Social media represents a shift in consumer behaviour, not a bunch of platforms or technology. That’s why changing the focus from the brand to the consumer will directly result in making all media and all marketing communications more social for brands. Placing social – whether it’s the concepts or actual people and expertise – at the heart of a brand, organisation or agency, leads to healthier relationships between the corporate world and its consumers.

Integration has been front of mind for brands and agencies for a long time. When it comes to social media, however, we still default to platforms such as Facebook or Twitter. This way of thinking can sometimes restrict the spectrum and possibilities that social media as a whole can offer. Moreover, as social media is still the new kid on the block, it is often planned or thought of in isolation – much in the same way that search activity is considered in a silo.

In my opinion, the case for integration with social media is simply common sense. It’s about understanding how consumers behave and how brands are not perceived based on the various segments of communication e.g. Facebook Pages, Advertorials or point of sale.

Agencies that promote integration over specialism just to ease their clients lives are forgetting about the most important part of their job – helping businesses achieve their objectives. Those objectives tend to revolve around consumers. Consumers must be the starting point, and their behaviour, motivations and actions will determine the case for integration.

Integrating social concepts into the different departments of an organisation can aid each of them not only through achieving their own specific goals, but also through building solid and long-term bridges with consumers. Transforming a brand into a social business cannot and should not happen over night. It doesn’t only require buy-in from every stakeholder, but also a shift of focus from the brand being at the centre, to the consumer taking the spotlight. The challenge here is that agencies will have to build confidence in their clients by delivering tangible results, illustrating the role that social plays in the consumer decision making process.

Below are 6 top tips on how to apply some basic principles of social media, which, we believe, can result in more effective marketing initiatives and push brands to start evolving into social businesses.

• Understand your target market’s behaviour and motivations will only help enrich your marketing strategy. For instance, if you observe that your customers tend to share their negative experiences with the brand on Twitter – set up a Twitter feed dedicated to customer services exclusively and not to promotions and offers. Brands such as Dell, BT or even ASOS are already benefiting from this approach.

• Elongate the consumer journey, from initial triggers to encouraging action and rewarding interaction. Advertising is still a powerful tool to raise awareness around new products, initiatives and keep the brand ‘front of mind’. Adding social activity to that same TV campaign will drive your target audience to a place where they can engage with the brand on a more intimate level.

• Make the brand more social and mobile. Adding social functionality to the brand properties, enabling commentary and creating shareable content will not only remove some of the faceless, corporate image of the brand, but also harness the power of peer recommendation.

• Nurture advocacy. Identify which customers could become potential advocates and make them feel part of your brand by listening to their feedback, sharing information or crowdsourcing ideas with them, this will empower them to defend and promote the brand. Brands such as Walkers crisps or Wispa have centered many of their campaigns on consumers, asking them to create new flavours or to write personal messages to be displayed on billboards. Brands like Starbucks have gone as far as asking their most loyal customers for ideas on how to improve their business.

• Partner with upcoming opinion leaders. As the market continues to be saturated and more complex, brands should look at the new protagonists forming around specific niches and influence their target audience opinions and purchase decisions. The key for success when planning social PR is to establish mutually beneficial relationships with these influencers and understand their motivations as opposed to targeting them in the same way as traditional press.

• Align your SEO and Social content strategy. With Google acknowledging the value of peer recommendations and personal relevance, devising a unified content strategy maximises the performance of both. Social content whether branded or user-generated is likely to make it onto the first page of Google. Additionally, if we take into consideration Google’s efforts to destroy spam and false content produced to increase a brand’s rankings, the case for quality content is even stronger.

I wish he was a real person and not just a character. However, I do love when brands create fictional characters to be the center of their campaigns specially when they represent the brand so well and it becomes so entertaining to follow. This is the way forward! Now Stella is looking for an actor to star in the movie about Jacques’ life and auditions are taking place on a Casting Call website set up for the campaign.

My brief experience with online collaboration platforms and my quest to focus in a world of multiple distractions

Project management is something I’ve been struggling with for quite a while now. Don’t get me wrong, I am pretty organised but whilst working online, with social media, has strengthen my multitasking skills it has also somehow made me pay less attention to (dull) spreadsheets. Having a collection of documents each one with one purpose and function looks to me like quite an old concept. You have a project plan in one place, a budget allocation in another document, you have to organise your folders hierarchically so you can find them… That’s not how the brain best functions, not sure that’s the best way to be productive.

The truth is… my description of the situation is slightly exaggerated (but you would be surprised of how many companies still working JUST with spreadsheets… far too many) as there are, of course, other options available out there.

The first, most widespread one is Google Documents which recently added the possibility of including drawings. Google Docs is the best way to share documents allowing several users to edit the same document at the same time and without even having to register in any new site (unless you’re one of those belonging to the almost extinct species of non-gmail users / you’re a mum).

I have tried other collaboration platforms that claim to make your work life easier and more productive, and some of them did help but only if you understood how disorganised the project was before the tool was introduced. In one case, I was working with several parties in one quite complicated project. The parties involved were production companies, writers, digital agencies, brands etc. All the communication was done by email so I used to receive hundreds of email a day, some of which didn’t actually relate to anything I was doing. It was total confusion, for most of us. Keeping up with all the emails while trying to do some work is very hard. Trying to organise all that information to make sense of it, it’s even harder. So for my own good I decided to (force them to use) gently introduce a collaboration platform well-known by me at that time, but just a buzzword for the others.Basecamp.

Basecamp is not overly complicated and a massive improvement from email. Easy to organise by workstreams and easy to share the right information just with the people who need to know about that particular piece of information. It works more or less like a wiki, in which documents can be shared and commented on, text pieces can be created and edited by various members whilst keeping all the versions in one place. Easy to feedback and approve decisions by several parties. Tasks can be assigned to different members and dynamic timelines set up. As some of the best tools, this one is not free either. Nevertheless it doesn’t have the best of the interfaces and the more workstreams you create, the more documents you upload the more complicated it gets and it’s not that easier anymore to find anything and keep up. So I wouldn’t say it’s completely scalable and appropriate for all projects.

Of course Google Wave seemed promising, like a dream of collaboration. It sounded perfect on paper but it didn’t quite work out to be that way. It was clunky, buggy and collaboration was taken to the extremes… so far that it wasn’t productive anymore. Being able to edit the other person’s text in real-time was just an example of ‘over collaboration’ or ‘collaboration without order’. Google Wave went far beyond that because it aspired to change the way people communicate… instead of reacting to a behavioral change, it was forcing the change in people.

Lately I started using one rather different platform/tool which is so similar to the social networks that we are currently familiar with (Facebook and Twitter) that it doesn’t even feel like a ‘work tool’. I am talking about Socialcast. Its major advantage is integration. It offers integration with Outlook, Gmail, Sharepoint, mobile, desktop etc. Each user has a profile, groups and activity streams can be set up, you can keep up to date through your mobile app, you can access it through the desktop application not having to access the website, it allows for microblogging… But probably the best feature is how the information is organised and the tasks are assigned / messages are directed to people; just in the same way as Twitter using tags and @username language. Tags are included in messages and added to files to group content in activity streams or groups. There is a free version as well as paid-for one, with extra features and extra space. However, I am still struggling to classify it as THE project collaboration platform; just because I don’t see how projects can be planned, because the ‘time’ element of the project doesn’t have a place on it at the moment. It’s great to share information, but not to show progress and keep that project on track.

The conclusion is that I still haven’t found the collaboration platform that really helps me manage my projects, my time and my workload more efficiently in a world of multitasking and continuous distractions. Is really a collaboration tool going to make me more productive? Have you found a better tool that does the job?

Lately I’ve been having some very interesting debates about what makes someone good at social media. Meanwhile some influential bloggers have been writing tips and recommendations on how to choose your ‘social media experts/agency’ and it appears some brands have been taking their advice on. Some of these tips include looking at the blogs and Twitter profiles of such experts and their influence and reach e.g. number of followers.

My question is, is a social media strategist with 10,000 followers better than one with 200? Is she/he better at advising clients how to spend their budgets because they have a very popular and regularly updated blog?

And my answer is simply no. And here are some reasons why:

1/  maintaining a blog about social media and compete with others run by several editors as the likes of Mashable or Readwriteweb is a hard and time-consuming task. The time they’re spending on their blog or building their fanbase is time they’re not spending on your brand. Time they’re not spending getting to know your brand, its strengths, its issues etc.

2/ talking doesn’t make the walking. So some social media types who claim to be experts may be it on paper, because they spend their time reading all the relevant feeds, studying and researching case studies, sharing knowledge and debating. But what have they actually done for brands? Have they implemented any strategy? Have they seen it succeed?

3/ it’s not about quantity anymore. Relationships are about quality, not quantity. The same on Twitter, the same with blogs. If I had 10,000 followers, I wouldn’t talk to 95% of them. Having 200 allows me to have conversations with most of them, reading what they post and being genuinely interested on what they are doing. The same goes for them towards my Twitter feed. I follow everyone who’s got something interesting to say. I am not a smug prick who won’t follow anyone.

Don’t get me wrong either. I am not saying that a social media consultant shouldn’t have an online presence. Quite the opposite. They have it because they like social media, they really enjoy it as users and that’s how they want to experience it. They try new tools, but in the end they decide what works for them. For their busy lives.

We, those ‘cool’ people working in social media, that apparently ‘spend all our time on Facebook’ and ‘looking at lolcats’, are also people and not superheroes or space/time benders. We, too, need some sleep sometimes.

1/ Stock in a company drops after the announcement of a female CEO, but not after that of a male CEO

2/ Women CEOs are more likely to come from outside the company. Women are less likely to emerge as winners within their own  companies

3/ There aren’t any women in Apple’s management team

4/ 52% of talented women quit their jobs after 35

It seems as the business space wasn’t created by women or for women. And some still believe on replicating male behaviour in order to climb the corporate ladder. It has worked for some, but is it really worth it? And most importantly, why can’t we do it on our own way? I refuse to stop being myself in order to be promoted. It’s about the quality of your work, your talent, your skills and your dedication after all.

I have been reflecting about my professional and, therefore, my whole life for quite some time now. In the same way social media has been seeking attention and credibility for the past 5 years, I think I have sort of been following the same path. And now, it’s finally that time when I can believe on my own skills and experience and I am ready to mature… or that’s what I’d like to think.

All this thinking also took me to re-consider the way we use email as a communication tool, and I wonder if it’s totally obsolete now. Or is our stuborness hindering our progress in this area? Are we too attached to email? I personally see email as a very old fashion way of working, specially in a digital agency. It’s slow, impersonal and doesn’t always delivers the right message.

Google Wave was an attempt to solve this issue. But it didn’t work. Some said it was ‘too early’. But email is too old… it needs to be updated. Still, some people find collaboration tools confusing. Some others still print their emails to then read. Everyone is different and perceives information in different ways. But could we not find a tool that suits everyone at the same time as being more efficient and effective than email? Or have we found it already?

I have to make a confession. Sometimes I lie. Yes, sometimes I fake it.

When I first started going online, I never gave away my name. I made one up. It was called ‘nick’ (short for nickname if you’re too young to get it). And I didn’t have a picture of myself online, I had an ‘avatar’. I used to lie more often back then.

Later Facebook came along and spoilt it all for me. I wasn’t able to continue pretending, they wanted my full (real) name. First name and surname.  Else I would be told off. And nobody wants to be told off by Facebook, right?

Facebook started it all. Google never asked my name, Google only wanted all my search data.

And now we’re all* crazy about Foursquare. A mobile app that encourages people to share their location with others, publicly, in order to obtain virtual badges. Few people are using it and not only because it’s only available on selected smartphones, but also because websites such as Pleaserobme.com may have scared many others.

But, as I said at the beginning, I still lie sometimes. Especially on Foursquare. This is my confession: I have checked in places without being there, from the comfort of my sofa whilst watching TV. I became mayor of my favourite ice cream shop when it was closed. I am a lier. And you’re not going to rob me.

*yes, we all people working on social media

Socialnomics have just released a new version of their social media revolution video. Some very interesting ‘killer facts’, although it’s slightly US-centric.

It comes to demonstrate how useful social media has become for all of us, in all areas of life and how it has impacted all other areas outside marketing. It’s not just us preaching to each other about how wonderful social media is.

Why some brands are still not investing in social media? Well, there is no one only reason.

First of all, they may be scared of putting themselves “out there” and “make a fool of themselves”, i.e. exposing the brand to negative commentary.

Secondly, it’s mainly because agencies are not providing them with a convincing measurement model that demonstrates the value of social media. A lot of jargon but nothing makes much sense. Then, there are reports with different numbers, but what do they actually mean? How do they know this can be categorised as success?

Print has been around for so long that is hard to believe how under scrutinity by advertisers is right now, too. But they have their metrics worked out. They have a formula, even if sometimes the numbers don’t add up.

TV is the master of advertising for the masses, having had the trust of all advertisers as being the mainstream medium of excellence. They have their metrics too, despite being based on sample audiences. TV advertising experts are, however, being asked tricky questions by their clients at the moment. Advertisers want to spend their money wisely. They don’t want to throw millions at the box anymore.

The problem with social media is that their metrics are nothing like print or TV and many agencies are struggling to create and re-invent measurement models.

So what are actually the metrics  by which to measure your social media activity? First of all, before even thinking about figures, look at your audience’s behaviour and what objectives you aim to achieve. What do you want to get out of social media?

Is it brand awareness? Are you launching a new product or trying to reach a new market? Then you need to measure:

• your share of voice in social media against your competitors
• the volume of conversation around the brand before and after the campaign (i.e. number of mentions, content pieces etc)

Are you re-launching the brand? Do you want to change consumer’s perception? Then you need to measure:

• Sentiment towards the brand before and after the campaign (e.g. % increase in positive sentiment, what is the brand associated to in conversations etc)

Are you trying to increase brand loyalty? Then you need to measure:

• Engagement: are users engaging with the brand’s programmes and content? Are they sharing it with friends?
• Advocacy: Are users becoming fans of the brand? Are key influencers recommending the brand to their followers/audiences? Are users/key influencers creating content for the brand?

So I say, if you can measure a cat you can measure social media.