Key success elements:

• personalise and humanise the experience – Best Buy trusted their all of technical staff to tweet their expertise to customers
• providing value – advice was provided to both existing and potential customers so all interested parties could join the conversation
• providing real time support – Best Buy ensured the twitter account was adequately staffed, all technical staff are allowed to communicate through the account to ensure it was always alive and present
• trust and guidelines – in order to sucessfully carry this project off, Best Buy provides their staff with communication guidelines and boundaries.

Some top of the line essential considerations for any blog that we discussed:

• Establish your objective – what do you hope to achieve with your blog
• Set goals to achieve your objective, this will help focus your efforts on maintaining and growing your blog – blogging take dedication! This might include setting aside regular time to blog, having a regular posting schedule so others know when to expect your posts
• Understand your audience – identify where and how to reach your audience, go where they are
• Connect and create conversations with your audience – build community, engage with other bloggers etc.
• Build trust with your audience online and offline
• Create consistency and interlink your profile across your social media platforms
• Ensure content is shareable across various social media platforms and email
• Personality – let your personality shine through your blog
• Integrate search into you blog
• Most importantly, blog about you what you are passionate about, this will help all of the above fall into place as well as keeping the blog posts flowing regularly

I will provide a more detailed explanation of the above in a separate post.

Who would this blog club event be suitable for?

Bloggers of all levels or those interested in starting a blog. Everyone can contribute to the open conversation and benefit whether through expanding your network, sharing your expertise  to learning a thing or two about blogging.

Please feel free to join (free of charge) the next London Blog Club. I’d be interested in hearing what you would like to get out of a blog club?

Pepsi’s bold move to refrain from NLF advertising and invest in social media

Pepsi announced that in 2010 it would allocate its usual 20 million US dollar advertising spend from the NFL to invest in social media increasing its digital spend by 60%. The charity campaign Refresh Everything gets individuals involved by asking them to suggest charities for Pepsi to support.

Key digital campaign elements:

• Conversation and engagement – with 32 grants given each month over a five month period, interested individuals and groups will feel they have a chance that their suggestion will be selected providing an incentive to enter and significantly aiding great conversation around the brand
• Giving ownership – it therefore goes without saying that there will be a large pool of individuals and groups that would have directly contributed to the development and campaign roll out
• Strength and consistency in message and activity – this campaign will be rolled out and integrated into all of Pepsi’s marketing effort for consistency and strength of message
• Socially responsible message – strong focus on charity
• News worthiness – such a bold move to refrain from NFL advertising and reallocate budget is news alone, coupled with the above points certainly makes for an interesting story amongst the industry
• Demonstrating forward thinking and commitment to digital – shown by the fact that Pepsi’s digital efforts run through their marketing activity, even looking outside the campaign we see Pepsi has provided brand sponsorship to Social Media Week in New York. Such a strategic move would suggest that this decision and commitment is supported by senior management, highlighting that they are serious and committed to digital.

Success factors:

• The test will be to see how this impacts competitor sales with Coke who has integrated a charitable campaign element to their Superbowl advertising.
• Will the combination of socially responsible behaviour through charity activity and a digital campaign create the right types of conversations, awareness and associations around the brand to reach Pepsi sales targets and competitive positioning?

What do you think of Pepsi’s move? How effective do you think their approach is and should other major brands also be moving in this digital direction?

The Dunkin’ Donuts campaign is being run following the success of last year’s campaign which generated more than 130,000 donut submissions and 174,000 votes. This year the one month competition is going digital.

Key digital campaign elements:

• Making the contest come alive through the consumer – consumer driven contest
• Putting the creativity in the hands of the consumer – allowing the consumers to get involved in product development by creating their own donut through a donut-building website, judged on ingredients, imagination and aesthetics, this gives a personal stake and personal touch to the campaign.
• Viral / shareable – because the campaign has installed a great sense of ownership, individualism and creativity, it has a strong viral nature. Participants are able to share their saved creation over various social media sites such as facebook.

Success factors:

• The success of the campaign will rest significantly on improving on the 2009 campaign sales results and increases in key campaign stats such as entries, votes etc.
• The digital element of the campaign will be expected to deliver higher offline sales and competition stats.

How do you think this campaign will pan out, do you think the integration of digital has what it takes to significantly increase the success of the campaign over and above 2009?

The London Blog Club organised by blogging gurus Murray Newlands and Marko Saric with the help of Filip Matous

An open source event with an educational focus aimed at new and experienced bloggers to share ideas, advice and blogging goals in a supportive environment. The 2010 program promises to include a host of insightful guest speakers and its fast becoming my favourite.

The London Bloggers Meetup organised by Andy Bargery

A monthly gathering for bloggers at all levels to get together for a casual drink at different bars around central London. Drinks are usually sponsored and there are usually interesting guest speakers.

Social Media Monday organised by Barry Furby

Bringing together users / developers of Social Media & Networking tools in the UK. An open event that discusses social media and networking tools as twitter, facebook, LinkedIn, WordPress etc. across digital platforms Web, Mobile, TV, Discussion.

Tech PR drinks organised by Will Sturgeon

I have yet to attend this event however it has come recommended for drinks and networking with those in tech PR and media. The members are generally part of the worldwide LinkedIn group for PR professionals working in and around the technology industry.

Measurement camp organised by Will McInnes

A monthly open source event for anyone wishing to learn more about social media and how it can be effectively integrated and most importantly measured. The two hour session is split into presentations and case study discussion in small groups.

Inbound Marketing Meetup organised by Murray Newlands

With the growth in social shopping, this event is useful to connect with those in inbound or affiliate marketing. There is usually a short presentation from a speaker (or two), followed by a discussion and networking drinks.

Geekdrinks organised by the Beth Caroll, Katie Colbourne and Steve Berry

A notworking event for anyone in PR, marcomms or media, strictly no pitching or agendas, just fun, drinks and #goodtimes.

The Yum Cha Club organised by Kelly Chan and Selena Chan – me!

This club, open to anyone is about anything and everything to do with yum cha. Kelly started this club in 2009 and we have recently launched a blog which will be a key resource for yum cha discussion including restaurant recommendations. Every month we also scout out different restaurants that serve yum cha / dim sum around London.

All of these events include complementary attendance and all foster an open and friendly atmosphere. A great way to get to expand your digital knowledge and contacts, learn a thing or two, familiarise yourself London’s bars and have a few drinks.

It seems what most of these pages have in common is:

• Let the fans do the talking
• Exclusive / value added content e.g. great images, interesting videos, behind the scenes, live content streaming or leveraging connections with sponsored celebrities and athletes
• Promotions, sales – in moderation
• Encouraging discussion around the brand or product development using voting, surveys and sometimes competitions when relevant
• Each brand keeps it unique and fans appreciate the human touch

Ironically the presentation is not available on Slideshare due to file size despite one of Steve’s key points being that we should ensure that all our content is shareable and easily accessible to a mass audience, however I found the content really useful combining many valid points that I’m sure you won’t mind waiting for the 45MB to download. I’ve found the presentation mostly relevant from an EMEA / Global perspective although I’m sure SMEs could get a lot of value from this.

Key points from the presentation:

• Some of the key social media elements that could be included in your online newsroom include SEO, blogs, RSS feeds, sharing, distribution, integration, social media releases and bookmarking / ratings.
• Strength of an Online Newsroom as the central HQ for all of your news content (press kits, photos, videos, backgrounders, research, white papers, historical archives) and audience can help to achieve greater consistency, strength in message and effective distribution and sharing.
• Go further than just the newsroom e.g. engage and integrate positioning of content such as press releases on social media book marking sites such as DIGG and Delicious which had nearly 50,000,000 visitors to their site in November 2009.
• Some interesting case studies included to demonstrate the points being made, including case studies from Starbucks and Disney.

I’ll be watching out for Steve’s 2010 webinar schedule and will keep you posted.

The strategy has been developed through social media and hits some of the key aspects that make using social media so effective and influential:

• Engagement with a relevant audience – brand advocates found from social media platforms facebook, twitter, YouTube and blogs
• Involve advocates in product development – used social media to help develop the recipe for new extra strong Marmite as well as the packaging design etc.
• Getting close to the customers – the Unilever team seemed very involved and hands on in the campaign and also attended the exclusive event to interact and listen to their brand advocates
• Getting advocates to join the conversation – advocates created content for the campaign launch by talking about aspects of the campaign such as package design on their blogs

I’m looking forward to we are social’s next update on the campaign!

As I’m fast becoming a regular at the Measurement Camp, I thought it was time I shared my enthusiasm for this event on my blog. This event tackles in my opinion one of the biggest challenges that PR agencies have when selling social media into clients and also that in house PR professionals have when selling social media in to their senior management – measurement and ROI of social media efforts. This ultimately comes down to why should we do it, how will this help achieve the PR objectives and add to the bottom line? Ruder Finn’s report on The Future of Communications conveys this challenge of integrating social media into the communications mix and why an understanding of measurement is important.

Every month this event attracts a mixed communications crowd of about 40-50 people who meet up to discuss different methods of tracking social media campaigns and activity. Of course in discussing measurement, conversation also includes social media strategy, tactics and trends. What makes this event unique is its attendance by such a variety of people in the communications industry including PR and advertising agencies, independent consultants, in house professionals etc., all representing a range of sectors. This is where a lot of the value is derived, when you get such a diverse mix of people contributing their ideas and experiences into one conversation.

The format, all in the space of two hours

We begin with presentations from guest speakers covering different aspects of measurement and insights to social media. During the second half of the meet up we break into smaller groups to discuss case studies, actual social media campaigns that have recently taken place. We then regroup and share findings.

To give you a taste of December’s measurement camp, guest speakers included John Griffiths, John V Willshire and Andrew Gerrard. I found John Willshire’s presentation showed a really strong analogy of social media vs. advertising and a good insight as to what social media is.

The goodness of it all

Will McInnes (co-founder of social media and web design agency Nixon McInnes) is the founder of the measurement camp and he keeps the pace going and all of us laughing with his slightly sarcastic sense of humour making sure we’re still following the plot by summing up and clarifying the methodology of what we’re discussing. Basically the camp was designed to get real discussions going that we can actually put into practice, challenges can be raised, shared and discussed pulling on the expertise of the group. It’s almost like a monthly interactive training session and absolutely no selling involved, just pure openness, with coffee, tea and biscuits.

Strictly no pets, under 19s or angry people

As long as you don’t fall into the category described in the above sub heading, anyone interested in expanding their digital knowledge in line with measurement of social media is free to join.  This is also a great way to connect with fellow PROs in the industry. Sign up or follow @measurementcamp on Twitter or  the Measurement Camp group on LinkedIn.