Twitter ‘Moments’, Good Digital Examples, Great Content and Social/Online PR at #MWeekLive2013 with @DaraNasr, @ashleyfriedlein, @rosmack and @greenwellys

Last week I went to Marketing Week Live. There were a LOT of speakers, conferences, seminars, presenters. The trick with these events I feel is to

decide what interests you before you go and plan your day accordingly. I like my learning to be as untainted as possible by commercial agenda so tend to avoid the supplier sponsored ‘seminars’, opting instead for thought leaders and speakers who have earned their place on stage through merit, rather than sponsorship.

Twitter ‘Moments’

The exception to this is a speaker from one of the biggies; Google, Facebook or as on this occasion, Twitter. I arrived at London Olympia and found myself instinctively drawn to the centre stage, with a mass of people craning their ears to hear the wise words dispensed by Twitter’s ‘Head of Agency Sales’, Dara Nasr. Entitled ‘Twitter – An Interest Network with Social Properties‘, the general sense of the entire Twitter presentation was thus:

MOMENTS

• Build a content plan around moments
• Plan for the best scenarios
• Expect the worse scenarios, e.g. Lynx and dogging
• When everyone is creating content, speed of creation and distribution can be a key differentiator for example the oft cited Oreos tweet and the Nando’s response to Alex Ferguson’s retirement announcement #nandosfergietime

Power out? No problem. pic.twitter.com/dnQ7pOgC

— Oreo Cookie (@Oreo) February 4, 2013

In honour of Sir Alex Ferguson we’re proud to introduce #NandosFergieTime – all our Manchester Nando’s will be open 5 minutes later tonight.

— Nando’s (@NandosUK) May 8, 2013

Modern Marketing Manifesto

Next up was Econsultancy’s Ashley Friedlein who talked us through the Modern Marketing Manifesto, with the following two examples:

The Tate was given as a example of a brand with a great digital strategy. This is publicly available and you can view ‘Tate Digital Strategy 2013-15: Digital as a Dimension of Everything’ here

Meat Pack Hijack was a great example of innovative, location based mobile marketing and won a Cannes Lion for its efforts. When a customer enters a competitor’s store there received a a message from Meat Pack with a countdown timer. The quicker the customer left the competitor’s shop and got to a Meat Pack store, the greater the discount they would receive. Brilliant.

Content Strategy by TUI’s Ros McKenzie (@RosMack).

There are two types of presenter. The first recites what they believe will sound good to the audience. A piece of jargon here and someone else’s case-study there. You don’t learn anything and leave feeling a little duped.

The second type tells you new and interesting things informed by personal experience and the evidence to demonstrate their assertions. Ros was this second type.

I thought I vaguely new what content strategy was about but Ros introduced the audience to a whole new world of content strategy. These are my notes:

• What is Content Strategy? Ros suggested the definition by Christina Halverson in Content Strategy for the Web and in it’s most basic form concerns the creation, delivery and governance of content.
• Content begins with differentiation
• It’s not just about what you create. Its also the why? how? when? where? for whom? how often? and what next?
• Substance + Workflow + Governance + Structure = Core.
• Substance = What content do customers need to enable them to buy products. They come the your website to complete a task.
• Structure = Is the content structured forcustomers to find and for multi channel delivery. Should be cleanly formatted.
• All content should be usable on website, mobile, apps, tablet, print, email, intranet, blogs, microsites and social media. Lots of platforms!
• Anne Rockley speaks of intelligent content including meta data for SERPs
• Blobs versus chunks. No big blobs of large content. Break everything down in to flexible chunks of information, for example, one chunk of 140 charaters for Twitter so the samw piece of content doesn’t have to be constantly repurposed for different channels. Reusable chunks are faster to get to market, have a reduced cost, improved quality, predictability and unlimited delivery. No different versions, one single source.
• Get the right content, to the right customer at the right time!

So

– Speak to customers, think of content first, have a reuse strategy and created structured, intelligent content.

Online PR & Social Media Fundamentals

The other conference speaker worth mentioning was Michelle Goodall’s Online PR & Social Media Fundamentals. Michelle is also the second type of presenter. She’s been in the industry a long time and really knows what she’s talking about. She also made me go bright red by mentioning me and my company Farrow & Ball as a case study. Shucks.

Michelle’s presentation is rather handily on Slideshare and can be viewed here.

A good event and thoroughly recommended.

Fergie’s Retirement – The Social Stats

Alex Ferguson Retires. More info at Simply Zesty (click image)

Facebook – Data and Haters

When it arrived in 2005, Facebook was a near instant hit. I heard of it through word of mouth and, because everyone else was using it – I signed up. Previous to that I had signed up to Myspace and previous to that the graveyard that is Friends Reunited. Since Facebook launched I also use Twitter, Friendfeed (now owned by Facebook), Last.fm, Foursquare, Chatroulette (purely for research mind)… and i’ll probably join a fair few others in the coming months and years.

Now this is a somewhat bipolar post. I don’t believe Facebook is a force for evil, but I am uncertain about one huge organisation owning hundreds of millions of peoples data. Consider it more of an exploration than a citation.

So why did I join Facebook? Well initially, like I have said, because everyone else was signing up and we all want to be included don’t we? Since then Facebook as a platform has evolved significantly. Not autonomously though. It has been hugely affected by the rise of Twitter and has attempted to keep up through matched functionality. But it seems to have lost it’s way. In trying to be like everything else it has lost it’s sense of brand identity.

What is Facebook now? What is its USP over say, Twitter?

Basically, a lot more people use it. I always use my wife as a benchmark to a products commercial or mainstream success. She doesn’t use Twitter but uses Facebook every day. A LOT! Because all of her friends do. The thing is 99% of Facebook users *probably* don’t give two hoots about all of the recent privacy issues. They log on to Facebook they have a nose at what other people are doing through reading statuses and looking at photos. They post their own statuses / photos and then log out. Then log in again to check responses. Then log out. Then login in again etc etc ad infinitum.

I work in the digital industry and so I of course take an interest in Facebook’s data issues along with all other news and trends. The winds of change seem to be turning against Facebook mainly due to these privacy issues. People are starting to (quite rightly) question where their data is going and how it is being stored. Who has access to this data and how is it being used?

How long can Facebook HQ claim ownership of your likes / dislikes, personal details or relationships? Well if you’re thinking of quitting Facebook based on them owning your data think again. Their privacy policy clearly states that even if you leave them, they will still own and use your data:

“Even after you remove information from your profile or delete your account, copies of that information may remain viewable elsewhere to the extent it has been shared with others, it was otherwise distributed pursuant to your privacy settings, or it was copied or stored by other users.”

Plus:

“Additionally, we may retain certain information to prevent identity theft and other misconduct even if deletion has been requested”

So deleting your Facebook account may well be a proud gesture but they still have your data. Wouldn’t you rather remain a member of Facebook to receive their updates. You know the saying, “keep your friends close, but your enemies closer.”

I don’t really agree with the current Facebook bashing that seems to be en vogue. I find it useful and use it daily, as do every single one of my friends. I use it in a completely different way to Twitter (work based), Foursquare (location based), Myspace (music based). I have friends in diferent areas of the country, Italy, America, Australia and can contact them with relative ease on Facebook. If I want something more then yes, i’ll probably arrange a Skype call or its equivalent.

However, all of the above said, i’ll leave you with this scary disclosure from Facebooks privacy policy:

“If the ownership of all or substantially all of our business changes, we may transfer your information to the new owner so that the service can continue to operate.”

eek.

Thanks to Kristian Carter for inspiring this blog post.