I’ve *finally* managed to kill off Rock-Star-PR.com, which, let’s face it, was a TERRIBLE URL!

So I bought some new interweb real estate (jedhallam.com and .co.uk) and then did some PHP action.

So you’ll now find my new blog (which you should OBVIOUSLY subscribe to) at…

http://jedhallam.com

When I was fifteen I decided I wanted to be a full time poet. My ambition was to become Poet Laurette within a few years, then I found out that the Poet Laurette only took home a steady 8k a year (and all the sherry he could drink – which was more of a draw either way). So I dropped that idea. And joined the world of marketing.

Then I started blogging, and said I’d never write a paid blog post. And I haven’t, ‘cept I’ve written one that gets me into a competition. Which isn’t the same, you cynical sods.

I’ve always worn my heart/mouth on my sleeve, and now is no different. Max (lovely chap) got in touch with me a few weeks back to ask if I’d like to get involved in a competition that eConsultancy was running – I agreed, then forgot, then he emailed me, and I apologised – repeat this for a few more weeks and we arrive at today. Three days after the deadline. Which is probably quite bad for my hopes of being crowned winner.

But, Max had asked me to write a blog post called “Why it’s worth your while to join up online and offline marketing” and this was something that I’d been thinking about since I’d seen Forbes’ top twenty social media campaigns, a list that was dominated by integrated campaigns.

So, regardless of missing the deadline, I thought I’d still write the post. Being one of the key areas in the future of marketing, I thought it might still be worth a shot .

So… Here goes…

Why is it important for marketing to be integrated online and offline? It’s pretty simple. In fact, you’ll kick yourself when I say it.

It’s important for marketing to be integrated online and offline because the consumer doesn’t distinguish between online or offline.

Or which department produced the content/wrote the script/spoke to you last Tuesday.

Or who should respond to their Facebook comment at 4:56am Sunday morning.

They. Just. See. A. Brand.

As marketeers, we are all far too close to our work/department/agency/industry to realise the simple fact that the consumer sees a brand, and nothing more. We see Nike. If we see a terrible television advert, we don’t go “Oh God, Wieden+Kennedy really dropped the ball with this one”, we say “Whoops, Nike screwed up”.

Almost all of the campaigns named in Forbes’ list were integrated campaigns. They tied an ad campaign with online content (more commonly referred to as a ‘viral’ – more on that another day) and a marketing drive with a Twitter campaign. Almost every successful social media campaign has been integrated.

The future of agency work isn’t understanding the next big thing, or figuring out how to charge more for less. The next big thing for the agency world is understanding how to work together, to integrate our specialisms to create huge campaigns that reach the consumer. The consumer that doesn’t see that there are six agencies behind the Facebook account that just pointed them to the augmented reality iPhone app that shows them where to get a free sample from – they see a brand. It’s our job to ensure that they always see the brand, and that that brand is truly integrated, regardless of how many agencies it works with.

Oh, and hopefully I’ll see you at Jump on my free press pass

This post is part of the #JUMPchallenge, a blogging competition designed to raise awareness of how to join up online and offline marketing, launched to support Econsultancy’s JUMP event

Social media monitoring is a complete waste of resources. Total waste of money, time and understanding.

Yep.

You know why?

I’m guessing by now you’re either really intrigued or really angry. Hopefully both.

Social media monitoring is completely useless without context or clear outputs.

What are outputs? Your next steps once you capture something.

What is context? Context means understanding the data, turning data to information. Something meaningless to something useful.

Please read on, let me elaborate.

Let’s take an example: you’re on the board of BRAND Z, you decide that after fifteen years of traditional activity you should probably look into social media, but where do we start?! ARRGGHHH!!! TOO MUCH INFORMATION??!!!

*ring ring*

“Oh, hello social media monitoring service! You only charge £7 a month? And I get shiny graphs?! Where do I sign?!!!”.

Here’s why I’m so irked.

(Now my next point is going to irritate you if you’ve read a few of my last posts because it was born from the Nassim Nicholas Taleb book Fooled by Randomness. Which I appear to quote for everything. Even in Tesco.)

Fooled by Randomness is largely about the unpredictable being predicted and the uselessness of models, and Taleb’s context is the financial markets. Which doesn’t sound too transferable to ‘digital’ but a few chapters in he begins to discuss the probability of successful analysis at different rates for monitoring share price and how minute changes shouldn’t effect your overall view of the investment opportunity – basically, always take a long view on big issues.
Think about this in terms of a boat on the waves, just because it’s at the bottom of a wave doesn’t mean it’s going to sink.

So Taleb then pulls together a probability of success at different rates table;

One year – 93% probability of successful analysis
One quarter – 77% probability of successful analysis
One month – 67% probability of successful analysis
One day – 54% probability of successful analysis
One hour – 51% probability of successful analysis
One minute – 50.17% probability of successful analysis
One second – 50.02% probability of successful analysis

The point that he’s trying to make is that people are effected too much by minute by minute changes and cannot comprehend the bigger picture. The same can be said for monitoring; of course it’s important to look at ‘real time’ alerts and understand what’s being said, but it’s much more important to understand how this fits into the wider context.

If you cherry pick blog posts about BRAND Z without giving them context you’ll have an almost completely random view of the brand – monitor every blog post and hold monthly reviews and you’ll begin to gather insight, do this for a year and you’ll have a much more clear idea about your reputation online.

The point of this post is not to make you angry, but to highlight that monitoring only works if two criteria are fulfilled;

a) There are a set of clear next steps to take – listening is fine if you know how (or if) to react

b) Always look at the macro, not the micro and always, always, ALWAYS give your monitoring context

I know this is quite a long, ranty post, but if we’re to move the ‘digital’ industry along we need to be be more intelligent about this stuff.

*quick update: this post has also been cross-posted on The Wall so there may be some interesting comments there too!*

Sentiment analysis is, for me, one of the most annoying phrases in the world (as you may have seen me tweet to Matt the other day). Whenever I hear someone mention it I picture two guys in cheap suits speaking to a group of board members at a big brand explaining complicated graphs and pointing at a smiley face, an indifferent face and finally, a sad face and then telling the brand that 65% of the world thinks that it’s product is ace and says so online. These suits then unveil a slide with a picture of a slick looking program that ‘looks at the whole of the web and computes how people feel about you’. Good stuff.

I’m probably not that far from the truth with my little image. Some of those cheap suits might even be reading this post now. Cool.

To be fair, my issue is less with sentiment analysis and more to do with how certain companies sell ‘automated’ sentiment analysis.

The issues with computational sentiment analysis are pretty well documented, and mostly documented by folk much more intelligent than me (that’s you Katie and Jason). The main problem being that computers aren’t smart enough to figure out the nuances of humans.

After sifting through literally hundreds of different services that monitor, track and analyse the web (most of which offer sentiment) – I found that the typical error rate for computational sentiment analysis is around 60-70%. So at most you’re getting valid data 40% of the time.

Yep, six out of ten pieces of information aren’t accurate (IE pointless pieces of information). So if 40% of the time the information is right, and you don’t know which 40%, how can you even begin to understand how people feel about your brand/product/CEO? You can’t, that’s how.

Even with Bayesian Analysis (usually used to filter spam, can kind of be applied to sentiment – still in infancy, mind), Markov Chains (a very complicated method that you can use to help computers learn – beware, I had to dig out my old A Level Maths texts) or even support vector machines (how many, many expensive monitoring companies ‘teach’ their computers to learn) there are still massive flaws with computers trying to understand what we mean when we write.

Plus, when I say ‘I love Washington’, do I mean the location, the actor (Denzel) or the cake? Or a friend of mine? Or a TV programme? These sort of issues are why Google recently bought Metaweb (to make search smarter).

The other problem is that our opinions and sentiment are transient. We’re allowed to change our minds and we frequently do (some of us more than others) and if our content is going to be analysed, how do we do that? Do we create aggregate compound sentiment scores? Or do we display individual mentions? There are too many complications for a computer, or most humans, to understand.

The bottom line is that the best way to compute sentiment analysis online is to do it yourself.

I’ll see you in six months when you’ve finished…

I read Todd Defren’s post and felt an immediate reaction bubbling. So I avoided the keyboard (and Twitter) and kept a lid on it. And I’m glad I did, I would’ve said some stupid things and shot from the hip (Meghan definitely shot from the hip!) when the post actually requires a reasoned and logical response. And I might have found that I actually agreed with Todd… A bit.

So here it is.

Let’s look at Todd’s post point by point.

When Professor Sledzik suggests that the real-world is tougher than you think, he’s spot-on.

He is. Spot-on. It’s hard to get a job, to stand out, to get a foot on the career ladder, to keep yourself financially afloat. It’s hard. GROW UP. LIFE IS HARD. The reason why everyone leaves college or university and expects the easy life is because that’s what we’re told throughout education; ‘work hard and you’ll get a great job’. Well hold on, it should be ‘work hard and you’ll get a great job, then carry on working hard and you’ll have a great life’. Education doesn’t finish at 21, it pretty much begins there. I graduated expecting to walk into a job on £30k a year – because the world needs graduates. No it doesn’t, it needs intelligent people with drive, ambition and confidence.

Your cover letter should be flawless and interesting. [...] Does the letter stand out, in a professional way, or is it generic?

Again, bang on. When you’re applying for jobs, you’ll probably find that you don’t have a client, a line manager and a journalist calling you for that covering letter. In fact you probably just have your mum asking if you’d like honey on your toast. You have plenty of time to perfect your covering letter and each one needs to be flawless and totally bespoke to each potential employee. Read about your potential employer, write your cover letter, proof it. Proof it. PROOF IT.

…you should already be fairly visible on Twitter, Facebook and/or your own blog.  You’ve got time to surf the Web for fun; so carve out 30 minutes a day to post relevant content that prospective employers will find when they Google your name (which they will, by the way).

If you’re going for a job at a communications consultancy then try and show that you understand the changing market place – as generation Y our biggest benefit (as we have little actual experience) is that we get new media, we’re digital natives and it comes naturally to us. Show this. You don’t have to go crazy, in fact you might just sign up to one new network, or start a photo-blog or buy Moo cards (!) but do something to show that you have some interest in the area that you’re applying for. Lying on a CV doesn’t work if you put ‘The world’s first Twitter user’. THEY WILL FIND OUT AND YOU WILL LOOK STUPID. If you actually ‘walk the walk’ then you can be confident talking to anyone.

Your choice of clothes is also important, when you come in for the interview.

Oh yeah, we’ve all read Wired, everyone knows about the Googleplex. You want to work at Google? Well then get used to understanding algorithms like this. It takes about 30 minutes to have a wash, iron a shirt and brush your teeth. It doesn’t matter that when you’re introduced to the office that everyone else is wearing trainers – you’re main objective is to impress the people that are interviewing you and you won’t do that if you turn up in camo pants and string vest. No one is asking for you to rock up in a tuxedo, but you need to make a good impression and convince the agency that you can present yourself professionally to clients, potential clients and the media.

Read the agency’s blog (or all of them, if there is more than one).  Read several weeks’ worth of posts.  Take a look at the client list.  Take a look at the newsroom.  Read the bios of the principals and other top execs.  Read up on the competition, too.  Then, COME WITH QUESTIONS.

If you were going on a date and you’d told the other person that you were really into art, then you wouldn’t turn up without at least trying to know one artist. An agency isn’t asking for you to completely understand the whole of the industry, it’s asking for you to understand a little bit. So read the MD’s blog, read where he used work, find out who’s interviewing you and what size shoes they wear, maybe, just maybe, look at the agency’s client list.

Oh, and if you’re planning on spending a couple of years at your new job, then perhaps ask some questions. You’re going to spend 60 hours a week for the next 104+ weeks working there.

Then Todd comes on to what to do when you’ve got the job

My advice then — and you may see it as biased — is to stay put for a while.  I am talking 3 – 5 years, at least.

This is a bit more contentious than rocking up in shirt and tie (to the point where Todd even posted a new post in response to comments about loyalty). I believe that if you’ve done your research before you apply somewhere then you should be there 3-5 years, but the key to this is the word research.

Research these bits;

• Look at the agency’s website
• Read about it in industry news (gossip sites, industry bibles, employee posts etc)
• Look at its values and what it calls it’s core offer (check the website again)
• Look at its clients
• Look at its staff (then check for them on Twitter – you’ll get a more intimate idea of who they are)
• Ask a few people in the industry what they think about the agency (I spoke to about ten people before joining Wolfstar)

If you do all this and you still don’t enjoy your first six months (spend any less there and you’re an idiot – unless it is truly awful) then consider a move – but this time do more research. But be prepared to explain why the fit was wrong – whether it was your fault or not, a prospective employer is going to presume it’s your fault.

Three to five years gives you enough time to spread your wings (and for the agency to realise you have enough promise to let you spread your wings). The industry that we work in lends itself to people with a speciality – making yourself invaluable by skill, experience or knowledge means you become an attractive member of the team that people want to keep hold of and that other agencies want to get hold of. I’ve been in the industry for two years and I’m still trying to find my niche – it doesn’t happen overnight.

If you’ve found the right agency, with the right team that will help you grow and you can add to the business and provide something invaluable that helps make money then stay. People usually suggest that it takes three months to settle in. Then three months to learn where you fit. Then six months to prove you fit. Then (after a year), and only then, it’s your time to grow. Whatever BNet says, job hoppers don’t make good employees – if you’re moving every 18 months then you’ve not given yourself enough time to grow in each role, and if you’ve not had enough time to grow then you’re skills and experience are staying stagnant.

My advice to generation Y

Wake up. We’re still in the grip of a global recession. When you apply for a job, you’re likely to be competing against people with a few years of experience because there aren’t very many jobs around. It takes a couple of hours to research each agency, which means you can research six agencies a day. Yes, 12 hours of research. Welcome to work. During this research time you can be Twittering about what you find as you’ll undoubtedly be learning something with each post you write. Have an opinion, but understand that when you leave university YOU KNOW NOTHING. THIS IS YEAR ZERO FOR YOU.

My advice to the boomers and gen x’ers

The most important thing to note is that being good isn’t generational – there have been good employees and bad employees throughout the ages – but a good generation y’er would be an excellent addition to any team.

Be prepared. For every 100 of the generation y’ers we’ve just defined there are ten that are filled with ambition, drive and new ideas. We (because sod modesty, I’m a gen y’er that’s in the aforementioned 10%) are coming for you. Once we’ve been around a while we’ll start to understand business because we learn quickly and you’re fantastic mentors. We know how to market to gen x’ers and the boomers because it’s a traditional model we understand and we know how to market to gen y’ers because, well, we are them.

We understand that things are changing and we know why – people have more access to information, to friends, to influencers, to anything that we can think of. The things that you guys have been learning for the last five or six years we’ve been living for the last ten. We all have butterfly attention spans and while you think that this is a negative, it means we know more (with only slightly less depth) about more – we were born on the side of the information superhighway, with iPhones in our hands, the nurse even slapped a StickyBit on our arse.

Embrace us. We’ll give you insight on how you can market and communicate with a new generation of people – we’re the generation that are bridging the gap between traditional and new – but only those of us that are willing to learn from you guys will actually succeed in helping the generational transition. Recognise which members of our generation are going to help your business make the jump and mentor them. I don’t agree with most of the reactions from gen y’ers that ‘we need respect and admiration’. We don’t, we need direction and business mentors.

We’re going to apply new ideas to new problems and solve them. We’ll think laterally about old business issues because we have different backgrounds to you. We are the future, because that’s how the life cycle of the human body works.

We are here to;

1. Learn from the generation x’ers and boomers, then…
2. Take over the business world and shake up old ideals and business models
3. Make sure the other generation y’ers put some effort in and get out of bed

Right, with all that in mind I’m off to pop my headphones on, sit on a beanbag and draw social network theories on paper airplanes until Stuart finds me and makes me write a status report.

Generation Y, learn how to work hard and smart, then let’s shake everything up.

(On another note, a perfect example of the difference between gen x and y is that y’ers expect to find anything they want on the internet and then use it however they want. Case in question; I needed a photo of baby in a suit for this post and all I could find was from the Triple Velvet ad’s – so this photo is thanks to Triple Velvet!)

“Getting a job in social media” sends a lot of search traffic my way, and I’ve written about it loads – here, here and here. Ben’s written up some great stuff, as has Mike. We’re all talking about how to do it.

For those people that are at the start of the ‘journey to a job’ – don’t feel disparaged, things will work out (this is possibly the WORST photo of me of all time…);

UPDATE: I’ve made the steps a little clearer to how you actually do this.

(As a quick FYI, this post will show you how to export and filter Facebook using RSS – pretty cool.)

I’ve written at length about my narcissism obsession with being constantly connected and always having my ear to the ground for mentions of me. There is a simple reason for this: I say a lot of stupid things, I say a few clever things. I need the opportunity to defend the stupid things and draw attention to the clever things .

HOWEVER, instead of posting another post, another moan, without any sense of solution, I thought I’d show you how you can be just as narcissistic as me!!!! YAYYYY!! It’s like a geekier version of Blue Peter. What am I saying?! That’s not possible…

Now Drew spoke about Boxcar and how to draw things into an iPhone – which I did. And now I get near constant updates from a West Ham forum where some guy called Jed Hallam likes to post. A lot. Seriously.

So I’m going to focus on how to pull everything into an RSS reader. Which, if you use Googsystray, will notify you from your system tray when something new happens…

Without adieu, here are my simple steps to monitoring your personal brand using RSS.

First, you’ll need to define three areas;

Social networks –this is a great way to filter your mentions from your favourite two social networks; Facebook (YES, it is possible) and Twitter

Composite blogs – these are, arguments aside, likely to be your friends, your industry circle. If these people mention you, they’ll use your name, either full or first.

Blog search tools – someone outside of your ‘feed circle’ is likely to refer to you with your full name.

InBound link tools – this should pick up each time your URL is linked to, regardless of the anchor text.

 

1. Open notepad
2. Go to http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=@jedhallam and replace the @jedhallam with your term and copy this URL into notepad
3. Log in to Facebook, then type out this URL – http://facebook.com/notes.php
4. Now you should see a page of your friends notes – click on ‘My friends notes’
5. You should now have an XML page like this “http://www.facebook.com/feeds/friends_notes.php?id=679220000&key=15ca5500fc&format=rss20”
6. Click into the browser bar and replace ‘notes’ with ‘status’ and hit return – viola, here’s the status udpates of your friends in RSSable format! Now copy this URL into notepad
7. Type up Google Blog Search and smash in your term, in this case; ‘Jed Hallam’ – http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&q="jed+hallam"&btnG=Search+Blogs – and copy the URL into notepad
8. Head over to Yahoo and type out ‘link:http://jedhallam.com’ and hit ‘search’ – then copy the URL (http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/uk/siteexplorer/search?p=http://jedhallam.com&bwm=i&bwmf=u&bwms=p&fr=yfp-t-702&fr2=seo-rd-se) and, you guessed it, paste it into notepad
9. Now open up Google Reader, or whatever you’re using as an RSS reader and ADD ALL THE URLs YOU PASTED INTO NOTEPAD INTO THE READER. This bit’s important,that’s why all the caps…
10. Now, export your OPML file from Google Reader or whatever and save it to your desktop
11. Now sign up for an account with Feed Rinse and import your OPML feed
12. Now click ‘channel’ and configure each feed to filter for the term ‘Jed’ (or maybe your own term )– this might take a while
13. Now you can either do some fancy crap with Pipes (worth another post ENTIRELY), export this feed to your RSS reader, or, if you’re like me, you can feed this little monster into a locked dummy Twitter account using Twitter Feed and then use Boxcar (like Drew sets it up) to set up instant push notifications every time you’re mentioned on teh interwebz (incl. Facebook). WORD.

Kerry Gaffney and Darika Aherns, I bloody love them both. They both spit truth and fire and always manage to post my brain thoughts on their blogs. Until now.

Darika and Kerry both recently posted about blogger outreach, they both wrote how, due to small campaign scales, we should look at client education and turn down short term work or shift focus from influential bloggers to mainstream bloggers and save ourselves time and effort – after all, we don’t have enough budget to maintain permanent blogger relations, do we?

Darika wrote;

It’s not possible to build trusted relations and have brand conversations in the short-term. Three months, the traditional quarterly budget or common campaign cycle, is not long enough.

Yes. Yes we do, that’s what we’re paid to do, that’s why we’re specialists and expert relationship builders.

Blogger relations, much like media relations isn’t just for Christmas, or Spring, or Summer. The people that you meet today don’t have a shelf life, and the strongest relationships are the ones that develop over a long period of time. Making friends isn’t a start / stop process.

Kerry wrote;

Niche bloggers might well not have the same range of places to get info and may well also feel a bit used and abused after the short campaign finishes. Which made me think that perhaps we shouldn’t look to engage bloggers at all on a proactive basis.

Kerry’s point about niche blogs really falls on my deaf ears; niche bloggers don’t feed from the mainstream, it’s completely the other way around. Run a network analysis tool (like ours ) through virtually any network and you’ll find that the influential blogs are the niche ones – watch how the news spreads through a network and 9 times out of 10 you’ll find it starts at a niche blog. So no, you can’t ignore them and just go for the big boys.

Kerry wrote;

I think basically I’m advocating a hybrid approach between traditional media relations and a self-service canteen here, which would lead to bloggers being self-selecting about working with PRs rather than being bombarded with love and then dropped when the next campaign starts.

Some of this I believe in, you can’t just drop a blogger once the campaign is finished, you need to nurture that relationship – most clients buy agencies for two reasons; experience and expertise – that expertise is what you know and who you know. WHO YOU KNOW.

As Darika says;

I personally turn down a lot of short-term project work these days because I think it’s not possible to achieve much beyond securing a few blog posts. I also don’t like hearing from bloggers and community contacts that they weren’t looked after beyond the life-cycle of a specific campaign – I’m not in this industry for the short-term.

Phew.

Kerry’s post also bought up another issue I’ve been wanting to raise; An inconvenient PR truth (I’m now back to agreeing with Kerry!), and Adam Parker (again, someone that I have the upmost respect for). The inconvenient truth is a very noble concept, it looks to fix our industry, but hey, let’s be frank, the only people that will read that already probably follow the Bill of Rights – they’re savvy PR people, that’s how they found it. They don’t work at a two man agency in Swinbourne that peppers national press with  lawnmower spares news releases.

# This post has been updated in a few ways, quotes have now been attributed, a quote from Darika has been added and a sentence has been added that distinguishes two points (second paragraph, first sentence).

I’ve come straight from reading a post on MediaBistro about Alex Bogusky being promoted and retiring at the same time – those crazy advertising kids!

But something that Mr Bogusky said really resonated with me, he said;

“I had one seemingly impossible dream when I started in advertising and that was to leave the industry different than I found it. For people to be able to say, ‘It was like this before Crispin Porter+Bogusky. It’s like this now.’ I feel like that’s been done.”

Wow, a pretty bold claim, but (and I’m sure you can see where this is going) one that I also aspire to. Most people fall into PR and enjoy it because it’s fun, social and creative. I enjoy PR because I feel like everyday I get a teeny bit closer to making an impact. I probably don’t, but in my head a bit changes.

So (and here’s the kicker), I’m putting it out there; I want to leave this industry different from how I found it.

Hopefully I’ll be leaving it at about 30 (the plan is to do a Freud and sell an agency for 11million at 31) having made some sort of difference.

Even if that difference is a big black mark on the industry. Which is quite likely. And I’ll probably be poor, no one leaves an industry at 30.