'Advertisers should fear Twitter and Facebook more than regulators'

Interesting viewpoint from the global head of comms giant Havas in the Guardian last Friday.

David Jones, the global chief executive of Havas Wordwide, has warned that advertisers who market their brands as socially responsible should fear "inherently negative" social media such as Twitter and Facebook more than getting ad campaigns banned by regulators.

Jones said that with the rise of social media, with which many companies are still grappling, brands should be more worried about consumers than trying to outmanouevre the regulator.

"Social media is inherently a more negative than a positive medium on many levels," he added. "Lots of stuff that is passed around is negative. If you are a brand or a company today you should be far less worried about broadcast regulations than digitally empowered consumers. What is an ASA sanction versus a [negative] sanction from a couple of million people if you are not authentic?"

'Surely he's being a bit melodramatic,' thought I to myself. 'It's not quite that vicious, is it?' Then, with consummate irony on the timing front, Néstle found itself in a whole Facebook of trouble over its supplier policies in Indonesia. That wasn't the touchpaper however. Having an idiot at the controls of the Facebook page was what provoked a storm of negative howls.

First off, a fairly cocky status statement greets you:

Ok, so far so not exactly shiniest practitioner of good community relationships. And pretty soon it gets called out on the attitude by Paul:

Ok, nobody's throwing stuff around so far. This is now the moment where a cool head will decide how things go from here.

 

Ouch! Way to show the customer who's always right, Nestlé. Firm, firm, firm hand at the controls. We like it! But Paul ain't going away.

Take that, you big multinational you, and rethink! Which they did!

Oh no they diint!
Oh yes they diid!! They just told him that he was as irrelevant as the on average eight insect legs per  bar that end up in the choccie vats, allegedly. With more pithiness than I can muster here, somebody later on in the thread said 'Well, the chocolate's hit the 93,000 fans now' or something similar. Sorry I can't find it now for proper attribution, but the thread is very, very, very long by this stage and will be having a massive impact on the company. I'm frankly amazed that there's no real sign of moderation from what is, after all, the world's biggest nyom conglom. I did find an apology of sorts in there too, but am curious as to why they bothered.

The floodgates are ripped off at the hinges long since, and the well meaning complaints and the cranks and everything in between are going full tilt through Nestlé like prune juice. Their nut clusters are in such a vice right now that it will have some sort of impact on share price, I don't doubt. And while obviously at the heart of this is a very sore point about how they go about their ingredients gathering in our super-connected world, it still got kick started with a rookie mistake. Control of the FB page was given to someone who should not have been entrusted with the brand's reputation on the two-way street.

This is what Havas head honcho Jones meant when he spoke about fearing the negativity of online interfaces like Twitter and Fb. Oh boy is it ever.

I wait with huge interest to see what Nestlé's next move will be. Last word with Paul, and this is still on the host's fan page. (Numbers of fans still growing, it is noted.)

The Facebook juggernaut rolls on

Image cred Bobbi L. Newman

Facebook has officially got over 900,000 Irish users. Seems like only a few months ago when I wrote that the social networking giant was just cresting 600k users here in Ireland. No, wait... oh, right. Getcha.
Anyway, a short while since it revamped its streaming updates to give itself a Twitterlike vibe (albeit a fattened out one, but even there it's decided to challenge little old Twitter) it seems to have aped the American experience here and taken off with a huge chunk of the middle of the market, attracting people at the mature end of the mouse spectrum who are suddenly realising how it can bind them closer to their friend diaspora. If you don't think that this matters beyond thinking 'aah, that's nice for them' then you need to consider what your clients may think of it all. A recent post here about the effect of socmeej on brand recognition for Sandtex demonstrates quite forcefully that when it comes to the potency of these types of vehicle for your brand, you can ignore them but you cannot afford to for long. More soon on that one, and some overviews on recent work by Coca Cola brands to follow.
But I digress. Facebook. Ireland. Numbers. Gone are the days of above the line, below the line, through the line, online, offline... it's WFL? as far as I'm concerned. Damien Mulley wrote about the numbers here. Good idea to see the breakdown. Not because you can now poke your mother in law either. Mulleybite:

So right now the stats:

• 905,980 people in Ireland are now on Facebook. In January there were just over 400k.
• 612,380 people are age 25 and older – 67%
• 399,440 people are age 30 and older – 44%
• 134,660 people are age 40 and older – 14%

It's a big zeitgeisty monster now. Question that brands should ponder is how, when and why it can be useful for them. It's far from universally applicable for every brand, but it simply has to be on the rota of considerations.

Websites: yours v Skittles

Fragmentation: it needn't affect the overall taste.
Pic thanks to Dirty Bunny.

Skittles has gone the next step. They've pretty much done away with their 'own' website and just harnessed themselves into a Facebook page.

Kind of.

If you go looking at their pics page, it's hosted on Flickr. Their videos? A link to a Skittles page on - you guessed it - Youtube. Click on the Chatter link and you're straight to their Twitter page. Even the links to product information bring you to Wikipedia.

They've put themselves in a very interesting place: totally visible at the centre of a very public web of communications.

It's awesome, it's obvious and it's a brave step for Mars nonetheless, embracing as it does the underlying ethos of 'social' in the term social media. There are almost 600, 000 fans on the Facebook page alone. Ten more people commented on the Skittles Twitter page in the time it took me to type this paragraph. Ok, I'm not the fastest typist, but you still have to be a bit impressed, right? Right?




Yes you do. Because Skittles are allowing unflattering comment too. Look at the top of the thread above. 'wtf is with the skittles???!!! i HATE skittles!!!!' Even antisocial has a social element in it, something not lost even on the once notoriously reclusive Mars family. So at the risk of repeating myself again for the 400th time this month, watch how brands are using social media to leverage consumer opinions. People said Bring Back Wispa was a once off, and maybe it was. Here's another in Skittles. Who's next? It could be you, or one of your clients' brands. Why not, exactly? Why not?

Monday's adlinks

The truth does not lie:

• Paige Worthy is a fact checker for Good Magazine
• Patty Turner is the wife of the CEO of McDonalds, Frank Turner. But of course.
• Splatt and Weedon have researched incontinence. Seriously.
  More unlikeliness here from The Times Online.

Big Brother is watching:
Got a smartphone? Google's Latitude brings you - and an increasingly heated privacy debate - into the spotlight. Media Guardian reports (with a tutorial from Google)

Healthy breakfast? Er, I don't think so Mr Kellogg.

The R word again. It's a shit shit time, but Bloom earn big respect for not fronting about it.

Five year old Facebook a fad? Rhodri Marsden finds out.

Twitter uptake still surging, but what to do with it?

Ten smart brands using smart social media.

Started using your GMail labels yet? They're shockin' handy. But why so long in coming?

Don't dis my Patty, punk!

Announcing the Web 2.0 Roadshow for Adland.

Corporate/Social applications of Web 2.0 for clients in Irish advertising agencies.

This is the new roadshow we're putting together for Irish agencies that have limited or no involvement with internet conversations for their roster of clients. Snappy title, right? Somehow Corporate Sapps doesn't seem right either. Anyway, this is a heads up for what we'll be doing moving forward. It's also an invitation to demand a free pint from me if I EVER use the phrases heads up or moving forward in this blog again. Utter arse clutter.

So, to redress the balance of technophobia (it ain't technics, baby) and the chasm of understanding between having a Facebook profile and using similar for your clients, the Web 2.0 Roadshow for Adland is being compiled, nay, composed (for it will be a beautiful thing) and will be doing the rounds from March. It'll be swift, enlightening and a lot less painful than trepanning.

This is NOT for those who are already well familiar with the web's social apps and are exploiting them for clients. It's pretty much for those who think that the web begins and ends with rollover banner ads which look awful like the press ad they just did. It's an introductory course to the pros and cons of corporate engagement on platforms such as

• Facebook
• Bebo
• Blogs
• Twitter
• Email marketing
• Virals
• SMS
• YouTube
• Google

Readers of this blog are to varying degrees already in the 2.0 wave. Many of those in the agencies you work with aren't. Spread the word! The Web 2.0 Roadshow for Adland is a pretty informal beast, but it has great relevance for Account execs, managers, directors, planners, media and creatives. Not so much for the agency cat, but for everyone else it's essential like avoiding David McSavage's 'new' 'show' on RTE is essential. It makes housecalls too, so disruption is minimal.

More to follow.

The importance of the logo to advertising

How many can you recognise? Extra points for knowing what the people behind the button actually do.

While facebook is a relatively new company, much earlier into its career than say, a creaky 23 year old Wayne Rooney, that didn't stop Microsoft from paying $240m for a chunk. Well, more a crumb really. 1.6%. That makes fb worth fifteen effing billion dollars. Not bad for a four year old. As a tradvertiser, if you're not asking why a social bloody network where people 'poke' each other is so bloody expensive, you should possibly stop playing Scrabulous for five minutes and find out.

And then there's YouTube. It's interesting to note that on the day your new €275,000 (excluding terrestrial media buy), 40" spot for your client's SwankyShine Shampoo breaks, two hundred THOUSAND people will upload videos of their own (many featuring themselves, with their bedroom walls in the background, mostly in the US and UK and, increasingly, here) and two fifths of them will be in the music and entertainment categories, stuff that other viewers will actively seek out. You don't have to be Spike Jonze or Michel Gondry either. Any old low res tat will do, as long as it's entertaining or informative.

Good luck with the new SwankyShine spots on terrestrial TV, btw. Thank God it's got added ProPylaxaToriAmos Ten, huh? At least YouTube can never make that sweet shit.

There are one million Irish profiles on this social bee already. About half a million of these seem to be Dublin nightclubs. It's Bebo, of course. Correctly used, this is an incisive way to reach a younger demographic. It could however also be a bit like standing in a lush, green meadow and shouting at the grass to try purple for a change. You need to be punting the right product or you're wasting your time. There is an interesting early test case involving the marketing of Granard's most famous export analysed here. Rarely has thirty grand generated such intense debate.

Here be bloggers. I know the word sounds fluffy and dismissable, but when everybody's TV analysis of the US election is certain sure to have its own blogger, then pay attention. No marketing campaign on earth is more finely tuned to the nuances of its target market, and if they say blogging is necessary, you should believe them. The W is for Wordpress, the B is for Blogger. Two of the main software providers for most bloggers. There are some differences between them (like Wordpress is a commune of freeware-loving hippie geeks and, er, Google owns Blogger), but fundamentals are the same. They give you a voice and a set of ears in a very big world. It's lunchtime as I write: already 88,570 posts have been written on Wordpress blogs alone today. The simplest way to understand the phenomenal attraction of blogging is to just start one.

This is Feedburner's logo. If you publish content on the web, in a blog or a podcast, and you'd like to advertise your stuff, Feedburner can help with that. Anyone who wants it will be given regular, automated updates of your new content by Feedburner. It can also help you analyse who visits your stuff. Owned by Google. The more you blog, the usefuller it is.

If you use StumbleUpon it means you can give the thumbs-up to web content you like. Wikipedia calls it a 'personalized recommendation engine which uses peer and social-networking principles.' StumbleUpon themselves say that it 'helps you discover great content you probably wouldn't find using a search engine.' Seven million people are out there using it, bigging up what they find cool or useful or relevant. Sounds nerdy? A waste of time? Yeah. That's probably not why eBay parted with seventy five million dollars for it in 2007.

When an engine is developed just to search blogs, it's safe to say that bloggers have arrived as a legitimate and understood voice in the social and commercial media mix. Technorati is the engine. But it's a bit more than that now too, as it also acts as go-between between the blogger and the advertiser. Oh, didn't I mention? If you're a good blogger you can get paid by advertisers who want your space.

Digg is where people share and discover web content. Users vote on popularity, and the best stuff rises to the top. This is, in theory, all done by users. I can, also in theory, give this blog post an extra boost by submitting it to the upcoming stories section on Digg and get some extra readership thataway. In theory.

Delicious (or del icio us) is a social bookmarking site. Instead of just bookmarking a site or page you like, you instead have a Delicious account where you keep all your favourites online. Everybody else can see and share and swop. This exposes you to more of what you like, so if trans-Carpathian slapstick cookery programme outtakes is your big thing, then you'll find like minded souls on Delicious. Or not.

Twitter is a relative newcomer, having started in California (you don't say) in 2006. In essence it's a way to network with your own friends by keeping them up to date with your movements in info bursts of up to 140 characters. This can be fed through to your computer on your Twitter homepage, Facebook, a variety of other apps or, more popularly, on your mobile phone.

You get a 'tweet' SMS or email telling you and your network that Sean has found his lucky sliothar and so won't need to kill you for accidentally giving it to Mrs Quin's Charity Shop. It may sound stalkerishly obsessive, but it's getting ferociously popular, adding on users every month by the million.

Linked in is yet another social networking site, this time for business purposes. It's your CV, portfolio and business card online. Your contacts/network is an extremely valuable part of the site's architecture, as they act as referees and an endorsement of what you're about. 30 million users are registered on Linked in. I'm dismayed to think that anyone would suggest I've added it in here so that I can be readily checked out. Shameless.


Some postscript observations.

I'm guessing that not one of these dorky names went through the focus group hell that a lot of big brand advertising is forced into. Just a small bunch of startup people with a working title and butterflies in their tummies. There are lots more out there: try 10,000 new downloadable applications already for the iPhone alone, and it's an infant.

The single unifying theme for all these new social tools is their interactive nature. They rely on user input, commentary, feedback. They thrive on it, including the critical stuff. Traffic is blood. And that represents the divergence between the old world and the new. Top-down communications the ad agency way is gone, at least for the foreseeable. Not listening is no longer optional. Marketing has undergone a radical shift, and the polarity between the young who have always known social network media and how to integrate them into their lives and interests, and the 30-plus demographic who have a half-hearted interest in a facebook account at best, has never been wider. The important thing from the agency's perspective is to appreciate which one of these is the growing market, and then learn - quickly - how to connect with them.