desktops and mobile internet use increasing rapidly through the use of smart phones.

Microsoft’s KIN phones, now launching in the US, were built specifically to embrace the use of social networking in the real world. KIN phone functionality includes functionality that is specifically targeted at social networking, for example enabling users to post photos and video directly from the phone which are location tagged to create automatic online multimedia ‘journals’. Apple isn’t sitting still though and has also filed a patent for an app that uses geographic location to form a network where people can broadcast information in real time. It’s a formidable trend – any source of information on a phone including calendars and address books can and will be used to direct location-based services and information. Popular applications such as Foursquare are already out there proving the concept.

It’s increasingly common for people to maintain multiple profiles across multiple social sites. According to that Pew report, it is actually adults that are increasingly fragmenting their social identities across networking sites, with 52% of US adults admitting that they had at least two different profiles. These identities are still differentiated by age group to some extent (more adults have a linked in profile, for example), but those under and over 30 are equally likely to have a Facebook profile.

A recent Forrester report strengthened the argument that mobiles would prove to be the key to unlocking the full potential of social technologies by bring together these different identities under a single, portable, universal social ID. Forrester argued that mobile devices are ideal tools for freeing the digital social environment from computers and integrating it into the real world, providing immediacy, simplicity and contextuality.

It is worthwhile raising a few questions amid all this excitement about mobile as a panacea for digital social integration. Firstly, will everybody really welcome a universal social ID? Many people still value a degree of separation between the individual identities they have created online, between for example, their personal profile (Facebook) and professional profile (LinkedIn). This possibility of segregation will need to be considered as part of any enticing universal solution.

Also, is the idea of moving away from computers in favour of phones really be attractive for everybody? Will mobile devices be everyone’s preferred device for engaging with social networks? Certainly the experience with phones is improving with bigger screens and slicker apps, but there may still be some things that the phone cannot offer. Many mobile social networking apps continue to deliver reduced functionality when compared to the desktop while payment models are often more complex. It’s true that mobile is more convenient for people when they are out and about, but the same people at home or at work might find computer access more convenient and seamlessly integrated with their other activities.

The relationship between social networking and technology hasn’t settled down into a solid mutual commitment quite yet. There are still a few ground rules that need to be laid down, incompatibilities that need working on and annoying habits that need ironing out on both sides. Still, like any evolving relationship, it will be compelling to see how things progress between technology and the social landscape in the years ahead…

This article was written as part of our April newsletter

If brands are truly throwing away their traditional marketing campaigns in favour of third party channels such as Facebook then I would agree it is unwise – but only ‘today‘. Because today you cannot connect the dots and establish the identity of twitter’ers and other anonymous users of social networks, but that will not always be the case. There will come a time when total transparency exists online and your anonymity will be lost. Every transaction, every interaction via the web leaves a trace and slowly but surely analytics tools are bringing these traces together. Data analytics tools are powerful now and it won’t be long before we will be able to identify the patterns that connect LinkedIn profiles to tweets, Spotify, Amazon, dodgy blog, dating and dare I say porn accounts. Beside the implications for individuals that total transparency highlights, there are enormous implications for marketers. The issue raised by McCormack that marketers, by turning there backs on traditional marketing methods and putting all their eggs in one anonymous social media basket are making a huge mistake needs revising. The distinction he makes between a well managed CRM campaign and the use of a Facebook page is surely wrong? Doesn’t a well run CRM campaign include social networking? Where does advertising fit in as surely offline advertising presents the same profiling issues that anonymous social networking does? I read a paper recently about the future of the postal service and it predicted the end of letter postage within 10 to 15 years. Email will have almost completely replaced letters in that period and yet has only been in existence for 15 to 20 years. What will social replace? McCormack is right to raise the data ownership question at the centre of his point. If brands handover ownership of customer data to third party sites in the same way that consumer goods have to the supermarkets in the grocery space they are in making a big mistake. In today’s world I am not sure that they have to providing they have a clear measurement strategy as part of their strategic marketing plan.

Interview with Ashley Friedleing, CEO of Econsultancy

• Episode title: An interview with Ashley Friedlein
• Episode number: 4
• Series: Expert Interviews
• Duration: 27 minutes

Listen now: Download audio file (ashley-friedlein-on-twitter.mp3)

Or, Download the Ashley Friedlein podcast (12mb)

An abridged version of the conversation between Ashley Friedlein and Paul Blunden can be read in our August Newsletter.

Alternatively you can also read the Podcast transcript

“Creating your own blog is about as easy as creating your own urine, and you’re about as likely to find someone else interested in it.” — Lore Sjöberg.

Andrew Keen recently posed a provocative question on his blog: ‘Is blogging dead?‘. A master of the catchy headline, Keen effectively answers his own quasi-rhetorical question by asserting that blogging is not dead, it is simply transforming itself. But even transformation is a death of sorts; death of the Old brought about by the birth of the New. And in this instance, the New is microblogging…and the poster child for microblogging is undeniably Twitter.

For the cave dwellers, Twitter is social networking and so-called ‘microblogging’ service which allows its users to post text-based messages of up to 140 characters (or ‘tweets’) in real time. Users can ‘follow’ the tweets of other users and read them on the Twitter website, external applications or devices such as web-capable phones. Created in 2006, Twitter is now ranked 16 in the world’s top 500 websites, according to Alexa.

Twitter evangilists often trumpet the immediacy with which messages can be posted as a key feature but rarely do they mention the quality. When you can condense Homer’s Odyssey into 9 stanzas of ~140 characters, does it still qualify as content? How much gets lost in the translation and how deeply are readers engaging with the message? A recent study by the Brain and Creative Institute at USC suggested that heavy use of so-called ‘rapid fire media’ may not provide adequate time for reflection or, to put it more poetically, for ‘admiration and compassion – the two social emotions that define humanity’, thereby lessening a person’s ability for moral decision-making. Twitter users may well be connecting with the tweet but not with the tweeter…

Which is probably just as well given some of the weird and wonderful ways people have chosen to use it, such as Your plants need watering or I owe you a coffee.

The first time I heard about Twitter I immediately pictured Jack Torrance in Kubrick’s The Shining endlessly clacking away at his typewriter: ‘All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy… All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy…’. There’s an old Japanese proverb which says ‘the wise man only speaks when he has something worth saying’, and it seemed to me on first glance that the vast majority of what people were saying on Twitter was frightfully inane, but then the same could be said of the early days for any new communication media. This, then, begs the question: Can a tool be considered stupid if the user does something stupid with it? Do we blame the hammer when the carpenter hits her thumb with it? Is this a case of ‘don’t hate the game…hate the playa’?

Keen would have us believe that microblogging is the new blogging, but that simply makes it the latest frontrunner in the race to publish less and less meaningful information more and more frequently. If Twitter’s exponential growth continues along its current trajectory, one could conceivably extrapolate a future in which people will be spending all of their time doing nothing but twittering, and Twitter posts will eventually degenerate in to a collective Torrancian ‘I’m Twittering… I’m Twittering… I’m Twittering…’

I’m prepared to concede that Twitter could be used in productive and sensible ways, but until very recently I struggled to find suitably compelling evidence. All of that changed when the horrific events surrounding the Iranian elections began to emerge, nay explode, and not on state-sponsored media (which was highly censored) or even Western media (which was shut out) but via Twitter. Here at last was a true example of technology giving power to the people, the mouse (and keyboard) that roared. In the face of such outrage and suffering, even a flinty-hearted jerk like me has to admit that Twitter can potentially be a powerful force for change in the world. The only news coming out of Iran was on Twitter, and all of the traditional news networks were scrambling over each other to trawl the legion of tweets for scraps of information. But that doesn’t mean that people were connecting with the events in Iran on an emotional level. Did reading about it as it was happening make it any more real? Did the fact it was brutal and violent and upsetting spark an emotional response in any of us? And if so, how does that differ from traditional news media? Does Twitter stand apart? Is it the future of news?

Interestingly, Andrew Keen posits that very question in his shiny new column for the Telegraph: Twitter vs. CNN: Blood on the streets. He provides an insightful contrast between Twitter and the old guard news media and, while not proclaiming Twitter a winner, he sees it as a contender. The biggest problem facing Twitter is the credibility of its contributors, the difficulty in discerning fact from fiction, rumour from opinion (although the same could be said of traditional media). Twitter is an instantaneous and voluminous source of information, but it’s not a particularly reliable source of news. As Keen says, ‘Its immediacy…compromises its reliability.’ Regrettably, in world news there is little room for idealism or chaos which, without some form of aggregation and validation, are all Twitter has going for it at the moment.

Social media measurement has received significant attention, particularly since the elevation of Twitter as the application of the hour, but organisations were already discussing how social media in general should be measured. Just this week, Matthew Yeomans of Custom Communications was interviewed by Econsultancy on the subject. Yeomans identifies three areas that combine to provide ROI data about social media effectiveness in a campaign context. These are: Reach, captured from how many people are talking about a brand post campaign; Sentiment, from people during the campaign; and Competitor Analysis to identify how the brand compared to peers.

It shouldn’t come as a huge surprise that the measurement of sentiment triggers the most debate when talking with clients. Methods range from software solutions that track words such as ‘like’ and ‘hate’ alongside mentions of brands, to detailed manual evaluation of comments made by identified influencers. The differences between qualitative versus quantitative methods and hybrid solutions leave marketers no clearer about the best approach. Even within the social media industry there is widespread concern that when discussing social media measurement, too many people are talking different languages and finding no concrete answers – yet.

Research conducted late last year by Marketing Sherpa added further to the conversation and the education. The US study looked at what worked in social media measurement, and where problems existed. It concluded that too many marketers were hung up on quantitative measurement when in fact qualitative measures added the most value. The survey found that the easiest things to measure (advertising for example) were actually the least effective, while the hardest things to measure (user reviews and ratings and relationships with bloggers) were the most effective.

Working in a research organisation, I understand why qualitative measurement is so important. 60% of the work we do is qualitative, although a great deal of that qualitative work is also supported by quantitative findings from parallel research in complementary areas (using web analytic traffic data to enrich findings from lab observation studies, for example). In our view both are needed to present the complete picture, but there are cost benefit arguments with every research project.

One thing is certain; there is a lot more to learn. Marketers will have to work through the noise to develop a clear understanding of how measurement should work for them. Establishing a measurement framework and strategy is work that can and should be done before even getting involved with evaluating solutions, and it should start far higher than the social media level. Providing your organisation with a measurement strategy is the gift that keeps on giving as it makes sure any decision making is firmly grounded in the business.

Returning to Twitter, we can see a great example of where an established strategy would help meet the challenge of measuring effectiveness. Trawling through pages of ‘Tweets’ to identify which referred to your campaign or website is not only time consuming it’s also very difficult to get right. Twitter’s prolific use of Tiny URL makes it impossible to see your campaign URL without actually clicking through each link. A better idea of what to look for can only help.

Businesses trying Twitter out today can write the investment off as innovation. Fairly soon though, senior people are going to start asking about ROI. When they do, we can expect to see a range of measurement solutions hitting the market very soon afterwards. By which time of course, Twitter will have been superseded by the next big thing. Do try and keep up!

Earlier this year, researcher firm Cutter Consortium narrowed down the motives of businesses choosing to block social media to three key reasons: security concerns, productivity loss and bandwidth ‘hog’. Senior consultant San Murugesan claimed that “to ban or not to ban social networks at workplaces is an ongoing dilemma” but also highlighted the fact that social networking simply reflects modern communications trends, and by failing to embrace it, businesses could well be making costly mistakes.

In business, we cannot fail to realise the benefits of mass communications of any medium, US President Rutherford B Haynes said of the telephone in the early days: “An amazing invention, but who would ever want to use one?” Just like social media the telephone was soon usurping face-to-face communication, just as social media is doing the same to the voice-to-voice communication of the telephone.

It is essential we embrace new technology if it is user-led, working out how best to exploit it safely for our own brand means.

Analyst organisation Beyond Analysis believes 2008 will continue to witness a great deal of evolution in the way in which social media is used, particularly regarding its impact on business. Strategy director Will Beresford has said that the customer experience in particular will only be enriched by data found on the social web, often superseding traditional sources and research tools, such as questionnaires and focus groups. Certainly, opinions and discussions circulating social media platforms are having an ever greater influence upon our purchasing decisions and our brand perception.

A good example of a company exploiting social media effectively is www.zappos.com, a US online shoe retailer. At Zappos all 429 of its employees, including the CEO, have a Twitter account. But instead of merely uploading a few words around where they are (like I do), they use it to better inform customers in an open forum. They share information about where their stock or order is, as well as any updates on other issues. If you log into the Zappos section of the Twitter site, you can see all the Zappos people communicating with their customers.

Publicly displaying information like this can be a dangerous game, but if you aim to be a transparent organisation, and get your customers loving you for you openness – then why not use media which they are most comfortable with, instead of creating long call centre queues or websites support quests that lead nowhere.

The Daily Telegraph (a UK broadsheet newspaper) reported a story on 16 June 2008 regarding a High Court ruling that required an ex-employee of Hays to hand over business contacts built up on the social networking website LinkedIn.

The story has since been picked up in various publications including Brand Republic and Computer Weekly but none raise the obvious, more expansive question of what the repercussions of this ruling might be for the rest of us? Computer Weekly does make reference to a legal specialist that advises employers to add clauses to employment contracts and to ask employees to set up business-only networks, but I think this misses the point.

Social networks are just that – social. The dictionary definition of ’social’ is: “living or preferring to live in a community rather than alone”. These networks don’t have boundaries and certainly don’t separate colleagues from friends. In many ways if they did, it would defeat their object. For many, however, this level of transparency is unnerving.

I had lunch with a customer recently who talked about her younger sister connecting with her on Facebook. I have a similar scenario where I am connected to my niece and nephew. They have very different interests and circles of friends to me, being as they are, about 25 years younger. But what is my alternative? Deny their existence? Compartmentalise them?

Only five days earlier (11 June) Times Online ran a feature that advised people to keep their social and business networks separate. This is an interesting idea and there were various suggestions made by different people – all in recruitment (or ‘talent management’ if there is a difference). One suggested he used a nickname on Facebook that only his friends know, and then used LinkedIn for business contacts only. I don’t see how this can work. There have to be crossovers. Otherwise, what happens when you conduct business with family members or if your business contacts are among your best friends?

The article concluded with a suggestion that soon software will simply track you down by making connections between you, friends and colleagues, then bingo – your profiles are connected for all to see.

What this really means is we have to get ready for a time when virtually everything we post online will be attributable to us. Potential employers will be able to see our connections with dodgy friends and family members and start judging us across a wider set of values. Is this good or bad? I am certain there will be losers as there always are, but I think this is akin to businesses getting used to corporate blogs – which of course many have yet to do.

There are countless examples of businesses gaining stronger brands as a result of honest information about them going up on blogs. They are measured by how they respond to negative comments about poor performance. People realise that no business is perfect and actually, if you can see them warts and all, you tend to trust them more. The same will surely happen for individuals and I think it will be refreshing.

I predict that the transition will be ugly, but when we get there we may see a levelling of the playing field on a scale never seen before.