Juice Digital blog

Christmas in the name of Social Media

December 16, 2009 – 11:15 am

This is a Blog by Tina Jagla:

This year’s race for the UK’s Christmas Number 1 might have surprised some traditionalists. The obvious candidate Joe McElderry from The X Factor with his single “The Climb” got competition from an unexpected source. A seventeen year old song called “Killing in the name” by American hard rock band Rage Against the Machine is continuously rising in the charts. Coincidence? No. Social Media.

Rage Against The Machine

The Facebook group “Rage against the Machine for Christmas No. 1” has called for action against the “X Factor monotony” and attracted over 700,000 members as well as copycats, including one called “Joe McElderry supports Rage against the Machine for Christmas No.1“. The surprising bit is, the members actually act and download the song to get it back into the charts, although I assume, many of them will already own it anyway. My prediction is that now that it becomes apparent that the goal can actually be achieved, even more Facebook users will be inspired to act. Also the press has picked up the story and the message is therefore spreading into mainstream media. This year’s Christmas No. 1 might well be “Killing in the Name”. Like it or not.

So here we have it again, the power of social media to influence mass behaviour. You might like these changes or you might not. If you are Simon Cowell, you probably won’t be too happy right now. But trying to get rid of the group is the wrong way to go. Suspicions on the internet are that either Facebook on their own behalf or on behalf of The X Factor is trying to do exactly that. The FB group was not available for hours throughout the last few days. This only leads to strengthening the movement and moving it elsewhere . But it will live on.

From a positive point of view, the Rage against the Machine movement is raising money for the charity “Shelter”. Donations of more than £20,000 have been made so far. This all demonstrates that understanding how Social Media works , embracing it and actually building up a loyal community of followers is the only way to use its positive benefits and prevent nasty surprises from happening. The X Factor is no stranger to Social Media use, but neither on their website, nor on their social media profiles can I find an official reaction to this potential Christmas No. 1 threat. Not even the most obvious “Make Joe Christmas No. 1 and don’t let the geeks win” official Facebook group. Just Simon Cowell’s comment in an interview with the Guardian, calling the campaign “stupid” and “cynical”. Come on Simon, you can do better than that.

I am looking forward to downloading the Rage Against the Machine song tonight and so for once, I’m going to do what “they” tell me. But they is not you, Simon.

Click here to watch the potential Christmas No. 1 on youtube.

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By steve.downes | Posted in Facebook, Social media, Video | Tagged christmas no 1, Facebook, rage against the machine, social media, tina jagla | Comments (2)

Social media? Yeah. Right. Whatever.

November 19, 2009 – 3:28 pm

Consumers are growing up and they don’t want their brands to shout at them any more.

If you’ve brought up kids, you’ll know what a culture shock it is when yours become adolescents. In my case, this time last year I had a gorgeous 13 yo daughter living in my house who was a joy to be with. I now have a surly 14 yo lodger to endure.

And, through a load of failed attempts, mistakes and experiments I’ve realised that I’ve got to learn to communicate with her in a completely different way if it’s going to have any effect.

For 13 years I’ve been ‘god’ in my house. I’m an adult you’re a kid, so do as I say. I’m wise you’re not, so believe what I say. I’m big you’re small, so I’m right. It worked for a while but not now. She now demands a rationale for every decision and won’t concur unless she gets a logical one. She disagrees with my opinions and tells me so. If she thinks something’s not fair she simply won’t do it, no matter how much I rant and rave. So, eventually, I’m learning to speak with her, not at her. I explain my decisions and change my mind if she persuades me otherwise. I try and not get upset if she has very different views on life to me.

There’s lot of similarity there to how brands are having to adapt the way they communicate with their consumers. For years they’ve ‘broadcasted’ their values and attributes at them. All media channels and the web have been used to shout how great we are. And, like me and my daughter, it worked very well for a while. Huge and successful brands have been built on the back of some great campaigns – both on and off-line. But it’s not working anymore. We consumers are growing up. We’re media and propaganda savvy. You can’t just talk at us any more or we won’t listen, you’ve got to talk with us. You’ve got to listen and take part in a conversation with us. And when you’ve done that, you’ve got to do something about what you’ve found out.

As a social media marketing agency we’ve our own jargon for this process – buzz and sentiment monitoring, engagement etc. but we don’t think for a moment that social media is the be all and end all of communicating with your consumer. All the traditional methods have their very effective place, DM, advertising, PR, events etc etc, but they’ve all had to adapt to the new savvy consumer.

The good news is that, if you get it right, your relationship will be stronger than it ever was before. Mine and my daughter’s is getting there.

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By steve.downes | Posted in Buzz monitoring, Digital PR, Digital marketing, Sentiment monitoring, Social Media Marketing, Social media | Tagged Buzz, Buzz monitoring, digital, Digital marketing, Digital PR, digital public relations, Internet, Manchester, online pr, Sentiment monitoring, social media, Social Media Marketing, social networking, social networks, Twitter | Comments (2)

Tangerine Juice anyone?

November 6, 2009 – 9:53 am

Leading Manchester-based PR agency, Tangerine PR, has put its money where its mouth is and driven a very large stake in the social media landscape by acquiring Juice Digital.

Juice has already become a leading social media brand and it will now become a division of Tangerine, which will retain the brand and invest in growing it into the leading social media specialist outside London.

So why have we done it? We’re talking to some of the UK’s leading brands about social media and there is no doubt this is both an exciting and lucrative opportunity.

I’ve been speaking to a number of great agencies and people about getting together but Tangerine appealed to me because it instantly saw the opportunity and is completely committed to making it a success. I’ve had my eye on Tangerine over the past few years and know that it is a dynamic company that’s really going places and it’s got a track record of being brave and innovating. I’m really looking forward to working with Sandy and her team to move Juice to the next level.

Listen to what Sandy Lindsay, Tangerine’s group MD is saying: “By acquiring Juice we’ve achieved three main things: 1) added extra strength and depth to our already thriving social media offer; 2) added extra ‘grey hair’ in the form of the extremely experienced and well respected Steve Downes to our senior management team; 3) taken over a very busy new business pipeline which, with the added credential of Tangerine behind it, should now be able to convert some very hot prospects.

“We have spotted an increasing trend whereby companies have expressed an interest in purchasing the services of a specialist social media team, over and above other PR and marketing services already in place, in order to capitalise on this vital area of audience targeting. Juice Digital, as well as supporting other client offers, will enable us to capitalise on this trend.”

So, all very positive (except maybe the ‘grey hair’ bit which, whilst accurate, is a bit gratuitous). Watch this space.

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By steve.downes | Posted in Social Media Marketing | Tagged Digital PR, tangerine pr | Comments (1)

Use Twitter and never miss the boat

September 29, 2009 – 4:40 pm

Andy Stanford-Clark, one of IBM’s 23 “master inventors”, took time out from his programme of relentless innovation to speak to David Rowan, the editor of Wired UK magazine at TEDGlobal 2009.

TEDConference2009 was help in Oxford in July

TEDGlobal 2009 was held in Oxford in July

Among many other things, Stanford-Clark explained how he hooked up Twitter to the Isle of Wight ferry, so that he would never miss the boat.

Check out the video.

This past July, TEDGlobal returned to Oxford for a now-annual conference. Four days of inspired thinking looked beyond the obvious, at the hidden forces shaping our future, at the mysterious functioning of things, at the invisible and at the not-yet-discovered. At TEDGlobal 2009, a roster of powerful speakers and performers explored The Substance of Things Not Seen.

Check out the pics here.

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By jeremy.dent | Posted in Futurology, Social Media Marketing, Social media, Twitter | Tagged hooking up Twitter, Isle of Wight ferry | Comments (0)

Why Social Media Marketing (SMM) is a natural partner to SEO (search engine optimisation)

September 22, 2009 – 3:57 pm

In addition to being a valuable part of a standalone marketing communications strategy, Social Media Marketing is also widely used in concert with search engine optimisation. One of the reasons social media marketing has been so widely adopted by those in the SEO industry is because of the dramatic impact that social media has on search engine listings.

Blogging, for instance, gives you a corporate platform on which you can develop viral/link content which is eminently promotable online. It gives you several additional pages and subjects a month that can be indexed by search engines and allows you to rank well for less common keywords that can still attract a lot of traffic overall (through the long tail effect).

Blog commenting, forum posting and content creation on other sites also helps you increase your brand exposure online and helps leverage traffic from within relevant communities.

With links in mind, it is worthwhile checking that your website SEO is up to scratch in terms of getting links to pages that have some form of decent design structure (titles, metadata, and relevant content) and linking with relevant anchor text.

One of the strongest reasons for SMM’s popularity is that it can bring hundreds of backlinks to a particular content piece. If you are a company that offers something like ‘conservatory building’ or ‘window cleaning’ it can be difficult to think up viral content.

So to resort to creating a piece on ‘The world’s ugliest dogs (and owners)’, even though the backlinks might help, is counter-productive. It would be much better to stay in the home improvement/development niche when thinking about content.

Even after the social media spike in traffic, overall traffic levels to a landing page will increase

Relevant content and advice can help with specific rankings for certain keywords, especially when link/anchor text is the same as the title of the story you are linking to. It’s likely to get more backlinks from the relevant niche.

Google appears to trust social media networks as a source for quality backlinks and appears to transfer link equity, even if most social sites ‘nofollow’ their links.

‘Nofollow’ is an HTML attribute value used to instruct search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target’s ranking in the search engine’s index. It is intended to reduce the effectiveness of certain types of search engine spam, thereby improving the quality of search engine results and preventing spamdexing from occurring.

Here are three ways that social media can impact SEO efforts:

1 Getting quality, relevant inbound links

It’s no secret that a successful social media marketing campaign can result in thousands of new backlinks to your site. It’s also well-known that backlinks are one of the most important things that influence the rankings of your site. Put two and two together, and it’s easy to see how social media can be a great way to improve your rankings.

The best thing about this is that the majority (if not all) of the links that come from a social media marketing campaign are natural links; they’re not reciprocated, bought, affiliated or solicited.

2 Using social media websites for reputation management

Many social media sites, especially the more popular ones, rank very well within the search engines. This can be both a positive and negative when it comes to managing your reputation.

On the one hand, it is very easy to control the first page of results by leveraging these sites. Get people talking about your company or site positively on Digg, MySpace or YouTube and you might end up with listings that show up on the first page of natural search engine results for your name, along with your own website.

On the other hand, it can be very easy for someone to tarnish your brand with social media. Take Comcast for example; if you look at the first page of results on Google for Comcast, you will notice that there is a video on YouTube of a Comcast technician sleeping on a customer’s couch.

3 Ranking through pages on social media websites

If you have a new sub-brand site, or page, that will be a challenge to register with search engines quickly, consider trying to create a page on a social media site as well as a brand microsite or website page.

You can upload some videos to YouTube or create a MySpace profile and build a few good links to them. It’s not necessarily better to have these pages ranked than your own website but, in a website’s early days, these links will be powerful tools in its visibility, acceptance and development.

As you can see, there are a number of situations where social media can affect your SEO efforts, both positively and negatively. In fact it’s becoming a necessity to learn how to use social media in concert with SEO. It is also vital that you are conscious of the impact that it can have on your reputation.

But managing your reputation through Social Media Marketing is another story…

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By jeremy.dent | Posted in SEO, Social Media Marketing | Tagged Backlinks, Blog, Comcast, Search engine optimisation, SEO, Social Media Marketing | Comments (2)

Does social media involvement equate to success?

September 22, 2009 – 3:55 pm

A recent study shows that the brands most engaged in social media are also experiencing higher success rates than those of their non-engaged peers.

Of course, what everyone really wants to know is whether or not social media actually pays off in terms of extra revenue. This study seems to indicate that it does.

To determine the nature of this relationship, the study focused on 100 companies from the 2008 BusinessWeek/Interbrand Best Global Brands survey and the various social media platforms they used like Facebook, Twitter, blogs, wikis and forums.

Top brands analysed for social media marketing success

Whether this correlation contains a causal factor cannot be proven: it can only imply that the relationship might be causal. However, given the large number of companies analysed and the consistent findings, it seems probable that social media has had an impact on the companies’ financial success.

The most-engaged brands are significantly outperforming their peers across numerous industries in both revenue and profit performance. They have even sustained strong revenue and margin growth in spite of the economy, according to the study.

It’s also worth noting that the level of engagement appears to be a factor, too. The companies deeply engaged in fewer channels (”selectives”) delivered higher gross and net margins than those only lightly engaged in more channels (”butterflies”). It other words, as the Report says, “It’s not about doing it all, but doing it right.”

The study grouped the brands into one of four engagement profiles that related to the number of channels they’re involved in and how deep their involvement:

The chart illustrates the results for each engagement type

At the top of the list are mavens, the brands heavily engaged in seven or more social media channels - like Starbucks and Dell, for instance.

Butterflies are like wannabe mavens, and are also engaged in seven or more channels but are spread too thin, investing in some channels more so than others.

Selectives focus on six or fewer channels but engage customers deeply in the ones they’ve chosen.

Finally, there are wallflowers, or brands engaged in six or fewer channels with below-average engagement; these include companies like McDonalds and BP.

The study was undertaken by Wetpaint and the Altimeter Group and the results released in July 2009. An accompanying website has also been launched.

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By jeremy.dent | Posted in Sentiment monitoring, Social Media Marketing, Social media, Surveys | Tagged engagement profiles, social media, Social Media Marketing, Surveys | Comments (0)

Amusing take on Social Media Marketing ROI

September 17, 2009 – 11:55 am

Olivier Blanchard Basics Of Social Media Roi

Follow the link to see an amusing take on communicating Social Media Marketing’s Return on Investment or ROI.

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By jeremy.dent | Posted in Budgets, Return-on-investment, Social Media Marketing, Social media | Tagged Return-on-investment, ROI, Social Media Marketing | Comments (0)

You are what you wear. Or are you?

September 14, 2009 – 4:26 pm

For as long as I can remember, ‘agency people’ have been put in convenient, clichéd boxes to enable recruiters and employers to categorise and filter the individuals they’re after. This goes something like:

The suits. Generally the account managers who liaise between the client and the agency. Also encompasses those involved in strategy, planning and new business development. Generally despised by ‘the creatives’ as bag carriers without a creative gene between them. Favourite comment – “the client quite liked it, but we need a few tweaks”.
The creatives. The people with the ideas. They can come up with ‘the big idea’ and make it look great. Allowed to wear jeans and play music. Generally demand detailed briefs from the suits then read them in 30 seconds. Their greatest laugh is listening to the suits creative ideas. Favourite comment: “tell them they’re wrong and go back and sell it”.
The techies. They do stuff like re-boot the server and install the new software everybody complains about not having. You can shout at them if you can’t get on your favourite website and ask them how to use Excel. It’s funny to say you don’t understand a word they say. They’re not sure where they sit between the suits and creatives so will often wear jeans with a shirt and tie. As likely to get invited to the pub on Friday as people in accounts. Favourite saying: “If you really want to stop the server crashing you’ll have to buy (insert list of IT equipment and software costing more than company turnover)”.
You may find this useful!

The webbies. They do stuff on t’internet. They have secret knowledge no-one else in the agency has and their opinions on anything online cannot be challenged by non-webbies. They will indulge their creative colleagues lack of digital expertise (they’re wearing the same jeans), but woe-betide a suit who challenges their work. Dress similar to creatives, but with deep and meaningful slogans on their T-shirts. Favourite comment “Have you seen the new (insert big brand website) it’s crap. I can’t believe they’re still using (insert last month’s big digital thing)”.

Now I accept that’s changed in a lot of agencies, but those perceptions are still very prevalent amongst many agency management teams and recruiters. In social media marketing those descriptions are completely redundant and lack any relevance.

To provide effective social media marketing strategies and services to clients, our agency people need a mix of all these skills – strategic, technical and digital. And SMM is no different from any other marketing discipline – it needs a big idea to succeed. How can you, for example, manage a social network for a client if you don’t know their business, market and competitors inside out? And at the same time set up social media channels and syndicate them. Then work out how this will work alongside the organic SEO strategy for the website. And what’s the thing that’s going to make people notice you in this crowded digital world?

So where to find these people is the challenge for employers and recruiters alike. Do you ‘grow your own’- recruit bright digital natives and train them? Do you retrain experienced marketers? Do you brief your recruitment consultants and let them get on with it? And if this social media networking is all it’s cracked up to, why can’t you just use that to find candidates?

Here at Juice, we’ve no simple answer. We’re trying all of the above and more. But I’ll tell you what’s not changed. If you recruit the best people and keep them motivated and trained you’ll succeed. No matter what they wear.

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By steve.downes | Posted in About us, Buzz monitoring, Corporate blogging, Digital PR, Digital marketing, Sentiment monitoring, Social Media Marketing, Social media, Twitter | Tagged digital, Digital marketing, Digital PR, digital public relations, Internet, juice digital, marketing, online pr, smm, social media, Social Media Marketing, social networking, social networks, Twitter | Comments (3)

Social media marketing, email marketing and SEO: the elite trio of online marketing?

September 14, 2009 – 2:27 pm

Source: MarketingSherpa Social Media Marketing and PR Benchmark Survey 2008

MarketingSherpa recently published a survey revealing marketers’ opinions of where social media marketing fits among what the publication calls the “elite trio” of Internet marketing: social media, search and email.

While it’s hard to disagree with the 97% of marketers who believe that social media marketing complements email and search marketing, the position of the 49% who feel that social media marketing will never become as important as the other tactics is more questionable.

The confusion stems from a couple of misunderstandings. First, Social Media (Networking) is a fundamentally different beast to Social Media Marketing. Social Media Marketing, in B2C markets at least, has no CRM function: it is the process of content distribution and syndication in a style that matches the vibe of your marketplace and aims at influencers and bloggers as much as consumers.

The second confusion concerns where Social Media Marketing fits in the marketing mix. Except in rare cases like Dell, which uses tools like Twitter for revenue generation, Social Media Marketing is primarily a PR-type activity.

The three tools have different purposes. Specifically:

Social media marketing is primarily a tool for awareness and credibility-building. Like traditional PR, it is a “top of funnel” tool. It’s as much about reaching influencers as prospects but it can, like PR, create extraordinary reach and loyalty.
SEO is for lead generation, or more accurately, name generation. It brings “suspects” into your funnel, contact information for people who may or may not eventually become leads and then customers.
Email marketing is most effective as a relationship-building medium for prospects who have already been identified as prospects: they’ve given you permission to communicate directly with them.

Generally, 20% or more of the people on your house list will open your emails, while perhaps 1% of your Twitter following will see any given tweet. This makes email a far less hit-or-miss medium.

The three tools need to be used in tandem, each for its own unique strengths. Neglecting any one will reduce the effectiveness of the others.

That’s our take on it: what do you think?

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By jeremy.dent | Posted in About us, Buzz monitoring, Digital marketing, Email marketing, SEO, Social Media Marketing, Social media, Surveys, Twitter | Tagged MarketingSherpa, open rates, Surveys | Comments (3)

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