A Report for Contagious by

SOCIAL MEDIA /METHODS & METRICS

2008

social media / index / p.02

INDEX / SOCIAL MEDIA / METHODS & METRICS

01 / page 03EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

02 / pages 04-05INTRODUCTION

03 / pages 06-15PLANNING

04 / pages 16-40MEASURING

05 / pages 41-84SOCIAL METHODS

06 / pages 85-89SOCIAL MEDIA / EMERGING TRENDS

07 / pages 90-91DEFINITIONS

08 / pages 92-93RESOURCES

Ryan*MacMillan is a social media agency. We use socialmedia to understand, amplify and influence the conver-sations around our clients' products and services.

To make this happen we provide:

- Situation analysis: understanding and quantifying theeffect social media marketing can have on the brand and sales

- Research in social media environments: monitoring audience conversations about the brand or product and understanding their effect: what they're saying, why and where they're saying it

- Product development: creating social media productsthat engage the brand's audience and can generate revenues

- Marketing campaigns: driving interest and considera-tion of brands by listening to audience needs and responding to them with content, dialogue and functionality.

CHAPTERS /

ABOUT THE AUTHORS /

02 /INTRO

01 /SUMMARY

03 /PLANNING

04 /MEASURING

05 /METHODS

06 /EMERGING

07 /DEFINITIONS

08 /RESOURCES

CHAPTERS /

02 /INTRO

01 /SUMMARY

03 /PLANNING

04 /MEASURING

05 /METHODS

06 /EMERGING

07 /DEFINITIONS

08 /RESOURCES

social media / executive summary / p.03

CHAPTERS /

01 / page 03EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

02 / Introduction

An overview of the report; why we have done it,what it includes, who it is aimed at and what wehope the reader will get out of it.

03 / Planning

Social media comes with a new set of characteris-tics and behaviours, not least of these being thevery active involvement of the audience. Thisrequires new ways of thinking about planning andevaluating media activity. In this section MarkPalmer provides an unsettling view of some of theshortfalls of how we currently measure media. Wealso introduce KUDOS, a framework for managingthe new paradigms and ambiguities thrown up bysocial media.

04 / Measuring

The measurement of social media differs fromtraditional media in both its impact and how thevalue of that impact can be determined. Thisrequires a different view of measurement and a

new set of tools for evaluating it. This section givesan overview of how audience needs are impactedby social media. It then looks at what tools areavailable for measuring it and what this means interms of economic value.

05 / Social Methods

This is a constantly evolving space and it producesnew ways for audiences and brands to engagewith each other. Each new way has its ownstrengths and pitfalls; this section provides anintroduction to each of the major areas: blogging,online conversations, brand utility, brand contentand narrowcasting. It includes an overview of eachwith some expert points of view. It also providescase studies of how the KUDOS planning frame-work can be used in each area as well as guides tomaking the most of these activities.

06 / Social media / emerging trends

While this report draws on the most recent exam-ples and current technologies in social media, this

is a fast moving world and in order to be ready forits next evolution we have taken a look into thefuture. This essay looks sideways at what isemerging from current trends and what will havean impact on marketing in social media in the nearfuture.

07 / Definitions

New areas, especially in marketing and technology,have a charming habit of breeding a whole new setof neologisms. We have collected some of themore useful definitions together for the reader'sreference and convenience.

08 / Resources

This report attempts to cover a lot of ground. Bynecessity some topics have required a light touchor a brief mention. This set of links to research,articles, blogs and actual examples of activity willenable the reader to further their knowledge andexperience of social media beyond the confines ofthis document.

p.06

03 / pages 06-15PLANNING

03.01 / KUDOS: A framework for planning

social media /

By Leo Ryan & Dan O'Connor, Ryan*MacMillan

The advertising and marketing press are filled with sto-ries of the end of advertising as we know it. The root ofthe cause apparently sits with the rise of blogs andsocial media and with the fragmentation of audiencesand media. It's not our place here to analyse the causes.It's sufficient to acknowledge that the role of traditionalmedia is changing as the size and influence of socialmedia grows. As that change occurs, brands areresponding by increasing their budgets and activity inthe new and exciting areas of social media. There are,however, concerns that this is still very much an experi-mental area and not one from which brands are neces-sarily expecting tangible results.

A lack of standards

One of the obstacles to serious investment in this areais the lack of standardisation. Each of the many waysthat a brand can use social media is measured differently.Podcasts, blogs, Wikis, social networking sites etc.each have their own particularities. This all makes plan-ning and measuring activity in this area a dark art at bestand guess work at worst. If brands are going to makeserious forays into social media, there needs to be someconsistency across the various channels and how theyare planned and assessed.

An example of the dilemma

A typical situation might look like this; an esteemedBritish brand is much loved for its traditional values andquality products. Its audience, however, thinks it is lack-

ing in vision and originality. As it happens, nothing couldbe further from the truth. The Marketing Director onlyneeds to provide her audience with the proof to put thislie to bed. But what is the best way to let her audienceknow about the planned new line of products? Shecould produce a weekly podcast about the company'sproduct innovation. She could have the articulate Headof Product Development start a blog. She could releasea series of white papers detailing the raft of experimentsbehind the product innovation. Or all of these. However,she has limited resources so she has to make a decisionabout which of these activities to engage in. After sixmonth of trialling two of them, she needs to be able tomake some kind of comparison.

As the Marketing Director is planning these activitiesshe also needs to recognise and satisfy dual agendas.On the one hand she has the brand that is supportingthe activity. On the other, there is the audience who isexpected to engage with it. Failure to materially satisfyeither agenda is going to make someone unhappy.

KUDOS and Social Capital

The directors of Ryan*MacMillan have been focusing onsocial media and how to resolve such dilemmas since2005. We've developed a framework for managing theambiguities of both the planning and measurement ofsocial media activity. KUDOS (meaning 'fame', 'glory','renown') is an acronym that reminds us of what attrib-utes a piece of social media activity should display if it isto be successful. It should be Knowledgeable, Useful,Desirable, Open and Shareable. And it needs toachieve this for both the audience and the brand.

CHAPTERS /

02 /INTRO

01 /SUMMARY

03 /PLANNING

04 /MEASURING

05 /METHODS

06 /EMERGING

07 /DEFINITIONS

08 /RESOURCES

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KUDOS is based on the concept of Social Capital(SC). SC is essential to our understanding of the way inwhich online social networks (OSN) work. It is a way oftalking about how valuable our online social networks are.It is a way of thinking about what we are able to do withthem, how we can maintain, expand and develop them.

SC is similar to regular, economic capital; the more youhave the more easily you can alter your environment. Itdescribes both the inclination of members of a network(or the entire network) to do things for each other and theresulting ability of an individual (or brand) to positivelyaffect their environment via the in/direct deployment ofthose networks.

The four qualities of Social Capital

The similarity to economic capital only goes so far. SChas the following four qualities:

Utility through Accumulation: Like economic cap-ital, the more SC an individual accumulates, the moreeasily that individual is able to affect their environment.

Inequality of Distribution: Like economic capital,SC is differently available. Some individuals have a lot,others less.

Expiration through Under-Use: Unlike economiccapital, which expires through over-use, SC expiresthrough under-use. 'Use it or lose it'.

Based Upon Trust: Regular capital is merely theexchange of agreed values as guaranteed by a centralauthority. SC, however, is a stockpile of trust, which isguaranteed only by the exercise of reciprocal actionsbetween diffuse individuals within a social network.

Having and Sharing Social Capital

There are two ways in which SC is important to our under-standing of how brands can successfully undertakesocial media activities, such as the fuelling of online con-versations, engagement in those conversations, or the

provision of utility beyond a brand's basic products andservices.

Having SC refers to the actual SC of a brand, thusdescribing a brand's ability to employ its online socialconnections in order to (positively) affect its environ-ment, i.e. increase sales, promote awareness, amelio-rate sentiment.

Sharing SC refers to the ways in which a brand canincrease the SC of other individuals within a given OSN,i.e. how a connection to the brand increases the ability ofan individual to (positively) affect their environment. Oncea brand has shared its social capital with its customers, itis crucial for the success of the activity that the cus-tomers, in turn, can and do pass it on.

Measuring Social Capital

Any planned social media activity by a brand within anOSN must be measurable by the way in which it increas-es or depletes the brand's SC. Measuring a brand's SC,particularly in reference to their online SC, can beachieved through analysis of online sentiment and influ-ence. This in effect is a measure of the 'tone of voice' thatonline conversations about a brand have.

Sentiment metrics describe the level of the 'stock-pile' of trust which constitutes SC: how trustworthy is thebrand understood to be, and how useful or desirable is itscontent or activity?

Influence metrics describe the efficacy with whicha brand is able to make use of that trust in order to (pos-itively) affect their environment: how easily is a brandable to share its knowledge around its social networks?

The outcome of any social media activity should be, inshort, more SC. Online, brands can accumulate socialcapital by being connected to individuals who havealready accumulated large amounts of SC, i.e. by seekingendorsements from influential network members.

CHAPTERS /

02 /INTRO

01 /SUMMARY

04 /MEASURING

05 /METHODS

06 /EMERGING

07 /DEFINITIONS

08 /RESOURCES

03 /PLANNING

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p.08

However, the brand must also ensure that the connection is prof-itable for the influential individual. This is achieved by sharing SCand making it work for them. If it does not, it is unlikely a) that theconnection will be maintained by the individual and b) that the indi-vidual will go on to share the knowledge being redistributed throughthe activity. Thus a brand's SC will deplete through under-use.

KUDOS: A framework for managing social media

KUDOS is a rubric to help brands manage their social media activities,and so maximise their social capital. The process of thinking throughthe KUDOS attributes helps a brand decide what channels it is goingto use and how it is going to use them. It can check and balance theneeds of both brand and audience. It can also establish what it isgoing to measure so that it can assess the success or otherwise of theactivity. The best way to illustrate this is by actual example.

BRAVIA Balls as an example

In 2005, Sony Consumer Electronics launched a new televisionbrand; BRAVIA. Unheard of at the time of launch, it represented astep-change in technology and TV quality and was integral to thesuccess of Sony's business globally.

The advert for the launch was an extravaganza of colour featuring300,000 bouncy rubber balls being shot out of cannons and tippeddown the hills of San Francisco. The net savvy and technically literateresidents of San Francisco took photos and video of the event andposted them on Flickr and Google Video.

Back in London the digital planning team (Fred Whitton fromOMD and Leo Ryan) picked up on this interest and the positive com-mentary it was generating. We decided that we'd fuel the conversa-tion by giving them more of what they were looking for; videos, photos,background interviews, screensavers and wallpapers. The result wasthat in the following five months the advert was seen online more thanseven million times with no media expenditure. The audience did all ofthe distribution and promotion themselves.

CHAPTERS /

02 /INTRO

01 /SUMMARY

04 /MEASURING

05 /METHODS

06 /EMERGING

07 /DEFINITIONS

08 /RESOURCES

The KUDOS Attributes

Knowledgeable /

Does the activity demonstrate knowledge on the part of the

brand? Is it knowledge that is unique to your brand, product or

service? Is it something your audience needs or want to know?

Are you increasing their knowledge or just telling them some-

thing they already know or could have gained elsewhere?

Useful /

Not all social media activity is useful to the brand's audience. Not

all dissemination of knowledge is actually useful to the brand. It

might be commercially sensitive. It might promote an out of stock

product or a discontinued service. The best-case scenario is when

an activity is useful to both the brand and the audience.

Desirable /

Desirable is a step on from useful. By desirable we mean that

both the brand and the audience actively want it. Think of eating

your greens; useful but not that desirable. If something is desir-

able, really tasty-can't-get enough-of-it-desirable to your audi-

ence, you'll know it.

Open /

Open means honest and transparent. Not just about the parts of

the message that are desirable to the brand, but about the whole

lot, warts and all. An audience will respond very actively and

negatively when they believe a brand has been dishonest with

them. It doesn't even require active dishonesty - just a lack of

intent to be completely open.

Shareable /

It is as important as being open that brands actively encourage

sharing. Are the materials easily downloadable? Can they be

linked to or have you gone and wrapped them up in a big Flash

movie that no one can link to? Have you acknowledged standard

protocols that enable sharing and added a simple 'Digg this' but-

ton or a downloadable Zip file of assets?

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CHAPTERS /

02 /INTRO

01 /SUMMARY

04 /MEASURING

05 /METHODS

06 /EMERGING

07 /DEFINITIONS

08 /RESOURCES

Attribute For Sony For Sony’s audience Metric

Knowledgeable / The raging debate around 'was it CGI ornot' showed that Sony BRAVIA was aninteresting intelligent brand who waspushing the envelope of visual effects.No CGI had been used, demonstratingthat Sony knew a lot about the impact ofcolour and motion by doing it for real. Itwas a real life demonstration of 'ColourLike No Other.'

The assets and information on the sitegave visitors behind the scenes or'insider' information about an advertthat was being discussed.

Inbound links: approx 19,000;SERP: number one result for Google searcheson “BRAVIA advert”, and “colour advert”;Technorati: 2394 blog reactions for “bravia-advert.com”;Blogpulse: 341 sites with links (Feb 2008)

Useful / The activity was useful to Sony in that itrepositioned them at a time when theywere suffering at the hands of earlyadopters; the online community was inan uproar over Sony Root Kit.

By having access to this material theearly adopters could demonstratethat they knew about something coolearly on, as could later audiences.Early adopters and early mass wereall made to look good.

Browser profiles changed from Safari andFirefox (early adopters) to IE (mass audiences)over time. IE % growth:39.2% (2 Nov 2005)56.73% (29 Nov 2005)

Desirable / Sony wanted to get their new brandBRAVIA out into the mind of the public.This advert, its related assets and theway it was picked up and disseminatedgot a new brand name in everyone'sminds in a positive and cost effectiveway. It was the first example of aConsumer Distributed Advert.

The audience loved it. It satisfied adesire to be entertained and to telltheir friends about something enter-taining. They deemed it very desirable,downloading it and watching it onYouTube and Google video.

As of March 2006 (five months into campaign):minimum views: 7,123,225;1,800,000 online advert views at BRAVIA-advert.com; 3,305,203 BRAVIA items viewed on YouTube;Google Video figures estimated at 1,983,122(source Hitwise March 2006); i-Film views: advert: 23.367; amateur video: 34,350

Open / The assets came from the shoot as wellas the finished product. There was nopretence that this was anything otherthan a piece of marketing material - onethat was handmade in San Francisco.

The assets were available for stream-ing and download. The video, wallpa-pers and screen savers were down-loadable and the photo gallery was in azip file for ease of download.

As of March 2006 (five months):35,900 downloads from BRAVIA-advert.com.

Shareable / As soon as the public showed interest inthis activity the brand posted behind thescenes footage, still shots from theshoot and eventually the finished advertbefore it was scheduled to air on TV.

Each new asset posted was a separateblog post; easy to link to and fast topublish. The assets were made avail-able for easy download and were sub-sequently reposted numerous times.

YouTube: 43 user uploaded videos; Flickr: 237photos tagged “bravia advert”; 211 photostagged “bravia ad”; 2,519 photos tagged“bravia”; Del.icio.us: saved by 9,408 people;Digg: 5,643 collective ‘diggs’ on “bravia ad”.

03 /PLANNING

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04.03 / Measuring KUDOS within communities /

By Joel Davis, agency:2

For brands to be accepted within communities they need to add valueto the debate or chat. For some brands this means being a thoughtleader and being useful by sharing knowledge. For others it might bemore about facilitating leisure time. In either case, the more a brand isable to help its audience to spend their time or waste their time, the moresocial capital it can gain.

How we attribute KUDOS in communities

Knowledgeable and Useful / If a brand's activity is deemed useful,users will respond by positively ranking their comments and thankingthem. If brands are not adding value they could be banned.

Desirable / The number of visitors from a forum, along with any feed-back on the postings, are some of the clearest indications of whetherthe activity is thought 'Desirable'.

Open / Ironically, 'Open' can be measured by looking at instancesin forums where brands have been banned or where they get flamedand become the unhappy recipients of a disproportionate amount ofnegative comment.

Shareable / By understanding where traffic originates and its volumeover time brands can get an idea of the reach that their contributionsachieve as well as the speed with which they spread. There are a varietyof tools to help track this, including internal data such as the site's ownweb logs as well as third party solutions such as Hitwise andNielsen BuzzMetrics.

Social Media Value: Measuring and optimising activity in forums

We can only manage what we can measure; this includes brands'involvement in online communities. To date, there has not been anagreed way to calculate the ROI on social media community activity. Toaddress this, agency:2 have created and actively use a dashboard thatmonitors brands' social media programmes and calculates the SocialMedia Comment Value of such activity.

The main components for calculating the Social Media Comment Valueof each post in descending order of importance are:

1. Search Ranking

(using the Google page rank as a guide)

2. Hyper link

(i.e. does the post have an active link to the brand's destination)

3. A measure of how targeted the audience is

(purely subjective)

4.The nature of any feedback

(positive, neutral or negative)

5.Thread Popularity

(measuring the volume of traffic and the nature of activity, i.e. do users just visit the thread or do they actually add to it)

6. A depreciation of the posting over time

(to acknowledge the user perception that the older the post the lessuseful it might be)

Each component has a different value weighting based on impact.Once the figures are plugged in we get the Social Media CommentValue and the all-important ROI calculation of a post and hence theoverall campaign.

The Social Media Comment Value acts as a key part of the socialmedia dashboard. The dashboard also includes a monthly look at theviews and interaction directly associated with the activity, competitiveshare of voice and an overview of the percentage of traffic socialmedia sites contribute to the total referral traffic.

These trends along with the Social Media Comment Value calculationcan give marketers the measurement tools needed to manage theircommenting campaigns in forums, chat rooms and blogs.

Joel Davis is CEO of social media agency agency:2www.agency2.co.uk

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02 /INTRO

01 /SUMMARY

03 /PLANNING

05 /METHODS

06 /EMERGING

07 /DEFINITIONS

08 /RESOURCES

04 /MEASURING

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05 / pages 41-84SOCIAL METHODS

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02 /INTRO

01 /SUMMARY

03 /PLANNING

04 /MEASURING

05 /METHODS

06 /EMERGING

07 /DEFINITIONS

08 /RESOURCES

05.01 / Overview /

By Dan O'Connor, Ryan*MacMillan

In this report so far we have covered the principles of social media andhopefully given the reader a grounding in understanding what can bemeasured and what these measurements mean. It is understandableif at this point marketers would like to start getting their hands dirty andto see how these activities actually work.

To help you, this section organises the vast array of possible socialmedia activities into five main groups; blogging, online conversations,brand utility, brand content and narrowcasting. While there are certainlyoverlaps between these categories, we feel that the principles and thepotential of each make most sense in these groupings.

Based on this, we have provided an overview of each area andlooked at how the principles of social capital and the KUDOS frame-work apply to each group. These have been illustrated with examplesof where they have been used well, and some not so well.

Each activity area also includes a case study from a leading brand.We have assessed the example using the KUDOS framework, exam-ining how it has delivered for both the brand and the audience andselecting some key metrics to underpin our understanding of theactivity's value. We've given each KUDOS requirement a qualitativescore of 1 - 5 (5 being the best) depending on how well the activity hasmet the requirement.

Each section includes guides to best practice. These have beendeveloped over the past two years and are based on our consultancywith our own clients as well as observations of what has worked andflopped in the market place.

It is not possible to provide a definitive guide in such a fast movingdiscipline, however we hope these guides provide a useful startingpoint to marketers actually trialling some of these activities.

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05.02.03 / Referral Statistics Are Your Friend /

By Tim Ireland, bloggerheads.com

The one thing you'll want to keep a sharp eye on during any onlinenetworking exercise is your referral statistics.

If you're doing it right, your online networking should be a sincereexercise in reaching like-minded people via the use of comments, track-back, hyperlinks and search engines. Keeping an eye on your referral statsis the best way to track growth and get better at promoting same.

If you want to learn about basic principles of networking growth, oftenit pays to use page tagging as well as log analysis software. The betterpage tagging solutions allow you to watch growth and spread as ithappens, which is as close as you're going to get to honing your craft infront of a live audience.

When watching inbound traffic live, you actually get to see inboundlinks spread from site to site. This allows you to learn more about howcertain influential bloggers interact. The subtleties of many relationshipscan pass you by if you're getting this data 24 hours later, and one of thebig secrets in online networking is knowing your audience.

Using your chosen traffic tracking package - if it's a good one - you'llbe able to see an overview of referrals combining traffic via other web-sites and via search engines, and will have the capacity to drill down todetermine how search engines are bringing you new traffic (i.e. viawhich keyword phrases).

After all, the self-publishers out there aren't your entire audience; theyare instead an influential audience, and your gateway to a much, muchwider audience.

Cumulative inbound links from self-publishers improve your searchresults. Your referral statistics are the best way you have of tracking thelatter and learning more about the former.

[For those who care, I personally prefer Statcounter (live) andGoogle Analytics (24 hour lag) for page tagging, and AWStats forweb log analysis. I did not use the full and correct term 'web log analysissoftware' above in order to avoid confusion with weblogs.]

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02 /INTRO

01 /SUMMARY

03 /PLANNING

04 /MEASURING

06 /EMERGING

07 /DEFINITIONS

08 /RESOURCES

links /www.bloggerheads.comwww.statcounter.comwww.google.com/analyticshttp://awstats.sourceforge.net/

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05 / pages 62-70 METHODS / BRAND UTILITY

05.04.01 / Overview /

By Dan O'Connor, Ryan*MacMillan

Utility: how can your brand help your customers?

If social capital is an expression of someone's ability toleverage their social networks in order to improve theirmarket environment, then brand utility is clearly a part ofthat ability. If a brand is useful then that utility contributesto a customer's ability to improve their environment.Through being associated with utility, brands increasetheir own social capital. For example, the travel website,Travelocity, endeavours to make its brand useful tocustomers beyond the mere capacity to book flightsand hotel rooms. In a small, but clever, piece of brandutility, they also offer a phone and email alert service,notifying their customers of delays and changes toitineraries. The utility to the customer is obvious and sothis expenditure of the Travelocity brand's social capital(their prior knowledge of flight times etc.) ensures that apotentially brand-damaging situation is mitigated asmuch as possible.

Utility: What does your brand have that your cus-

tomers need?

Providing brand utility is invariably a question of theexpenditure of a brand's social capital through theprovision of additional online functionality. Amazon's'Marketplace' function, for example, involves the brandsharing its webspace, its search engines and its e-com-merce functionality with customers. In thus expending itssocial capital (webspace, search and e-commerce beingthe primary ways in which Amazon leverages its networksof consumers to improve its environment), the brand is

able to attract more customers to its website and so,hopefully, increase profits. Amazon's Marketplace is anexample of how a social media activity can be measuredas a success by the way in which it permits both brandand customer to demonstrate the qualities of KUDOS.Amazon shares knowledge between both vendors andbuyers on its website, acting as an honest broker, pro-viding useful and desirable information about productsbeyond Amazon's own offerings.

The social capital of many brands comes in the form ofinformation, knowledge that their customers, not nec-essarily being specialists, may not have. For example,the Halifax Bank, the UK's largest mortgage lender,very obviously possesses a great deal of financial infor-mation which the brand accumulates through its networkof employees and associates. By seeing this informationas social capital, Halifax is able to expend it in their'Shareprice Alert' service. This service uses email toalert customers who invest with Halifax to notablechanges in the stock market. Customers can person-alise the alerts, thereby making the information evermore useful to themselves. For the Halifax, it is hopedthat the utility they have provided to their customers willreflect well upon the brand, increasing its own socialcapital by both retaining customers and attracting newones. KUDOS is evident here in the open sharing ofdesirable information in such a way that reflects well onthe Halifax brand (the providers of the utility) and whichhelps the customer to improve their own economicenvironment.

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It should be simple: produce a tool or application that your audiencewill find useful. But it's not always easy to know what it is people want- and whether they'll take kindly to it coming from your brand. The fol-lowing tips on creating tools and applications that extend your brand'sutility are unashamedly common sense in their approach, but haveoften been learnt the hard way.

Stay on brand /

Just because your target audience has a need, doesn't mean it's inyour interests to fulfil it.

Initial audience research is crucial /

There are no excuses for not knowing exactly what your audience'sfunctional and rational needs are within the social media space. Useconversation monitoring tools throughout the development processto listen to what your audience is saying.

Collaboration will create the best ideas /

The best ideas will occur when clients, consultants, researchers,developers all sit round the same table, developing ideas together.

Make sure the product itself encourages collaboration /

A good social media tool will ensure that the more people use the tool,and use it collaboratively, the more they will achieve.

Let your advocates be your product testers /

Develop closed groups of alpha testers whose enthusiasm for thebrand will make them an excellent external testing group.

Open up the development process /

Blog the development process. Let people know what you're doing. Invitetheir feedback. And respond to it. Make sure your team has enoughresources to listen, engage and respond to these interested parties.

Turn testers into seeders /

Provide information and materials to allow these positive, interestedparties to become online advocates.

Develop quickly - you can evolve it later /

Let go of the age-old habit to only launch your application when it is aperfect, shiny, gleaming reflection of the brand. You're competing foryour audience's attention with bedroom developers who can put outa new version of their tool, in response to user feedback, within hours.The social media space is one which expects and tolerates ongoingtinkering and improvement.

Embrace open standards and APIs /

Allow users to adapt your application to suit their own needs, makingit do what they want.

Be prepared to keep supporting the application /

Depending on the permanence of the audience need the tool isanswering, it may require long-term support and commitment fromthe brand. It may fit into a product lifecycle, rather than a marketingcampaign plan. When you budget and plan, remember that the initialsoft launch is simply the end of the beginning… Ahem.

Don't expect an instant hit /

If a tool is truly useful, its usage should grow virally rather than as a resultof a big marketing campaign. It took a few years before the likes of Flickrand Facebook jumped the chasm from early adopters to early majority.

BRAND UTILITY / HINTS & TIPS

05 /METHODS

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06 / pages 85-89 SOCIAL MEDIA / EMERGING TRENDS /By Leo Ryan and Dan O’Connor, Ryan*MacMillan

Throughout this report, we've been examiningthe current social media landscape and askingjust how we can measure the types of activitiesthat are going on there. In looking at this worldof blogs, podcasts, forums, wikis, crowd-sourcing, and endless conversations, it ispossible also to detect some new develop-ments. In this concluding essay, we identifythese emerging trends - which are the sort ofphenomena that we'll be applying our socialmedia metrics to in the future.

06.01. / Persistent profiles

Our online profile is a representation of ourselvesonline. Profiles can vary from a username in a forum toan avatar in Second Life. Increasingly it can be a socialnetwork profile. Who we are, how we present theaspects of ourselves and how we maintain control overthat is an increasingly key issue in social media. Oneway that we think this is going to develop is in the con-solidation of profiles and possibly the creation of con-sistent or persistent profiles. Google's OpenSocial

presages such a development. It is comprised of threeelements; Profile Information (me), Friends Information(my friends) and Activities (things that happen). Theprinciple of OpenSocial means that as a user moves anapplication or widget between different social network-ing platforms their profile is maintained. So my contactson my industry network (www.vbma.net) don't have tobe all uploaded again to my Bebo profile. The applica-tion I add to my LinkedIn profile will also work on myPlaxo network.

What might we choose to keep in this profile? Creditrating, sexual preference, search history, privacy set-tings, music taste. And where might it follow us? Notjust across social networking sites, but across all sitesthat provide some level of interaction based on who weare and what we want. Our profiles will have elementsthat are maintained as we do our banking, add friends toMySpace and as we slay a few enemies in World ofWarcraft. We will be able to manage our profiles as wesee fit - presenting different identities to the onlineworld depending on the context. Friends will see a dif-ferent profile to business associates. However, for thisto work properly, there will need to be some significantimprovements in how our data is collected, stored andused. In the same way that the web is teaching us todoubt the veracity of all information, so it will also erodeour naivety about all degrees of privacy unless those wetrust with our privacy prove to be worthy of it.

06.02 / Aggregated intelligence

The online environment has made it easier for largegroups of widely dispersed individuals to express ideas,vote for an outcome or give something a rating. It alsomakes it easier for these expressions to be aggregated.This aggregated intelligence has been termed the'wisdom of crowds' or 'collective intelligence' and theprocess of harnessing it; 'crowdsourcing' is on the rise.The web audience is already familiar with sites that har-ness the collective intelligence. Old favourites Wikipedia,Flickr and del.icio.us are being joined by new ones suchas the Encyclopaedia of Life. If collective knowledge iswhat we are seeing now - the harbingers of the nextstage; collective action are already starting to emerge.

CHAPTERS /

02 /INTRO

01 /SUMMARY

03 /PLANNING

04 /MEASURING

05 /METHODS

06 /EMERGING

07 /DEFINITIONS

08 /RESOURCES

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page 94CREDITS

Produced by Contagious Communications

Editorial Director

Paul Kemp-Robertson

Series Editor

Georgia Malden

Report authors

Leo Ryan, Iain MacMillan, Dan O'Connor, Ben Bland, Maggie Walsh /Ryan*MacMillanT: +44 (0) 20 7193 4556www.rmmlondon.com

With thanks to our contributors

Alex Burmaster / www.nielsen-online.comJoel Davis / www.agency2.co.ukGraham Hansell / www.sitelynx.comTim Ireland / www.bloggerheads.comJustin Kirby / www.dmc.co.ukFlemming Madsen / www.onalytica.comMark Palmer / http://maverickplanet.co.uk/Nigel Shardlow / www.zygocommunications.com

Edited by

Emily Hare

Additional Research

Giacomo Bracci, Katrina Dodd, Will Sansom, Piers Young

Production

Ellie Kilburn

Cover Illustration by

Chellie Carroll / www.chelliecarroll.co.uk

Other Illustrations by

Chellie Carroll / www.chelliecarroll.co.ukLove Everyday / www.love-everyday.co.ukAssorted members of Flickr / www.flickr.comiStockphoto / www.istockphoto.com

Design

FLOK / www.flokline.com

Contagious Communications

45 Foubert's Place, London, W1F 7QHT: +44 (0) 20 7575 1981www.contagiousmagazine.com

Published in partnership with

Xtreme Information / www.xtremeinformation.com

Xtreme Information is the market leader in the pro-vision of media Intelligence and competitiveadvertising monitoring from around the world.Xtreme works with the majority of FTSE 100 andFortune 500 multinational companies, and withevery major advertising and media agency. Thecompany is backed by leading US mediainvestors, Veronis Suhler Stevenson.

Report published April 2008

No parts of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted in any form or

by any means stored in any information storage or retrieval system without the pub-

lisher’s written permission. Where source material has been reproduced the copy-

right remains the property of the copyright owner and material may not be repro-

duced in any form whatsoever without the owner’s prior consent.

CHAPTERS /

02 /INTRO

01 /SUMMARY

03 /PLANNING

04 /MEASURING

05 /METHODS

06 /EMERGING

07 /DEFINITIONS

08 /RESOURCES

social media / credits

This report is part of a series of Special Reportsproduced by Contagious Communications.

The series also includes reports on MobileMarketing, Branded Entertainment, Gaming andSocial Networking.

For more information, can Gual or Harry on +44 20 7575 1886/1822or visit www.contagiousmagazine.com/shop

Branded Entertainment /

Gaming /

Social Networking /

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