How many tweets are actually being read?

Measurement in social media has long been a hot potato. There is still limited solid information out there upon which to make reliable ROI based decisions. However, there are big strides being made towards more tightly focused metrics. A thought-provoking piece published this week, suggests that Twitter reach may be around the 2% mark. It was not a scientific study, it was a piece of personal research aimed at kicking off a debate around Twitter’s true impact. So for balance, a similar metric developed last year suggested it may well be 10% with the additional value of up to 1.3% CTR.

Reach is a good kick-off point, however Twitter is not merely a broadcast medium. These stats are just the start for the true potential of Twitter. Used properly and consistently, it is a powerful tool for engagement. If your brand is simply using a Twitter stream to post press releases, then 2% readership could be a cause for concern, especially as you have no control over who your readership is and also your brand is unlikely to understand its true influence in the space. If it is part of your overall social CRM strategy however, one of your tools for engagement, then simple readership is just part of the overall package.

Social communication is not all about followers, or readers, or fans. It’s about a new way of communicating and co-creating, it’s about creating exceptional service and finding out if you’ve got a service problem. This is not to be dismissive of the purist measurement of the reach of social media. It is essential that this becomes more robust and as an industry we are starting to get more scientific with open source movements such as ‘Measurement Camp’ helping to build more reliable models that will stand even your FD’s scrutiny, but we need to ensure we keep focused on social media's killer USP and that is 'dialogue'.

Is Facebook the answer for financial services brands?

Facebook announced its 500,000,000th user this week. That makes it the equivalent of the third most populus country on the planet; 7.4% of the world’s population; 1 in 13 people is a member etc. etc. I’m sure you’ve probably read the stats, they’re front page news after all.

However, the question remains. Is Facebook the right place for all brands and in particular the large established financial services brands to start engaging with customers? While trust remains at such a low ebb, financial services brands have got a long way to go before they can be 'Liked' on Facebook with any true conviction.

There's no doubt that financial services brands should be involved in social media, but the job at the moment is to listen. In many ways it could be argued that brands with the lowest trust levels should be modelling their businesses around social even more than those that are loved. That means listening, learning, feeding that into customer service, product development and innovation and then releasing and engaging through multiple touchpoints with consumers.

There is an opportunity right now for financial services brands to build businesses that could emerge as some of the most customer responsive and fully immersed companies in the market. So Financial services braqndsdon't concentrate too much effort on being 'Liked' on Facebook. It's a distraction. Concentrate on being 'involved' with your customers at as many touchpoints as possible.

Move over Meerkat, Old Spice is the new guy on the web

What’s 71 years old, looks fantastic in a towel and smells great. That's right, Old Spice baby. In the past couple of weeks Old Spice guy has stormed the Internet, in what is without doubt this year's 'Compare the Meerkat', in terms of it's impact, engagement and huge, fast-growing fanbase.



At the heart of the project is Old Spice guy, a smooth talking, towel wearing, hottie, loved by men and women alike. While the TV advertising sets out his buff credentials, the online activity has taken the campaign way beyond TV's dreams.

Since Tuesday, Old Spice guy has been personally responding to questions posed by fans and online big hitters alike. So far, the team has shot over 200 30 second video responses posted on Youtube, each within a couple of hours of the original question. The video postings have so far prompted over 10 million views in just 3 days and grown a Facebook fan base of over 500,000.

Undoubtedly the key to the Old Spice success has been the digital engagement strategy. The strategy sits at the heart of what started out as a TV ad aimed at going viral. The social media phenomenon that was Meerkat, started out as a side project which successfully grew exponentially as time went on. The recognition by P&G and Wieden and Kennedy (the agency behind the campaign) was that online social media needed to be, 'as well as', the TV not 'instead of'.



This has taken bravery and trust from the client, who are effectively handing over sign-off of, what are effectively, 100, 30 second TV spots, per day and enormous commitment and resource from the agency. There is currently a team of techies, film crew, analysts, marketers, writers and producers holed-up in a studio somewhere in Portland, Oregon working round the clock to get these things out.

As has been proved time and again digital and social media in particular is not the easy option. It takes a herculean effort of co-ordination, man-hours and creativity. Given the right time and space though, the rewards can be countless. Monocle smile @-)

Transactions via social networks and mobile gather pace

New research last week suggested that the pace of movement towards mobile payments is gathering. Teamspirit has been tracking the rise of alternative payment methodologies for a while, but it would seem the big banks aren’t necessarily taking the threat of the spread of these systems, through social networks, that seriously.

I’ve blogged previously about the potential impact of Facebook bank, but in the absence of a full commitment to all services the Facebook credits system that has been introduced, and widely used for payment of services such as online gaming, is very reminiscent of the way Paypal leveraged E-Bay to secure a foothold in the payments market to ultimately launch across the entire web. Facebook credits could easily follow the same model and become much more than the virtual currency it is currently.

But apart from these large social networks moving towards transaction it is the tipping point, provided by the adoption of smartphones that we feel will probably see the category explode. The emergence of smart phones, which can simply enable mobile wallets and interact with both marketing databases and payment-settlement networks means these devices can provide a bridge for what are currently e-commerce processors to reach the physical point of sale.

Evidence of this trend emerged earlier this week with news that PayPal and Google have found ways to let accountholders with their payment systems use their handsets to tap those accounts with physical merchants. As always the internet is finding ways of sweeping away all the old traditional structures, this doesn’t mean that the banks will necessarily lose, but their strong survival will in large part rest on an extremely powerful mobile strategy.

Facebook may finally have a true rival

On Thursday Google made their first major update to Google news since 2002. The aim is to make the whole news section more relevant, personal and of course, as is de rigeur these days, more real-time. We’re wondering though whether it may be a precursor to something much bigger and could perhaps be part of the functionality development within Google Me.

‘What’s Google Me then?’ you may ask. Well it’s just a rumour, however, it’s coming from some very credible sources. By all accounts Google Me is a social service due to rival the might of the now omnipresent Facebook and frankly a competitor probably couldn’t come soon enough. It’s been argued that Facebook’s sheer scale is strangling innovation as it harvests all the best ideas and releases poor imitations of the original idea.

However the real win here is the focus on the privacy issue within Facebook. This week Mark Zuckerberg has been in the UK facing questions about the privacy issues and he and the company have assured users they are tightening up on security. However, Google have an excellent reputation for data security (despite the slight Streetview blip) and given that fact and their similar scale they could provide a real alternative to Facebook. Let’s just hope Google Me doesn’t end up being the next Buzz or Wave.

Nationwide bookie's taking bets now

So there I was watching the England v. Mexico game (or should that be one side traversty) last night and the new Nationwide Building Society ad. came on. Leaving aside the pros and CONS of using Little Britain characters to represent your brand, the core message promoted the 4 year Football bond and promised 'If England win you win'.

Unfortunately I can't find the video anywhere but the promise is repeated on their site.



Now is it just me or does that basically make Nationwide a bookie? I'm really not sure that in an environment that needs Financial Services providers to rebuild trust with their customers that becoming a bookies is a good idea.

The dangers of putting all your eggs in the Facebook basket

A couple of months ago Loic Le Meur posted a tweet. The founder of Le Web's assertion was that 10 years ago brands’ presence on the web was all about their websites, 5 years ago it was about Google and today it was about Twitter and Facebook. Our response was that we felt that today a brand's web footprint needed to be far wider than just Facebook and Twitter. We didn't get a reply, but as a digital heavyweight I doubt that Le Meur's thought was as narrow as the literal tweet suggested.

However it does highlight an issue that has become a serious concern in the past month, as the Facebook privacy row has exploded all over the web. There are plenty of brands who have ploughed a lot of resource into a very narrow Facebook channel, building huge (successful) presence and even changing their digital calls to action to point into Facebook and adopting Facebook Connect as the route to login. Given the growth of names around Facebook in the past 18 months on the face of it this make sense, however building such strong presence in one place is not necessarily about becoming more social, but actually about an extension of destination thinking that started with every brand on the planet rushing to open up shop on the web in the mid 90s.

There is a real danger in putting so much resource into one channel that is completely out of your control. The fact that people become fans on your Facebook page is great, but their interaction is still independent of your brand and entirely dictated by the terms of the channel in which you've chosen to exist, a fact that has been brought in to sharp relief with the Facebook privacy issue.

Now all of the above has to be taken with a pinch off salt against a backdrop of numbers that suggested last week that, a) the number of Facebook names had reached almost 500 million b) that visits to the site were up by 2% c) that the dwell time on the site was up 1.2%, a number that is already 4 times that of Google it's nearest rival in terms of daily visitors.

However, Facebook isn't the social web. It's a very big social media channel which requires it's own processes, governance, guidelines and forms of accountability. However brands must break out of extended destination thinking and go to where customers are, not rely on them to come to them. As we replied to Le Meur brand footprints need to be wide, it's important that you surf in many channels, test in many channels and be aware that at any time one channel could suddenly become irrelevant. After all remember Friends Reunited and Friendster.