The link between social media, crowdsourcing, creating targeted audiences, generating buzz, and greater online distribution of media assets is beginning to transform the PR and Media Relations industry. While this has been in a growth mode in the US, its rare to see it being acted upon in Europe.

Yesterday, Usain Bolt the fastest man in the world, took part in a charity event on the organised by watchmaking brand Hublot, for whom he is an ambassador. He was on the starting line in front of the Hublot’s Headquarters in Nyon, Switzerland pitting himself against 10 child athletes. Hublot had agreed to donate 10,000 US dollars for each child who reached the finish line before “Lightning Bolt”, and ended up paying $100,000 USD to the Usain Bolt Foundation. LABEL vigorously supported the event in creating new channels and online communications through social media channels, assisting the WorldTelevision ENG, video streaming and media relations team to further the reach and awareness event.

LABEL spent time ahead of the event researching and connecting with influencers, Usain Bolt fans, track and field bloggers , watch bloggers and developing the links to existing fan groups on Facebook for track and field , Usain Bolt and Hublot.

In support of the live event a rigourous set of twitter streams were targeted at influencers and media so they were aware of the event on a day when three seperate news items involving Usain Bolt were reported in the world’s media. One of the basic stratgeies employed is that of frequency and consistency of messaging in both buildup, during and post period of an event. This prolongs the news and captures a long tail audience who is both interested in Usain Bolt and Hublot, while delivering and distributing a set of compelling media assets. While everybody may not see it on the day or tune into a live event, the residual effects of well executed tagging and referencing  will ensure that search results will give it greater audience overtime.

Check out some of the videos from Usain Bolt’s charity race against 10 children at Hublot’s HQ in Nyon, Switzerland.
The Race - http://ow.ly/27xrY
Event Highlights with Hublot’s Ambassador Usain Bolt  http://ow.ly/27xt6
General views from Usain Bolt’s charity race at Hublot  http://ow.ly/27xub
Usain Bolt interview http://ow.ly/27xvH
Interview with Hublot CEO, Jean-Claude Biver http://ow.ly/27xxh

“One of the points Mr Zuckerberg was making was that the web has become a lot less anonymous and Facebook is definitely positioning itself as wanting to be the owner of that information,” said Maya Baratz of the Huffington Post. (Given Facebook’s growing and highly influential size the Huffington Post online publication has dedicated a whole section of its site to news surrounding Facebook which you can read by clicking here.)

Zuckerberg told developers at the f8 conference that the experience will mean a more personalized, social, smarter Web. As quoted from an another article on Huffington Post “Facebook is spreading its wings to the broader Web with new tools that will allow users to see personalized versions of websites they visit elsewhere.

The move could change the way people experience the online world, though it could come with deeper privacy implications. By accessing Facebook’s tools, websites will be able to customize the experience based on the list of friends, favorite bands and other things users have shared on their Facebook profiles.

“The Web is at a really important turning point now,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said at the F8 conference for Web and software developers in San Francisco. “Most things aren’t social and they don’t use your real identity. This is really starting to change.”

In its first steps Facebook has changed the semantics surrounding fans “people who like this” – has replaced the former term of “fans.” Facebook has added these new features to its site,

If you haven’t noticed these changes in the past few days take look.

In conjunction with this step it also launched the concept of what it calls Community pages. The concept of Community pages is to revamp users’ profiles to emphasize the pages for bands, books and businesses that users have become fans of. Facebook has started prompting users to essentially combine the two ( a users “Faned” page , and their profile page ) So if you listed The Clash in the “favorite music” section of your profile, Facebook will now ask you to join his page, if you haven’t become a fan of it already.

Facebook has also announced its working to eliminate the FB Connect ‘brand and replacing it with OAUTH – OAuth (Open Authorization) is an open standard that allows users to share their private resources (e.g. photos, videos, contact lists) stored on one site with another site without having to hand out their username and password.

Its also working on projects such as social plugins whch they call GDP (granular data permissions) and continuing to work on user privacy settings.
Zuckerberg said Facebook made sure that its new tools don’t intrude on their privacy. Users’ preferences won’t be logged unless they choose to press the “like” button on websites. If anything, Zuckerberg expects the “like” tools to give people more control over what they want to share with their online entourages.

If users embrace it, Facebook could gain valuable insights that could help it sell more advertising, potentially rivaling online ad leader Google Inc., which typically tailors ads based on keywords in search terms and Web content.

“If I were Google I would be really scared because Facebook might end up with a lot more intelligence than them,” said Alain Chuard, Founder of social marketing firm Wildfire. “Google is just an algorithm, but Facebook could rule the Web.”

So there’s obviously and lot more planned for the near future as the battle for social dominance increases. I wonder what Google will do now since its Buzz launch looks like a knee jerk re action to Facebook’s growing importance and it incremental loses in market share of audience time and visitation online?

When in logged into my Gmail a few nights ago I got a screen that introduced me to Google’s Buzz. At a first glance I skipped over it not wanting to go to deep into a distracting setup that stopped me from doing what I had originally set out to do : check my email . In hindsight I am left questioning whether Google’s BUZZ has any buzz? Buzz will probably have impact on the digital marketing world overtime but its not that apparent at the moment. However, we should take notice of this change.  Buzz is a service that aims to compete in the social networking space not unlike the services of Bebo, Orkut ( owned by Google) Facebook, Twitter to take on the likes of Facebook and Twitter, across devices like the PC and mobile phone.

What Buzz is attempting to do is add the social networking features in the burgeoning number of Google’s services, over the top of the existing number of contacts a person has in their Gmail accounts. It has 97million users at its disposal to do this but it does pale in consideration of Facebook’s 400 million users, Myspace’s 130 million user and Friendster’s 115 million users. Google’s published rationale for Buzz is to work a more centralised and sorted approach to social services, sorting out the noise and organising information into a a relevant experience for users.  On its blog it says  ” With more and more communication happening online, the social web has exploded as the primary way to share interesting stuff, tell the world what you’re up to in real-time and stay more connected to more people. In today’s world of status messages, tweets and update streams, it’s increasingly tough to sort through it all, much less engage in meaningful conversations. ”

At the moment all the sentiment on the airwaves of the net, is that people have invested alot of time in developing their Facebook profiles and friends and their Twitter profiles to want to pull out of these platforms. Here is one observation I had of myself and one that I think is also being spoken about by Buzz critics. I am used to using Gmail for email, behaviourially I go there just to do that : email. I go to Facebook for other reasons , I rarely actually go to Twitter, but access it via another platform . I think changing these behaviours will be hard for Google to do unless it provides a real efficiency. It has said that Buzz is built on all the open API’s so there’s nothing to stop it creating Twitter and FB connections and adding them as services overtime too. The question is will it work? Can Buzz change people’s behaviours ?

The other side to this is its business case. It obvious that Google is trying to hedge into social search to monetize social networking in terms of semantic and geo targeted advertising . It has long been locked out of Facebook and not privvy to the masses of consumer behavioural data that Facebook has been accumulating and only recently coming to terms with and being able to create some intelligence out of it.  This is potentially a huge market. Google can calculate  and index underlying semantics and intelligence surrounding peoples conversations, interests, geo location using this information for a more targeted  and semantically driven array of advertising services.

Google is also well aware  of the mobile advertising potential surrounding both mobile use and geo location. There are critical statistics surrounding mobile use and social networks ( lets look specifically at Facebook )

• There are more than 65 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices.

• People that use Facebook on their mobile devices are almost 50% more active on Facebook than non-mobile users.

• There are more than 180 mobile operators in 60 countries working to deploy and promote Facebook mobile products

The Buzz service is only open to or limited to Gmail users or through Google’s mobile phone , but knowing Google this will not stop just at Gmail. Remember Google got into the consumer electronic space via moblies , why ? Not to build devices but to protect it revenues into the future.  People are moving away or adding a smart phone in addition to their PC, and in the developing world the PC isn’t the connection to a digital world, the smart phone is. So mobile advertising is critical for Google’s growth or maintenance of its business revenues in the mid to long term.

We have seen social media destinations like Facebook or Qzone , Hi 5, Twitter grow at exponential rates in the past few years and take of the form of the new giants and the “Colossus”, Google, is now stepping in with a bid to compete for the consumer attention in social media. Google is no small player and has in recently shown it will flex it muscle and take on the giants or Microsoft and Apple. Buzz possibly has the potential to be a ” Game Changer” if they get the adoption equation right. The game change will not only be for the established Social networks  but for many small startup companies. Take for instance Foursquare or Brightkite who are rapidly gaining popularity these maybe shadowed and pushed into the margins very quickly or get bought as Android and if Google’s phone gains greater market traction. As Google says on the Google phone , “Google Buzz is much more than just a small screen version of the desktop experience. Mobile devices add an important component to sharing: location. Posts tagged with geographical information have an extra dimension of context — the answer to the question “where were you when you shared this?” can communicate so much. And when viewed in aggregate, the posts about a particular location can paint an extremely rich picture of that place” with a Buzz overlay on Google maps.

Sadly Google Buzz on the iPhone is a clunky experience.
My thoughts. Buzz will take a long time to take off. Its hard for people to change old habits if there is no significant increase in efficiency or simplicity.Its a play for social search for targeted advertising tat will become increasingly important, and  Buzz mobile may be the real mid to long term winner.

To view the Buzz offer you should take a look at the Google Blog.

1. By 2014, social networking services will replace e-mail as the primary vehicle for interpersonal communications for 20 percent of business users.

“Greater availability of social networking services both inside and outside the firewall, coupled with changing demographics and work styles will lead 20 percent of users to make a social network the hub of their business communications. During the next several years, most companies will be building out internal social networks and/or allowing business use of personal social network accounts. Social networking will prove to be more effective than e-mail for certain business activities such as status updates and expertise location.”

As in the social network space direct emailing between people has dropped as people prefer to message each other as static email type messages or as IM working directly within the social network interface. The broadcast of messages appears as news feeds either to all persons in a network or as news specifically based upon an individuals interests, affinitities, or information needs has eaten into email’s dominance of electronic messaging and communication in the consumer world and will continue to do so. Interestingly, one enterprise social networking system we recommend from Telligent has a email client bridge at the moment that allows a “cross function”  between an email client and the an enterprise community/or social platform. It integrates to the MS exchange  email client allowing it to  act as social publishing interface when the enterprise user prefers not to enter the social network but still have its postings and interactions visible.

“Gartner recommends that organizations develop a long-term strategy for provisioning and consuming a rich set of collaboration and social software services, and develop policies governing the use of consumer services for business purposes. Companies should also solicit input from the business community on what collaboration tools would be most helpful.”

2. By 2012, over 50 percent of enterprises will use activity streams that include microblogging, but stand-alone enterprise microblogging will have less than 5 percent penetration.

The huge popularity of the consumer-microblogging service Twitter, has led many organizations to look for an “enterprise Twitter,” that provides microblogging functionality with more control and security features to support internal use between employees. Enterprise users want to use microblogging for many of the same reasons that consumers do to share quick insights, to keep up with what colleagues are doing, to get quick answers to questions and so on.

One such enterprise Twitter like microblogging  stream is Yammer, which at LABEL, we use as insight, research, and broadcast channel that doesn’t spam through our email system and allows for quick response and interaction between interested parties.

“However, it will be very difficult for microblogging as a stand-alone function to achieve widespread adoption within the enterprise. Twitter’s scale is one of the reasons for its popularity,” said Jeffrey Mann, research vice president for Gartner. “When limited to a single enterprise, that same scale is unachievable, reducing the number of users who will find it valuable. Mainstream enterprises are unlikely to adopt standalone, single-purpose microblogging products.”

We do differ to Gartner in our thinking. Where we see their use is in smaller defined interest groups inside of large enterprises. The enterprise microblogging services  will be picked up as quick information exchange platforms between collaborating and social groups within an enterprise. This is clearly illustrated by the growth of groups within communities and networks as centres of specific interests or needs.

3. Through 2012, over 70 percent of IT-dominated social media initiatives will fail.

I think this supports the adage we often adopt in recommending social media activities with clients be they consumer facing or in the enterprise. It not about the technology , but about how people use the technology. Start with the people equation first, not the technology equation and the adoption of these tools will ultimately succeed. We advise our clients to stop, listen and learn, create an engagement strategy that supports the business and communication objectives of before concentrating on the what and how of the technology. The answer is clearly underscored by the observation we have of IT companies making consumer facing websites or working out consumer engagement strategies in terms of digital marketing they just don’t do it very well, they deliver a platform not a communications solution and a strategy.

“When it comes to collaboration, IT organizations are accustomed to providing a technology platform (such as, e-mail, IM, Web conferencing) rather than delivering a social solution that targets specific business value. Through 2013, IT organizations will struggle with shifting from providing a platform to delivering a solution. This will result in over a 70 percent failure rate in IT-driven social media initiatives. Fifty percent of business-led social media initiatives will succeed, versus 20 percent of IT-driven initiatives.”

“Enterprises will need to develop entirely new skill sets around designing and delivering social media solutions. Until this happens, failure rates will remain high. A dearth of methods, technologies and tools will impede the design and delivery of social media solutions in the near term. But long term, enterprises will realize that social media is not a “hit or miss” activity naturally prone to high failure rates, and that a calculated approach to social media solution delivery must be an IT competency.”

4. Within five years, 70 percent of collaboration and communications applications designed on PCs will be modeled after user experience lessons from smartphone collaboration applications.

” As we move toward three billion phones in the world serving the main purpose of providing communications and collaboration anytime anywhere, Gartner expects more end users to spend significant time experiencing the collaborative tools on these devices. For some of the world, these will be the first or the only applications they use. The experience with these tools for all who use them will enable the user to handle far more conversations within a given amount of time than their PCs simply because they are easier to use. Just as the iPhone impacted user interface design on the desktop, the lessons in the mobile phone collaboration space will dramatically affect PC applications, many of which are derivatives of decades-old platforms based on the PBX or other older collaboration paradigm.”

5. Through 2015, only 25 percent of enterprises will routinely utilize social network analysis to improve performance and productivity.

The practices of Social Media analysis and the growing number of tools that are examining dialogue, sentiment, and the semantics surrounding consumer expression in participatory media can be applied as useful methodology for examining the interaction patterns and information flows that occur among the people and groups in an organisation or company. Gartner says “However, when surveys are used for data collection, users may be reluctant to provide accurate responses. When automated tools perform the analysis, users may resent knowing that software is analyzing their behavior. For these reasons, social network analysis will remain an untapped source of insight in most organizations.”

“Before undertaking a social network analysis, Gartner recommends that the organization ensure that it has the trust and buy-in of the people it hopes to include in the analysis in advance. Issues of privacy and confidentiality must be addressed and a determination needs to be made regarding how the information will be used and communicated. Establishing the ground rules upfront will encourage more open and honest participation and reduce the resistance to ongoing relationship monitoring.”

The rise of the importance of the  Facebook fan page has become an integral part of companies social media campaigns or presence. Its not hard to understand why. Facebook is the web’s most popular destination after Google ( it is number 1 in Indonesia, Philippines , Malaysia and Singapore )   where the average user spends in the order of 33 minutes per day and its registered user numbers are upwards of 350 million. As the use or entry to a brand’s website are in decline due to a shift in how consumers use the web this days it makes common sense to to add Facebook into the online marketing mix. With number of brand, star, cause or business fans ranging close to 5.3 billion , that means News Feeds to user’s pages are carrying  a range of  brand content and updates.

View  a full review of Facebook’s internal statistics

Last November  “The Big Money” part of Slate Magazine,  ranked  50 brands that they see as making the best use of Facebook. The ranking is based on factors like number of fans, page growth, frequency of updates, creativity and fan engagement, not just numbers of fans. According to “The Big Money” Coca-Cola is ranked as the brand that makes best use of the social network thanks to its “organic fan-centric page without a corporate feel” and some extremely good apps the currently coin the phrase “Share Happiness” in a campaign to boost the diffusion , awareness and contact with the brand in social media.

On Facebook currently  there appears to be no common thread to a brand campaigns or successes in appealing to users. Brands such as Starbuck’s , Papa John’s Pizzas, TGI Fridays all have gained large numbers through a tactical “promotional friending” or free food and drinks in exchange for friendship amongst other tactics. Others with very popular ratings either use the channel for fast paced entertainment updates, customer interactions and feedback, user polls, and contests. “Flavour tournaments” have driven large fans bases for food brands and beverage brands  where consumers have been asked to create or give opinions on developing new flavours. The winners in this type of engagement are Pop Tarts, Mountain Dew, and Vitaminwater.

Here are the Top 10 as presented by The Big Money with the current fan numbers as of today:

The brand benefits of CRM and Social Marketing Programs are obvious.  Value exchange creates loyalty and potentially advocacy – By providing a benefit you will be most successful if you also consider the value expectations of your audience. Providing value will ensure your customers continue engaging with your brand in the social landscape. In the sense of making brand advocates of your consumers your exchange might even inspire them to share the value you provide with others.

In terms of marketing communications, many of your online ‘friends’ or fans will only remain a ‘friend’ as long as you keep providing a value exchange in your services, content, newsletters, tweets or updates. The same value exchange already exists in other services that include loyalty programs, memberships and clubs where there are high levels of consumer interaction and the value of being involved has tangible rewards. Its also good to remember that these activities sometimes have a high cost.  Even if you are on smaller programs of involvement the exchange still needs to be in place, small tokens of appreciation always work well.

The ubiquitous social term ‘friend’ should not be mistaken as being similar to friends in the real world. The value of exchange needs to be balanced and considered for the long-term relationship. Short term goals or sales in favour of a brand might not sustain a relationship withits  circle of friends. Brands cannot assume that they have a bond of friendship strong enough to get away with delivering content that benefits the brand alone or doesn’t maintain the relationship. This one way relationship will not work online anymore. So if someone becomes your online ‘friend’ it is the brand that needs to earn the friendship and nurture the relationship, not them. Make sure you continue to deliver value of service, content etc in your exchange with your online ‘friends’ or they will move onto other ‘friends’ ready to give them attention.

So what benefits and value are you providing for your consumers beyond your product?

According to the BBC, initial data from Trendrr, a Web service that tracks activity on social media sites, the number of Twitter posts containing “Michael Jackson” totaled more than 100,000 per hour. That put the momentary news of Jackson’s death equal to the peak surrounding the Iran protests ten days before.

Twitter posts on #iranelection reached 100,000 per hour on June 16 and eventually climbed to 220,000 per hour. In response to the Iranian governments shutdown of both local and international from reporting on the events unfolding in Iran, it’s connected populace turned to social media channels, to break the news using mobile phones, through proxy servers setup by freedom of speech advocates in the US and their own blogs and social media outlets. The Twitter channel #iranelection gained so much importance and notoriety in a matter of a few days that the State Department of the US asked Twitter to postpone network maintenance so it could continue monitoring the service. The opening of social media channels spread the defiance against the Iranian government, caused an intense cyberwar (Crisis in Iran Sparks Global Guerrilla Cyberwar) and caught the traditional media outlets by surprise. The effects of the  immediacy of news and the spontaneity of world’s citizens to rebroadcast and support that news was so profound that even CNN’s Christina Amanpour was quoted in the New York Times saying “You can’t keep news down anymore & that’s a huge change…getting the word out is totally democratized.”

Twitter had matured in an instant and its reported plateau on user adoption from the month before was suddenly just another small bump in Twitter’s rocky road to mainstream user adoption.

Twitter’s growing impact on journalism is punctuated by what is  happening in Iran. News services like CNN and BBC renowned for on the spot reporting were caught out, the world was watching the news , but not on their channels. Mainstream media commentators posted a pieces on rules of engagement for journalists following the 1st spike in activity when the true power of the world’s citizens voice was amplified through Twitter.  Coincidentally at the same time as history was being created in Iran, Clay Shirky of TED was delivering the this message on how Social media  helps define history through instant reporting.

Notably on these two defining events the buzz surrounding the Twitter service peaked as a new wave of adopters hit the platform.  Here’s a  look at a what these two events effects on Twitter have been.

User Adoption

How to Use  Twitter – The question on what to do ?

With all this buzz surrounding the Twitter platform and its continued massive adoption, the service has to really work on capturing these waves of people and turning them to loyal users. Its failure to scale an infrastructure quick enough for unexpected demand reminds me of my days at Activision. The combination of deep social media based fan communities and highly precision driven digital campaigns together would on occasion overwhelm our servers. The technical infrastructure guys would cringe saying it wasn’t good, but the marketing teams pointed to it as a success point the “digital marketing efforts” were working extremely well. Needless to say it was seen a good problem to have, it spurned an investment in an web serving environment that could handle the onslaught of big and hugely successful campaigns and opened peoples eyes to the strength and importance of the digital and social media.

What is clear from my experience is you have got to have a brand people love then users will forgive a few hiccups in service or shortcomings. What is obvious is that the people have spoken, Twitter is gaining love.  It has peoples attention and will be forgiven for a few outages. Now it has to capitalize on these peaks and show that its a platform worthy of true love and loyalty.