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!

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

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.

Digital Communications is challenging search engine optimisation

There was an interesting article (paywall) which appeared in the last edition of PR Week which underlined a number of points I have been making in pitches to new clients recently. The main one is that search engine optimisation (SEO) has changed and is continuing to change and although buying into link farms and using SEO specific companies still works to a certain extent there is now a new kid on the block for getting high rankings on Google and that is using digital communications effectively.

In fact, the head of Google’s webspam team Matt Cutts issues a warning within the piece: ‘Buying or selling links that bypass (Google’s) PageRank (system) violates our webmaster guidelines. If a webmaster buys or sells links for the purpose of manipulating search engine rankings, we reserve the right to protect the quality of our index.’

Gaylene Ravenscroft, head of digital at Hill & Knowlton adds her point about the importance of social media: ‘Bloggers are becoming so crucial they underline PR’s importance as an integral part of the communications mix,’ she says.

The article itself makes some more interesting points - which I will let you digest yourself. However, it highlights a campaign by Volkswagen Commercial which it claims was successful. The campaign included targeting bloggers with press releases and essentially spamming them. This is not how we would advise our clients to go about their communications.

Social media companies and specialist public relations agencies should be advising their clients to engage in the social element, not in press release spamming, as the blogging community can often find this intrusive and you could do your brand/company more damage than good.

Simon Collister another public relations blogger has also written an interesting post on this article with his views - basically damning the use of spam as a communications tactic. I mean who really likes receiving spam these days anyway - I certainly don’t and I blog.

The article rounds off by making the final point: "So, if any traditional PR agency is dragging its feet on digital PR it may soon find its clients are not only considering other PR agencies for their digital work but also extending the remit for search agencies beyond web optimisation and into digital PR. Once Google toughens up, companies will be begging PR agencies to help."

Cross posted on: Norton’s Notes

Some really interesting business blog links

I’m not a fan of link posts, but for once I’m going to indulge in it myself:

OpenSkies is a new airline from British Airways and it has launched not with a traditional website, but with flyopenskies a business blog where they invite you to “join the conversation” and say they want to try and be open about the process of starting the new business.

My old friend Simon Collister has an interesting post about his just completed CIPR diploma dissertation on “whether political bloggers in the UK have an influence on the media agenda of broadsheet newspapers”. I look forward to reading the full dissertation which Simon is going to publish as a PDF.

Chris Edwards, chief executive of Education Leeds, is someone I know and admire from the days when I was a local councillor. He is now a very prolific blogger at his Interesting Times! blog. After spending the day at BETT with a client I read that Education Leeds and Bluewave SWIFT were winners of the prestigious BETT award for ‘Supporting Institutional Leadership and Management Solutions’.

The always interesting Colin Byrne, CEO of Weber Shandwick, has a good post on online politics about both the Labour Party and the Conservatives appointing advertising agencies, both of which are looking digital marketing strategies. I can’t help but wonder if ad agencies are the right people to assist with this and if public relations consultants might not be better qualified.

PR Week reports (behind a pay wall) that “public affairs chief” Steve Morgan of Morgan Allen Moore is “commuting between London and the US to work for Hillary Clinton”. Given what’s happening with Labour deputy leadership contender Peter Hain I suspect some people think he should be spending some more time in the UK.

Full Disclosure: I was director of communications for Alan Johnson, Secretary of State for Health, and the deputy leadership contender who narrowly lost to Harriet Harman.

XP: A PR Guy’s Musings

Is social media a waste of time in business?

Here is an interesting blog post I found whilst researching something for a client this morning. Basically Jim Tobin from WebPro News takes an interesting view on how social media is just a distraction and adds nothing to your business.

It certainly got me reading and he does make some interesting points. The best of which is that you have been distracted for 30 seconds reading his article.

I decided to distract myself for a further minute while I commented on the article and pointed out that if social media is used correctly it can lead to new business pretty quickly - even if you don’t specialise in social media.

For instance, if a business adopts an effective social media programme it can provide better search engine rankings and web traffic for that company, which can often lead to further new business opportunities, as potential clients click through to your site.

Cross posted on: Norton’s Notes

Social media campaigns - convincing the technophobes…

It appears that the business community is starting to understand that social media has to be part of an effective public relations programme in 2008.

Consumers across the globe are now actively using the popular social networking sites such as Myspace, Bebo, Facebook and 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.

So you want a free Skype phone…

The guys over at 3mobilebuzz are running a little competition that I think those of you who have been asking about the Skypephone, will be interested in. The winner of this contest gets three 3 Skypephones, 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 the entrant’s 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

The space cowboy returns and joins in the social media revolution

At Wolfstar we are always looking out for interesting stories which get us all talking, and we often like to cherry pick the best and closely examine them to see what is good and what is bad.

Yesterday, we saw a great story about the disco, funk and pop band Jamiroquai, who have launched a new social media website. Seb and I both love the disco funksters, so we found this very intriguing and had to check the site out ourselves.

The band, who have always been known for being forward thinking in their music and marketing, already have a myspace, Facebook group and YouTube channel. So to enhance their offer to their fans they have developed a new website which has incorporated all of these mediums.

The website looks great as it is packed with interactive elements. In fact, the group themselves will all be blogging when they are next on tour - so if you are into Jay Kay (no relation to our Beth) and the guys, make sure you look out for that. I am positive there will be some interesting stories to come out of it. Hopefully, there won’t be anymore expensive car crashes like when Jay Kay last totaled his Lamborghini - see right.

We have been working with a number of musicians recently and reading this article, we noticed that some things which were in our proposals were also included in what they did. If we are honest, there were also some things that we didn’t propose but we will be using them in future as good examples. I personally love the fact that people can download Jay Kay widgets and use them on their own blogs. There were also some things which we proposed which weren’t in what they did, so its good to see we still have some good ideas which will benefit the music industry.

Anyway as it’s Friday, here’s one of my favourite videos of all time which features the guy with the big hat - Virtual Insanity! Obviously, please watch this in your own time and not in your employer’s but that goes without saying.

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