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Skills

Sharpening your skills for the new media landscape

Matthew GainHead of Digital CommunicationsWeber Shandwick

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says more than 120million people log onto

Facebook every day

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Video usage continues to grow

77% of Australian web users have uploaded video in the last 12 months...

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MySpace experiences more than 60 million unique users each month

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And there has been the odd mention of Twitter in the press...

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- Association of National Advertisers (US)

66% of US marketers have used social media in 2009, compared to 20% in 2007.

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Today people are looking more to their peers and each other for news, information and cues and relying less on institutions.

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Listening

SearchEvaluation

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Listening

Photo by cesarastudillo on Flickr.com

Radian 6

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But there is also a range of free tools

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Experiment with

• Google alerts – be alerted when you are mentioned online

• Blogpulse.com – track conversations and trends

• Search.twitter/Twilert.com

• Boardreader – track conversations on forums

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Things to remember

• Look for peaks and troughs in communication

• Have clear objectives

• 3 months minimum

• Think beyond your brand name

Photo by smason on Flickr.com

Identifying advocates

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Blog measurement:• Unique visitors (comepete.com though not always reliable)

• Number of comments

• Google/Technorati and other rankings

• Number of times posts have been saved on Delicious

• The number of sites linking back to posts

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Twitter/Facebook/MySpace measurement

• Number of friends/followers

• Engagement of the followers

• Frequency of updates

• Twitter.grader and Twitvision rank

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- Lorem Ipsum

Forums

Forums:• The number of community members if available• The number of new threads • The number of posts within a thread

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CHALLENGE

Educate and build advocates online for new Microsoft products at CES 2009. SOLUTION

• Leverage existing relationships with online community to get them hands on with new Microsoft products

• Hosted an evening event to coincide with the global announcements in Las Vegas

• Provide the advocates with exclusive assets to share with their followers and to encourage engagement and conversations

CESFest results

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80 separate conversations were stimulated solely by the experience, within which more than 1,200 contributions were made WOM stimulated by

CESFest event generated more than 500,000 tracked engagements After being part of the

CESFest experience key voices created more than 9 times more Microsoft WOM prior to engagement

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Things to remember

• Relationships are key

• Blogger engagement ≠ journalist engagement

• Transparency is fundamental

• Cash for comment is bad in media and bad in social media

• Think conversations not key message delivery

• Be authentic and personal

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Search

Photo by groggits on Flickr.com

Social network embassies

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Search engine optimised materials

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CHALLENGE

Educate the British public about the role of The Foreign & Commonwealth Office as part of the ‘Bringing Foreign Policy Home’ initiative.

SOLUTION

• 17 video diaries, 33 in-house blog posts, Google maps mashup; first ever FCO podcasts on iTunes, and an ’Ask the Ambassador’ channel on Yoosk

• Roundtable event chaired by BBC tech correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones attended by 14 of UK’s leading bloggers resulted in 9 pieces of positive coverage

• 3 online editorial placements, including first ever coverage of FCO’s work by a gay publication

• Cited by Foreign Secretary as a campaign of excellence

RESULTS

WS mobilised blogging Ambassadors to participate in conversations on websites and Twitter, and to create video diaries. We distributed content across multiple platforms and created targeted content to engage specific interest/cultural groups such as the gay and Chinese communities. We forged relationships with online super-influencers by facilitating a panel debate connecting technology, political and social bloggers around a table with senior diplomats.

Wrap up

Three key skills communications professions today and tomorrow:

• Listening

• First step in any social campaign

• Start exploring free tools tomorrow

• Evaluation

• Online advocates are many, but if done right even a small group can generate big results

• Search

• Search embassies are a good way of extending your searchable properties

• Think not just for human readers, but search engines

• What’s next?

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Get in contact!

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Matthew Gain

• Email – mgain@webershandwick.com

• Twitter - @matthewgain

• Website – matthewgain.com

• Phone – 0416 181 073

Thank you for listening – I hope it was useful