Google announced as world’s number one brand

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Yesterday Google was announced by ‘Superbrands‘, as the UK’s number one  business brand beating off giants such as the BBC. This has made me appreciate just how big this company really is. I myself use the search engine ‘Yahoo’, simply because that was the first engine my Dad introduced me to years ago. Interestingly, all my friends find it bizarre that I don’t use Google, as if the organisation owns a monopoly over searching on the internet. But of course they don’t and there are probably thousands of other search engines on the net, so why has Google gone on to rule the net, winning the crown for the brand with the best reputation?

Speaking of Yahoo, the business recently rejected a bid made by Microsoft for a ‘friendly takeover’. According to The Lang Report, Yahoo has just announced 1000 job cuts, its largest ever amount since the dot-com crash. Perhaps this due to the effects of Google’s growth in this sector. I believe in forthcoming years, the fate of companies such as Yahoo will be unsure, as Google continues to reign.

My university tutor suggested that the popularity of Google could be thanks to the idea of WOMM (word of mouth marketing). This is an interesting thought and I think he is right, especially when you think of the phrase ‘Google-it’.  It has become synonymous with internet searching and it is very common to hear people in work, the press and even teachers at school using the phrase to their pupils. I am told it actually makes an appearance in the dictionary now too!

FT social network doesn’t have longevity

I picked up The Guardian this morning and read an interesting article by Mark Sweney about the Financial Times which plans to create an exclusive social network.

The proposed scheme will be a membership only network costing a fee of £2k a year for each lucky networker.

The Guardian describes the membership as including: "attendance at any one FT Global conference plus 20% off subsequent events, face-to-face members’ networking events and a 12-month premium subscription to FT.com."

Oh I think I should point out that the FT will also be using your details to target you for anything they possibly can if you join.

"Busy executives in the media and technology industries are increasingly networking, communicating and connecting online and the launch … provides a highly targeted network where executives from these fast-moving industries can connect and share their knowledge," said Jayne van Hoen, FT conference director

Having read this story I have asked myself one question - why? Why would I join a social network at the cost of £2k a year, when there are already plenty of decent business networks out there which cost nothing?

Social networks such as Facebook and Linked in also have the ability to make themselves exclusive too - so you can have who you want within your particular network.  I also don’t really see the value in having a closed network - the only real benefit I can see is actually for the FT , not the user, as the newspaper gets everyone’s details for marketing purposes.

Only time will tell if this will actually be a success - my guess is it will get a few members initially but don’t expect Facebook to be quaking in its boots!

Cross Posted on: Norton’s Notes

Pakistan bans YouTube

Whilst reading the good ole Yorkshire Post with my morning coffee and toast I read a snippet of news about how the country Pakistan (that’s right the entire country) has banned the use of video sharing network YouTube. The government has banned access to the site because it contains ‘anti Islamic’ movies. Whilst I do not agree with slander, whatever happened to the right of free expression? And isn’t the whole point of religion that you choose to believe despite what anyone else has to say? Having faith in something and living a life by that belief should be a choice rather than enforcement and does banning something not make it more desired? I ask myself what is the government afraid of? That when people see these movies they will suddenly turn against the Islamic religion? What little faith the government has in its people.

I understand that some videos may be offensive to the Islamic religion but there are lots of videos on YouTube that I do not agree with, but I simply choose not to view them. It is surprising that in this democratic country where recent elections spurred hopes for change and development that the government has been so closed minded about an Internet revolution that is taking the world by storm. By banning the site, a taboo will be generated around these videos and they will ironically end up with more views than if they had never been mentioned in the first place.

2008 - How are you celebrating the extra day?

At Wolfstar, we have decided to celebrate the fact 2008 is a leap year and has an extra day (Friday February 29th) by offering up our services to the local community. Yep, that’s right the team here have all agreed to help a local community group on the day in question.

We are willing to help you with anything we can - we are happy to get our hands dirty with whatever needs doing whether it’s litter picking or painting a local community centre.

We are also looking for any other companies from Leeds or Yorkshire who are willing to help - just for one day - by getting in contact with us too.

Community groups that can provide us with work should call Beth Kay on 0113 394 7960 or email bethk@wolfstarconsultancy.com, by 5pm on Wednesday February 27.

We will reveal the winning project on the blog on Thursday 28th February.

Leave Britney Spears Alone! Another YouTube Phenomena

Whilst on YouTube a couple of days ago, I discovered a very humorous yet at the same time slightly disturbing video by a man named Chris Crocker . Apparently the video is huge across the world with millions of viewings. The video is of Chris under what appears to be a bed sheet, hysterically crying over the media’s negative portrayal of his favourite pop star, Britney Spears. If you haven’t already seen this video, you must watch it, if not for comedy then for its sheer craziness. I actually believed that Chris was a Christina for the entire video as the openly gay man has a bleach blonde bob and a mascara stained face from crying…

What I find fascinating about this is that the video only lasts for 2 minutes and yet Chris became so popular with YouTube fans that he was actually given his own American TV show. The ability to broadcast yourself using YouTube meant that Chris’ (freakishly unhealthy) obsession with Britney Spears and his hatred for the press was exclaimed to more than 4 million viewers in only two days. This is just another example of how powerful social networking sites are becoming as well as their stars, the public.

Online audience to be included in ABC figures

I have just read an interesting post from Roy Gleenslade reporting that online unique users and circulation figures will now be added together in a new report format for the first time - this is a big step forward.

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

Measuring social media is easy, evaluating it is difficult

This post started as a comment in response to KD Paine’s comment on Seb’s post about last night’s Chingwag Live on measuring social media.

I was at the Chinwag event with Seb and his post only includes snippets of what was discussed. My main reason for going along is that in all the social media consulting and public speaking I do this is the subject that I feel most vulnerable on.

I came away both pleased and disappointed. Disappointed because I didn’t feel that I’d learnt a great deal. Pleased because I now feel far more confident about my own and Wolfstar’s views and expertise in this area.

Will McInnes and Robin Grant both made some good contributions, that were broadly in line with what I think. Some of my other thoughts following the event include;

Measuring social media is easy

Measuring social media is easy, as there are a myriad of tools available to provide you with numbers. The difficult bit is evaluating it - how you interpret these numbers and what you do with your findings. The problem is that a lot of the numbers are misleading and fool people into thinking they have some meaningful data. Seb’s example of AVEs (advertising value equivalents) is spot on. AVEs are totally and utterly discredited, yet lazy public relations people continue to use them, often with the excuse that it’s “what the client wants”. My response is “Show a little backbone and consult” - you’re the expert and it’s up to you to educate the client that AVEs might be a measurement tool, but they have absolutely nothing to do with evaluating the effectiveness of a public relations campaign.

Focus groups are dead…

… all you need to do is monitor online conversations. Yeah, right how dumb is that? Online and social media, although absolutely an essential part of any corporate communications strategy, are only half the story and will only ever be half the story. There are not only millions of consumers who will never contribute anything online, but millions more who aren’t even that interested in online.

You can’t even evaluate the success of many online campaigns, without looking at the effect offline. One successful social media project I did would have failed every test if you measured it online. It was a blog with very few readers, only a few comments and very few links to it. It was also a brilliant success in that it achieved every single one of its objectives in that it got people talking offline about the issues discussed online. But you wouldn’t know that if we hadn’t done a paper-based postal questionnaire and a focus group.

It’s not that you can’t measure it, but you have to ask why?

Advertising and web people are the ones obsessed with measuring social media, mainly because that’s their background. Those of us from a professional public relations and corporate communications background have a much more relaxed attitude.

Contrary to popular belief it’s not too difficult to evaluate the success of a public relations campaign. However, it is frequently too expensive. On a multi-million pound advertising budget you can do some clever and effective measurement and evaluation for a tiny fraction of the total budget. On many PR campaigns you can do the same measurement and evaluation, but it takes a big percentage of the budget. Money that is usually better spent on running a better campaign.

I think that it was Will who gave the best bit of advice of the evening when he said: “understanding is more important than measuring.”

UPDATE: Just seen a good post by young Mr Collister at Simonsays with a great comment from David Brain: “The biggest lie in marketing is ‘if you can’t measure it don’t do it’. Measurement should be seen as a useful tool not some sort of holy destination.”

Wolfstar’s new management structure

Starting a new business is both exciting and a challenge. And since starting Wolfstar it’s certainly been a roller coaster ride. I’d been planning to to write a post about our first year, when we’d actually got to the end of it. But some recent changes at Wolfstar have made me think that now’s probably a good time to give a quick summary.

Wolfstar started in April 2007 with four founders:

Stuart Bruce, director: a partner in Bruce Marshall Associates, with a background mainly in traditional corporate relations, B2B and public sector public relations who has more recently specialised in social media, online PR and digital marketing.

Susie Lawrence, director: a freelance PR consultant, with a background of working in big London PR agencies working on mainly consumer brands.

Kirstyn Pollard, director: a director of Raw Creative, Wolfstar’s sister design and brand consultancy with a track record of working for big consumer brands and a wealth of experience in the property sector. Kirstyn was also previously the editor of PAD magazine.

Tim Sinclair, director: the founder of Sinclair Mason, which he grew into one of the north’s largest integrated corporate marketing communications companies, before selling it to the Huntsworth Group to become the northern office of Trimedia Harrison Cowley.

At the start it was only Susie and myself that were active in the business as Tim was still on his earn-out period from Huntsworth and finally became active in the business in September. After a great start in the first couple of months, things slowed down significantly, with the main barrier for growth that that we were spending most of our time on servicing existing client projects.

The Wolfstar team has now grown with account manager Sebastian Mysko onboard from the start, account executive Beth Kay joined us in July and account director Chris Norton started in November. In November Susie also took the decision to leave and pursue other interests.

New management structure

This month we’ve introduced a new management structure in Wolfstar.

I’ve taken on the role of managing director to lead and direct the growth and development of the business.

Tim has become chairman whose primary responsibilities are to use his experience of growing a big marketing communications business and to take a lead in identifying new business prospects. Becoming chairman also reflects the fact that Tim has a number of other business interests including being the chief executive of WOM UK, the new association for the word of mouth marketing and communications industry.

Kirstyn is also taking a much more hands on role in Wolfstar and I’m taking on responsibilities with Raw so that the two businesses provide an integrated corporate communications service to clients.

Finally Karen Bruce, my wife and a partner in Bruce Marshall Associates, is starting to finish her maternity leave and is able to join Wolfstar to significantly strengthen our public sector, event management and community relations capability.

New client wins

I’d also like to be able to announce a couple of new client wins, but both are still too new to be able to talk about them much. One is a social media project for a big consumer brand in Europe and the other is a stakeholder relations campaign for a public sector organisation. Subscribe to the blog to find out more!

XP: A PR Guy’s Musings

How do we even start to talk about measuring social media?

I’ve just been to a Chinwag event in Soho, London where a panel of industry professionals battled out the debate of measuring social media.

I find this whole topic incredibly interesting, especially when the panelists on the stage all work within the marketing mix, but have such different professional backgrounds. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still loving all the new tools that are constantly appearing - Dopplr being by current favourite, but measuring conversations? Can it really be done? I think panelist Will McInnes described putting the words conversation and measure together as “wrong and slightly filthy”.

I reckon there’s a couple of thousand CEO’s out there that would love for a measurement formula to be created – even if it’s as ‘fluffy’ as the old school AVE. At least they would have something tangible to work with.

There was a lot discussed tonight, and I believe the full session will be available as a downloadable podcast, but I just wanted to pick up on a few things that got me thinking;

1) One of the panelists believes that focus groups are dead and buried……finite measurement can apparently be achieved by monitoring online conversations…

2) Another said that it is and has been possible for quite some time to monitor everything about a person through analysing their online profile…

3) Product development, word of mouth and transparency are all key to a brand’s success…

4) If you’re going to try and cheat the system – DON’T! Because “people know people” and you’ll eventually always get caught!

I agree with two out of the four above points – and I don’t think it’ll take a genius to work out which two I’m talking about.

Ads vs WOM

Is Word-of-Mouth Marketing (WOM) becoming more effective than Advertising? After reading through many a debate on the internet on this subject I decided it was time for me to do my own research on the matter so I could formulate my own well-informed opinion.

Advertising has been the most popular form of marketing for a number of years. Almost everywhere we look there is a blatant form of advertising, so much so that we are becoming desensitised to it. Ads are appearing in absolutely every medium imaginable and this saturation is turning people off the message. ‘76% of people don’t believe that companies tell the truth in advertisements.’ This shows that audiences are becoming more cynical and developing resistance to advertising, of course companies are going to say their product or service is the best, but with hundreds of these messages being fired at us every day it is hard to know who to believe.

If I want to go out for a nice meal with my boyfriend I very rarely go somewhere that hasn’t been recommended by a friend, this is because I don’t pay attention to ads because I am very aware that they are bias and I trust my friends as a more credible source of information. Also if I am watching the TV I tend to flick channels during the ad breaks or do something else until I hear what I want to watch coming back on, almost everybody I know does exactly the same thing. This proves to me that advertisements are not the most effective use of a marketing budget.

A smarter, more creative way to market is WOM. WOM is growing, thanks to factors such as the rise of communications on the internet. Customers are getting smarter and now need to know that something is good before they will pay money for it. They are in control. ‘92% of people trust word of mouth as the best source of new product ideas ­ up from 67% in 1977.’

It seems to me that WOM is becoming the most influential media source, WOM is not about telling consumers what is good but about letting them discover it themselves, formulate their own opinions and spread them to their social networks. I for one appreciate not being commanded what I should think and I like the element of control that WOM allows. I am much more likely to act upon a recommendation from a friend or  at least search for customer reviews on the internet than I am to act upon a flyer or an ad I see on the TV, radio, or newspaper.

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