I spent a few days last week trying to write up a comprehensive post on the important of integrating different elements/specialisms of marketing to create successful social media campaigns – by successful, I mean those campaigns that break out further than niche communities. The campaigns that have the same impact that a Nike TVC would have. Successful offline and online, integrated and successful.

It was harder to write than I thought. Serious writers block.

So I turned to Keynote, and here it is…

You cannot send a video ‘viral’, it’s impossible to predict.

How could you even begin to understand how a video is passed from one person to another? How could we interpret individual, nuanced communications between two friends? Who’s on their email contacts? Or their Facebook friends? Or their YouTube account? HOW COULD WE POSSIBLY UNDERSTAND THE SOCIAL MECHANICS?

Well. Simple.

Understand the social structure, then the environment and you’ve got your roadmap to ‘viral’. Or ‘virality’ as I’d like to call it.

You see, ‘viral’ is an interesting subject for me. I spend a lot of time rebuffing the notion that social media is all about getting 8 trillion views on your video. And to an extent, I’m right – 8 trillion views from people that aren’t interested in your product is A WASTE OF TIME. But 8 trillion views from potential customers? Now that’s ROI…

So let’s lay out three scenarios for a client situation. The situation is as follows:

The client is selling product A and has produced (with our guidance) an intriguing video that has some ‘wow’ factor as well as a mention for product A.

OK. So here are the three possible situations (followed by the perfect solution )

1) you speak with some potentially interested communities – 3,000 views

2) you ‘seed’ the video on YouTube and hope for the best – 300 views

3) you send it to all your friends and ask them to send it to their friends too – 30 views

From what I’ve seen, these are pretty much the basic ways of ‘seeding’ a video to create a ‘viral’ effect.

So, here’s the fillet steak you’ve been waiting for, the coup de grace…

How do you send a video viral?

The term ‘viral’ comes from virus, something that is spread from one person to another via contact. This has exactly the same meaning when we refer to the ‘viral’ video – multiple contact points from multiple people within your social graph (IE your friends). So, understanding who has the most contact points is important – they’re the centre of a social graph (IE group of friends) so are more exposed to more people within that circle, who are then each exposed to more of other circles, and on and on.

Picking the social graph…. An interesting one really. If you’re trying to send a product launch video viral that’s of a new mobile handset, focus on the early adopters with large social graphs – the people at the centre of the technology universe. But here’s the key – don’t contact them, contact someone that influencers them, with a video/content that they’re likely to like. If influencer A is contacted by influencer B about some content that we’re sure influencer A will like (because we’ve analysed him and his preferences) then we can make the following assumption – the key influencer within a social graph is receiving content from a peer (remember people trust people like them) that has been created for her/him and is therefore incredibly likely to pass this content on to her/his social graph – spreading the message on behalf of the brand, unknowingly, to people that trust people like him.

Then we let the Matthew Effect kick in.

If Influencer A has 300 connections, each with a high level of trust in influencer A (and each influenced by her/him) then lets estimate that 10% of people pass this on to their 300 connections – reaching 9,000 people, each having a similar success rate (because each network is built around the same type of influence and trust, regardless of the perceived level) this reaches 900 people within two steps. So within two emails (effectively, we’ve reached three times the number you would’ve if you’d seeded the video on YouTube (leap of faith time).

This only works if you understand network dynamics. How a message moves within a network, who passes on viral’s and memes, who is a communicator, an early adopter, an innovator and on and on.

But let me make one thing clear, if an agency tells you that ‘viral’ is unpredictable, THEY ARE LYING.

(But understanding network dynamics is expensive, and they probably know you can’t afford it – after all, reaching 8 trillion of the right customers should be cheap…  )

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

This post has probably been written 56,341,463 times before, but this post is for me, not for you (ok, maybe you can read it too).

Facebook is due to announce some plans for some location stuff tonight (none of the other 56,341,463 posts are as technical as this one, I know) and everyone is speculating about how it’ll kill FourSquare. And Google. And Gowalla. And cure cancer (no one said this, but give it time). And for the first time, I agree.

Here’s why…

Facebook has more than 500million users. Each of those users feels warm and safe with Facebook. They log in, they stalk their friends, they upload photos and ask people to comment on them, they share too much. They know Facebook.

FourSquare has more than 2million users. Each of those (guess work here) is an innovator/early adopter. Each is waiting for the full value to be realised. They’ll all probably stick with FourSquare (ego-trap and all that).

Providing that Facebook doesn’t rock the foundations of it’s own platform, people will use location. If it introduces the ability to check-in at locations like you’d update your status, people will. 500million people will. Facebook introduced the ‘Like’ function – low latency, high pick-up. If location is as introduced in a similar way, pick-up will undoubtedly be similar.

New networks are like icey lakes, get on the ice and if it’s thick enough, you’ll slide about like Torvil. If it’s thin you’ll fall underneath and die. The same can be said for the way that we take up new networks – the risk is a barrier, the opportunity to fail (people perceive people that join every new network as ‘throwing enough at the wall’) and people don’t like to lose face. Facebook is the equivalent of Torvil picking you up, skating into the winter olympics and getting a solid ten. It’s safe.

It will change things in a big way. Imagine tracking 500million people around the world, each checking in and sharing their location with friends (and due to Facebook’s inventive approach to piracy, the rest of the world probably).

As a data geek I’m practically frothing at the mouth.

I was digging through the internet last night looking for interesting videos on the digital world and stumbled across this mental Romanian video from a few years back featuring Faris Yakob and Iain Tait!

It’s a pretty good interview (bar the incredibly loud sound effects between scenes) and Iain makes some interesting points about where advertising is moving towards (which we’ve seen proven in the three or four years since this interview).

The point is simple: digital isn’t a set of trends, it’s a way of thinking.

Also, early on, look out for Iain talking about how he’s online even in his sleep

Social media, and in particular, social networks, are a mental mess of ‘big data‘. Photos, text, links, videos, podcasts, FarmVille – our online lives have become busy to say the least.

When we originally signed up to the internet (bad terminology) we looked for people that we already knew (from real life) and people that we had shared interests with. Fine. Great, even. I think this is how we create our own little version internet – our network depicts exactly how we view the internet.

Our network shares links that we click, and that network is built from people that we find, people that we believe are similar to ourselves because they’re interested in what we’re interested in. Google is now starting to prioritise our search results based on our social graph – the friends that we choose now dictate the search results that we find.

Can you see the issue with this? We choose our own network, therefore we choose our own internet, content, links. We reinforce our own interests – which is great to find more out about what we already know, but is it good for widening our understanding of the world? Probably not…

This thought has been rattling around my head for a while, so I started to think how I could battle it.

The first thing I thought was: streamline my networks, therefore trimming out a lot of the tertiary friends and keeping the ones that I love. The next thing was to stop reading about 95% of the blogs I read and find new ones, using odd terms to find them. Terms that I knew nothing of such as ‘neuroscience’, ‘architecture’ and ‘futures trading’.

Streamlining networks
This is something that I’ve been thinking about for a while now – you may have seen me (using the ‘hide’ function on Facebook, culling my Twitter friends and then categorising the remaining good few [:-)] and trying to use more traditional methods of keeping in touch with my closest friends (the phone, texts, email even). It’s been pretty successful, I can leave Twitter for six hours and have a very speedy catch up when I come back, Facebook isn’t dominated by stupid games updates and I’ve caught up with so many friends in the last seven days – just by understanding my own networks.

Finding new sources of knowledge
Search for things that you don’t understand – look for people that are specialists in their area, people that explain things in a clear way. That way you’ll stand more chance of picking up and idea quickly and transferring it to your industry (hopefully). Don’t be scared of what you don’t know.

Social media is about communication, both receiving and transmitting, and both of these are ultimately about relationships and understanding – we surround ourselves with people that we admire and that we learn from and love. If you’re about to suggest that I’m using my relationships like commodities, let me stop you right there – I’m trying to maintain existing relationships and build new ones by spending time with people – could you say the same if you followed 80,000 people? It’s important to give the right level of attention to each of these relationships – following 45,000 people or having 8,000 friends on Facebook surely cannot be conducive to having valuable relationships? And what could you learn if these people were all marketers?

What do you think?

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…

Hello.

If you read Becca’s blog or my Twitter feed you’ll have realised by now that we’re going on holiday.

It’s our first holiday since September 2009 so we’re understandably quite excited. By quite excited, we packed our suitcases last Friday. We don’t fly until Wednesday. Excited is an understatement.

So we’ll be leaving for Kos for ten days and pretty much laying down by a pool (one of twelve, yep, twelve – fancy!) and drinking cocktails the whole time.

However, and I’m sure you saw this coming, I’ll be taking some light reading with me. Which is the motive behind this blog post really – I thought I’d share my reading!

I’m going to finish Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Fooled by Randomness, and I’ll be trying to smash through these new ones too:

• An Introduction to Theories of Popular Culture, by Dominic Strinati. Impulse buy, has two big sections on feminism and structuralism – love both.
• Predictably Irrational, by Dan Iriely. Lost my copy, got mad, tried to find it, couldn’t find it, definitely lost, bought another. If I find it, comment and you can have it .
• 48 Laws of Power, by Robert Green. I loved the Art of War and I’m hoping that this is just as good!
• Six Degrees, by Duncan Watts. Watts is my hero. Period.
• How we Decide, by Jonah Lehrer. Lehrer has been on my radar for a while yet I’ve never read anything he’s published, just read about him. This looks like a good starting point!
• Free, by Chris Anderson. Haven’t read it, should’ve read it, gonna read it.

Undoubtedly I wont read any of these and I’ll come back moaning about sleeping for the whole of the holiday. However, I bloody need ten days sleep. I appear to be running on coffee and the odd cigarillo at the moment, and I’m not Jack White so that’s not cool!

I’ve always been a big believer in having individual communities for individual interests, yet I’ve always maintained quite a homogenous collection of networks. In fact ask any of my Wolfstar employees and any one of them could name a time when I stood up and declared “I only have my own self, split across multiple networks – me is me!”.

Well that is still true, “me is me”, but now it seems that I’ve realised that my connections are filtering into these niches.

There has also been a slight change with the technology that I’m using. I’m now a Mac boy. It has made things seem a bit lovelier. A bit more… easy.

With this in mind, I’ve decided to start using multiple networks regularly (some of them will be connected, but hopefully I’ll do this in a smart way and not create a continuous content reverb. It’s awful when that happens. Just awful.)

So, without adieu, these are the networks for my niches…

Tumblr – I’ve had a Tumblr account for a while, never really known what to do with it though, so now (under the inspiration of the beautiful Becca Caddy) I’ll be using my Tumblr account to repost fancy stuff that I find. That’s why it’s called ‘What was that thing I saw the other day…?’

Twitter – this will remain my confession box. I’ve always struggled to self moderate, now I’m just going to embrace that. For all the PR people following me, stop following me and subscribe to my blog instead. Word.

jedhallam.co.uk – this is my blog. This is where I talk about innovation, digital communications and (occasionally) public relations (‘cept I’m not even nearly experienced to talk about PR as I am to talk about innovation, kind of). My blog will be my brain dump. The place where my Moleskine is turned into letter thoughts and typed up and everything.

Flickr – Becca and I bought a fancy pants camera for Valentines day, so we’ve collected a mass of photos (some are here, here and here) and I’m planning on updating Flickr with my photos much more regularly. It also helps that I’ve recently refound my Flickr password.

I’m also toying with the idea of pulling all of the above (plus LinkedIn) into my flavours.me account (for the uninitiated it’s basically a feed reader for a person), but time will tell.

Where do you stand on personal disparity between networks?

What an opened ended and truly knobish way to end a blog post.