More stats from the 377 page (UK) Ofcom Communications Markets Report, in particular ones that reinforce the fact that TV-led campaigns or properties are very often more effective when combined with online.     Three findings in particular (with graphs)

1 – Live, scheduled TV carries a low attention threshold. Compared to other forms of media, consumers are least likely to give live TV and radio their undivided attention.     Social media and print have medium attention scores, while games and downloaded video content rank best when it comes to consumer focus (hence the wisdom of spending money on in-game promotions).

2 – We’re now more likely to ‘media stack.’ 20% of media time is now simultaneous – very often involving TV + the Internet and mobile phones.  Among the under 25s that proportion rises to 29%.  16-24 year olds managed to fit just over nine and a half hours’ worth of media into a little  over six and a half hours of actual time.

3 – The most popular YouTube channels are variations of mainstream media properties. It’s a myth that we want to spend our time on YouTube watching home made ‘world’s funniest animal’ type videos.   Instead, much as we do on TV, we want to see content with high production values, involving recognisable names.

Where’s the proof that TV + online work in tandem works?  Here are three random examples:

1 – PHD and Medialets developed a True Blood iPhone ad to support the last series.   Though we can question whether HBO’s 38% increase in viewers was down to the mobile campaign, the best click-through rate of 8.73% that the campaign achieved was way beyond the usual display ad rate of 0.02%.

2 – Speaking of click-throughs, Coke achieved one of 6%, when it ran a Promoted Tweets / Twitter World Cup campaign.   Running a World Cup promo while people were tweeting about matches made sense – Twitter saw a clear spike in activity, including a record for the number of tweets per second during the recent tournament.

3 – One of my favourite examples is this one:  US broadcaster Oxygen piloted a “real time viewing party” called Oxygen Live around one of its hit shows – Bad Girls Club.   This pulled in comments and conversations from several networks such as Twitter into an online hub while the show was airing.

Oxygen Live kicked off 30 mins before each show started, meaning that it was trending on Twitter 5 mins before each episode and there was a consistent increase in viewers over the hour.   In fact in the US West Coast when they *didn’t* run Oxygen Live, ratings were up 9% among women aged 18-49.   Once Oxygen Live launched that ratings then saw a much bigger increase, up to 57%.

And as far as a successful example of integrating TV advertising and an online campaign goes….Old Spice anyone?

As a final point, it’s worth noting that two of the new social networks that have created a buzz over the past few weeks, Miso and Glue, have a model that’s directly related to people checking into entertainment events and TV programmes, as opposed to locations.

We’ve got a more detailed summary of the Ofcom report in the latest (agency) Rabbit feed, the html version is here.

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A common answer to ‘why Twitter, it’s not a mass market tool?’, is ‘because the people who do use it matter.’ The influence over numbers argument.

That’s backed up by an ExactTarget study, reproduced in emarketer. US Twitter users in April 2010 were far more likely than general Internet users to post to forums (75% vs 25%), blog (72% vs 14%), comment on blogs (70% vs 23%) and post ratings / reviews (61% vs 20%).

In other words, the 14 million odd people who regularly go on Twitter (as opposed to the 95 million that have signed up), are already active in social media, know how to make things happen and to create noise – good or bad – online, and take conversations elsewhere, be that to blogs, forums, other social networks, or even the mainstream media.

As Morgan Stewart of ExactTarget puts it, “What happens on Twitter doesn’t stay on Twitter. While the number of active Twitter users is less than Facebook or email, the concentration of highly engaged and influential content creators is unrivaled—it’s become the gathering place for content creators whose influence spills over into every other corner of the internet.”

ExactTarget also asked Twitter users why they followed brands. The biggest reason was for informational purposes, with updates on future brands (38%) and keeping informed about the company (32%) being the main reasons.

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Hubspot has a useful graphic that makes sense when you think about it, but is still useful when someone comes to you asking for a Facebook page with 10,000 fans by next month.   The most popular Facebook pages according to Hubspot, involve movies, TV shows, popular books, bands and so on.

And at the bottom of the scale we have Govt pages, musicians (I guess unknown ones?), local businesses and Govt public services.

In fact, Inside Facebook says that entertainment sites are now driving a larger proportion of traffic to the social network, helped along by Facebook’s ‘like’ button that it unveiled the other month (and that I’ve finally got around to installing myself).

Inside Facebook quotes Compete stats that show that the whole boycott Facebook campaign over privacy issues was something of a non-starter, and probably a discussion point only among the minority of us that read the social media and tech press – in the US at least, Facebook gained 2.1 million new visitors in May.

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The PBS Media Shift blog has some interesting points about the UK web election that wasn’t….well once you get past the 1st paragraph anyway (“The British still consume high tea and scones….” enough said).

PBS links to BBC’s tech correspondent Rory Cellan Jones who says, “this was not an Internet election, and all those who suggested it might be had got it completely wrong.   It was a television election, and all of those tweeters and bloggers were sad political obsessives talking to each other.” Guilty as charged, those of us pontificating on Twitter about the election were largely preaching to the already converted.

Actually the following chart (produced before the election ended) by Echo Research should be a wake up call for all of us who make a living out of predicting the death of old media.   Sure, 48% of UK voters were influenced by the Internet…while 60% were influenced by newspapers and 85% by TV.

At the same time, the websites of all mainstream media outlets – TV and newspapers, saw a rise.   This points towards something that I for one believe is true – the delivery mechanism of the news might be different, but ultimately people still want it from trusted brands.

Spoof campaigns such as the Facebook group ‘vandalised Conservative Billboards‘ were more popular than the official party efforts, but you wonder to what extent they didn’t just amplify what was coming out of the echo chamber.

Social media effort from the UK election - vandalised Conservative posters on Facebook

As Jaron Gilinsky who wrote the PBS piece says, “now is the time for the various players to absorb the lessons from this election, and get back on the bike.   Perhaps in five years time, the training wheels will finally come off.”

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A feature in Campaign asks the question of whether clients need specialist social media agencies. Though that’s not what we call Rabbit (we do a lot more than social media outreach), we’re aware that we’re often grouped in that ‘pot’, so we thought we’d respond.

Sure, we have a vested interest, but actually our take is that clients don’t need specialist shops per se. What they do need is specialists who know what they are talking about and have some first hand experience of the tools they recommend.

And at the moment at least, the latest breed of social media and digital agencies just happens to be where a lot of these specialists are to be found and where a lot of the, what you might call skills development, takes place.

It’s an open secret that given varying levels of client education in what’s still quite a new space, that it’s been possible for just about anyone to set themselves up as an ‘expert’ and roll out a presentation containing a few buzz-words.

Social media marketing isn’t just ‘online PR’
As a result, last year blogger (and now a senior executive at Edelman in the States) David Armano questioned whether as he put it, social media practitioners should “eat their own dog food ” – this followed a number of organisations in the US appointing people to social media positions who didn’t actually have any kind of significant track record.

That might have worked a year ago, but clients are increasingly buying into the idea that social media marketing isn’t simply ‘online PR’ (transferring offline habits online). Instead what is it?

1 – It’s being able to come up with a winning idea and concept, that definitely hasn’t changed. The other week, the creator of spoof website mydavidcameron.com, in a post on the five lessons you can learn from his site, admitted that number one was the fact that he had a winning idea – everything else stemmed from that.

2 – It’s having an understanding of how whatever you do can translate throughout the rest of the marketing mix, rather than sitting in a digital silo.

3 – It’s having an appreciation of how things evolve online, where the gap between items being talked about on social networks and hitting the mainstream media can be as little as four hours.

4 – It’s having an understanding of metrics. Part of our job is a numbers and planning one, and being able to make sense of the various sentiment and influence analysis tools out there.

5 – But finally, it is knowing about the right tools to use to get the job done, and there nothing beats first hand experience.

Just Google the team

Recently, a client googled both fellow-Rabbit Louise and myself as individuals to see if we had any kind of online footprint. Fortunately we do, and we shouldn’t really be in the space if we don’t.

That seems like good practice going forward. If an agency comes up and presents ‘social media’ or any kind of digital strategy, google the individual team members just you would a job candidate. What do you find and what have they done? Do they use whatever they are recommending in a personal capacity, and do they also interact with their peers online?

In response to David’s post last year, one of the few comments in disagreement pointed out that media planners don’t always have experience of using the products they work for. A better analogy would be this – would you allow someone who doesn’t actually watch much TV to advise you on your TV strategy?

Image – Mai Le

Earlier today, bloggers Ory Okolloh and Mark Belinsky wondered whether Apple’s tablet (now unveiled as the iPad) would “kill Haiti like Michael Jackson killed Iran.”    In other words, if some major celebrity or gadget focused news breaks, do those of us online forget what could be considered the real news, involving many real lives.

According to the Pew New Media Index, the answer is yes.   The blogosphere (and social media in general) might indeed be quickening the news cycle, shortening attention spans and causing us to zone out when it comes to hard news…preferring to move onto lighter topics.   Like sex really.

In the first week of January, the mainstream media led with the failed bomb plot on the NWA flight from Amsterdam to Detroit, the economy and terrorism in general.

Looking at blogs however, the NWA flight was number two.   The number one topic that seemed to get bloggers hot under the collar was the Kings College (London) study that the female ‘g-spot’ was a myth.    And third was news that dating site beautifulpeople.com had kicked out 5000 members for not being that aesthetically pleasing.

This actually made the top trending story on Twitter with the NWA terror attempt relegated to number five.

Twitter does over index when it comes to journalists and various social media ‘influencers’ being active members.   Twitter and blogs have also played a key role in giving anti-Government demonstrators in Iran a way of getting the word out.

Yet, at the same time the Pew results also put things into some perspective and reinforce the continued need for serious news journalism.

For example, yesterday, so before the official iPad launch, Venture Beat produced a list of Twitter trends for various US and non US cities.

‘Thoughts on the toilet’ trended just about everywhere…but interest in Haiti seeming to be decidedly on the wane.   While it was still a top trend in LA, San Francisco and London it was no longer on the trends list for Washington, New York or Sao Paolo.

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According to US mobile messaging company Tekelec, the over 45s in both Europe and the States are starting to use SMS, with as many as 60% using text on a regular basis.

What does this prove?  Text messaging is the first baby step before using your phone for other things, such as surfing the web on your mobile.  And if 2010 really will be the year of the mobile Internet, it will only be so if it stretches across more demographics than 20 something iPhone or android users.

As a result, “brands will miss out if they only market their mobile campaigns to younger generations” says Tekelec’s Roland Cornelisse.

Among all consumers, 32% said they preferred SMS as a method of communication, compared to 33% who preferred email.   The 32% score is based on people liking the immediacy of text messaging.  If services like Twitter and phone Twitter applications gain mass appeal, it would be interesting to see to what extent they replace texting – personally I’ll always DM someone on Twitter first and text second.

Again, thinking about Twitter, 16% of the under 35s use SMS to vote on reality TV.   With ‘social TV‘ becoming more of a phenomenon and TV networks utilising social media to drive live audience engagement, you wonder whether SMS + TV will soon be redundant as well.

Image – Kiwanja

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This is according to the UK’s media recruitment agencies as reported by industry publication PR Week.

Recruiter Major Players looked through 4500 CVs received in the past two years (4500?  Guess times really were tough!), only 6% mentioned social media, 9% mentioned twitter and 2% mentioned blogging.   13% said ‘Facebook’ though a lot of this was as an interest or hobby.

By comparison, 33% of recruitment searches are for positions that require digital skills and another 28% require at least a general understanding.

In the article, the CEO of Cake turns the situation on its head a little bit implying that there are plenty of people, especially the under 25s, who use social media but that there’s a “dearth of strategy and planning people.”   In other words, sure you ‘use’ social media, but can you marry that up with a basis in communications strategy and skills.

Image – Justin Cormack

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I rarely put posts up where I talk about myself, but this will be the exception.

That’s because from today I’ve got a new job.  The former digital division of Cow has been hived off into a separate agency, Rabbit, which I now head.

So, nine years after being one of the team that started Cow, I’m back in start-up mode!

Cow (where we remain part of the group) has done some incredible things, going from a £10,000 loan in 2001 to agency of the year in 2008, while remaining completely independent.   That’s thanks to the amazing group of people working there.

The awesome Louise Doherty has come over from Cow Digital to help me make Rabbit happen and we’re drawing on five more Cows in Cape Town and London – really we can be as big as clients need us to be.  But, if with Rabbit we achieve just a fraction of the success that Cow has had, I’ll be happy!

Why a separate agency rather than a division?   Three reasons really, two commercial and one personal.

I know there’s been chatter that this year could see the end of division between digital and traditional agencies, but from experience, we’ve lost out on business due to some brands still preferring to give online business to someone they saw as a specialist.

Having said that, we have backgrounds in traditional comms and marketing and don’t believe in working in silos.   Whatever we develop will be designed to have traditional media legs as well as online ones.   In fact, ideally we want to become the lead creative agency in campaigns.

Then there are certain advantages in being able to build up our own client base.   Some clients we’ll of course share with Cow.   Others will be our own.

And from a personal point of view? I just fancied trying this all over again and concentrating on something that’s become a specialism of mine.

We like carrots, not sticks

Finally why Rabbit:

Because of the Cow link we wanted to choose an animal, but we took one that was as likely to be undomesticated as live on a farm.   Then there are the obvious Internet connotations with ‘rabbit, rabbit’ and ‘breed like.’

Want to find out more? Check us out online, follow us on Twitter, or send us a mail – hello at therabbitagency.com….and, oh,  did I mention exactly how excited we are about all this?!

Image – Svadilfari

There would be something seriously wrong if this chart from Marketing Sherpa showed something different, but it confirms that so-called social marketing budgets are set to rise across just about every industry sector.

Retail is the most active area with 79% of marketers saying they intended to up spending, while only 1% said they’d cut it.

And how is this money going to be spent?   60% will be on the “human factor” – salaries (finally, more brands set to bring in dedicated social media staffers?), monitoring and so on.    Meanwhile 20% will go to outside agencies and other suppliers.

However also worth noting is the chart below from Marketing Sherpa’s Social Media Marketing Benchmark Report.  It assesses the effectiveness of various activities versus the time and effort it takes.    Blogger relations is seen to have the biggest impact, but just like with offline media relations it’s not an easy hit.

According to Marketing Sherpa:

“The most effective tactic shown in the chart above – blogger relations – is used by far fewer organizations than less effective tactics primarily because of the effort required.  This focus on “fast and easy” versus effectiveness is a problem that is far more prevalent with organizations in the trial phase of social marketing maturity than with more advanced social marketers working from a strategic social marketing plan.”

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