Weekly Round Up #1: Five interesting things from my week

With the new year upon us and my personal goal planning now underway (Short guide to personal goal planning), in terms of this blog I had a big think about a content plan for the upcoming months.

Part of my planning led me to think of creating more of a short, sharp and informative regular-weekly style of post. Consider it to be like a newsletter, where I encourage you to click out of my blog and indulge in whatever I have shared.

My Prerogative:
The process of sharing what I have found interesting, motivating and/or fun in my week with you the reader helps me set aside time to reflect on it all and I actually simply enjoy sharing interesting things with friends, so hopefully it's a win win setup.

So this is it, welcome to the first of what I hope will be many weekly posts called - 'Watch, read, listen, think, learn: Five interesting things from my week #1'

Enjoy.

The Facebook free bus has left this town

I recently read a good article by Jeff Bullas which raised some very good points about Facebook. For people who work within social media it is common knowledge that the proverbial Facebook 'free bus' has gone - this post is for the marketers that perhaps were not fully aware of that. 

Without alienating you with social media lingo that often gets bounded about ten to the dozen, my summary and takeaways below are in lamens terms.

Jeff's article focuses on the biggest social media platform of them all, Facebook. I think this is a very pertinent topic for many brands that are active on this platform.

For those of you who maybe aren’t too familiar with Facebook media / advertising, I have some bullet points at the bottom of this post that explain what is possible on this medium.

Planning your Social Media content activity

This is a short post to give you the reader a top level look at creating and using a Social Media content calendar and what I call the 'Key Pillars of Social Media Content'. It touches on tone of voice, content creation and dealing with negative feedback, but these elements are not the focus for this post.

Before we begin it is worth noting and accepting that as with most things in life, there is not a 'one hat fits all' solution when it comes to planning your brands Social Media activity - we are innately and sometimes spectacularly different - what works for one person or team may fail miserably for another.

That said, I believe there are some basic pillars associated with Social Media activity that if constantly considered will ensure that your brands Social Media content remains exciting, engaging, and therefore diverse. By using a calendar you will be able to have a 'helicopter view' (sorry for the gregarious use of such an overused and underwhelming marketing term!) of your weekly Social Media activity.

Even though I use Hootsuite Pro and other Social Media tools in a professional sense, I still use a top level Social Media Activity calendar created and shared to our marketing and agency teams on Google Drive, which allows us to discuss and edit it in real-time.

Top 20 Fast Food Brands on Social Media

Fast food - love it or hate it, the fast food industry is huge, and continues to grow. In Australia alone it is worth $16bn a year, and has an annual growth of about 4%. (Source)

If 'convenience' was a chess piece, think of it as a Queen or a Rook. It's the top trump. No matter how many consumer research groups, documentaries, and general bad publicity fast food retailers have constantly biting at their ankles, the 'proof is in the pudding'; convenience prevails. I guess the masses are just too damn busy (and hungry) to care.

And that is what amazes me. I actually almost admire the fast food industries ability to constantly re-invent / re-position themselves, and prevail despite the constant surge of negativity around them.

Social Media, education and customer service plays a major part in some of the major fast food retail brands strategies, especially where the brands can now be publicly attacked, and their responses are open to the world to see.

Facebook Graph Search: 7 implications for brands

Guest post by Oli Mistry, Digital Strategy Director at Leo Burnett Sydney

On January 15th Facebook made one of its biggest and most interesting announcements relating to a major platform update it is planning to launch, Graph Search. Graph search will allow users to search Facebook for people, interests, places and photos. Unlike other popular search engines the results will be based on the interactions and updates of the user’s first and second-degree connections. Their friends and friends of friends.

An example of this might be a user planning a holiday being able to search for friends who have been to Thailand. They will potentially get results that show their photos, see where they checked into and stayed, where and what they ate and therefore who to contact for advice and recommendations.

We all understand the power of personal recommendation or brand advocacy and its influence in the decision making process when it comes to purchases. This is a hugely exciting update for marketers and although there are no details out there on opportunities for advertising it’s certainly possible to speculate with reasonable confidence about what opportunities might begin to emerge.

So what does this all mean for brands? What are the dangers, what are the opportunities, where might this initial update be leading longer term and what should we be starting to think about in terms of actions and strategies to gain competitive advantage?

The first port of call when it comes to predicting future developments is to look for insights into the company and industry.

36 Faces of Facebook Fans - which one are you?

I recently wrote an article Has too much social media turned you into a zombie that had a brilliant halloween themed infographic created by confused.com that compared social media users to types of zombies...(it was Halloween!!). Well, to continue the themed pigeonholing of social media users, or I should say, the known user types that are found on Facebook, I wanted to share this great and amusing slideshare presentation by Soap Creative that attempts to categorise the 1 billion+ Facebook users into 36 types of users.


From 'The Firsty', 'The Hater', 'The Expert', 'The Moral Highgrounder' to 'The Drawler', 'The Spammer', 'The Wannabe' and the 'Troll'; there is something for everyone.

Engaging, funny, true, and interesting. Enjoy.

Facebook's Edgerank explained in an Infographic

Below is a short summary about my thoughts on Facebook's Edgerank and peoples obsession with increasing their fans. Don't get me wrong, I think the fan base metric is important, but would argue engagement rate and dialogue with fans / prospective fans is more important. It's a quality over quantity thing. If you can have both, even better - but work upwards from the lowest hanging fruit aka 'quality'. Perhaps this analogy doesn't even fit, as 'quality' is actually one of the hardest things to get right, and is the element that is often comprimised!

Within the marketing landscape, I am constantly seeing articles and video 'how to's' describing how I can (a) 'Increase my fans / followers', (b) 'Get my website better ranked in Google and (c) basically do a better job with minimal effort and maximum success....

Word Cloud taken from my blog post 'Digital Marketing & Social Media - My thoughts on todays landscape'

I thought it would be fun to put my first official blog post Digital Marketing & Social Media - My thoughts on todays landscape into a word cloud. 

And unsurprisingly 'people' was one of the main words.

If you haven't read the original post then below is an excerpt from it, which I hope gives this word cloud a bit more context. 

"The thing I love and continually excites me about digital is the accountability, the user centric focus, and the constant evolution and drive by the successful practioneers out there to deliver something that people want, in the way people want it, probably done best by people that understand people. This is a big shift from marketing from yonder years were there was a huge emphasis on the 'push' mentality. It must also be noted that there are many people using digital very badly..............It's my belief that digital marketing really lets you target, segment, monitor and engage with your audience far more effectively and cost efficiently than other forms of marketing. Focus on strategy, team skillsets and being prepared to test new things. Do marketing (anything) for outcome and not awards. Focus on people. "

Digital Marketing & Social Media - My thoughts on todays landscape

My professional career has piggy backed the constant evolution of digital marketing. From the very first paid search engine marketing craze at the beginning of my career, to SEO where everybody and their dog thought they had the magic insight into beating Googles algorithm and promised to get your website to the top of the seach rankings, which even as someone who 'sold SEO' felt morally obliged to tell people it was a black art and the best I could offer clients was guidance on best practice (which is important). Then we had display & affiliate campaigns, email and then mobile marketing, bespoke web development which then blossomed to easy to use content management systems where anyone could easily set up a website. Then website functionality started to bloom with intelligent web functionality such as related products, wish lists, fully customizable AJAX tools, RSS feeds etc all of which we all know as web 2.0.....and let us not forget social media, which had been brewing away all along.

Digital:

The thing I love and continually excites me about digital is the accountability, the user centric focus, and the constant evolution and drive by the successful practioneers out there to deliver something that people want, in the way people want it, probably done best by people that understand people. This is a big shift from marketing from yonder years were there was a huge emphasis on the 'push' mentality. It must also be noted that there are many people using digital very badly.

Great Analytics tool for Social Media

Easy to use and free tool to track/monitor social media activity over time plus competitor comparison #wildfire

Find out more 

9 Tips for Running Successful Facebook Contests

Short and interesting post on Facebook contests advice by Jim Belosic.

Good Read