I’ll be back…

I realise it has been a while since I last posted. It’s a conscious decision I’ve made, so don’t worry, I’m not huddled on the floor of a cold shower in the foetal position trying to figure out the next blog post to write.

I’ve decided that I will actually pay for a WordPress blog instead of what I’m doing now, which is using the free version. Anyone who has used WordPress before will understand the advantages of doing so. Anyone working in digital will also empathise with my belief that it’s better to iron out the kinks in your blog while it’s still young than having to deal with the traumatic loss of precious SEO that would occur if I started from scratch in the future.

I’ll keep you all (by ‘all’ I am referring to my mother – probably the only person who will read this) posted with future posts.

 

Data visualisation for social media

Recent developments in the visual mapping of social media trends have enlightened profound new realms of analysis for those of us using social media to influence others.

Data visualisation programs such as The New York Times’ Cascade: Data Visualization for Tweets are providing researchers with new tools that enable social analytics to be recorded and analysed on a visual plane. Check out the video below to see what I mean.

According to the NYT’s Research & Development labs;

Cascade allows for precise analysis of the structures which underly sharing activity on the web.

This first-of-its-kind tool links browsing behavior on a site to sharing activity to construct a detailed picture of how information propagates through the social media space.

It’s not the first of its kind (the data visualisation below documents the Twitter turmoil that prompted Hosni Mubarak to resign as President of Egypt), but it demonstrates an important step in the development of more accurate social media monitoring. By showing how users share information between their networks, programs like Cascade are visually articulating the true dimensions of social media connection. Although social media use is ubiquitous within the modern existence, we are often blind to the diverse array of happenings that occur beyond our own social network.

Sometimes pictures can be more powerful than figures, so a visual glimpse at communicative processes and sharing between users represents a unique opportunity for communicators. It sheds light on patterns of use and information sharing that would otherwise remain invisible.

What data visualisation means for communicators

The most obvious benefit of tools like Cascade center around being able to determine influence. As information is shared, the strength of connections and the power of certain messages becomes far more overt. For communicators trying to impart key messages on audiences, this means more accurate monitoring and understanding of the many variables that affect how information is shared.

An understanding of how messages are affected by their construction and external facets means communicators can create content that is more conducive to engagement. If communicators have a greater understanding of an audience’s consumption and propogation of content, more effective calls to action can be created.

For public relations practitioners, tools like this could cut out much of the guess work that occurs when trying to determine who appropriate influencers should be. Knowing which people will propagate information or subvert it to their liking in advance will mean improved economies of scale, because the most appropriate influencers will already be apparent. The beauty of it is that as data accumulates, assumptions become more accurate!

Perhaps Cascade is an unnecessary complication to an already muddled social media landscape. I can’t help but think that any form of analysis would be very resource intensive. Still, it is good to see developments like this that allow us to rethink the strategies that we already know.

 

Product DISplacement

Skimming through Youtube the other day looking for videos of cute baby otters and red pandas, I stumbled across an old favourite video of mine. It was made by the indie cool people over at ABC’s Hungry Beast last year, but this time around the actual theory behind Hungry Beast’s suppositions resonated with me.

It’s that old chestnut of an idea called Elaboration Likelihood that I explored in The Psychology of Social Media. In that post I applied elaboration likelihood to social media relationships, however, as in the case of Hungry Beast the idea is also applicable to mainstream advertising, public relations and marketing.

Again, it’s a question of central processing versus peripheral processing. By having brands like Foozle instead of Google or Pecsi instead of Pepsi, Marc Fennell explains that the idea of ‘product displacement’ is to bamboozle the audience by having a brand that looks and feels like a real brand, but isn’t. As he suggests, this concept evokes a challenge among audience members to figure out what the what brand being misrepresented actually is. Even if this process of correction only takes a second, it has done exactly what marketers had intended by gaining the consumer’s attention.

The idea of product displacement aims to subvert what consumers know about a brand in order to make them exert mental energy in deciphering its true meaning. This cognitive expenditure is exactly what marketers want because if one is conscious of a brand, then it has generally taken a central processing route, meaning a stronger brand connection and heightened awareness of its presence.

As brands become more ubiquitous in modern society, they are increasingly peripherally processed in our minds. We create mental shortcuts for them and in the process we become less involved in their story. Product displacement is a relatively new method that attempts to usurp our consciousness, and although it might be scary to some, it’s definitely an exciting realm for others.

 

The benefits of blogging

Having to dump your vegetable and food scraps in a compost heap every day is a chore. Maintaining a blog is not. Many people and businesses focus on the immediate concerns that maintaining a blog may warrant, but in the process they lose sight of the long-term recompense of successful blogging.

Like composting, writing a blog should be an organic process. It should come naturally to a business that is joining the online conversation of its respective industry and if done well there is every chance that it will become a healthy, durable asset, not unlike a well-fertilised, flourishing lawn.

As Rick Burnes suggests, your business blog is an annuity. Communicating with your target market is one thing, but according to Burnes there is also an opportunity to write for an unrestrained number of potential of audience members.

‘Each time you publish a blog post, you’re purchasing an annuity.

Every time you write a blog article, you get an ongoing cash flow over the lifetime of your blog — except instead getting cash each month, you get valuable search traffic.’

Using his own blog as a relevant example he follows with this.

‘For the past three months, a post I wrote back in November about inbound marketing has been getting about 300 visits a month from people searching for the term “inbound marketing.”

… we would have to pay $2.41 to get each of those visits via paid search traffic. That means that each month that post is producing about $730 worth of traffic from search engines.

Now think about what that means going forward. Assume that page holds similar traffic for the next two years. With an interest rate of 5%, that traffic is currently worth about $10,000…’

How to write a successful blog post

Depending on how pertinent your blogging is to those beyond your regular readership, good blog posts could see key messages perpetuated in a constant or even growing influx of site visitors. Good blog posts are no fluke though. The following three requirements are vital to any business wanting annuity from its blog.

1. Uniqueness – An original concept by no means ensures the success of a blog post and likewise an unoriginal premise does not spell the end for a blog (I mean it’s not like this blog invented new media). However, if an ongoing readership is sought, uniqueness definitely helps. Much like the business world, offering something that nobody else can puts you in prime position when people look for what you offer. Use your articles to monopolise topics in your area of expertise.
2. Accuracy – Expertise is vital for those exhibiting authority on a topic within a blog post. The reason someone starts a blog is entirely up to them, but for businesses, a blog should seek to facilitate authentic, two-way dialogue where ideas can be shared on both sides. If you expect or want your blog posts to exist long into the future, then you have the responsibility to produce accurate, well-thought out ideas so that erroneous information is not perpetuated throughout society. Don’t write about mereological nihilism if the only thing you know is how to train cats to do a handstand.
3. Relevance – Offering a unique blog post that nobody has ever thought up may be useful in terms of originality, but if the post is not relevant to anyone you can forget about it being a useful asset in the long run. Relevance is mostly subjective though, and in most cases a blog’s relevance depends on evolving trends and patterns within its online context. Hone in on what you know about your audience and use your knowledge of them when creating keywords and tags that may maintain or improve the number of visits to your website.

These three recommendations for blogging are not secrets. They do not guarantee that your site will magically turn into the most visited site in the world, however, they do help it maintain significance for posterity and ensure that it gets the best possible start. Always know that there are greener pastures beyond the murky initial stages of making a blog, because that’s what I’m going to keep telling myself.

 

My first meme

I am aware that this blog was meant to be a strictly informative outlet for me, but I have experienced an important development in my life that has encouraged me to contradict the ethos of my blog – my first meme! For someone who who spends as much time as I do online, I really should have gotten this out of the way earlier, but I guess I was just waiting for the perfect opportunity to come along. Needless to say, the opportunity has arisen and therefore I must exploit this opportunity to the best of my ability.

So here it is, my first ever meme. I think the iterative process that led to this development produced a beautiful result and I hope you gain enjoyment from it too. If you don’t like it please consider the fact that it’s my first and I may be a bit rusty. Also, you might want to reconsider your priorities in life if you’re actually going to criticise a baby polar bear!

 

How public relations can manufacture fun

Defining ‘fun’ is a hard task. Trying to commodify and sell it can be just as difficult – yet it is a challenge communications professionals face all too regularly as they work with clients who are eager to deliver the ultimate experience to fun-seeking patrons. In order to demonstrate my point I’m going to have to use an obscure example.

LARP stands for ‘Live Action Role-Play’. A LARP manifests itself as a game whereby real people physically act out the actions and personas of their own chosen fictional characters. LARPs exist in many different genres derived mostly from genre fiction, so if you ever see a large group of people sincerely re-enacting situations from a medieval battle scene, please don’t be concerned for their sanity. They’re LARPing!

So why do people LARP?

The answer is because it’s fun. It’s an unusual type of fun, but it is fun nonetheless. The ‘15^th Century steel Swiss longsword’ that a LARPer yields may actually be made out of plastic, but feelings of enjoyment and amusement are indisputably real. The authenticity of said fun is enough to encourage hirsute, middle-aged men to play like children, arbitrarily shouting renditions of early modern English in public spaces. The answer to the question of why they look so odd to the average person is a phenomenological explanation, an explanation that all communication professionals can apply to determining what is fun for target audiences.

The notion of fun is a social construct. A post-structuralist approach to fun would suggest that fun to one person may mean a completely different thing to another. LARPing to me seems odd, however I know that it is my social milieu that has shaped the fact that I don’t interpret it as fun instead.

A hermeneutic phenomenological approach suggests that human experience is the most important site of meaning making. Experience is viewed as the vehicle that drives the interpretation of phenomena to a destination. This is a consideration that public relations and marketing experts use to shape messages, because they know that nobody will interpret phenomena in the exact same way as somebody else because no one person has the exact same experiences as another. The meaning of fun to two different people will never be identical.

How can public relations manufacture an influencers desire for fun?

Fun is easy to define for some of us...

The key word to consider here is ‘manufacture’. In most cases it can be assumed that a desire for fun within the human psyche has met a state of equilibrium. Over time, people figure out what is fun to them and what isn’t, and they interact with phenomena in accordance with these tastes. Public relations though, has the power to construct experiences, and according to phenomenological scholars, nothing is more influential than our own personal experience. For instance, a failed triple front flip attempt is enough dissuade most people from trying that experience again.

A healthy brand is forged through innovative and well-thought-out messaging. Through creative and targeted stories, public relations can manufacture strong messages that reinforce positive public perceptions. A healthy brand means consumers who are willing to follow its story and affiliate themselves with its message.

Once influencers are willing to associate themselves with a brand, a dialogue can occur. Unique interactions between influencer and brand foster the development of new experiences and these experiences serve as a platform for new realms of conversation.

Shared experiences lead to shared ideology. Shared experiences create a bond and unity between both parties, and when a brand tells an influencer that something is ‘fun’ any connection of trust will help to validate this promise.

Defining fun is a near impossible task. From a purely semiotic standpoint we can see that the word ‘fun’ is not directly referent to a signified feeling, because fun is subjective. For some people pain is fun (which may perhaps ruin my stove analogy above), for others the notion of pain being fun is incomprehensible. Successful interactions between a brand and a consumer allow an opportunity to develop mutual understandings and agreements on topics. Through communication we don’t have to define fun because we can manufacture it.

 

The psychology of social media

Recently during a night out on the town I noticed a peculiar thing. A friend of mine who considers himself a social butterfly was gravitating around the room to have short, sporadic conversations with people he knew, introducing them to me as his ‘friend(s)’. I found it odd that, to my friend, these short interactions with no real emotional or experiential profundity constituted what he called a friendship. And in another example of my professional life invading my social existence I began thinking of what the implications of my thoughts were in a social media setting.

The relationships I was witnessing between my friend and the people he was introducing seemed to me to be acquaintanceships. My friendships (including the one with the friend in question) are categorised as such because of their strong emotional ties and bonds forged by shared ideology and interests. Surely the conversations he was having weren’t delving that deep in such short periods of time. After questioning my friend it quickly became apparent that the word ‘friend’ was ushering a semantic misunderstanding between us, but what I witnessed showed a common psychological trait that is highly applicable to online relationships.

Our disparate interpersonal relationships represent keystones of basic cognitive theory – theory that all businesses have to consider when building relationships with influencers online. With social media replicating real life at a significant rate, online community managers need to decide whether they’re going to be that person at the bar with lots of friends but weak interpersonal ties or the other person with less friends but strong interpersonal ties.

It’s a question of reach versus affinity, which the diagram above demonstrates very clearly. The very best online communities, such as these amazing facebook fan pages, are able to pair both factors. They combine above the line impressions with strong bonds that can perpetuate ongoing interrelationships. Not all brands have the social clout of these big name brands though, so for many other brands, psychological factors must be recognised in order to achieve success.

Psychological rationale for online relationships

According to elaboration likelihood theory, which was first espoused by R. E. Petty and J. T. Cacioppo, there are two main cognitive paths in which information is processed in the mind – the central route and the peripheral route.

Central processing – This is essentially the extent to which somebody will seriously think about and discursively reflect on an issue. Attitudes and opinions are formed by rational and logical appeals that eventuate from deep thought.

Within the context of an online relationship, central processing can be understood as the process by which one party (influencer) has reflected on what the other (brand) has to offer them. Relationships that have evoked central processing typically take a long time and a lot more effort to maintain, but the reward is a relationship characterised by loyalty, longevity and trust that is far less vulnerable to decay.

Peripheral processing – This is the notion of simple, instinctive thinking that can form a person’s perspective of an issue via emotional appeals and less cognitive processing. Peripheral processing often relies on heuristics and preconceived ideas that help to form one’s opinion on a topic or issue.

An online relationship that has taken the peripheral route involves a process whereby one party (influencer) has used existing thought patterns and prior knowledge to form an assumption about the other (brand). Although forming a relationship in this manner means that larger audiences can be reached in a far shorter period of time, it also means that relationships will have less substance, which makes brand loyalty and long-term relationships far less likely.

It might seem like obvious stuff, but community management too often neglects to consider the psychological traits of online relationships. The way in which relationships are managed should be in accordance with what they want to achieve. Hedging bets and trying to take both cognitive routes is not a sustainable option. So what does your online presence require? Quick impressions or ongoing conversation?

 

Quora asks the right questions

It might sound like a name a parent would give to a baby girl born in the Mediterranean, however the delightful pun that is Quora is also fast-becoming a talking point in the social media realm. Touted as the answer to the Yahoo! Answers service, Quora is an online user-based question and answer service that allows users to contribute queries with a focus on answer accuracy and credibility. This balance of reliable answers combined with easy access to information is driving Quora’s growing momentum, which in turn is allowing a unique platform for public relations campaigns at variety of levels.

User-orientated Q&A websites are by no means a new phenomenon. So what then differentiates Quora from sites like AllExperts and Yahoo Answers to the extent that it would be valued at $86 million? The answer may be that Quora has delineated itself from the notion of anonymity that similar sites exhibit in favour of profile-based interaction. By linking with personal Facebook and Twitter accounts instead of just using usernames, Quora was obviously seen by valuers to herald a new opportunity for informative, accurate answers, with credibility more attainable as users put their actual names (and indeed faces) to answers. In theory the site will encourage input only from users who have expertise or a strong interest in the questions they choose to answer, which are displayed in their feed. It is this potential for relevant, communal conversations that makes Quora a public relations tool for the immediate future.

The Quora homepage interface displays questions and answers from topics that users choose to follow in real time.

1. Developing a brand community – Quora is a chance for brands to generate a story that can give them a leg up in flooded markets. With a community of inquisitive individuals eager to satisfy the thirsts for knowledge of themselves and/or others, intellectual conversations are clearly apparent between current users. If one was to harness the power of these C2C conversations, self-generating brand awareness is entirely possible. A successful brand could make use of consolidated online groups that could in turn perpetuate brand messages through individual social networks.
2. Extending the reach of a campaign through different social media platforms – As has been mentioned, the intrinsic coexistence with Facebook and Twitter serves the interface well in adding credibility to answers, however, its power to generate awareness is also notable. Being linked with the two social media outlets means that any activity made by users on Quora is linked to news feeds on all three sites. This multi-channel display makes the consumer a billboard to their friends. If a brand’s image is strong, there is every chance said consumer’s friends (who most likely share similar interests) will be exposed to a campaign too.
3. Recognising opportunities and developments important to a campaign – Peaks and troughs in information become clearly palpable on Quora. Depending on the intent of a campaign, observations made within the interface of the website could yield interesting results that would result in more relevant discussions for a specific brand. A distinct lack of knowledge on a subject matter for instance, would indicate an opportunity for a campaign to educate through online discussion. Alternatively, questions that garner a significant amount interest could signify a movement or pattern of thought that could be usurped for the benefit of a brand.
4. Monitoring perceptions over time – The opportunities presented as a result of Quora’s immediacy also help to differentiate the service as a valid public relations tool. If one was to monitor the public opinion of a campaign, Quora would allow real-time information, and allow individuals to engage in conversations about a brand. If one was to apply this to a crisis, Quora could be used to quell negative discussions about a campaign if need be, with an emphasis on personal and symmetrical communication rather than the dissemination of information. Quora users are typically opinion leaders, and for a public relations practitioner this could be a useful resource when examining a campaign or planning one for the future.
5. Why not other Q&A sites? – The accessibility of other Q&A services is perhaps their downfall. How often have you typed a question into your search engine and come up with a Yahoo “Answer” that was completely insensitive to your amazing conundrum? It seems as if other Q&A providers have become far more opportunistic, with minimal involvement between users. Rather than just a one-post question demanding an answer, Quora users are engaging in ongoing dialogues that make them far easier to communicate with in order to deliver key messages. The fact that at the time of writing this, Miley Cyrus is trending on Yahoo Answers probably says a lot about site’s main demographic and disparate intentions.

Understanding the online arena that a public relations campaign is entering into should be at the helm of every social media proposal. The advantage of sites like Quora is that they provide immediate insights into consumer attitudes, with a unique opportunity for brands to guide (not force) how the public understands their vision. The personality of Quora is the ideal opportunity for a brand to make its mark with minimal effort.

Here are some helpful examples of  Quora questions and answers:

• How do I get started using Quora?
• How should journalists handle errors in tweets?
• What are the best examples of charities using social media techniques in raising awareness or funds for their cause?

 

What Super Bowl 2011 teaches us

Seeing as I haven’t really harped on about the importance of integrated approaches to advertising and public relations campaigns on this blog yet (probably because this is my first post), here is a very real and very current example of how integrated campaigns cannot always skew attention towards one particular discipline.

Super Bowl ads have long existed as a nodal point for some of the world’s most notable and entertaining above the line campaigns, with the event guaranteeing unparalleled consumer interest and ad spend from some of the biggest companies in the world. Getting air-time during the Super Bowl ensures a massive audience, and for an event that only goes for around four hours, the potential for consumer impressions is absolutely astonishing.

So why then did the ads of Super Bowl 2011 not live up to to their expectations?

The answer is complacency. Integrated campaign approaches this year relied too heavily on audience action to ensure key messages were transmitted. Brands and their respective agencies spent massive amounts of money and time on what they expected to be lucrative campaigns with excessive yields, but what they failed to achieve were proper interactions with their target markets. This year, commercials were expected to go viral and complacency led to a lack of noteworthy content that should never have been expected to achieve much.

Look at this Coca Cola commercial for example.  It looks like something my children would skip watching in favour of doing homework! And I don’t even have children! That means that even my non-existent children have higher expectations for television viewing than what the Super Bowl ads offered, and considering their expectations technically don’t even exist… well yeah, you get the picture.

The integrated approaches for Super Bowl 2011 should not have taken whole aspects of their campaign for granted. The ads were boring with little to no magic, and as a result they did not evoke a sense of wanderlust that would draw people online. Online presence was viewed as a switch that could be simply turned on to create a successful brand. One piece of the puzzle was relied on too heavily, and as a result online page views have suffered and brands will surely not feel the good effects of ongoing brand messages in the same way as they did last year.

Super Bowl 2011 had a captive global (but mostly American) audience. In 2011, the captive audience did not suffer from the Stockholm Syndrome of last year that drew them willingly to online campaigns. Apart from Volkswagon’s ‘The Force’ advertisement, which was released online well before the event in order to spark interest, success was severely limited. Online represents an opportunity but also a key measure of success, and this year Super Bowl ads fell short of the end zone.

More Super Bowl 2011 ads:

• Hotel chain HomeAway’s seriously confusing Youtube channel
• Groupon’s Brazilian wax commercial ft. Liz Hurley
• Monkeys are usually awesome, but Careerbuilders.com finds a way to make them boring