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!

Last night my friend, let’s call her @trudy_adams, was headed to a comedy gig in Brisbane. Being a young early-adopting Twitter user she did of course tweet her intentions and happened to mention the name of the performer. Within a few minutes a bar next door to the comedy venue had started following her and given her a special offer if she popped in for a drink before the show. She was chuffed because they’d taken the time to give her something of value. They won themselves an extra customer for the evening.

Cost to both parties: nil.

This was not a major corporate chain with a team of social media strategists working behind the scenes to squeeze dollars out of sentiment, this was just a small business owner overhearing a conversation by a potential customer and engaging.

It had never occured to me that starting a social media marketing agency was a dumb idea. I’m reasonably cluey, not too bad at making business decisions, and have done OK for myself over the last decade since I stopped working for The Man, but it didn’t occur to me a firm which focussed solely on helping companies create meaningful, profitable relationships with their customers via social media was doomed.

You can be a gatekeeper to a new technology for a while, but you’ll quickly end up being a troll trying to eek out a living guarding a bridge to nowhere, oblivious to the fact that a new bypass has opened up just down the river.

Social media is just another bunch of communication channels which work the same way as talkback radio and letters to the editor do. The only difference is that everyone gets to be Rupert Murdoch and the old people aren’t invited. It’s not rocket science, it’s just the way people communicate now. If you’re interested in it and you’re adept at expressing other people’s opinions in 140 characters or less, you’re looking through a small window of opportunity here to pimp yourself out as a social media consultant. You’ve got about 8 months left to hold seminars and help newbies guide the way, but by 2010 all the road maps will have been re-written and marketing managers, PR firms and advertising agencies will be bypassing your little bridge in the woods as they travel down the newsest section of the information superhighway, on which Twitter will have been relegated to the slow lane and Facebook will be a distant speck in the rearview mirror.

Make hay while the sun shines of course, just don’t try and build your house from the crop. Remember what happened to the little piggy.

The winner has been announed for Tourism Queensland’s ‘The Best Job in the World‘ campaign and congratulations must go to Brit, Ben Southall, for taking out the prize.I have no idea what he did to win, but presumably he was affable, scrubbed up well on YouTube and had starred in less than a handful of Russian porn films. I haven’t been following the campaign closely, but of course, I didn’t have to. Every news channel in the world has been running headlines since day one, Sunrise had a spot on it this morning and even ABC news bulletins have talked the story up.

I’m mighty impressed with the campaign on the whole, despite some early stumbling, and given that this is only the end of phase one (the dude now has to go do the ‘work’ and write a blog about his experience), I’ll bet Tourism Queensland are chuffed with Cummins Nitro’s work. My guess is Ben’s blog won’t reach even a fraction of the people that news of the campaign to hire him did, but at the end of the day, I don’t think that really matters. Both agency and client will be hoping the online journal generates some interest, but success will be measured by overall column inches, and by that yard-stick, they’ve put together one of the best social media campaigns to date.

Will it translate into dollars for Queensland’s Tourism industry? It certainly will for Hamilton Island (I wonder what the other resorts think of it all). There’ll undoubtedly be a ripple effect too for the rest of Tropical North Queensland, but I’m really looking forward to reading the final report at the end of the day and comparing the success of this social media-bsed campaign to what they’ve done in the past. I’ll be surprised if there are any jaw-busting revelations there though. I think it will result in much greater media coverage than they’ve ever had, but in reality, Queensland is a long way from the rest of the world and favourable coverage on Fleet Street has a long way to trickle-down. For this to convert to substantially greater visitor numbers would be a massive achievement. I don’t think they’ll pull it off, but regardless, it is an absolutely fantastic advertising campaign.

Oh, and did someone mention something about a new mens range at a clothing store? No? Didn’t think so.

We’re about to launch a major new campaign/initiative for a client of ours, if all goes well it’ll get a bit of national press and we should get a few hundred thousand people involved. The press, if we get it, will be nice, but I’m far more excited about actually helping this particular organisation get back in touch with its customers, take on board some feedback, create a community of users, and at the end of the day, make some money.

What we’re doing is social media #101, but the funny thing is, you’d be hard pressed to recognise it as such. You see, the client won’t be starting a Twitter account, they won’t be blogging about their experience, they won’t have a Facebook page, no photos will appear on Flickr, we won’t touch the company Wikipedia article and YouTube won’t play a part. In fact, there isn’t a scrap of traditional social media involved in this social media campaign, and you know what, I think we’ve come far enough down the digital highway for that statement to not be an oxymoron. I feel a bit like those particular sites are stepping stones on the social media path, tourist attractions if you will, the big bananas of the digital world. Politicians and interested surfers with too much time on their hands use them as pit-stops on the information super-highway because they’re there, because they think they have too, even if, like Anna Bligh, they end up with 14-year-olds on their MySpace leaving such poignant messages as: “its good ur trying 2 reach the next generation of voters and all but you really need 2 get more friends. just a heads up.”

Sure, MySpace still has lots of users and everyone’s on Twitter or Facebook these days, I’m not saying those sites are so far past their prime they’re irrelevant, but they just weren’t the right tools to help this particular client engage their audience and treat their customers like friends, so fuck ‘em.

DP Dialogue is a member of the American Word of Mouth Marketing Association - it means we get a little logo to put in places, but more importantly, we get access to lots of cool articles and resources related to word of mouth and social media marketing. This morning their daily newsletter threw up this little gem about the most valuable and under-used social media strategy - customer reviews; in particular, negative ones. It’s worth a read, and quite timely I think. We’re certainly putting it into practice.

What about you?

This article is a collaboration between myself and Nathan Bush (A.K.A. Another Advertising Wanker, A.K.A. AnotherAdWanker). We’re both strategists at Brisbane advertising agency De Pasquale and had our ire raised a notch when we found out The Starlight Foundation had spent $14 million on its own social network. The fact that we’d been working on a similar project for The Children’s Hospital Foundations had a little to do with it, but mostly, we just couldn’t figure out how they could drop that much dough.

You may have heard about the new social networking site for sick children produced by the Starlight Foundation called Livewire. It is similar to a Facebook or MySpace application but only available for children in hospitals or with serious illness. As Daniel Oyston points out in the Marketing Today podcast, it is an incredibly valuable service for the kids and will no doubt help them feel connected, positive and strong in their recovery process.

However (and I think you knew that was coming), if we put to the back of our minds that this is a children’s charity, there are a few questions that have to be answered in regards to the cost of the project and the allocation of tax payers money. Cameron Reilly addresses this in his podcast with the Livewire creators here.

The crux of the issue is that the cost to develop the social media project over 18 months was $14.7m. The Government supplied $7.2m through Senator Stephen Conroy’s Clever Networks program. The remaining 30% was supplied by Starlight and 20% from other suppliers (keep-in mind that this is not necessarily all cash and includes some in-kind donations).

Nevertheless, $14.4m is a lot of money for a social media project so we will list all of the elements we could find which are included in this budget:

Online platform including social networking tools, chat, mobile platform

Let’s presume you’ve downloaded Ning, analysed it, and then made your own version of it. Let’s say you then get a team of one designer, one project manager and two programmers working exclusively on this for two months. That’s four people times $150 an hour times two months. If you played a lot of ping pong in between meetings, and got your agency’s agency to mark it up a few times you could probably get to $250,000.

Competition Engine

Let’s call it $25,000. That’s one junior programmer working for six months. If you can’t do that for $25,000 you’re doing something very terribly wrong.

Hosting

WebCentral are about the most expensive hosting provider in Australia. Two of their dedicated servers will cost you about $20,000 a month. That’s $160,000 over a year.

Content Management

You could use a free open source CMS like MODx, but your agency won’t make any money out of that, so they’ll convince you to spend $60,000 on some proprietary piece of shit that does the same thing.

Content

Hire a pretty blonde with a PR degree and she can punch out content for 12 months for $60,000.

Customised manual sign-up to increase data security

Call it $5000.

90 computers and tables in hospitals for children to access from bedside

Dell will sell you 90 computers for $108,000. Presuming the kids are happy with IKEA and don’t need rich mahogany, you should be able to get 90 tables for $9,000

Wireless networks and wiring in some hospitals

Five business plans and a few modems - call it $10,000

Parents and siblings site to come by the end of the year

Surely you’d build this in the initial stages as part of the whole thing?

Two therapeutic studies on the benefit of social networks to recovery

Two w@nkers telling you shit you already know like “kids who can interact with other kids have faster recoveries than those stuck in solitary confinement in a Romanian orphanage”. $100,000.

15 full time employees in total - chat room hosts, editorial, security and an outreach person in each state to work with partering organisations to demonstrate how to use the site

$60K a year each, so that’s $1 million, tops.

Training program for chat hosts with the Australian Federal Police

Let’s say they had two police officers training staff for two days. That couldn’t possibly come to more than $10K. Cops don’t earn that much.

TOTAL

$1.79 million

As you can see there is a lot more to this project than just being a social media site - especially in regards to security and support. However, we still can’t see how all of $14.4m will be completely spent by the end of this year. We can get to around the $1.4m mark with some generous estimates. This leaves $13m unaccounted for. This leaves us with some questions:

1. As Cameron Reilly points put, is there any reason to reinvent the wheel? Surely a free network creator such as Ning and embedded content would have significantly brought the cost down with no major impact on functionality?

2. Will the publicity around social media projects such as this and the budget being used scare other charities off playing in the social space? We know that charities can do sites such as this for next to nothing - but will they ever bother to explore now?

3. Livewire is aiming for 20,000 members by the end of the year. Given the funding of the program (which ends this year) - this equates to $735 per member. Is this a responsible allocation of funds when our hospitals have a long wish list of other resources required?

Don’t get us wrong, it is a great project and will do wonders for the kids. But surely we need more accountability here?

The Internet is a largely unregulated place. Sure, corporate lawyers try and throw their muscle around when they sniff a suit, but the reality is, there are no rules. Rotten.com still exists over a decade on; spam continues to infiltrate from the darkest corners of the globe and short of selling kiddie porn, you can get away with anything you want; no matter how bizarre, how random (WTF?), how sick or how depraved. It’s the interwebs. That’s the way we like it. The less rules, the better, just as long as you’re not hurting anyone.

Daniel Oyston, my favourite Canberra-based writer since the late (great) Matt Price, wrote a lovely little piece yesterday about the rules of social media engagement - the ones that have been made up by social media commentators along the way. He questioned whether we should try and follow them, or just give up and let the marketers do what they want.

He knew the answer of course; dumb marketers will corrupt anything to make a quick buck. As former Naked exec Mat Baxter said over at MumBrella the other day: “We’re aware of the hypothetical rules in this sphere - there are a lot of people out there who claim to have the rule book. But the reality is that it will be shaped by what the consumer will tolerate.”

If a client ever comes to me asking for a stategy their consumers will ‘tolerate’, I will resign, on the spot (not once the press gets hold of it, not after no-one can believe what I’ve said anymore because I’ve lied to them in the past) because I will know right then and there that I have failed in my fundamental role as a marketing consultant, whose fundamental job is to build relationships with people; long-lasting ones. Profitable ones. Ones built on mutual respect.

Go to any party and the most popular person is the one who talks the loudest. They’re the one with the best stories (even if you know they’re lies); the one you tolerate because they’re good for a laugh after a few beers. They have the most friends when everyone is drunk and doesn’t care, but when people need someone to rely on, when they’re moving house, breaking up, falling in love and falling over, they’re the person you call after you’ve spoken to your real friends. If you want people to rely on your brand, you don’t want to be that person. You don’t want to lie to people.

You want to be the first person they call.

I’ve been lucky in the last few months to work with a bunch of clients who understand that fundamental value - that in an age where customer recommendations fly around the planet at the speed of light, 87% of people trust their friends opinions and only 14% trust ads any more (Source: Neilsen Global Trust in Adversiting urvey, 2007), any marketing strategy not built on trust is doomed to fail. I get to launch two massive social media campaigns in the coming months. One involves a company with a bigger presence in this country than McDonalds - another one involves a drink brand that outsells Coke in Queensland. It’s going to be interesing to put my money where my mouth is for those, but in the meantime, I thought I’d share the rules of social media engagement as I outline them to clients. These rules were born out of The Cluetrain Manifesto (a must read for anyone who thinks customers are happy to ‘tolerate’) and have grown up quickly after watching countless stupid marketers fuck their clients over by recommending social media strategies that take consumers for granted.

If you’re running a social media campaign, or a business for that matter, forget any other rules you’ve heard. Forget what the latest, greatest theory is, forget what your new Twitter hero said last night, forget what your lecturer said at uni, forget what your mate said at the pub, forget what your boss recommended, forget what the client says they want. These are the rules you need to obey:

Rule 1: Treat your customers the same way you’d treat your friends.

That is all.

I’ve been spruiking social media and the virtues of customer engagement for a while now and it’s going quite well. It’s such an easy sell because the benefits are clear, it’s cheaper than a TV commercial, and virtually everyone on the planet is using at least one social media channel these days. More often than not, the people you need to talk to are half sold on the concept before you even sit down with them, so it’s just a matter of pushing them over the line. Still, it’s handy to have a nice overview of what social media marketing is about, where it’s come from, and exactly what it can do for you.

This Powerpoint presentation is my little baby. It’s grown up a lot over the last 12 months and has done a brilliant job of convincing clients, bosses and marketing managers that they need to be working in the social media sphere. It’s just at home on a giant screen in the boardroom of a multi-national bank as it is on the lunch-room table, so I thought it was about time I shared it with the rest of the world. If you need to sell social media to someone, hopefully you can find some inspiration here. Feel free to share it (you can view the slideshare version here) but please respect my (and DP Dialogue’s) copyright.

How Social Media has Changed Word of Mouth Marketing: Using the Internet to Build Long-Lasting Buzz about Your Brand

I gave up Twitter this morning. I deleted my account. I no longer exist in the Twittersphere. I feel free.

Going cold turkey was hard, but it’s for the best. There are better, less annoying, more fun ways to network, share links and spout wisdom. I’m going to use those instead. RSS was invented so people could broadcast information to subscribers. I’m sick of letting Twitter own my conversations when I have my own channels.

I’m sick of trying to extract virtue from 140-character snippets of people’s lives. I’m sick of feeling like I have to follow someone or they’ll think I don’t value their opinion. I’m sick of people following me just so I’ll follow them.

I’m sick of brands using Twitter as an indication of what I think of them. I’m sick of companies thinking they can interrupt my conversations and engage me just because I mention their product. If they really did care, they’d treat me like a friend. They’d ask me before there was a problem and make a serious attempt to find out what I want. They’d value my time more than they valued theirs. Twitter lets them eavesdrop and lets them go to sleep at night believing they actually give a shit. I refuse to let them have it that easy.

I’m sick of wasting time. I’m sick of the overload. I’m sick of missing the beautiful trees because the forest got in the way.

I’m sick of trying to be the first, the smartest, the coolest, the most popular. I’m sick of everyone else trying to be the first, the smartest, the coolest, the most popular.

I’m sick of Twitter. And I feel much better without it. Give it up, even for just a week. I guarantee you’ll feel better too.

We had a meeting with the bank earlier this week. We knew they were interested in the whole social media thing or they wouldn’t have asked us back. We also knew they were going to struggle to see value in monitoring social media channels when they could easily setup Google alerts for their brand and catch anyone having  a sneaky whinge. We knew Google alerts were only half the story though; if you want to engage people, you need to meet them. It’s hard to meet people when you only know them as just ‘levinator25′ or ‘ID203′ in a database. So this is what we did…

Two of my best mates have both just got back from holidays on seperate coasts of the United States of A. (Interestingly both of them are marketing geniuses in their chosen (search-related) fields, but neither of them have a Twitter account or a Blog. That’s beside the point of this article, but it’s interesting nonetheless).

Both of them have spent extended periods of time in America before but they said buzz surrounding Obama’s inaugaration was deafening. I was lucky enough to be in the US during the 2004 election and that was an amazing experience in itself, but I get the feeling, as I’m sure you do, that the country is currently going through a once-in-a-lifetime process of change.

If you’re media-savvy you’ll know all about Obama’s use of social media channels throughout his election campaign, but it seems even CNN have seen the light at the end of the modem and in a move that seemed to come from left field, the global news giant teamed up with Facebook to provide cross-channel coverage of the inauguration via Facebook Connect. I hadn’t heard anything about it, but according to my two sources, it was all over the press in the US. I have no opinion on the subject, but it’s a really interesting marriage, particularly given the convergance of marketing, journalism and social media communities in Australia.

Read the Facebook blog if you’re interested in what they got up top and why, or check out this nice summary from The Guardian.