Month: November 2007

How to visualize your Google results in a brand cloud

Search engines increasingly play a vital role in how brands are perceived. A study in 2005 showed that 40%, or twenty of Britain’s top fifty grocery brands had negative commentary amongst the top ten results on their Google search page. For some the negative comment is the number one result. This week, Media Orchard wrote about a simple way of illustrating “the impression a brand’s Google results are making on potential customers (or investors, or employees)”.

By taking all the words in the first three pages of the search results for a brand, and add them into TagCrowd, Scott at Media Orchard got several “brand clouds”, this one below is for IKEA.

ikea-cloud

Here are the results for H&M.; Not quite as flattering as for IKEA. Common themes are children, child labour and cotton. TagCrowd doesn’t work very well in Swedish, but there is a stop list of Swedish words that can filter out unwanted words.

created at TagCrowd.com

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Aftonbladet sees 12% increase in blog links after linking to bloggers

The Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet started to show blog links via its own blog portal Bloggportalen.se on October 23, 2007. I noted on that day, that we should “prepare to see a major increase in blog links to Aftonbladet.se the coming weeks”. The reason being of course that bloggers would be more encouraged to link to a high trafficked site that could possibly send them large amounts of new visitors. So was I right?

Well, on the launch day (at 11.45 PM to be precise), Technorati had registered 61,853 blog reactions to Aftonbladet.se. Today, a little more than a month later, there are 69,219 blog reactions (at 9.38 PM), which is an increase with 12%, in just one month. And I may be wrong here, but I believe that Technorati track links during the last six months which means that links that are older than six months do not count any longer (please correct me if I got this backwards). If that is the case, the increase cannot simply be due to a stretched measurement period, but something else is at play. I would not be surprised if the blog linking stategy has paid off already.

If I had had half a brain, I would also have scribbled down the number of incoming blog links to Expressen on Oct 23, so that we could compare, but unfortunately I didn’t.

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Top 100 Social Media and Social Networking Blogs

VirtualHosting.com has put together a nice list of what they define as the Top 100 Social Media and Social Networking Blogs. Some very good ones are on it (congrats Neville, for example) and others I haven’t read, but will check out. And perhaps if I rename this blog “Social Media Culpa” I’d have a shot at being included next time (I guess having a unique blog name wasn’t a criteria…).

😉

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Are PR agencies ready to rule web 2.0?

Swedish companies invest 288 million kronor (45.5 million USD) per year in social media campaigns. Well, actually they don’t. But it is an intriguing thought, if they did. According to a survey by Coremetrics called ‘Face of the New Marketer’, US marketing professionals spend 7.8 percent of their online marketing efforts on social media campaigns in Q3 2007.

social media investments

During the same period, Swedish companies invested 924 million kronor (146 million USD) in online advertising (pdf). If the same percentage of the Swedish online budgets were spent on social media, that would be about 72 million kronor per quarter, or 288 million per year. Now, I don’t believe for a second that we are even near those figures yet but you could look at the number as the potential market for these services in the short term. Then you could start asking yourself questions like:

a) How long will it take for us to get there?
b) What will drive marketing professionals to spend on social media?
c) What type of consultants will capture the lion’s share of the spending?

And let me make a quick attempt to answer, just from the top of my head:

a) Probably longer than what is healthy for many brands
b) Communications agencies need to evangelize these services to clients, they need to show ROI and how to measure, and they need to show successful cases
c) I am convinced that PR agencies could be in the driver seat when it comes to social media.

Dagens Media’s editor in chief Rolf van den Brink asks this week whether PR agencies in Sweden are ready to handle the social media landscape. And while I think many agencies lack deeper knowledge about web 2.0, I disagree that advertising agencies should be better suited than PR agencies to tackle relations directly with customers. PR agencies are used to managing relations with different audiences and to deal with messages that aren’t directly in your control. Previously you needed to communicate via gatekeepers (read: journalists) that could distort, praise or ignore your message. In social media, your message is in the hands of the consumers. If any consultant would be able to advise clients on communicating in a transparent, chaotic, conversational media landscape, then it should be PR agencies. I don’t see advertising agencies excel in two way communication, do you?

Björn at JMW adds a few more arguments:
– PR agencies are good at assessing news value, which will also be relevant in new media.
– PR agencies are experts on producing content, which can drive the conversation.

But that’s in theory. How it is in practice, is a completely different ball game. Some agencies are already working with these matters, while others are many steps behind. So, who’s ready to make 288 million kronor?

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Media execs: 40% of content user generated in 3 years

During the IFRA Expo, the content management company Polopoly asked 3,000 European executives in media about their thoughts on user generated content. The respondents said that they believe that 40 per cent of their content could be user generated within three years (in Swedish here). Earlier this year an Accenture study said that “media and entertainment executives see the growing ability and eagerness of individuals to create their own content as one of the biggest threats to their business”.

Disclosure: I used to work at Accenture.

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How to jeopardize your brand for $5.98

The US bank Washington Mutual positions itself as an informal, friendly and fun bank. But Shel Holtz’ experience with the bank when he needs to send some cash to his son, who is in the army, is neither friendly nor fun. He concludes his story by saying that “The Stanley Cup Playoffs will be held in hell before anyone in our family has anything to do with WaMu again.”

When the gap between rhetoric and reality becomes too big, today’s consumers spell it out on their blogs or on social networks, which may seriously hurt a brand. Companies, are you listening?

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