It’s hard to believe SXSW is just less than two months away, but sure enough, today schedules for SXSW 2012 went live. At first glance, the online schedule functionality seems easier to use than in years past, which is important when you’re sorting your agenda  and weeding through 5,000+ events for Interactive alone! You can use the schedule to browse events and add events to your customized SXSW schedule using your SXsocial username and password. This ain’t Text 100’s first rodeo at the annual show!

We’re getting excited for the trip to Austin, to join clients speaking at SXSW such as Food Network, Gartner, Macheen, MTV, Nokia, NXP, Xerox, attend insightful sessions, and of course network as much as possible!

So update your Facebook status, queue up your tweets with #SXSWi, ensure you have your Instagram and/or Path apps, and get ready to check in on Foursquare. And be sure to leave us a comment here if you’ll be attending, so we can add you to our list of friends on SXsocial. See you there!

Photos came in from around the world and regardless of location or time, there were two pervading themes: Friendship and Fun.

The photos which can all be viewed here demonstrate the uniting force of our people culture that has been the foundation of Text 100 since 1981. Over the years people have come, gone and stayed, but each individual has played a vital part in building the fabric of this company by supporting their peers, being passionate about delivering great client results and having fun during the process. This competition is just one way in which we remember and appreciate these contributions.

There were five winners chosen from more than 150 entries. The photo which garnered the strongest emotional response from online voters and our company judges was ‘Inspirational Lisa’ submitted by Shari Roberts. Lisa Altobelli was the managing consultant of our NY office until she lost her battle with lung cancer in March 2010. Lisa was dearly loved by those who worked with her at Text 100 and we remember her passion, commitment and sense of fun fondly. Shari has generously offered to donate her prize money to the Lisa Altobelli Foundation to continue helping other cancer patients find comfort in their time of need.

The other winning photos were all chosen for not only their online popularity, but for their reflection of our history, culture and creativity. The winners are, in no particular order:

-          Letitia Zwart’s photos of the first Christmas party held in the Text 100 Australian office. These photos demonstrated that size doesn’t matter when it comes to having fun. At the time of these photos, the Aussie business and APAC HQ consisted of five people. Today there are now more than 30 people sitting in Sydney and more than 230 across the APAC region.

-          Brian Churchard’s photo titled “Headcorn or headcase?” was one of the oldest photos posted on the site and was loved by all for its sense of nostalgia. It was also popular as proof that Tim Dyson has indeed aged over the last 30 years

-          The craziness of Kumi Mochizuki’s photos from Japan were highly popular. Everyone loves the horse which has become a regular feature from this office and well, how can you not recognise a horse in a Santa suit ordering sushi?!

-        Angela Denly’s photos of the APAC GM offsite were a popular representation of Text 100’s strong APAC presence and another good representation of how the company loves to dress up and party. Catching all the leaders of our Asian businesses at a Mardi Gras inspired event was an opportunity relished by employees and our alumni alike.

We congratulate all the winners of this competition and offer special thanks to all participants. On behalf of all employees past and present, we thank you for reminding us of good times passed.

Facebook timeline – key features

How is it different? Essentially your profile is now much more visually impactful – almost taking cues from the about.me platform using large graphics and simple sections. The biggest changes are the addition of a cover image on the top of the page to complement your profile picture, and the fact that all information you have ever shared since you joined Facebook is now scrollable (mine goes back to 2007, however one can actually add in information prior to this date including your own birth date – completely digitising your life story).

You and your friends can now find out about all of the major and minor moments of your life journey. Instead of just broadcasting a status update you can now broadcast a ‘life event’ such as your wedding or new job etc. Imagine when Gen Y and Z pass on – their grandchildren if curious will be able to look up the kinds of things they were up to when they themselves were born or what shenanigans you were up to in your twenties!

Additional new features include the ability to tag locations to your images and the ability to see all of your recent location check-ins from a Facebook maps perspective.

In summary we are excited about the new platform and are interested in seeing the kind of reaction it gets when it ever does finally fully role out. Is this a new and thought provoking way of recording and preserving the human experience or just another example of the internet eroding our privacy even further?

Facebook timeline – according to Facebook

Your cover: Fill this wide, open space with a unique image that represents you best. It’s the first thing people see when they visit your timeline.

Your stories: Share and highlight your most memorable posts, photos and life events on your timeline. This is where you can tell your story from beginning, to middle, to now.

Your apps: The movies you quote. The songs you have on repeat. The activities you love. Now there’s a new class of social apps that let you express who you are through all the things you do.

Text 100 Sydney’s perspective –

Rachel Vidaic: “I don’t like it. It looks messy and there’s like way too much going on. I don’t like too much change”.

Bec Badcock: “I like it. It’s easy to see everything all at once!”

Simon Clark: “I love being able to discover things from the past that I’d forgotten about. I agree with Lisa Hope King quoted in a recent article on USA today regarding timeline that it will create further focus on digital grooming”.

Simon Fitz: “It’s like a virtual project/artifact which graphically and chronologically tells your Facebook life story…Lifebook perhaps?”

Messenger

As well as the timeline platform, Facebook also recently release their stand alone ‘Messenger’ app for Android, Blackberry and iPhone. The app builds on the success of similar tools such as ‘Whatsapp’ to send instant messages over the internet. The benefit of being linked to Facebook is that most people have a far greater wealth of personal contacts on Facebook than even their phonebook, making it extremely easy to contact almost anyone.

We recommend giving it a try!

Dear Facebook,
Seriously, stop changing. We had a great relationship going, and now you’re rocking the boat way too often. If you don’t stop, I may be forced to go through the break-up and see what Google+ is all about. Do you really want that? I think not.
Love, Lauren

Interestingly enough, Lauren’s status update could be a direct supporting quote for a pre-F8 announcement Mashable post written by Ben Parr who discusses a hard truth for many of us to face -   our relationship with Facebook has gone stale over the years and more of us are simply continuing to log in because it’s the service where we can find all of our friends. In his post, Ben points out that while Facebook boasts high levels of users and engagement, the platform has lost its emotional resonance with users over the years – hence our ho-hum attitude and likelihood to explore new platforms, like Google+.  As you can probably imagine, this is not the best model to continue to grow your business – thus today’s news out of the Facebook F8 conference.

For those that may not be familiar with F8, it is Facebook’s annual conference that brings together developers and entrepreneurs to build a more social web and collaborate on the future of personalized and social technologies. The conference has also historically been the place where Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, introduces new features and major announcements to the public for the first time.

Today was no exception.

The conference kicked off with a rather hilarious impression of Zuckerberg by SNL actor Andy Samberg, who announced some fictional, but rather on-point changes to the site – including the “I’m not really friends with these people” friend list, and the “slow poke” button, which provides a 24-hour delay on the poke button, just in case you want to retract one from the night before.

Giving Samberg the boot, the real Zuckerberg reclaimed the spotlight, and over the next hour, talked about the evolution of Facebook over the next five years, which will bring a litany of changes to the interface – including the ability for users to update news feed with information about what media they’re consuming – which if embraced by users, is anticipated to bring about a major shift in the next generation of social media, and its business value.

Here, at a glance, are the most significant changes announced during the conference today:

Based upon this logic, and with the Singapore General Elections right around the corner, Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong and his team ran a live Q&A session on the PAP Singapore Facebook Page to engage the citizens of Singapore in an online debate about the issues surrounding the General Election, in a similar concept to what we’ve done before for clients like Nokia in a Twitter Cafe.

The event was well-hyped in the build up to the live Q&A session as this was the first time that any political party had exercised the use of social networks in such a fashion. However, looking back at how it went, the general feeling was that it was not well-executed as the PAP’s social media team were simply swamped with questions. Here are some of the takeaways:

• Using Facebook comments on a page limits the conversation to only individuals who are fans of the Facebook Page, and this prevents the conversation from gaining traction with a wider base of people online, compared to Twitter where conversations are public. However, that being said, using Twitter forces you to relinquish control over people who are interacting with you, thus having to contend with spammers and trolls in addition to real people. Facebook at least asks the user for an email and real name, and providing an identity, respondents can’t just simply troll the thread.
• Lee Hsien Loong and his team were unable to address most of the questions posted by the voters as the Facebook interface is more cumbersome compared to Twitter. This is due to the way Facebook loads the comments and additionally, once multiple threads were started, it got really difficult to keep track of conversations going on in all those threads at once.
• Going back to read the entire conversation again is also quite a pain as the huge number of comments are making load times take forever. Having it on Twitter with a hashtag makes referring back to the conversations much easier

However, kudos to the PAP team for trying to reach out to the voting populace via social media. It’s really heartening to see political parties from both sides strongly using social media as an engagement tool to win the hearts and minds of the people.

Making an advertising investment isn’t a decision that should be taken lightly. However, for brands just getting set up on Facebook and looking to do a quick promotion of their page, advertising within the medium is a great option. But before jumping head first, consider the following about your audience and their reactions:

1. What type of action are you hoping to incite – do you want people to know the page exists and follow it, or do you want users to like the page and participate in an activity or contest? The latter action – though harder to encourage with just advertising – will yield better engagement in the long-term.
2. How will you sustain users’ interest after they’ve clicked the ad and started following your page?

Once you’ve evaluated your audience and considered the type of outcome your ad is helping to achieve, there are a number of ways to evaluate the budget and time investment needed to maintain the project:

Ad campaign costs per day

Facebook ads offer the opportunity to control how much you spend on a daily basis. Once your budget has been met for the day, your ads stop appearing until the following day. To get an idea of what type of budget you should set, create a dummy Facebook ad to receive an estimate of the cost per click price based on the content of your ad and targeted demographics (you can segment audience by gender, geography, interests, etc.). Then, multiply this number by the number of clicks you’re aiming to receive throughout the life of the campaign and divide by the amount of days or weeks you have to achieve this goal.

Cost per click vs. Cost per Thousand Impressions

• If you aren’t sure whether to choose to pay per click or pay per impressions: Cost per click (CPC) works best when you want the ad viewer to take a specific action (register on a website, ‘Like’ a Facebook page, download a certain file etc.), whereas cost per impressions (CPM) works best when you’d like to simply inform the user of a specific activity (similar to a roadside billboard). In terms of cost, CPC allows you to specify how much you are willing to pay each time a user clicks on your ad; CPM allows you to identify how much you will pay for 1,000 views of your ad. In general, the CPC model is favored by most Web advertisers because the goal is to incite the ad viewer to commit to a certain action.

Time investment

• It’s best to experiment with Facebook Ads using the easy step-by-step process to get a hold of as much information about your projected results before you enter into a formal engagement. While the set-up process is simple to start and run, Text 100 clients report needing approximately two hours of time per day to monitor the performance and improve ad content, targeting, etc.

Projected Results

The chart below shows the advertising results for a pilot campaign run in India. The brand ran advertising on both Facebook and Google with a budget of about 780 Euros (approximate $1,125) for one month. The client opted to invest slightly more in Facebook’s variations because the target demographic was shown to spend more time there and Google ads run at a higher expense in the market, which made the Facebook investment more cost-effective. This project provided valuable insights about how each platform delivered so the client could make a more educated budget estimate.

While these results are positive in the short-term, navigating the waters of Facebook Ads is tricky and needs a solid integrated strategy to yield truly beneficial results for a brand. Getting people to click on an ad is just step one. If your goal is real engagement with your audience, couple your ad campaign with a number of communications and outreach tactics to further your message and keep users coming back for more.

I’d also like to thank our contributors who have helped make this blog as vibrant and diverse as Text 100 itself.

Happy reading – and happy holidays!

Objects in the Rear view mirror, by Jay Cuthrell http://www.flickr.com/photos/jcuthrell/63028482/

Ten Practical Steps for Improving Your Facebook Presence

Now that many brands are advertising Facebook presences ahead of their actual web presences, it is more important than ever that we understand the conversations that are happening on brand Facebook pages. Are they positive or not? What type of content engages fans? Why do fans actually become fans in the first place?

What you can learn from the BP Global PR Twitter spoof

You’ll often hear social media dorks like me talking about how easy it is for brands to lose control of their message in social channels, but what does that actually mean in practical terms?

What You Need to Know About German Social Media

Guten Tag! In the next segment of our regional social media snapshot series, I thought I’d share insight from the Text 100 Munich office into the region’s unique online behaviors and cultural considerations…

Infographics and communication – data visualization in the information age

I love infographics. I really do. What am I talking about? Well, this is how Wikipedia defines the word infographics (or data visualization). Information graphics or infographics are graphic visual representations of information, data or knowledge. These graphics present complex information quickly and clearly, such as in signs, maps, journalism, technical writing, and education.

The top 10 most influential FTSE brands on Twitter

Some time ago I did a little research into which companies from the FTSE 100 index could be found on Twitter, and in this post I want to take a closer look at which of those brands are the most influential. I also wanted to know what makes those brands more influential than others, and if there’s anything we can learn from them.

Credit: centrifugal, shoothead, http://www.flickr.com/photos/leecullivan/519240547

1. The wisdom of groups

It seemed that 2010 was the year that we re-discovered the age-old technique of group buying. Groupon went global, and in doing so it released a pent up demand for getting together and buying stuff that we may not necessarily need but might at some point. Gathering the collective wisdom of crowds will only become more critical in 2011. We’ve seen the growth of social media conscience sites like Jumo that connect people and organizations working to improve the lives of others. Kickstarter created a new way of getting creative projects off the ground using crowd financing. For 2011, I expect much, much more of the same. I anticipate companies will embed the principles that underpin these services into their businesses. They’ll find ways to better connect their customers, partners, suppliers and employees using social networking tools. The challenge will be to ensure that the brand objectives play a distant second to meeting the needs of the people they’re trying to connect together.

2. Would the last reporter to leave please turn out the lights

The decline of journalism as we knew it is well documented. But while that old models decline; this surely creates new opportunities for people who can tell compelling stories (such as journalists). We live in an age in which everyone can publish – but just because they have the tools, doesn’t mean companies can create good, compelling content. I see 2011 as the year of the brand or corporate journalist. These folks will become the new objective voices of our organizations, creating interesting content on behalf of their companies and sharing it with the world. Their web content – be it blog post, photo, video, or whitepaper – must be objective and inherently good enough to warrant sharing. Those companies that get this right should expect their audiences to consume, interact with and, most critically, share their stories. Those that continue to deliver the Cluetrain Manifesto’s “…facile corporate happytalk” should anticipate a different outcome.

3. Complex things made simple(r)

Credit: Simplicity (Explored), Yogendra174, http://www.flickr.com/photos/yogendra174/4931561906/

In an age where people see more than 34 billion bits of information each day, something had to give. And it did this year. In 2010 we saw apps such as Flipboard, Pulse and Paper.li take our myriad of complex data streams and re-package them into form factors more reminiscent of magazines than RSS readers. It was also the year of the app. Though cruelly described as the ‘strip mall’ of the Internet (versus the web’s open prairies), it is clear that people like apps. Thirdly, those amazing infographics visualizations that make complex data easy to digest also came into full bloom. In 2011, I expect this quest for simplification to continue with the app experience increasingly crossing back to the Web. Websites will be redesigned around their audiences, with social networking in mind. After all, no one wants to have a relationship with a dictionary. The patience for buggy, beta or complex sites will wear thin in an age where people have more options than ever before. Add to this the desire for a seamless experience across all devices – driven by the rise and rise of mobile – and we’re going to see a new era of ease-of-use.

4. Marketing is participation

2011 will see the proliferation of the community managers – those people that keep our shared-interest networks together. One lesson from 2010 – as learned the hard way by companies such as Nestlé and BP – is that managing an online community is not a simple task. While many companies have created social media presences on twitter and Facebook with a view to sharing their happy news with keen fans or followers, these channels need editorial direction, management and investment. A study by our sister brand Beyond told us that the top two reasons for following a brand on Facebook were to find offers and discounts and to demonstrate love for products. But love alone isn’t enough to keep people from clicking. Just like a television channel, twitter and Facebook need programming, new content, and interaction – fundamentally a unique reason to keep someone coming back. Whether the community is for employees, customers, prospective hires or journalists, you can’t underestimate the skill required to run this environment. Nor can you ignore the fact that these properties are increasingly the first point of contact for your brand. Ensuring your best people oversee your businesses’ most critical online relationships will only become more important as the year goes by.

5. The customer is always right

Credit: Shopping trolley patterns, grumble_bum, http://www.flickr.com/photos/grumble_bum/3756941370/

One of my favourite quotes from 2010 comes from Time Magazine’s Man of the Year, Facebook’s (disclosure: client) Mark Zuckerberg, who said, “There’s going to be an opportunity over the next five years or so to pick any industry and rethink it in a social way…we think that every industry is going to be fundamentally re-thought and designed around people.” While there’s no surprise the person who created the world’s biggest social network espouses this view, it’s hard to deny the logic. We live in an age of unprecedented access to information and choice. Smart companies realize this and are building their business strategies specifically around their customers, employees, partners and prospects. They’re also realizing that simple customer acquisition is no longer the end game. The old sales funnel logic doesn’t apply. In 2011 the point of sale is the beginning of a new relationship through which the customer – empowered by community or network – should become an advocate. In doing so, old customers help reduce your cost of acquiring new ones. In support, 2011 will be the year that social media evolves from being tacked on to your marketing efforts to becoming fundamental to your business strategy.

Tune in tomorrow, gentle reader for the next five big social media trends for 2011…

Gone are the days when you could plan out your marketing and public relations programs well in advance and release them on your agenda. The idea of working on new product launch schedules that target some distant point several quarters into the future doesn’t work in today’s always-on world of the web. We’re living in real time now, and if you’re not engaged, then you’re on your way to marketplace irrelevance.

Real time means news breaks over minutes, not days. It means ideas percolate, then suddenly and unpredictably go viral to a global audience. It’s when companies develop (or refine) products or services instantly based on feedback from customers or events in the marketplace. And it’s when a business sees an opportunity and is the first to act on it.                                                                         

Off to the airport,  by Kara Allyson  http://www.flickr.com/photos/kara_allyson/4481876743/sizes/m/

 Are some companies too big to fail? That’s been a hot question in recent years. But when talking about the revolution in real time, we need to turn this question around: Are some companies too big to succeed?  With epochal changes underway, are the largest enterprises, like dinosaurs, too unwieldy to evolve? It’s a scary question that needs to be asked.

After mulling this over, it occurred to me that the top 100 U.S. companies was as good a focus group as any. So I usedthe Fortune 500, the annual list from Fortune magazine that ranks by gross revenue America’s top 500 public corporations.

I sent an inquiry via e-mail to the media-relations department of each of the top 100 companies on the list. I asked each company to tell me how it had adapted to the new realities of the real-time Web. I asked: “In the last year or two, has the structure of your corporate communications team and/or communications processes changed to embrace the real-time digital era? If so, how?” I included my e-mail signature with a link to my site, blog, and Twitter ID in case people wanted to find out more about me right away.

I heard back from just 28 of the Fortune 100 companies.

In itself, that top-line result is not encouraging evidence that the lights are on in corporate America. Even more discouraging was that I could not even reach 11 companies because there was no way to contact them online. And I received tone-deaf canned auto-responses from many, such as Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance, Amazon.com, and Walgreens who did reply.

On the other hand, it was very encouraging to find that a few companies are already very much on the ball. That leads me to hope the others will be able to catch up once they focus on the right questions.  Boeing, Chevron, Coca-Cola, Ford, Intel, Prudential Financial, State Farm Insurance, UPS, Verizon Communications, Wells Fargo, and others who answered my questions, deserve to be recognized as leaders. So let me say this to any senior managers from those companies who might read this: “Your real-time communications team is doing a great job, please give them a pat on the back from me.”

Question my methodology all you like. Okay, so I’m not Thomas Friedman of the New York Times. And I’m not a statistician. But I write for a bunch of publications like EContent and the Huffington Post with many readers. And I’m the author of two global best sellers in a category that should cause PR people to sit up. I write about marketing and PR, for Pete’s sake!So if I can’t find a way to contact your company’s media-relations team, and I can’t get an intelligent response from them—or any response at all—I don’t think it’s a stretch to say something is badly out of whack in your real-time communications infrastructure.

Why is it that only a quarter of the Fortune 100 companies respond in real time to media inquiries? The fastest were the five companies that responded in less than one hour. Twelve of the companies responded the same day I sent the inquiry, and another 11 responded the next day.

A comparison of 2010 stock prices reveals that on average the publicly traded Fortune 100 companies engaged in real-time communications beat the S&P 500 stock index while the others on average underperformed the index.

During the period — closing price on December 31, 2009 through closing price on September 3, 2010 (when my book Real-Time Marketing & PR: How to Instantly Engage Your Market, Connect with Customers, and Create Products that Grow Your Business Now book went to print) — the S&P 500 stock index was down just under one percent. During the period, the average of the publicly traded companies that respond to my inquiry was up three percent while the average of the companies that did not respond were down more than two percent.  In addition, the stock prices of well more than half of the companies that engage in real-time (67%) were up during the eight month period I measured while less than half (only 42%) of those that do not engage in real-time were up during the period I measured.

My analysis provides us with evidence that there is a positive ROI (return on investment) for investing in real-time marketing and public relations. These companies that have developed a real-time mind-set are leaders in more ways than one.

- Guest post by David Meerman Scott http://www.davidmeermanscott.com/bio.htm

Twitter : @dmscott

Dell has deployed Chatter on a large scale with 113,000 employees using the social network. Chairman and CEO Michael Dell recently relied heavily on Chatter, to bring employees from two departments together in order to carry through on a sale.

Businesses that are using the paid version of Chatter ($15/month),  will have access to tools to track business data that freemium company members will not.

Social networks for enterprises aren’t new; there are offerings from large vendors like Cisco and Microsoft to small companies like Spigit, Yammer and Socialtext. According to Salesforce, it’s not competitive with the large vendors, and is focused primarily on workplace teams, handling customer and sales problems.

Although Salesforce now offers Chatter for free, the paid model can still be beneficial given its potential to track business data and integrate with any of Salesforce’s existing CRM capabilities.  The freemium service also has some interesting implications thanks to the impending integration with brand monitoring and social media management tools like HootSuite. Once rolled out,  there will be tremendous benefits to having your external monitoring portal linked closely with internal team chats in order to speed action on customer prospects or service needs.

That said, internal micro blogs and social collaboration tools tend to fail without a critical mass of users. This is something Salesforce has addressed head-on at its own company, by rewarding the employees who are making the best contributions on the network. In an on-stage conversation with Forbes Associate Editor, Victoria Barret, at the NetWork conference in San Francisco, Salesforce Chairman and CEO Marc Benioff said “Some workers might add as much value to the company as high-level executives, and should be paid accordingly. You, as an individual contributor, can receive the same compensation — stock, cash — as an executive vice president.”