An approach to ’social centric’ planning

Following lots of presentations on the importance of social media, here are a few thoughts on putting ’social’ at the heart of marketing plans. Very much work in progress so any thoughts are welcomed.

bus shelter roof advertising

genius or annoying or only relevant to tourists on open top buses and youts playing loud music on their phones?

or all of the above?

Mindshare Twitter research

Very late in coming but here is some research we have conducted at Mindshare on Twitter. Using both qual focus groups and quant network analysis we’ve looked at the various ways people are using the network, how brands are engaging them and the spread of branded messages. From this we have drawn some rules of engagement for how brands should approach Twitter as part of their broader social media strategies.

how facebook beat myspace

A fairly conclusive Hitwise chart revealing the visit fortunes of Facebook and Myspace over time – from an interesting article on Read, Write, Web on How Facebook beat Myspace: From College Dorm to Platform

some recent work

It’s been a while since i posted about any campaign work so here’s some of the latest stuff:

Pepsi Maxcast – a continuation of M&B’s branded music curation on myspace but this time from a blog platform and then out across twitter, tumblr, facebook and youtube. The boys at Pirata have done a great job on the new design work.

Aero Thought Bubbles – a simple little facebook application that let’s you add ‘thought bubbles’ to your pictures on facebook. 20,000 fans of the brand in less than a week show how people will actively get involved if it is around a passion, such as chocolate!

Nike – Show Your 5 – a bit old now but still a great campaign involving a video mashup tool on Youtube and some superuser outreach with our friend Smivadee.

Future of mobile

i’m currently doing some research for a future media debate at Mindshare and coming across lots of interesting stuff, most of which I’ll post after. in the meantime one interesting film that doesn’t quite sit with our case and I don’t think will hurt our argument if i share, plots the recent growth of mobile and makes predictions on where it’s all going:

if the future is anywhere near this then it has huge implications for mobile brands and the following highlights the predicament that major manufactures currently find themselves in compared to apple:

social media propaganda

Some social media propaganda from socialnomics. I don’t entirely buy some of these stats but it still paints a compelling picture (not that readers of this blog probably need much convincing):

what’s next

A great follow up from Paul Isakson to his deck from last year - ‘What’s next in Marketing and Advertising’:

What’s Next In Marketing And Advertising (2009)

View more documents from Paul Isakson.

Best Buy getting it, again

Following the video from Barry Judge the CMO of Best Buy on the Marketing Capability, this is a great ad that again demonstrates how the retailer gets and is embracing Twitter. Check out Twelpforce and #twelpforce.

it’s the internet, stupid

I’m working on various projects at the moment (will post once done) about the future of media, twitter and how the internet is going to change our TV experience, and this fantastic TED talk from Clay Shirky nails a theme that runs consistently through each of these pieces of work. (It also nicely brings to life what Gordon Brown talks about in his surprise talk at TED Global last week).

The internet is now social, the old rule of top down media is dead, control is giving way to convening and this is all irrevocably changing the media landscape, our organisations and politics. From twitter dictating the flow of news to google liberating the content on our TV screens, it all directly impacts the role that media and brands play in people lives.

I’ve not got the answer, but as this is all changing faster than the agencies we work in and the brands we work for, it seems time to step back and reconsider how we ‘advertise’.

There is more on this also from Chungaiz over at TheScrapbook, where he talks about Jeff Jarvis’s ‘Advertising as Failure’ and Monocol’s approach to media titles as creative partners.

I would love to know your thoughts on the above, please comment or email alastair.cotterill@mindshareworld.com