Articles in Engage
I never tire of watching videos which highlight the incredible statistics surrounding the penetration of the internet, and I’m still surprised by the growth in some of these statistics.
JESS3 / The State of The Internet from Jesse Thomas on Vimeo.
Alan Long, Research Director for Hitwise reports that Social Media Traffic in Australia has nearly caught Search as depicted by the following chart.
Top 10 Social Networks in Australia are shown here, dominated by Facebook which boasts over 8 million Australians.
The net affect is that companies need more than ever to develop a strategy for Listening and Engaging with these networks so that they have the ability to influence consumers.
As organisations start to embrace social media monitoring, it’s important for them to categorise conversations to allow a suite of various engagement response tactics to be executed.
This beautiful slidedeck from Amber Naslund, highlights the key categories that should be considered.
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It’s surprising giving the hype surrounding Social Media, that it’s still quite a challenge to sell the adoption of social media to organisations.
There are many obstacles that stand in the way of running social media campaigns such as 
- Risks associated with open conversations
- Non existant Internal policies covering social media engagement
- Lack of internal communication of social media engagement policies
- Perceived lack of metrics
- Clarity of roles for managing the campaign
One of the hottest news for social communication this month was the beta launch of Google Wave.
Like a lot of people, I’m still waiting for my Beta invite – Google released 100K invites on Sept 30, 2009, and hopefully a 2nd wave of invites will come soon. {Update : Thanks to Gus for sending me a twitter invite soon after this post was published)
The Economist has published this video which contains a series of interesting statistics about the changing media landscape.
Whilst the stats are US focused, they are representative of the changes that are occuring across the globe.
Be a Football Hero allows you to create a personalised audio commentary.
Select your name, country, and age, and then listen to the professional soccer (football) commentary of yourself performing the ultimate football heroics.
If you like what you hear, you can order the soundtrack as a CD for 14.99 pounds.
The soundtrack is very realistic, and you get to hear your surname and age as you score the match winning goal in the dying minutes.
Is social media a fad? Or is it the biggest shift since the Industrial Revolution? 
Welcome to the World of Socialnomics
Qualman defines socialnomics as “The ability of social media to generate exponential returns for individuals and businesses”.
They have released a video which showcases some of the social media statistics that describe the social media revolution, and how it is changing the world.
And this revolution has only just begun !
Most of you would have heard of the “Will it Blend” videos, that do a fantastic job of promoting the Blendtec blender.
Today, I came across an interesting cross promotion featuring the founder and star of Will it Blend, Tom Dickson and one of the Ford Fiesta Movement agents, Ryan Dembroski.
The Ford Fiesta Movement has been one of the pioneering social media PR programs, which had over 4,000 people apply to become one of 100 agents. The successful agents were all given a new Fiesta for six months, and are expected to record and share their experiences with the car.
Social Media has brought content creation tools to consumers, allowing an efficient means for organizing, facilitating outreach, encouraging dialogue and raising money.
This video describes how social media is being used in Lebanon for “digital activism”.
Successful cause initiatives such as Kiva (Microfinance), myC4 (Microfinance & Mentoring), Build An African School (Financing new schools in Africa) and MobileMovement (Microfinance using mobiles) all understand that the social media landscape provide consumers the means to more deeply engage with the cause, and in doing that these initiatives are reaping the benefits of communal support.
Not all campaigns will be successful, but not having a brief, or having one that is “too brief” definitely increases the likelihood of failure.
The Brief is one of the most important stages of the marketing process, and yet many clients fail to see it’s importance, and either ignore it all together or pass this responsibility to the agency. Agency created briefs or “reverse briefs” can work well where the client / agency understand each other well, but there should still be some kind of approval step so that clarity of scope is understood.
