My role as head of Consumer PR at Tangerine (and working alongside my colleagues at Juice Digital) has ensured that I have been very aware of the development of social media as a marketing and communication channel and its growing importance within the PR & Marketing strategies for our retail PR clients. I like to think that, at Tangerine, we are ahead of the game in utilising these channels to our clients’ benefit.

However, personally, I could never be described as an ‘early adopter’. I’ve gradually absorbed Facebook and, to a lesser extent, Twitter into my life and it now vies for my attention alongside Tangerine, the husband, baby, horses and dogs!

But the more I learn, the more I realise there is nothing new about the principles of social media marketing. For time immemorial, people have always been influenced by others when they shop. No matter how confident a shopper you are, the approval (or otherwise) of trusted friends has always had a huge influence on your purchasing decisions. We’ve all built up a loyalty to certain brands which, experience has taught us, will ‘just work’. Whether that’s a pair of jeans or a new toaster ,we trust certain brands to not let us down.

All social media has done is make the process of consultation, recommendation and opinion sharing easier, faster and on a much larger scale. But it’s not new.

Take Social Shopping, the ‘big new trend’ in fashion retail. We have always had favourite friends to go shopping with. Those whose opinions we trust and know they’ll tell you what they really think. And we’ve all got those types of friends and colleagues who are always ‘on trend’ and great to consult with. Then there are the certain shops we know we’ll find what we want and always make a bee-line for.

Social Shopping has simply taken this age-old behaviour online and mobile. This site is a great example: http://www.shopwithyourfriends.com/us-women/
Here you can see what outfits your friends are wearing, how much they cost and where to buy them. You can create a ‘lookboard’ for yourself then ask your friends what they think before buying. You can browse the new looks from your favourite retailers and co-ordinate them. I think it’s great – a sort of specialist fashion Pinterest.

So there’s nothing for retailers to be scared of as social media develops. The core principles of retailing still and will always apply, we just have to help our clients keep ahead of the new ways of applying them!

Last week, The Drum published an article announcing that Strathclyde police force was to be one of the first in the UK to give officers in every district their own branded Twitter accounts, as part of a new ‘tweets on the beat’ scheme. From this month, officers will use the tool to inform and update communities about incidents in their area.

Now, let me make one thing clear: I love Twitter. In my opinion, there’s no better way to keep abreast of news and developments in your industry. But I’m just not sure, for something as serious as crime, whether there’s too much potential for things to go wrong.
And, judging by the comments that have appeared online since the scheme was announced, I’m not the only one.

The main concern seems to be regarding time spent on sending out tweets, when officers are already over-stretched. The director of communications at Strathclyde police, Rob Shorthouse, has attempted to allay fears about administration, telling officers, “This is not going to be a huge burden on your time. You’re not going to be Lady Gaga, you’re not going to have 20 million followers.” Indeed not. Although quite a spectacle to witness I’m sure, it would be an impossible task to catch criminals in one of Gaga’s outlandish outfits, complete with 6-inch heels.

Shorthouse insists that the scheme follows the same principle as a public consultation meeting, but that the discussions are taking place in a different – and, arguably, more relevant – environment.
When you look at it this way, it makes perfect sense; the police force is simply embracing modern communication techniques in an attempt to reach those members of their community that might not otherwise engage with them.

But there is no doubt that the scheme will have to be implemented carefully and monitored continuously, and this is what concerns me. Given the current pressures on the British police, I would anticipate that monitoring officers’ tweets will be a logistical nightmare. What worries me even more is that Shorthouse claims there will be no specific guidance for officers in terms of what they should or shouldn’t say on Twitter. Social media policies are crucial for any business, and particularly for those for whom an ill-timed or factually incorrect tweet could have serious repercussions.

If applied in the right way, I agree that the scheme could be a step in the right direction in the fight against crime, with all the information-sharing opportunities that Twitter offers.

But I can see both sides of the argument and, if I’m honest, I’m still on the fence. I’d be interested to know everyone else’s thoughts on this!

Is there anybody more qualified to discuss the future of newspapers than Keith Rupert Murdoch? I think not. He has tabloids, broadsheets, free sheets, regional papers and even some much smaller local papers.
Let’s face it, what the man – whether you agree with him or not – doesn’t know about the print industry isn’t worth reading about.

His global business has expanded beyond his wildest dreams and of course broadcast is where he makes his real money but you cannot deny the man has news print running through his veins. He props up the Sunday Times to the tune of millions of pounds of losses.
Newspapers will always be his first and true love, so it was with interest that I noted his prediction regarding their future.

Commenting on the rise of “disruptive technologies” that could not be properly regulated, Murdoch said: “The fact is, the internet came along, slowly developed as a source of news, and is now absolutely in our space. And it is responsible for a loss of circulation.

“Certain things can be done to control the major players but in the long run it is too wide. You have blogs coming from Beijing and the Cayman Islands and you can’t regulate that. The danger of putting regulations in place is that in 10 years you will have no press to regulate.
“We’re dealing in a very complex world with disruptive technologies and we’re suffering at the hands of those so when it comes to regulation I just beg for some care because it is really a very complex situation. The press today guarantees democracy and we want democracy rather than autocracy – I think that we would all agree with that in this room.”

Murdoch added that newspapers were “a huge benefit to society” and had had a “good run”, which he partly took credit for in terms of making the UK industry profitable again, but said that the run had come to an end because of the rise of new technologies.

He added: “In five years time there will be a billion tablets; smart telephones will probably be double that. There is very little cost of entry there; there is great cost of entry for newspapers.
“I think we’ll have, in quite a while – not 10 years; some people say five, but I am inclined to say 20 – we will have very small circulations. The day will come when [Publishers] will say we can’t afford the big presses and we will be purely electronic.”

He also defended local newspapers and pointed to the BBC, which has developed a vast number of local newspaper websites, as one of the major reasons they have faced particular difficulties.
Murdoch said: “The local press in this country has a great history of contribution to democracy and it will be a very sad day if the major ones – if all of them – disappear.
“I don’t know that they can be saved. They could be saved from the BBC, but I’m not sure that would be enough.”

It is very hard not to disagree with his analysis and it is easy to underestimate the significance of what he had to say on the future of the industry to the Leveson Inquiry.

His motives may well have been called into question and his testimony challenged by many – including former Prime Minister Gordon Brown and esteemed ex Times editor Sir Harold Evans – at various points throughout his two day appearance but his neat summary of where the industry is at was sincere and an extremely rare glimpse inside the mind of the greatest traditional media mogul of the modern era.
There will never be another Keith Rupert Murdoch – and no doubt many with celebrate that – but he is the last of the great newspapers barons. The future media will be dominated by digital leaders, as the power of print slowly declines further and further.

And it is for this reason alone that Murdoch’s testimony is so important, it will go down in history as the last stand from the world’s last ever newspaper baron.
There may be plenty of fight left in the old dog yet but his appearance simply confirmed how Murdoch is, quite literally, a dying breed.

We’re Forever Manchester and we do charity the Mancunian Way.

For anyone who’s not familiar with ‘doing things the Mancunian Way’ it means that we like to do things a bit out of the ordinary, we like to lead rather than follow, we do things with a bit of swagger and a sense of humour and as Tony Wilson so eloquently put it “This is Manchester, we do things differently here”. We’re famous for it and we’re proud of it.
That’s why, when making our new promo video to raise awareness of our charity, we wanted to steer away from any images of sadness, upset and need, and make a charity video the Mancunian Way.
We’ve taken a very tongue in cheek look at the recent trend of ‘chugging’ (charity street fundraising) which has now made Manchester’s Market Street an almost impossible obstacle course to walk along and try to show that, unlike other traditional methods used by charities, we try to combine fundraising with having a laugh, with doing something a bit different and, you guessed it, fundraising the Mancunian Way.

Although we don’t regularly start a flash mob and party with Rowetta to ‘Step On’ by the Happy Mondays in Piccadilly Gardens to raise money, as we did when making the video, we can regularly be seen fundraising with a Manchester twist at festivals, comedy shows, gigs and exhibitions to name a few.
Yet as much as we like having a laugh there is a very serious reason behind our innovative fundraising techniques – and that is to help the wonderful people of our wonderful region who selflessly give up their time to set up or run local grass-roots community projects for the benefit of others. We give money to these people who use it to improve where they live, to make sure there are always things to do and to make sure Manchester is the best place on Earth to live!
So if you’re passionate about Manchester just as we are, help us to raise awareness of Forever Manchester and the work we do by watching our video and sharing it with as many people as you can!

Take a look at the video!

Twitter: Follow @4EVERManchester
Facebook: Like facebook.com/forevermanchester

Pinterest.

Instagram.

Draw Something.

Tumblr.

Notice a trend?  4 of the fastest growing and most valuable social tools are 4 of the most simple to use and understand. They don’t require massive up keep, a strong social/digital awareness or even that much thought at any level.  They just simply entertain and engage. 

 While social networking and apps can serve a tremendous amount of advanced purposes from counting your calories to doing your taxes, it seems as though it’s still just the most simple pleasures that keep us coming back for more.  As our attention spans get shorter, and we are inundated by more and more choice of sites to visit and things to do online, I think it will continue to be the simplest platforms that win.

So if you’re thinking about building a new network, game or application – think quick.  Think easy.  Think simple.

The Grand National is the biggest date in horse racing and one of the most popular events in the British sporting calendar. There have always been positive and negative opinions on horse racing but the annual event at Aintree seems to polarise these views. This year two horses died during the race and were added to the growing list of fatalities at the event.

The weekend saw The Grand National become yet another victim of social media with some powerful online commentators calling for the event to be cancelled. At least two horses have died in this year’s race, with several jockeys receiving lengthy treatment on the track. It has been this way for years; horses are killed and jockeys are hurt.  Nothing has changed but the emergence of Twitter as an online force has given those previously without a platform to voice their discontent a chance to do so, and with some effect. The Grand National has been feeling the strain more than ever this year because more and more people are finding their feet online and growing in confidence.

The snowball effect in social media is a phenomenon and one that can overpower almost anything; a small conversation can become a national debate in a couple of hours. 

Horses cannot fight their own corner but you can be certain that if there are people out there who want to do it for them, they can be found online.

People ask me all the time – why did you come from the States to the UK?! They seem shocked, surprised, even flabbergasted at the thought of turning down the bright lights of NYC or sunny beaches of So Cal for the grey skies of Manchester.  While there are some professional reasons, the ultimate reason I came to the UK lies in the poem/video Tangerine made to celebrate its 10 year anniversary 

I’ve been very fortunate over the years to work with a number of agencies and a lot of very talented individuals.  The one thing I tended (not always, but often) to find was that it was hard to find fun, successful and profitable agencies that were built on integrity and character.  It seemed a lot of fun agencies put fun ahead of all else; successful agencies put revenues ahead of the client’s best interests; profitable agencies, well they couldn’t have too much character because they’d never hit the margins they wanted.

Tangerine has achieved all 3, without sacrificing character, while assembling a bunch of talented people who can only be seen as a bunch of characters in their own right (and now they’ve added a YankinManc – talk about characters!).

This short, animated video that @sandylindsay commissioned to commemorate the 10 years of Tangerine demonstrates exactly what Tangerine is all about.

It’s witty but caring.

It’s creative and fun, but with an air of simplicity that’s refreshing.

It’s proud of its achievements but knows who to thank for helping it achieve it.

 So watch the video and take a quick look at why I came from Park Ave to Potato Wharf.

As a digital strategist I was encouraged by this latest report http://www.reuters.com

demonstrating that more and more people are interacting with brands on Facebook and that this is influencing many of them to purchase products and services from said brand.

 It also made me consider what ‘interacting with a brand’ actually means and how valuable that interaction is. I thought I’d have a look at a few of them:

1.              Free Stuff

No matter how much the social media ‘purists’ might sniff, research after research has shown that the prime motivation for many people to connect with a brand is for giveaways, discounts and vouchers. Online vouchering has become an industry in itself.

 So the key for a brand is to extract maximum value for its ‘free stuff’. How has the transaction built brand loyalty? What influence will it have on repeat purchase? How has the campaign increased community numbers? If you can’t measure increases in these parameters post-campaign you have achieved little.

2. Increased Brand Awareness

Here’s the tricky one. Attracting large fan bases can have a huge impact on brand awareness but, in my opinion, only if that community is, in some way, engaging with the brand. Engagement can mean many things including ‘free stuff’ mentioned before – or some of the things I’m going to mention next. But millions of ‘hollow followers’ who rarely even visit the page have little value in my eyes.

 This is particularly seen in Facebook’s (not so) new intuitive timeline, which sees brands with more engagement achieve a more significant presence on timelines. Those with a ‘hollow following’ are increasingly starting to drop-off, seeing less traffic to their page and a smaller rate of growth than many of their competitors.   

3. Brand Preference

This is the Holy Grail really. Countless studies, including this latest one, have shown that if a brand can truly engage with a consumer, that consumer will prefer that brand to its competitors. So that brings us back to what ‘truly engaged’ means.

 In my opinion, it means that there has been some one-to-one communication between the brand and the fan. That could be anything from discussing a news snippet, to the fan uploading some of their own content to the brand’s Facebook page. It can mean receiving feedback, competition entry or good old voucher requests again. The important thing is that this engagement is personal for it to have the desired brand preference effect.

4. Market Research

This type of interaction really is win/win for a brand. Done well, crowdsourcing opinion (the currently trendy word for mass feedback) can give you extremely valuable insight into how your brand is perceived and what your fan base wants from it. Starbucks is brilliant at this. For several years now it has leveraged its fan base to get feedback and feed that into new product development.

But the ‘double-whammy’ is that people love to be consulted by their favourite brands, which in turn, increases loyalty and propensity to purchase. It’s a win/win situation!

5. Customer Service

This is the area that scares many brands. Yes, interacting with brands on social media will occasionally mean, depending on your product or service, that they will use your channel to air their grievances but this isn’t always a negative thing.

 If people feel aggrieved about something they will voice that, online and offline, whether you know about it (or like it) or not. So having this type of interaction on your own channel means:

1. You are aware of it, you can track it and understand the impact it has on your brand
2. You can deal with it, demonstrating (to the wider online community) your commitment to resolving the issue

 In fact, if properly handled, resolving a consumer’s complaint can turn that customer into a brand ambassador. What’s more, being seen by the rest of your community to have resolved it will increase goodwill towards the brand.

 These are just a few ways to generate value from ‘interacting’ on Facebook. I’d be interested in your thoughts.

There is a perennial argument about whether marketing and its disciplines are an ‘art’ or a ‘science’. Not in the academic, degree-awarding way, they always seem to categorise them in the arts sector. No, but in the way that these two terms are understood by the average Joe.

In my opinion, some of the disciplines are quite easy to categorise:

PR

 Art, definitely. Yes there’s a fair bit of sciency stuff: research, AVEs, media analysis and target audience segmentation etc, but really it’s all about writing, relationships and ideas. Much more art.

Advertising

 Art, definitely, even more than PR. Good advertising is 50% psychology (understanding motivations) and 50% creative inspiration. Like PR there’s a bit of science, particularly in the analysis of what works and what doesn’t, but overwhelmingly art.

Media planning and buying

 Definitely science.  A number cruncher’s dream. And a negotiator’s. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a fair bit of art and opportunities to be creative in new mediums, approaches etc and now that the principle of ‘earned media’ has finally got traction, even more so. But overwhelmingly science.

Search Engine Optimisation

 Science, definitely. Most so called artistic types couldn’t even spell algorithms. And if you’ve ever tried to understand a PANDA update you’ll know what I mean. Like above, there are lots of opportunities to be creative. In fact that’s what differentiates the good practitioners from the mundane, but still more science.

Direct Marketing

 Hmm. Getting tougher now. Lots of both needed to be successful here. As much, if not more analysis and number crunching than media planning. Analysis is crucial – open and click-through rates. Quite a lot of tech knowledge needed as well in the area of email and sms. However, to pass the instant bin or delete test it needs to be clever, creative and well written. Nevertheless, on balance, I’d go for science.

Social Media Marketing

 This is where you come in. I really can’t decide. My heart tells me art. It’s all about the conversation right? And the relationship.  It’s about connecting and engaging and lots of other ing words. But the ‘science’ is crucial. Monitoring and evaluation systems and their complicated algorithms are developing daily. Accurate, automated sentiment analysis through natural language analysis is the Holy Grail. Social media ROI equations abound. A fair bit of the knowledge and expertise of the SEO specialist is necessary.

Let’s be honest, to do it really well you need to be a bit of a tech geek. Desktop and mobile apps are key and the functionality and popularity of emerging devices, especially the new hybrids, is important knowledge.

And yet.  I’ve pretty much spent the last four years of my career practising social media marketing. If you forced me to choose just one of the many aspects of my job that has been the most important I would choose – ideas. Coming up with campaigns/activities that would make my clients stand out in the increasingly crowded world of social networks.  That’s art. Or is it?

I’d be delighted to know your opinion.

 It’s official – I’m sold.  Pinterest is here to stay.  I’m not saying that it will ever be as big as Facebook or Twitter but it’s definitely not going anywhere.  Why?

 Not because it’s fun – I mean it is fun to just post photos from anywhere on the internet and give them some personal meaning. It’s the inside of your school locker.  But that’s not it.

 Not because it’s simple – the hardest part is adding the “Pin it” button to your browser.  After that pinning is so simple everyone from my three year old cousin to 90 year old grandparent can do it.  But nope – that’s not why it’s sticking around.

 It’s certainly not staying because of how well it’s integrated into other social networks – although it is amazingly well thought out from an integration standpoint.  You MUST have a Twitter or Facebook account to sign up.  It made its competitors its allies.  But that’s still not it.

 So what is it about Pinterest that has me amazed… that has me wow’d?  It’s the fact it’s attracted a user base that is just not using other social networks.  Yes it has the digital geeks and the socially overdosed tweens who are the core of all social networks.  But it’s also grabbed an entirely new user base – 25+ girls who simply don’t really post or engage on Facebook or Twitter with any regularity.

 Facebook and Twitter are too personal for them.  They are adults (kinda) and they don’t want to share their personal moments (good, bad or ugly) with the world.  It’s a privacy thing, it’s vanity thing, it’s a too-cool-for-it thing.  But Pinterest…it’s different.  The five most active people in my Pinterest network are five girls who have made a combined three Facebook posts since the new year.

 It’s not sharing as much as it’s collecting. Look in any girl’s wardrobe – collecting is something they specialise in.  It’s also slightly less personal as 99 per cent of the imagery is NOT personal at all.  It’s restaurant they want to eat in – but not them stuffing their face.  It’s a beach in Bali they want to go to – but not them in a bikini hoping for the lighting to hit just right.  It’s a pair of shoes they want to own – but not them telling the world they actually blew their whole pay cheque on them.  It’s just an innocent collection of things they have….need…want…and can’t wait to have.

 So why is Pinterest here to stay?   It’s Dining Out, Jetsetter, and Gilt without – pardon the pun – the guilt of actually spending.  Did I mention that each of these companies are billion dollar businesses targeted at the 25+ female demographic?

 I’m noticing a trend!