I’m angry that Kyle Sandilands, Jackie O and the producers of the 2Day FM breakfast show thought it was perfectly acceptable to hook a 14-year-old girl up to a lie detector test on live national radio and quiz her about her sex life. I’m fuming. I can’t believe they got away with it and I feel absolutely terribly sorry for the poor girl. (John Howard take note, I personally didn’t cause her any harm, but I’m still sorry for her, you can be sorry without admitting guilt). I’m shocked, appalled and last night I did something about it - I used my Twitter alter ego @mattgranfield to tweet #kylesandilandsisadoche. Thousands of others did the same. It helped make the trending topics.

Gee, didn’t we teach him a lesson. He must be shaking in his boots.

This morning I reflected on my actions and thought about the time I changed my Twitter avatar to green to support the Iranian elections, or something like that. I’m not exactly sure what I was supporting to be honest. I’m almost certain it was a good cause. I’m not exactly sure how it all ended up either. I think the dude with the beard is still the president.

Clearly, Twitter is a useful mass commnunication tool. It’s just a shame people like me aren’t very smart at using it to get to the right people.

Read this article over at mUmBRELLA if you will, it’s about how there is pressure growing on Optus to pull their sponsorship of the 2Day FM show. Apparently they aren’t getting the message. Apparently they don’t think people are angry enough about it. I happen to know that Optus is listening to Twitter and I happen to know the people doing the listening have a reasonable social conscience. If you’re angry about what happened on 2Day FM, don’t tweet #kylesandilandsisadoche, do something useful and let Optus know.

Tweet #optus #stopsponsoringaustereo

Show them you’re not happy.

I love MadMen, of course. They’re doing a great promo for the new US season premier where you can ‘MadMen Yourself‘. It’s kinda fun and a lovely example of a social media viral. It’s clearly working if I’m taking the time to blog about it. Here’s the results - what do you think?

Real Matt                                                    MadMen Matt

I just published a quick post on Twitter’s new ‘Twitter 101 for Business Guide‘ but I thought I’d make special mention of their measuring advice - this is straight from the website in the best practices section. It’s quite good:

Before you set up measurement tools, focus on the quality of your engagement, and use your gut to check how things are going. How’s the feedback and interaction with your followers? Are you responding to most or your @messages? Are most tweets about you positive? Or if they started out largely negative, are they coming around? Are more people beginning to engage with you and mention your company?

Next, think about quantifying your experience. Although it can be tricky to add up the value of relationships, Twitter does lend itself to measurement in a few ways—especially if you’ve already defined what you hope will be different for your company in three months, six months or a year if you succeed on Twitter. Tactics like these can then help you assess your progress in meeting that goal:

• Keep a tally of questions answered, customer problems resolved and positive exchanges held on Twitter. Do the percentages change over time?
• When you offer deals via Twitter, use a unique coupon code so that you can tell how many people take you up on that Twitter-based promotion. If you have an online presence, you can also set up a landing page for a promotion, to track not only click-throughs but further behavior and conversions.
• Use third-party tools to figure out how much traffic your websites are receiving from Twitter.
• Track click-throughs on any link you post in a tweet. Some URL shortening services let you track click-throughs.

I’ve been writing posts along these lines for the last year and every day it seems another entrepreneurial web design/marketing/social media/pr/advertising/research firm is holding a seminar/webinar/conference/hoedown/stadium tour on how to use Twitter for business, but at last, the Twitts themselves have released their own version. Twitter 101 for Business has just been launched on the Twitter website and by golly gosh, it’s handy. Topics include:

• What is Twitter?
• Getting Started
• Learn the Lingo
• Best Practices
• Case Studies
• Other Resources

There’s even a series of slides you can download to show your boss. Neato!

It’s the best thing since Google released their expanded webmaster guidelines a couple of years ago (a must read if you haven’t brushed up in a while).

It’s no secret that I’m a gigantic MasterChef fan. I won’t invade this blog with my culinary musings because I have a whole other platform to do that with (see the content dilemma post below), but I thought it was rather interesting how the Google Zeitgeist has started showing results for a ‘masterchef’ search in Australia. Google makes page suggestions in a website you search for based on their own algorithms for what is popular. Julie was the winner, Chris was the favourite, Poh did exceptionally well, but only one contestant makes it into Google’s page suggestions list. Is it a coincidence that she’s pretty and blonde? Google is a remarkably reliable gauage of popular culture. My money is on Justine to go on to the biggest and bestest things.

So I’ve been in Sydney. It was a business trip and a personal trip. I like taking photos, I like writing, I like tid-bits of information. I’ve got a pile of stuff to share from the last week but it’s going to take me days as I file everything in the appropriate channel. My business friends don’t want to see photos of my Grandma, I don’t want my Grandma to see pics of me at Splendour in the Grass on the weekend but I don’t want to bore my friends with business stuff. I have more Facebook friends than people I’ve actually met, I can’t be arsed emailing people pics of scenic drives because they’re not that interesting but I want to store them somewhere publicly because I know there are others that will want to see them, but I’m not prolific enough to have a Flickr channel. 140 characters isn’t always enough and I like to keep this blog reasonably formal and focussed on the social media side of marketing. Tumblr is looking like a contender, but then I’ve got to start another new channel and I’m starting to spread myself thin and I dont want to focus my energy on something that no-one pays any real attention to.

Perhaps I’m not GenY enough to be this social. Perhaps I should get into scrap-booking.

Zac Martin, what would you do?

I had a ball speaking at Social Media Club Sydney’s measuring social media event last night. I’d describe the sound as shabby, but shabby sounds kind of soft and warm, like a pile of clothes lying next to an over-flowing Vinnies bin. The audience could be forgiven for thinking we were in Town Hall station, or as @leehopkins put it ‘I’ve heard better train announcements’. Nevertheless, the organisers did a great job pulling everything together under trying conditions and it was a pleasure to meet so many wonderful people.

The brief I had was to spend no more than 5 minutes talking about measuring social media in general using a Powerpoint presentation. I’m not sure what the audience was expecting, and I didn’t know what level of knowledge to assume, so I put together a quick presentation detailing how advertising, PR and Digital campaigns have traditionally been measured and how you can apply similar metrics to social media.

Here ’tis.

Drop me a line if you’d like to discuss!

Yves Klein Blue are a band. They’re from Brisbane, they’re friends with the band I’m in and I happen to think they’re awesome. Their album came out on Friday and, as I suspected it would be, it’s bloody marvellous. You may know the song ‘Polka’ from that Mitsubishi Lancer commercial, and if you don’t know it, that’s OK, they’re probably not overly concerned because 75,000 other people have listened to it on YouTube, which is rather a lot of ‘reach’. I talk about music every so often on this blog because it’s one of my top four favourite things (the others being marketing, cooking and vintage motorcycles), but the reason I’m talking about Yves Klein Blue today is because they are a marvellous case study of how you can use social media to market things. At least, they could have been…

You see, Yves Klein Blue aren’t a particularly huge band. They’re signed to a major independent record label called Dew Process, they’ve been doing the rockstar dream thing and have just recorded their album in America with a big-name producer, they’re playing all the right festivals, but they’re certainly a long way behind some of their other label contemporaries (The Living End and Ben Lee, for example) in terms of popularity and chart success. As a marketing case study, they’re starting from a reasonably clean slate, which is a good place to start from if you want to do some quantitative analysis.

The trouble is, despite bringing The Population on board to kick-start their album launch with a wonderful, if not entirely original, idea for a Twitter application and a competition to win tickets to the Splendour in the Grass festival by mentioning the bands name and what you’d do to win the tickets, they don’t seem to have created much of a splash. I’m certainly not knocking The Population’s work mind you, I think the ideas were great. I’m just surprised that for a band with over 75,000 views on YouTube they haven’t created a bigger buzz so far. Check out this graph which shows the number of Twitter mentions (positive AND negative) each day since the campaign launched and you’ll see what I mean:

Before the Twitter campaign launched Yves Klein Blue were being mentioned a small handful of times a day. In the week since the campaign launched, they have been  mentioned 234 times (Twitter Search’s figures aren’t historically accurate as they don’t count people who tweeted and then deleted). That’s a lot more than a handful, but it’s not exactly overwhelming. Cabbage is more popular than that.

Perhaps it’s too early to judge, perhaps this is the calm before the storm, but right now, the graph of people Tweeting about Yves Klein Blue seems to be going nowhere. Seth Godin (if it’s still cool to quote him) would call that a ‘dip‘. I’m wondering just exactly what sort of success they were aiming for? I’ve giving a talk at this month’s Sydney Social Media club about measurement in social media marketing. One of the great things about having a social media monitoring tool so close at hand is that it becomes a lot easier to calculate the reach of social media marketing campaigns, which makes it much easier to justify ROI to marketing managers.

Whichever tool you use, you can calculate the reach of the first week of Yves Klein Blue’s album launch Twitter campaign in a number of ways:

1. Calculate the number of people who downloaded a song (presumably that was the primary goal)
2. Calculate the number of individual people who tweeted about Yves Klein Blue (that’s the number of people who actually engaged with the campaign, they’d be more likely to go on and make a purchase)
3. Calculate the number of tweets which mentioned Yves Klein Blue (a handy figure for charts)
4. Calculate the number of people who saw tweets about Yves Klein Blue (this will look way impressive when you do your powerpoint presentation at the end of the month, but in reality, if any of these people were interested enough they would have then tweeted about it themselves and we’d know who they were)

I don’t know how many people actually physically downloaded a song but the record company will; although I can’t imagine they’re suffering bandwidth problems at this stage (it’ll be around 100). Anyone can count the number of individual people who tweeted, and the total number of tweets that mentioned Yves Klein Blue was 234.  The overall exposure to those tweets (what traditional media planners would traditionally call ‘reach’) you’d calculate by multiplying the number of mentions by the number of followers each tweeter had at the time of tweeting. If you were being honest, you’d also subtract the negative mentions multiplied by the number of people who saw those. Danica Davis from Brisbane was actually the only naysayer of the bunch and remarked to her 94 followers “omg how bad are yves klein blue“. While Danica doesn’t bring the overall total down too much (hint: it’s at the low end of the five figure scale), at the end of the day, this is the digital world and traditional reach doesn’t count for much - not when you can get precise figures for the exact number of people who actually engaged with the campaign and took an action of some sort.

The campaign is hardly a ‘fail’ (hell, as much as I like them, they’re not Radiohead), but it does go to show that you just can’t trust ‘reach’ as an indicator of campaign success, no matter what the medium.

What do you think?