Those of you that know me, are well aware of my view on the necessity for good quality data and I think this is going to be one of the big things for next year. Developing access to multiple sources of information and having analysts capable of scouring through reams of seemingly indecipherable numbers to identify traits and patterns is something that agencies and organisations alike are now recognising as a business imperative. It may not be as sexy as buying developing augmented reality applications for mobile devices, but in a post recessionary environment where many of the economic indicators are still unstable, being able to prove the merit of your work is becoming an operational mandate. For everyone.

Add to this an increasing complexity within the agency world, where agencies are diversifying both horizontally and vertically in an attempt to find new sources of income (Skive’s success at the CIPDs should be a stark warning to us all) and the changing dynamics of the HR world, where we are already starting to see a consolidation of traditionally decentralised units into single departments like ‘communication’ and ‘branding’ and the message is clear: if you are unable to prove your worth, you’ll be left behind, scrabbling for scraps of work to survive.

The positive news is that Hodes has a good reputation for delivering work that is effective. The challenge we face is how to help ourselves and our clients set up systems that allow us to monitor and respond to an increasing number of touchpoints, especially when those touchpoints may be raising questions that people are (understandably) reticent to answer.

One of those questions is often raised in Direct Sourcing workshops – in a world where it is incredibly easy to find out vast amounts of information about individuals, where should a business draw the line? Ian Ruddy, HR Director of O2, has actively stated that Facebook will not be used in any part of the recruitment process, recognising (as many do) that individuals see Social Media sites like Facebook and Bebo as tools for personal conversations, as opposed to sites like LinkedIn which are purely professional. But other HR Directors (and their agencies) have not been as forthcoming.

It is heavily apparent that candidates believe the distinction is clear. But the recruitment world has yet to make up its mind. And while this quandary is digested, discussed and debated, more data is being added to the mix. The problem is that data is fails to discriminate between information used for personal purposes and that used for professional purposes. Interpretation is a task for the analysts. Or lawyers.

There is a nice presentation I came across on Slideshow that outlines the challenges posed by the melding of all our social groups, which is definitely worth looking at. This is something I expect all our clients to be asking us about. And we need to be prepared to help them find answers.

For those of you who prefer the less verbose, then here are a couple of nice sites to look at, courtesy of Messrs Dix, Gunnell and Henchman:
•    www.thewildernessdowntown.com (ideally viewed in Google Chrome)
•    http://coolmaterial.com/roundup/if-historical-events-had-facebook-statuses/
•    http://www.bartleboglehegarty.com/#/europe/our-work/mentos-diamond-white-banner

Enjoy

We are already seeing a shift in the sort of content that Recruitment Sites are offering, with added value content really helping to drive and support attraction campaigns, specifically the race to produce more and more content by the Future Talent market. I think the more intelligent recruitment models will shift to a more complex community based value-exchange model (Social Media Marketing is a step towards this) and we have already been talking about such approaches with two major Blue Chip clients. So this week’s mail is dedicated to freevertising – interesting examples of free-to-market distribution models.

Enjoy

OhMyGodWhatHappened is a book that was released last month, by a company called Innovative Thunder. The book can be purchased from Amazon, but if you want to download it for free, all you had to do was send a Tweet advertising the book. The distribution model makes sense (they are exchanging the value of their thought for the value of an individual’s network) and relies on what I often refer to in teaching courses as ‘reciprocity’ – the notion that if someone gives you something, they expect another thing back in return. It is classic human psychology. It will be interesting to see how much money they actually make, but its certainly done a lot of good for their Brand Awareness.

Swiftly following the release of OhMyGodWhatHappened was What Matters Now, a collection of thoughtpieces from recognised thinkers throughout the world, which was released by Seth Godin, a globally respected planner. The only difference here is that Seth doesn’t ask for money, only your network. For those who want to read it, it makes an interesting read.

On a slightly different tack, my sister-in-law recently attended the Social Media Measurement Camp. I had never heard of it, but looking into it, the camp is a global open-source movement to encourage knowledge sharing and industry collaboration towards answering ‘how do we measure engagement in social media?’. It has hubs in the UK, USA (Bay Area) and Ireland. Attendance costs nothing and the sessions are well attended. The content is managed and distributed via a wiki, so the entire business model is based on freevertising.

Particularly useful is the list of measurement tools. I receive about a zillion requests for these types of tools and this site has collated them into a useful, constantly updated source.

Finally, not necessarily free, but something that uses free content in an intelligent manner, Lab42 is a survey platform with the ability to dig through social networks to find your target consumers and enable them to give your company feedback. Low cost, broad in reach and highly customisable, it is a fantastic idea that makes market research much more accessible at significantly reduced costs in quick turnarounds. As with all these things, it will be interesting to see how long the business model remains viable, but I love the concept.

Coca Cola has recently done this, so I thought you (and where relevant, your clients) might like to see what they have said.

What we often see is tools and sites being used in ways that had never been anticipated. So this week’s mail is dedicated to resilience. Things that we are not meant to be able to do,  but still can. As the boundary between PR, Recruitment Advertising and mainstream Advertising blurs, we will have to consider adopting a much broader array of techniques to get our message in front of an audience. And as our ongoing Herts Police success shows, it is joined-up thinking that delivers results. And a good relationship between client and agency…

For those who are about to rock, we salute you
A friend of mine recently attended the AC/DC concert and spent many days beguiling me with details of how cool it was. For those of us who were unable to attend, Sony BMG issued the album in an Excel spreadsheet. That’s right, a full album, compete with videos made in ASCII characters in an Excel document. The idea was that it was a way of distributing music across company firewalls which would normally block anything other than the standard suite of Microsoft products. It is pretty cool, but also a stark reminder of how easy it is to transcend security procedures.

All your Easters come at once
A modern means of ‘signing’ your work (rather like the mice that you can often find carved into pews in churches, or the cameo appearances by Alfred Hitchcock in his movies), an Easter egg is an intentional hidden message, in-joke or feature in an object such as a movie, book, CD, DVD, computer program, web page or video game. I’ve mentioned these before, but it is amazing just how many of these proliferate the media that we use on a day to day basis. My kids are pretty adept at stumbling up on these, but for those of us who are less trapdoor savvy, EEggs.com is a useful site. If you’re just interested in software eggs, click here.

Show me the money!!
OK, so it’s not an Easter Egg or an interesting use of an application, but it DOES make you think. If you get as finicky about long, drawn out meaningless meetings as I do, this tool is a stark reminder that time equals money. Simply plug in the average charge out rate of the individuals attending a meeting (I usually go for £100 or £120), enter the number of attendees and hey presto, an instant cost calculator. Next time you hold an internal meeting and someone is 15mins late, it is worth noting just how much billable time we are actually losing…

Extending the afterlife of a conference
Given how much ignorance there is about microblogging and Twitter in particular, I thought this article was very engaging. Skim down to the section headed ‘The Open Conversation’, which talks about how Twitter extended the shelf life of a conference on education reform. At a number of recent conferences, it has been interesting to see how Twitter and hashtags have been used to distribute and discuss particular topics and debates on a much broader basis.

“Injecting Twitter into that conversation fundamentally changed the rules of engagement. It brought a wider audience into what would have been a private exchange. And it gave the event an afterlife. The sum total …added up to something truly substantive, like a suspension bridge made of pebbles.”

Our theme for this week is all about the power of the cloud and the crowd. We have talked in many a Friday mail about how the digitisation of media is making it easier for individuals to group together for collective benefit, without having to be encumbered by huge infrastructural or set up costs. We have also touched upon how the notion of a job is also changing. But many of the transformations that are taking place around us go beyond technology. A more sociological shift is happening which requires us to rethink the nature of both what we do and how we do it.

The first example below is a classic example of this. It highlights how an age-old publishing model is being completely redefined by what is quite a simple technological approach. The second example just got me thinking about how the postal industry has been decimated by sites like Flickr and Facebook. It used to be that baby announcements were made in a newspaper, then formal mails were sent out to kith and kin, supported by a beautifully shot photo. Thanks to photo sharing and social media sites, each organisation or service in this supply chain (newspaper advert sales, paper and pen manufacturer, stationary sales, film producer, photographic processor, postperson) has simply been removed. Or at the very least severely impacted. The final site just appealed because I like Scalextric.

Enjoy

A new model for storytelling (http://blog.storybird.com/)

Storybird is a service that makes it simple for families and friends to create short, visual stories together that they can share and print. For artists and writers, Storybird is next-generation publishing: global, viral, and instantaneous. The site goes live next month, but I love the business model, which enables artists and illustrators to form a direct relationship with consumers, rather than being forced to go through publishers. Tony. I expect to see your work up here sharpish!

If that doesn’t appeal, then just look through the illustrations. Some are just beautiful.

Storkmail (http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=75111&id=566379719&l=596c944783)

Just as we welcomed a bleary-eyed Paul back to the team, with hearty congratulations, then Mrs Clode decided to have her baby early. For those of you who want to see the latest addition to the ever-extending Hodes baby club, Stu has dropped some photos on Facebook. Raya, apparently, means “friend”, “wise guardian” or “the heaven”. Aaaaaaaaahhhhh

An old game made new (http://www.magicsocket.com/)

As someone who never reached the echelons of Scalextric ownership, I was immensely jealous when my 8 year old was presented with his very own Dukes of Hazard Scalextric set for his birthday. And now, courtesy of Paul Gass, I now have my very own set, which sits as a backdrop to navigating through a site. Hugely addictive. Heavily interactive. The only issue I have is that it detracts from me actually looking at the rest of the site. But then, I guess I’ll be coming back again and again, so I have plenty of time to engage with the company’s brand.

Ok. Russ has set me a challenge to see if I can get a William Shatner video into a Friday mail. Easy. This week’s theme is about the use of YouTube as a channel for communicating with key audiences. In a testament to films I thought we would feature the good, the bad and the ugly.

Enjoy

The good

BarackObamadotcom as a URL. Need I say more?

Intelligent use of multiple channels in a clever and more importantly, integrated way. 170,958 subscribers. 24,813 friends. Compare this to Gordon Brown’s efforts (see below)

He just oooozes cool.

And more than that, hope.

The bad

Star Trek originally only ran for 3 series, but in that time managed to address and debate a range of contentious issues in a way that have had a hugely beneficial impact. The use of human beings interacting with alien species allowed Star Trek to cover and debate homosexuality, interracial relations, authoritarianism, racism, economics, human rights, feminism and the role of technology. Needless to say, it made William Shatner (the actor who played James Tiberius Kirk, the captain of the USS Enterprise) a global legend.

And his legendary status remains to this day, with YouTube full of ridiculous short clips and excerpts of him doing everyday things. Like this one. I mean, who want to see a man showing off his new BBQ smoker? I mean, really? But boy, he sure can eat a lot of pork…(Russ wanted me to mention something about the resultant Klingons, but I thought that was going too far…)

The ugly

Gordon Brown has had a torrid time of late, so in an attempt to leverage the goodwill that Barack Obama has generated through his uber-modern use of social media, he has taken to the use of YouTube in a less formal way to air contentious issues. Unfortunately his gawky, awkward and uncomfortable excerpts have resulted in him being parodied and ridiculed by both the opposition and his own party. This wasn’t helped when he created an ‘Ask The PM’ tool which allowed users to submit a question and users to vote on which one they thought was the best, which he would then answer.

Unsurprisingly “why don’t you resign” was the standout winner…

…even more unsurprisingly, the PM removed this question and refused to answer it

So, this week’s mail contains a couple of charitable examples and then something that I saw earlier this week which quite literally stopped me in my tracks. OK, the latter isn’t anything to do with charity, but it is about Social Media. Honest.

Oh, and many thanks to Stuart and Anthony for their poster ‘ambush’…

A

A waterfall starts with a drop of rain. http://www.justgiving.com/

Justgiving was founded in 1999 with a simple mission: to enable any charity, no matter how small, to use the web to raise money at no (or little) cost. With over 6.5 million users and £370 million raised for more than 6,000 charities, I think I would say that they have achieved this, no? And for those of you who want to see Just Giving in action, our indomitable Oscar could always use a few more pennies to support his Marathon fund-raising efforts (http://my.artezglobal.com/personalPage.aspx?SID=242480).

Proctor & Gamble raises money for charity be embracing social media http://adage.com/digital/article?article_id=134879

On Wednesday night, Proctor & Gamble paired 40 digital media and agency executives with 100 of its North American directors in a contest to sell Tide T-shirts for charity, as its much vaunted ‘Digital Hack Night’ became a four hour reality show aired largely in social media. For an upfront spend of $4,000, P&G managed to sell 2,000 T-shirts at $20 a pop for charity, while exploring the top ten trending topics on Twitter in the process. That’s a tenfold ROI. I love this approach to educating clients about social media, by capitalising on natural competitiveness and making a significant return at the same time. Why didn’t we think of it?

Jaws. The atonement. http://www.churaumi-hakken.jp/p3/

Jaws was a groundbreaking film. Not only was it a box-office smash, but it also created a generation of people who were unable to swim in deep water without encountering a spine numbing fear about what lay in wait below. Anyway, this site, which promotes an aquarium in Okinawa, uses user-generated videos from You-Tube in a way that is quite frankly one of the best uses of Flash I have seen in ages. It takes a while to load up, but the effect is worth the wait.

The person in question had been given a brief by their EMEA Board to investigate how organisations were using Social Media, in an effort to develop an organisation-wide strategic approach. With more than a touch of cynicism about the value of such an exercise, (reinforced by a fruitless afternoon’s trawling search engines for an answer), the Director had started searching LinkedIn Answers for inspiration. They came across a response I had posted to a similar question and as Bernard Hodes Group had an existing supplier relationship with the company (albeit with a different department), she contacted the head of that department to get my contact details. The irony wasn’t lost on me…

As part of our commitment to continuous improvement, we regularly trawl the ether for examples of good/best practice (as well as poor/worst practice). We try to encourage our clients to benchmark themselves not only against other competitors in the HR industry, but against a broader competitive set. In one such recent ‘expedition’, we came across a useful blog that provided a list of social media marketing examples.

There were two specific questions that the consultant was looking for: how were organisations using Second Life and whether YouTube could be used for commercial purposes. I’m not going to delve into the response we provided (conversations are still ongoing), but the list of URLs below is worthwhile exploring. The first is a list of some companies using Second Life, the second, a list of some companies that are using YouTube. Neither list is exhaustive, but it should start to give you a good feel for the pros and cons of each option.

Second Life

·         ArcelorMittal:  Second Life presence

·         Coca-Cola: Virtual Thirst contest in Second Life to design a vending machine

·         Dell: Second Life island

·         IBM: IBM Business Center and Rational Software Conference/Hipihi in Second Life

YouTube channels

·         Alltop: Alltop tutorial on YouTube.

·         AT&T:  Share AT&T channel on YouTube

·         DaimlerAG: Daimler-Blog YouTube channel

·         EMC2:  YouTube channel

·         Forrester: YouTube channel

·         Johnson & Johnson: J&J health channel on YouTube.

·         Kodak: YouTube channel

·         Quicken: YouTube account.

·         Sun Microsystems: YouTube account.

·         UK Government: Number10 channel on YouTube

·         Wells Fargo: YouTube channel

Sign up, log in and get going!

A

Are you digital enough?

Yesterday saw the release of the much anticipated Digital Britain report. This reports outlines our Government’s plan to be at the “forefront of the global digital economy” and is one in a series of similar reports published by various quangos since the internet became mainstream back in the early nineties. Apparently we will all be digital by 2012, which is nice. It has received the usual barrage of criticism from a range of mainstream (and more obscure) journalists, but I’ll be withholding judgement until I’ve read it (a nice task for the weekend). Anyway, if you are interested, its there for the reading.

‘Tweeting’ goes mainstream

A while ago, we talked about Twitter in one of our Friday mails. Twitter is a social media application that allows users to post updates about what they are doing (a practice also known as micro-blogging) – try to think of it like updating your status on Facebook or LinkedIn. The key difference is that updates can be sent to and from your mobile phone, irrespective as to whether you have internet access or not. The service is free and users are restricted to 140 characters, but Twitter reserves the right to collect and use data.

I’ve avoided it for quite a while mainly because its has principally been a playground toy of journalists, celebs and the broader PR community, but over the past month, its usage has skyrocketed and it is now definitely a mainstream application that needs to be considered. What I find interesting is how people within organisations are using it as a form of direct sourcing – posting job requests via their company Twitter profile. To get you started, I’ve attached a couple of interesting examples here (Stephen Fry is understandably the most eloquent)

·         Stephen Fry’s blog is the best example that I’ve come across that explains how to use Twitter (http://www.stephenfry.com/blog/2009/01/29/twitter/)

·         Barack Obama (http://twitter.com/BarackObama)

·         SAB Miller (http://twitter.com/sabmiller)

·         Hodes (http://twitter.com/hodes)  

A ‘couple’ of social media sites you might like

I got a call the other day from a senior Marketing Director at KPMG who had seen my response to a question on LinkedIn, found out that Hodes is a KPMG agency and contacted our client Alison to get my details. She was interested in looking at some examples of Social Media usage in the corporate world. Whilst trawling the web, I came across a very useful blog that outlines a huge list of activities and offerings. I’ve listed a couple below.

• Bank of America:
  • Online video: Managers sing at a corporate meeting.
  • Social networks: Small Business Community on Clearspace.  Medal Me! Facebook application
• British Airways:
  • Microblogging: Twitter account
  • Social Networks:  Metrotwin community
• GSK:
  • Blogging:  alliconnect.
  • Social networks: myAlli weight loss community.

·         Heinz. 

o   Online video:  YouTube contest

• IBM.
  • Microblogging:  Smart SOA SocialNetwork ((S3N)) Team on Twitter.
  • Online video:  Rational Heroes machinima videos and Meet Mr. Fong on YouTube.
  • Social networks:  Rational Heroes community space.⁷²
  • Wikis:  developerWorks.
• National Geographic:
  • Mashups: Wildlife Filmaker
  • Microblogging: Twitter account
  • Online Video: Everyday Explorers, YouTube channel
  • Social networks: Imbee, MySpace,
  • Widgets: NGM Widgets, Facebook widget

Embrace your inner woman (http://accidentalcampposes.tumblr.com/)

As a very swift introduction to the harsh realities of lifelong commitment to one individual (congratulations, btw), Anthony has discovered a series of guerrilla attempts by his fiancée to ‘out’ him by posting a number of highly disingenuous photos. In an attempt to regain the upper hand, Anthony swiftly created a site dedicated to highlighting that all men should be in touch with their inner woman. So far only three submissions. Or perhaps I should use another word?