Take a look at our in-depth conversation below.

It is a platform that has publicised protests in the Arab world, spread riots across English cities, and even helped to coordinate a mass cleanup effort in the wake of London’s unrest. The UK riots have reminded the public of the power of social networking as a tool of instant mass communication. The British media have been vociferous about the role of Twitter, Facebook and BlackBerry in sparking unrest among youths intent on destruction.

It is not just crowd mentality, social problems or police actions that are being coined as the catalyst for London’s unrest: it is technology.

While the Daily Mail reports protesters were rallied through text messages, Twitter and Facebook, one constable speaking to the Evening Standard pointed the finger at video games in inciting violence: ‘When I was young it was all Pacman and board games. Now they’re playing Grand Theft Auto and want to live it for themselves.’ The Sun writes rioters used Twitter to rally looting in Tottenham by encouraging their followers to join in the robbery of local businesses.

Meanwhile, The Guardian has led the debate for the role of BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) in coordinating the riots. This is on the back of a recent Ofcom report which found almost half of British teenagers own a smartphone. The argument for BBM’s role in inciting the riots was so strong that, according to a Daily Telegraph report, BlackBerry manufacturer RIM is helping police investigations into disturbances coordinated over BBM.

Is it right to blame social networks for what we are witnessing on the newsreels? While Twitter has been slammed for its media-prescribed role in provoking the violence, today the platform has demonstrated its capacity as a force for good.

#riotcleanup is trending worldwide as Londoners use Twitter to coordinate a voluntary cleanup effort. Created this morning, @riotcleanup already has over 50,000 followers at the time of writing. Facebook groups including ‘Supporting the Met Police against the London riots’ and ‘Post Riot Clean-Up: Let’s Help London’ have gathered hundreds of thousands of followers within a matter of hours.

There’s undeniably a technology-fuelled method to the madness that has erupted in London. Yet it’s the force of the social network that has brought together its victims – ordinary people living in the cities – to repair the damage to their communities.

Editor’s note: This post originally appeared on the Text 100 UK blog.

Richard Branson, Rupert Murdoch and Wired Magazine, are some of the media heavy hitters looking to lead the publishing revolution by using the iPad and upcoming Android tablets as their medium. But will they succeed in creating content that has been attempted by many, but achieved by few? And is this really the future of publishing?

Wired was one of the first publications to release an iPad magazine application. When released in May 2010, the application received positive reviews for its interactive features which included 3D graphics and images that could be rotated with multi-touch gestures, in-line videos that were relevant to articles and taking advantage of iPad features such as swiping left and right to advance pages. But, it also received alot of flak for the cost structure (Wired charged $5 per iPad issue, but only $10 for a year subscription of the print publication) and the fact that according to many the content didn’t reinvent the publishing industry as a whole, it just brought Wired to the iPad. There was no additional reporting or iPad-exclusive articles to make the extra cost worth it.

Six months after Wired launched their first digital magazine, Richard Branson and Rupert Murdoch are entrenched in a battle to do something new with publications and tablets. Branson recently launched his iPad only magazine titled “Project.” The publication has a full staff of writers, illustrators, developers and everything else needed to create a digital magazine. Initial reviews are positive, again highlighting the publications ability to use interactive images, video and graphics to bring a story to life on the iPad, but many are still skeptical if a monthly, iPad only publication can survive, considering the speed of news in today’s cycle.

Enter, Murdoch’s rumored iPad only newspaper called “The Daily.” With more than 100 journalists from publications such as the Wall Street Journal and Time and around $30 million invested in the project, Murdoch is looking to use a newspaper format (and Steve Jobs’ backing) to become the de-facto news source on the iPad. Many people are skeptical that Murdoch can pull this off, as he has been behind the Web curve before (his purchase of MySpace is considered one of his biggest flops) and the fact that the iPad customer base isn’t large enough to make the publication profitable without charging consumers more than what a typical daily newspaper subscription would cost.

So where does this leave us? The bottom line is that the publishing industry still is trying to understand what it needs to do to take advantage of new media and content delivery devices such as tablets. But that doesn’t mean these mobile news sources should be ignored, for they represent a new opportunity to reach the early adopter customer base – those that are highly engaged and influential in social media. These digital publications also allow companies to use interactive and creative digital content to bring new life to a story.

We’ll continue to watch this space as it matures and more publications start to deliver their content through tablets. While it’s too early to tell what will happen to the industry, the mobile audience is ripe for the taking and the brands that experiment with this media early through this learning curve could reap the potential rewards down the line.

By Aaron Grabein

Although currently in beta, Text 100 was lucky enough to receive an invitation to test out the latest in social browsing last week. Here are few of our favorite RockMelt features:

• Facebook and Twitter functionality – Update your status in the browser. Facebook photos appear on the left and you can comment and “like” updates; chat in the browser; share links with a simple drag and drop; and, see who’s online. So, for example, you can be on ESPN.com and simultaneously check my Facebook newsfeed and comment on a friend’s page without going to Facebook.com, as well as post the article about which NFL team is expected to dominate the NFC West to your friend’s Facebook wall.
• RSS feeds – You can add other social networks, such as LinkedIn, as well as RSS feeds for websites, to the right column in your browser.
• Visual search previews — Upon entering your search term, you can preview the results and scroll through them until you find what you want. Google also happened to launch Google Instant previews this week, which like RockMelt, previews search results
• The UI — It’s graphically appealing. Enough said.

If you’d like to test it out for yourself, contact Melissa Chanslor via Facebook or @chanslor.  Here’s the official RockMelt video demo. We’re not saying RockMelt is for everyone – it’s not. But for the avid social networker, whether you’re looking for fun, personal branding, or to manage a company’s social properties, it’s worth a try.

Because we are curious about these things, we decided to conduct our own research by analyzing 4000 posts from the top 100 brands to see what we could learn. The results have been collated into the Beyond Brand Interaction Study. To save you reading it, we have also put together a video which summarizes our findings and collates other freely available facts and figures we found interesting.

One of the challenges with data analysis is to create some specific actionable insights so we have pulled together our Top 10 Practical Steps to building and engaging your community on Facebook:

1. Put together an incentive program for your loyal fans
2. Increase the use of images and rich media to increase likes
3. Use polls to increase comment levels
4. Aim for a ratio of brand comments to fan comments of 1:10
5. Funnel customer service issues into the appropriate channels and away from Facebook
6. Clearly signpost news distribution from within the corporate facebook presence
7. Ask the fans for ideas for content
8. Integrate your Facebook presence with all other social presences and web presence
9. Let other fans handle a lot of the other negative comments
10. Benchmark your Facebook presence against other brands in your sector

We can’t promise that this will get you as many fans as Coca-Cola but we can guarantee if you follow these steps you will be well on the way to building a happy fan base.

Our full white paper is also available here.

Guest Blog:

David Hargreaves is CEO of Beyond, Next Fifteen’s specialist digital consultancy that was launched earlier this year. It works for clients such as Google, YouTube, Genentech and Cisco.

FaceTime chat with Ben Parr

The iPhone 4 is officially in my hands – woohoo! iPhone 4s have been flying off the shelves (and UPS trucks for those who pre-ordered), which isn’t a surprise since the iPhone has overshadowed the Mac computer to become the company’s largest source of revenue and earnings. Apple says it sold 600,000 in early orders and Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster predicts sales of 1 million to 1.5 million phones by Saturday. According to Munster, this is the largest sale he’s seen for a consumer tech device.

Sure people are having reception issues with the antenna, saying they don’t like the rectangular shape or you should’ve never purchased the phone on the day it came out because it’s the first generation of that new line. For the record, I’m not one of the Apple fan girls who stood in line the day it became available – but I did pre-order, and am happy I did. My favorite features?

• FaceTime video calling: Although it only works with other iPhone 4s, this makes phone calls much more social. And fun (though I will be avoiding this feature for any early morning calls). Think Skype video chat, but on the go and with your current device. From a PR perspective, this could serve as an alternative to face-to-face meetings or media interviews to make the calls more interactive and offer more personality. Check it out – FaceTime-d with Ben Parr from Mashable.

• High-definition video recording: The camera on the iPhone 4 records HD video, and by purchasing Apple’s iMovie software app, users can shoot, edit, add music and send a video clip on the fly via their devices. This will be beneficial for brands as they can film quick videos that can be leveraged for PR and marketing, such as at tradeshows, demos, customer meetings, etc. The videos can then be promoted on your brand’s properties, such as your blog or Facebook page, pitched out to traditional media and/or leveraged in promotional marketing materials.

Besides, if Hitler hates the iPhone 4, don’t you want to love it?

He’s Upset About the iPhone 4 Antenna from MG Siegler on Vimeo.

Here are some examples of questions that Web analytics can help you answer:

• Is our corporate Twitter account driving traffic to the right Web pages?
• Are our press releases or social media releases being cited by journalists and bloggers, and if so, do they drive traffic to our corporate site?
• Is Key Message A more effective at driving sales than Key Message B?
• Should we invest more resources in social or traditional media?
• Where do we find the audiences most likely to respond to our campaigns?

While some of these questions require advanced analysis and statistics, there are many straightforward questions you can ask your internal Web analytics team for data on:

• For starters, get some data on what unpaid sites drive the most traffic to your Web site. Unpaid traffic includes any Web sites that provide a link to you for which you have not paid (i.e., not ads or paid search). Many of these sites are influential publications that publish content about your brand, so you should know who is most effective at driving awareness and demand.
• Next, ask questions about what the traffic that these sites refer looks like. Do they tend to sign up for information or buy things on the Web site (or to put in Web analytics speak: “how well do they convert?”). Where are they located geographically? What keywords did they use to find the information, if any (this is great input into determining how you should write copy about your company)?
• Then you may want to do some benchmarking. How does earned media compare to paid media? How does Twitter compare to blogs?

Your internal Web analytics team should be able to provide you some of these reports out of the system or provide you or your analyst of choice access to the application. You can also talk to your agency or research vendor who can help answer your questions on how to get started. We frequently get asked by clients to do this and also help answer complex questions such as: what messaging results in more sales? Where are the untapped audiences with the most potential? Which audience segments should you target with various messages to get optimal business outcomes? There are many ways you can use the data to give you campaign insights, and if you combine it with other data sources, the possibilities are vast.

For more information on the subject of how to get started using Web analytics for PR, you should also take a look at this presentation, which Context Analytic’s Seth Duncan gave at IPR’s Measurement Summit recently:

Vance gives plenty of column inches to critics’ who characterize “Microsoft’s path as a long spiral toward irrelevance.”  Author Nicholas G. Carr says, “I think Microsoft is still moving pretty slowly as it shifts at least part of its business to the cloud.  Some of that is due to its corporate culture, but I think most of it is due to it trying to protect very lucrative businesses with high profit margins.”

Moving slowly has been the death of many a lumbering giant, from the T-Rex to General Motors.  Is it even possible for a giant to be quick and agile?  If you’re Dwight Freeney, yes.  But if you’re a multi-billion dollar company, the issue is still an open debate.

In June, Chris Anderson wrote in Wired that “the next new economy, the one rising from the ashes of this latest meltdown, will favor the small.”  To underscore the point he quoted venture capitalist Paul Graham: “”It turns out the rule ‘large and disciplined organizations win’ needs to have a qualification appended: ‘at games that change slowly.’

And as we all know, tech can change the landscape overnight.  So why did the August 29-September 4 edition of the Economist declare in big, bold font on the cover: “Big is back.  The return of the corporate giant?”  Well, one of the reasons the giants “have the advantage again,” as the magazine put it, is because of “the emergence of companies that have discovered how to be entrepreneurial as well as big…..giants (that) are getting better at minimizing the costs of size…while exploiting its advantages.”

Entrepreneurial as well as big.  That feels like the crux of it to me.  But sometimes a company can have the desire, but the behavior doesn’t match.  How many PR pros have worked with clients who allocate most of the PR budget to today’s commodity cash-cow products, while leaving the innovative products–yes, the ones that can be tomorrow’s cash cow–tin-cupping for resources?  Unfortunately, it still happens all the time.

What I like about the Economist’s take is it’s not “either/or.”  Big can be entrepreneurial.  But it takes a lot more than professed desire and a great messaging document.  The question isn’t whether big companies can be big and agile; it’s more whether they will be as rare in the business world as the Dwight Freeneys are in the NFL.

]]> http://text100.com/hypertext/2009/10/can-big-be-fast-and-does-it-want-to/feed/ 0 http://text100.com/hypertext/2009/09/what-you-need-to-know-about-german-social-media/ http://text100.com/hypertext/2009/09/what-you-need-to-know-about-german-social-media/#comments Thu, 10 Sep 2009 18:14:59 +0000 Lars Basche http://text100.com/hypertext/?p=469 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:

• Social media usage in Germany lacks behind other major European markets and globally compared to the USA or Asia/Pacific. According to the a recent report from Universal McCann, only 57% of the active Internet users in Germany regularly read blogs and 50% have created a social network profile.  A recent ReadWriteWeb story noted that Germany is five years behind the US in terms of social media adoption.

• While Facebook is seeing tremendous growth, the biggest social network in Germany is SchuelerVZ, a community of 7.4 million students from 12 to 18 years old.  In June, Facebook cracked the top three with more users than competitors StudiVZ and Wer-kennt-wen. Companies planning to launch a consumer social media campaign in Germany should keep in mind that Facebook isn’t the only place to target and SchuelerVZ has a bigger reach.

• Looking to make business connections in Germany? The most important German business network is Xing, which dominates LinkedIn in the German market. At the end of July Xing boasted more than 8 million users; among them are 635,000 premium users who pay for their accounts. Like LinkedIn, Xing has lots of different groups around targeted business topics like SMB or social media marketing, etc.

• Interesting cultural tidbit: Germans are very hesitant to change and known for their habitualness. This translates to their lives online:  Each time Facebook introduces new features, Germans express their outrage.  Be sure to spend time listening before you launch your social media program in Germany to make sure you understand their social media preferences and patterns. The use of these norms will increase your project’s chance of success.

A few weeks ago Vodafone launched a marketing campaign in Germany with a large social media component (see Twitter, Blog, Facebook, Youtube, MySpace and Microsite),  one of the first of its kind in this region. Vodafone faced harsh criticism of the campaign for a handful of social media 101 offenses that you should always keep top of mind:

• Social media is a conversation, not a megaphone: Vodafone was criticized for purely taking its marketing messages and pushing them through this new channel, not tailoring their approach for the community or trying to start a dialogue. In addition, the company received more than 2,000 negative comments within two hours on Facebook, but did not respond or adjust their approach.
  
• Don’t fake it. Always be authentic: Vodafone hired a popular Germany blogger to support the campaign. This blogger was well known as an iPhone and T-Mobile customer, so his work for Vodaphone was immediately seen as a shame.  Vodafone should have more closely evaluated their partners and insisted they be transparent about their involvement.
  
• Get to know your audiences likes/dislikes before you engage:  The Vodafone campaign used Denglisch (German mixed with English terms, in an attempt to sound cool and interesting), but some didn’t even seem to be sure how to pronounce the buzzwords they were using. This tactic backfired as Germans complained they would have preferred to be reached via German or English language, not a combination.

Want to learn more about social media in Germany? Leave your questions in to comments or get in touch with me on Twitter or Xing.

Extending your social media strategy into new a country requires a strong understanding of that region’s online behaviors and cultural considerations. To help you build your strategy, I thought I’d share insight from Text 100’s Sydney office and provide a quick look at what makes social media engagement unique my country:

·      Australia currently lags behind other developed nations in what we consider to be fast Internet connectivity. Rural areas are waiting for their connection speeds to catch up their city counterparts. If you’re looking to reach people outside of the major metropolitan capitals, YouTube might not be your best bet. However, earlier this year the Australian Federal Government announced that it would invest $43 billion over 8 years to build a National Broadband Network. The new network is expected to deliver high-speed Internet access linking metropolitan cities, major regional centers and rural towns, eliminating existing ‘blackspots’ and in turn driving uptake of online video, e-commerce, online education and social networking.

·      Flickr use grew by 14 percent last year, making it the third most popular social media site in Australia by year’s end. Be sure to consider a photo stream as part of your strategy to not leave this audience untapped.

·      2009 really saw the critical mass adoption of Twitter in Australia. In fact traffic to Twitter grew by 1,067% in January, with Australia’s being the 4^th largest group on new users globally. However, Aussies still only make up 2 percent of the total Twitter users.

·      According to research by Forrester, Australians are more likely to be creators of social media content than their US counterparts and 41 percent have published opinions specifically about brands. You’ll see this trend in action the most in blogging. In fact, in the tech space the ratio of “journo bloggers” to true” bloggers who are simply passionate about their technology is beginning to change. More true bloggers are becoming more prominent in the social media-scape.

Interesting cultural tidbit: While Australians have long been known for their sense of adventure it doesn’t translate to their love lives. Aussies are very reluctant to use the Internet for online dating.

Want to learn more about social media in Australia? I’m happy to share a larger presentation on the topic or answer specific questions in the comments.

Image Credit: Forrester’s 2008 Australian Adult Social Technographics Report.