If you hear someone say: “Fans & follower numbers don’t matter” on a social media blog, CLICK AWAY IMMEDIATELY. This is the exact type of social media guru platitudism (yes that’s a word) you don’t need. Fans & follower numbers MATTER.

Now that I’ve started by being contentious, let me explain.

Most of the time, if you ask a client / marketing director / CEO what the objective of the campaign is, the answer is almost universally

Sell More Stuff (SMS)

Of course it is. If you’re:

• an automotive company you want to… sell more cars
• a FMCG you want to… sell more toothpaste, food, etc…
• a politician you want to… sell more votes

The list goes on.

There are multiple reasons why this objective is not useful but fundamentally, it’s too big an objective and it’s not specific enough. For example, you can SMS by optimising your supply chain so that you can actually make enough units to meet demand. That has nothing to do with your social media campaign.

So whenever my guys tell me that the client says the objective is to SMS, I say to them, dig deeper.

And by digging deeper I want them to ask these questions:

1. Who’s product / issue targeted at?
2. What are the demographic / psychographic / personas who we are trying to motivate?
3. What is it we want them to DO? This one is important. Spell out the next physical action we want them to take.
4. What’s their current attitude?
5. How are the social elements going to be woven into the campaign?
6. Where do these people hang out? Physically, and online.

Once you know this information, setting an objective will be much easier and you will be able to see how your objectives for social media channels fit in to the overall picture and whether they can actually become the overall campaign objectives.

When I have this information I will often go away to do some additional desk research. I may use a listening tool to get an indication as to what’s happening out there. I may rely on research from a research house or tap my own networks for people who work in different parts of the company.

Once I have this information I take myself away from my desk and literally just stare into the distance for a bit and digest and distill the information. When the thinking is done, usually I come back with an objective that looks like this:

We will increase preference for Brand X amongst Young Women aged 18-24 by 15% in the next three months

By framing the objective this way, we can now set out to achieve it and ultimately serve the wider business/capitalist objective of SMS.

More importantly, you can measure it beyond the platitudes of “Generate buzz”, “starting a conversation” or heaven forbid “Engage our audience”.

This is the first in a series of posts regarding social media measurement and also appears on jonathannguyen.net

Listening tool vendors need to stop thinking about human emotions in binary. We are not computers. Positive / Negative sentiment is not enough to evaluate whether someone is likely to buy the brand. For example, if someone is cynical about a product, they could potentially be won over, if they hate the product they probably can’t, or the effort is better diverted elsewhere.

Yet under every listening tool I’ve used (Nielsen Buzzmetrix, Radian6, Visible Tech,  and Alterian SM2) you can only evaluate both of those as either negative or positive.

That last sentence was also to see which vendor eats their own dog food and picks up the brand mentions first.

So rather than criticising something and not offering an alternate solution, I would like to propose an alternative. How about using sentiment tag clouds?

Automated sentiment is roughly as good as flipping a coin, so we tend to evaluate sentiment by hand based on a random sample. So instead of marking sentiment as positive or negative, there should be a free text field where we can enter emotive terms e.g., curious, uncomfortable, aware.

In public affairs scenarios you would be able to gauge whether the population is confused, angry, or cautious on a subject rather than purely Negative. You can’t do much with Negative.

So there. I said it.

Emotions in this post: challenging, hopeful

If a million people ‘like’ your content and share it on Facebook, it will now absolutely impact your search rank.

The deal announced today between Microsoft and Facebook finally demonstrated a practical application of crowd sourced information built into search. Microsoft’s Bing search engine will be incorporating Facebook ‘likes’ into its search algorithm.

The end of Google’s dominance in search was foreshadowed long ago by users of social network Friendfeed, a Twitter-like platform built by ex-Googlers. Their argument was that unlike Google, the content within Friendfeed was shared by like minded individuals.

Although the basic premise was good, Friendfeed was not the right platform. Like Twitter, it was too much of a stream and the information you were getting was good, but did not arrive at the right time. It appeared in your stream when someone shared it not when you needed it.

It was also yet another network you had to be on.

The announcement today, builds upon this by drawing crowd sourced information into a platform that you would already, naturally use for search. A search engine.

This has far reaching implications for SEOs, brands and Joe Bloggs. In coming posts I will deal with each of these individually. Watch this space.

• notifications
• Group chat
• document sharing
• a much nicer interface

What it is not unfortunately is a new way to manage privacy. When I initially saw this announcement, I thought they would match Diaspora’s ‘aspects’ functionality. Especially given Zuckerberg’s blog post:

“The biggest problem in social networking is helping you easily interact with your friends and share information in lots of different contexts.”

An aspect is exactly that, a reflection of an aspect of your real life. Aspects of your life might be family, close friends or work colleagues.

Diaspora allows you to place people into these aspect groupings so that content you share with those aspects remains within the aspect. So an off-colour joke to your close friends is not shown to your work colleagues. People in those aspects don’t know they’re in the aspect. And more importantly they can’t add people to the aspect, only you can.

After some testing within the Sydney Digital Influence team we established fairly quickly that the new Facebook Groups is not the equivalent. There were several issues we found that clearly made Groups unsuitable for this purpose:

• members can add members: as the person sharing the content, this does not give you absolute control to who can see the content. Like the most recent internet meme Karen Owen. As the group admin you are able to retrospectively block and ban permanently
• the member is aware that they are in the group: which also makes it harder for you to compartmentalise people. You can’t call a group ‘acquaintances’ because the people in that group may consider themselves your best friend
• which also means that as a member if all of my colleagues had a group called ‘colleagues’ I could be a member of 20 ‘colleagues’ groups. Annoying.
• YOU MUST OPT OUT of notifications. If one of my friends sets up a group for their business or gaming site and invites me, I automatically join AND can start receiving EMAILS from them without opting in.
• The next problem with having to OPT OUT is that if a friend of mine creates a Pro Life or Pro Choice group and invites me, I AUTOMATICALLY join it! Which shows up in my group memberships. There are multiple issues with this!

Ultimately, the Groups app is actually a good app for groups to share and collaborate within. The interface is great, much better than the old groups. The problem is simply the way Zuck’s positioned it opens the company up to more privacy criticism.

Allow me to clarify. Client asks you to roll out a campaign, there’s an event, the event hashtag goes crazy, you’re trending on Twitter, client loves you. Three days later, you do a search and find NOTHING. Zilch. Nada. That’s because Twitter search does not persist. So when people go looking for information after the event, you get no link backs to your campaign site, and there’s no ‘word on the twittersphere about your campaign’. Not ideal right?

Now just to clarify what I meant about Slideshare. If you upload any presentations from the event to Slideshare, it will live there and your content will be searched for and found ad infinitum.

OK, so the headline is a little bit controversial and a bit of bait. But here’s the dealio. What you want to do, is aggregate the hash tag stream on an open, search engine friendly platform. That might be a WordPress site as an aggregator, Tumblr or some other bespoke system, this has to be done if you want the conversations to be found down the track.

Thanks to Jeremiah Owyang for the prompt to commit this post to paper. He talks about using a live blogging application which is great idea. This works well if you have an official blogger at the event. What a campaign aggregator will do though is capture everything on the hashtag (and any other social media) not just what your official blogger is doing.

Given sheer user numbers, it looks like Facebook will drive adoption to these services faster than Foursquare ever will.

If you recall, Facebook has already taken the:

• @replies feature from Twitter
• Dropped the ‘is’ like Twitter
• Live status updates from Friendfeed (which it bought)

And so continues the rise of the Facebook juggernaut.

The Digital Strategist is expert at evaluating a client situation and developing a comprehensive digital strategy that includes social media outreach, online marketing, development of user experiences, search visibility programs and innovative ways to engage people. He/she must be fluent in all aspects of social media. The ideal candidate:

• has 1 - 2 years agency or in-house experience;
• is an active blogger or active in social media;
• is a project management pro
• can work under pressure.

Experience can be in either a public relations or advertising agency, but fundamental to the role is participation in social media. You will be given training how to develop social media strategies the Ogilvy 360 DI way that provides the best value for your clients.

In return, you’ll get to work with some of the biggest brands in world, a very cool team global team, and great social workplace.

To apply, contact Brian Giesen (@bdgiesen, brian.giesen@ogilvy.com.au) and Graham White (@gwhiteoz, graham.white@ogilvy.com.au)

My first search I used the fastest method, and asked the Internet to use Google only, and here is the result (click for a full size):

I thought to myself, “Gee, I didn’t think that the internet was that apathetic about Windows 7!”

So I thought I’d rerun the search based on Microsoft’s own search engine, Bing:

I smelt a rat. So the final search I took the slowest option and checked against ALL search engines:

Is there something fishy going on at Googleplex?

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Disclosure: Microsoft is an Ogilvy client, however they haven’t paid for or endorsed this post, but this blogger thought the results were extremely amusing. This blogger doesn’t really believe that Google is tampering with the scores… or are they?