The image of a rockstar standing on stage, high above the audience is a strange one to bring into the digital marketing world.  Marketing to me, is about communications, and experiences.  When we work here, on the digital journey of our clients, it is about working in partnership – not in standing apart and down into the mass experience of a rockstar crowd.  I think that’s particularly true in the B2B market.  Yes absolutely you want to build expertise, and knowledge as a marketer- that is after all why a client wants to work with you, rather than going through the learning curve themselves or diverting time from delivering their core purpose.

The image of rockstar brings the image of one person standing out on their own.  Here – we use the strengths of our whole team to work on the best solution for our clients.  The image of rockstar I also think can have some baggage with it – is that really the image marketers want to be giving their clients and potential clients?  Think real “rockstar” behaviour and what may come to mind is smashing up hotel rooms, acting like a diva and making impossible demands.  Not very client led!

Focusing on being a rockstar puts the emphasis in the wrong place- with you.  Where you want to put it is in showing how you can help this customer, this need, this particular problem.

And how you can share that knowledge, or deliver that work, in the best way to strengthen the position of the client.

Share your thoughts on this below – are you a rockstar or guru?  What other tems do you use to describe what you do?

Here are a few to get you started:

1. As a research and listening tool before you invest and prioritise in an active social media campaign.
2. To give you data to back up your case for using social media as an organisation.
3. To identify which platforms your clients and competitors are using right now.
4. To identify which platforms your brand is being mentioned on.
5. To monitor perceptions about your brand and those of your competitors to find out not just the volume but whether the mentions are neutral, positive or negative.
6. To find out who is talking about you and your brand along with how influential and wide reaching those conversations are.
7. To provide a benchmark ready for specific campaigns and activity online.
8. To monitor the impact of marketing initiatives such as publications and sponsorship of events.
9. To monitor mentions of specific, key individuals within the firm and what is being said about them (partners)
10. To give you early warning for any potential crises which may occur and be spread via social media as a forum.
11. To help you target interaction and engagement with the influencers you identify.
12. To give you content ideas based on the language being used by online mentions.
13. To identify the hottest topics and themes to provide ideas for topical content and responses.
14. To provide influencer names to build into blogger outreach and other social media activity.
15. To capture trends in the industry you work in (news aggregation)
16. To input into internal activity to show the impact that the firm has in the “real world”
17. To monitor for specific areas such as complaints and compliments, with a goal of putting in place processes to reduce areas which customers are complaining about online.
18. To monitor use as recruitment tool and what people say about your firm in relation to recruitment.
19. To pick up mentions of any mentions of people who work for you now – potentially spotting and heading off any internal dissatisfaction which is being shared online.
20. To find out what conversations and communities it may be worth getting involved in which support the business and marketing objectives of your brand.
21. To discover and recognise evangelists and fans of your brand.
22. To monitor how long buzz around a specific event lasts online.
23. To spot potential issues of “non official” responses that aren’t in line with the response you’d have liked to make
24. Gain additional knowledge on what real time alerts you need to set up to monitor for potential crises.
25. To help you understand the different platforms and consider appropriate strategies and responses which fit with each individual case.

What else would you add?  Do you have one which has been most useful to you?

Here are a few I really liked…

Facebook Introduces Places.

Not sure what the impact of this will be yet – partly because we haven’t yet got it here in the UK.  An interesting continuation on the privacy debate with a few articles covering the risks of allowing others to check in for you.  You can find out more about Places here.  On other news about Facebook, Mashable updated us that the dislike button was a scam.  Pleased to hear it – I like positive news not wanting to show I dislike something!

Twitter tells you who you both follow

A new tool from Twitter which tells you who you are both following.  I like this to be able to see mutual connections – interesting to see where interests co-incide!

Google CEO Warns on Online Activity Impacting in later life

The CEO of Google Eric Schmidt this week said that he thought activity online early on in life could lead to people changing their name later in life to escape unfortunate activity in their youth.  Seeing how people post comments about job search/ interviews, it’s worth thinking about how schools and colleges should be educating about this so that this becomes a natural part of how students act online – balancing the personal, fun and social now, with the fact that your digital footprint will continue to exist long after the hangover has gone.

More time online – multitasking reigns

According to a new survey by OfCom yesterday, we are multitasking and spending around 7 years a day in a combination of communication and media activities that combine TV, surfing the web and watching online video.  Interesting that Facebook is reported at 45% of mobile use in the UK – if that’s not a good reason to think about adding Facebook to your marketing mix, I am not sure what is!

Online Sales hit 3 year high

It goes hand in hand with the fact that more of us are spending our money online.  The Cap Gemini Index covers online sales at around 100 UK retailers.  This was a better than expected performance with poor weather being partly behind the gains.

The Rise of Freemium

LinkedIn is one service which already does freemium well – a great free offering, and the chance to have a paid service for additional levels of interaction and search.  This week Slideshare, the presentation sharing platform, announced it was moving to a Freemium model.  That’s not long after Hootsuite, the popular third party application, also announced a freemium model for customers moving forwards.

I think it sums up something I often say to business people and individuals about sharing information.  It’s about creating your own criteria and guidelines about what you are comfortable sharing.  This will definitely vary from person to person, and even business to business.  Some of the things which may impact on your criteria at a personal level are:

• How you like to share information personally.  If you are private in real life, common sense says you are much more likely to be private online.
• If you know someone who has had problems because of information shared online, or you have had issues yourself.
• If you have a work contract restricting what you can post under certain circumstances
• Your level of personal concern around privacy – safety or beliefs

I was also inspired this morning by a great post by Tamar Weinberg on the Techipedia blog.

In addition to that, what you share may be impacted by your purpose.  It’s more likely if you want business visibility online, that you have more information available online because of that, than you do if you are just using social media from a purely personal perspective.

At a business level, your criteria to share may depend on:

• Your contract and what information you can share without consequences
• Restrictions based on role or business type – such as sharing inside information, disclosure rules etc.
• Ethical concerns – for instance a coach may be more comfortable sharing personal data than a counsellor.

If you are a business, and thinking about moving into the social media space yourself it is well worth taking the time to think through what it means to your existing contracts of employment with your staff, and what other help or guidance you may need to give them.  In your company you have people who want to help evangelise your brand and share their expertise – it is how to do that on message and in tone with the rest of the work you do as a brand.

One way to do that is to brainstorm different scenarios which could occur and then create some guidance around specific responses and your criteria for sharing information both at a personal, professional, and business level.

The move is designed to further enhance Pannone’s online brand presence and digital marketing strategy, and create a cutting-edge website for existing and prospective clients.

Pannone Managing Partner Emma Holt said: “We see our website as an increasingly significant platform for communicating with our current and future clients.  We felt the time was right to refresh our existing website design and architecture.

“Intendance anticipated our agenda well, and thought carefully about what would be important to Pannone. Also they were not afraid to provide an objective critique of our existing website and explain how they could boost our digital marketing strategy.”

Intendance Head of Business Development Fanni Vig said: “Intendance is delighted to be working with Pannone on its new website. Pannone has evolved significantly during the last few years both as a firm and a brand. “The website will not only reflect its current positioning, but will enable Pannone to exploit the full potential of online marketing and social media with a fully integrated  approach.”

Our reputation can take a long time to create, and is a function of building trust over time.  It’s about being someone who does what they promise to, when they say they will. Often it can be about over delivering.

With web 2.0 we have more than ever before, the chance to tell people what we really think about that big brand we have been working with.  We can tweet, we can Facebook, we can blog about our concerns.

If you’re a brand, then this is a big deal.  It means knowing what is being said about you, where and when.  Social Media Monitoring will help you here.  It means considering what your response should be.  Above all, it means thinking about how you rebuild that reputation, from the ground up.

What’s hurting your reputation right now, may be a whole host of issues.

Complaints about your product or service

Dealt with smartly, these can become opportunities to showcase your ability to deal positively with your customers.  I remember reading a book that said your main problem wasn’t your customers who weren’t happy, it was the silent majority that just walked away from working with you ever again, and chose to work with someone else.  Complaints, whilst painful, can be a way to understand processes and systems that need fixing, service issues that need handling and a front line view of what your customers see everyday.  Is it what you want them to see?

Monitoring these will help you respond in a timely and appropriate manner, and where possible, get the problem fixed.  BTCare do this, as do VirginTrains (using Twitter).  Note that it’s not about the problem being all visible in the tweet stream – it’s about fitting social media with your existing customer care and showing how you will resolve and giving “real life” options to get it sorted.

An interesting post I picked up on Twitter today (thanks @robwatts for tweeting it into my stream!) emphasises the importance of listening and responding. It links to this post by Sloane Berrent about the Pepsi Refresh project and some technical issues with it, and how this had made the blog post writer feel, and then an update after Pepsi had been in touch with them.

Issues with your brand/ associations with your brand.

Think of a high profile issue and you’ll probably also be able to find mentions on most social media channels.  BP had a Twitter account set up BPGlobalCare which is an account not run by the company, and tweeting about the oil spill.  It does have an official (and verified) account BP_America which is now tweeting updates and has a Twitter background with full information on where to go to find out more.

These are more challenging, because it’s not only thinking about the particular response, and whether making one will add fuel to the fire, but it’s also about the big questions about how brands work which may sit at a much higher, more strategic level than where ownership of the Twitter account sits.  Here, it’s about deciding your response, and any changes over time that you may want to make as a response to criticism.

Fake Sites and accounts

Another place social media monitoring and planning can help you is in becoming aware of anyone tweeting / setting up accounts using your brand name.  Twitter for instance, has a policy about this and a way of verifying accounts.  Other ways you can help protect against this are:

• Making sure you use your own brand name on social media platforms and use strong passwords to protect them.
• Use corporate branding and links to the corporate website to identify them as genuine accounts.
• Help people by showing them on your website as official accounts (Dell do this well).
• Protect your brand by registering the variants of it as well as the one you are using, so someone can’t “sit” on your domain name or use it against your brand.

What else do you see hurting brands – and how are you handling it?

Intendance senior designer Shannon Tomblin said “The design team is very excited to be working on the new site for Kingsley Napley. The firm has a very down to earth and open minded approach to the project, which allows us to push the boundaries. We want the design to be fun & edgy and to really get across the unique personality and bespoke service offering of the firm.”

The firm’s site has grown quite substantially during the last year, and the navigation had become difficult. Visitors have to click quite a bit to find certain services, and the information architecture is not ideal. Our teams have been looking at ways to provide visitors with a better experience, along with a fresh, vibrant new look.

Alison Burdick, Marketing Director at Kinglsey Napley said “The new site will convey more about the kind of firm we are as well as what we do. Using research from visitors to the site as well as from internal users we focused on ensuring the most wanted content was easy to find,  engaging to read and last but absolutely not least, pleasing to look at!”

Facebook announces a date for Page Changes

Facebook announced last Friday that it will be changing the layout of pages on August 23rd – administrators will have an opportunity to preview what their custom tabs will look like before that, in order to make any changes before the automatic resize. It means if you currently have information on the side bar in a box, you’ll need to move this to one of your tabs instead.

Facebook for media.  Facebook introduced some great pages recently, including this one for Media Companies.

Twitter creates their own Tweet Button

Twitter creates their own Tweet Button – they also cover that they’ve worked with Tweetmeme (the creators of the “Big Green Button” you’ll have seen on many blogs, and that they now have their own new plans in the pipeline and will continue to work direct with Twitter.

New HP Study shows re-tweets are a key sign of influence

This one didn’t surprise me too much, having heard a great analogy at #smmuk10 about how you work with Twitter can be likened to the speed of sharing your message.  When you tweet yourself, it depends on who is listening and engaging with your content.  When you @reply someone, then you have a slow speed of interaction, because it is generally a little more like having a personal chat (albeit one that everyone can see!)  And finally, retweeting is widening the circle of influence that information can be found through.  More details can be found on this Mashable post. Looking at the list of influencers, it is interesting that it is accounts with high profile, consistently sharing up to date information.

That’s it for this weeks round up – what did you see that you liked?

Do your friends think you need a holiday?

There is a short video explaining the logic behind the idea, which is a sound one.  When you go on holiday, even if you use something like TripAdvisor, how many times have you come back and found someone who has been – and whilst there found something to do that you’d have LOVED to have done – if only you knew about it!

Well, that’s the idea behind TripFriends – that you sign into TripFriends with your Facebook account, and then you can see information on who has been to different locations, and then you can ask them for their recommendations of what to do.

From signing in, you can see their home areas, cities they can advise on, and their favourite cities.  Then you can ask for help!  You can put in a location and TripAdvisor will tell you who has been, and you can then either message that person or send out a call for help to your Facebook wall.  I just did mine for Madrid, so it will be interesting to see what additional tips come back!

What could it mean for business to business?

Here, linking Facebook and Tripadvisor is one way to link the social web to your decision making process.  Business to Business applications may be:

*  Asking who has worked with a certain firm / partner within a professional services firm

*  Asking for recommendations of particular services (legal, accountancy)

*  Ratings on services/ products visible for all to see

*  Visibility of who in your network has used what services (where they choose to make that public)

How do you feel about these moves to link together your networks with decisions and choices we make?