It has become pretty easy to create a social dashboard in Google Analytics now that we have specific social reports. It's even a lot easier if someone else does it for you. ;)
Feel free to download the Social Media Dashboard for Google Analytics and customize it.
Not all was lost when the infamous Belgian speech technology pioneer, Lernout & Hauspie, crashed and burned back in 2001. This nifty website by Easy Way language center uses Google’s speech recognition technology to help you improve your pronunciation while also having some fun
In an innovative piece of social journalism, WSJ reporters and editors are using Facebook’s Timeline tool to cover Facebook’s initial public offering.
The news org has created a new Facebook page, www.facebook.com/GoesPublic, using Timeline to not only chronicle its IPO roadshow but to also tell the history of Facebook.
A survey from Branded3 has found that URLs receive a significant boost in Google rankings when they are shared on Twitter, with those receiving over 7,500 tweets almost always ranking inside the top five results on search engines.
Other key findings:
This campaign from Volkswagen shows the way. To promote the VW Amarok they created the Facebook Flipbook. It consists of 200 images that are following each other. You just keep your finger on the > button and flip through the album so fast that it turns into a never ending movie loop.
Art meets technology in this recent Sony Ericsson Xperia commercial from Japan.
But you can only fully appreciate this masterpiece once you have seen this led-suit enhanced dance routine performed by Wrecking Crew Orchestra in its entirety.
And of course you can check out the making of as well.
Only in Japan...
Five guidelines for adapting Big Ideas for the new media landscape:
1. It’s More Important To Have A Point Of View Than A Line.
Activities thrive better than ads in the new media landscape. So the most useful Big Idea is a point of view than can inspire activities. John Grant refers to this as a Marketing Enthusiasm: a point of view on the world that is bigger than the brand or the product. Persil's 'Dirt Is Good' is more than an eye-catching line. It is a marvelously rich point of view about how children develop through play. For example, its website currently promotes a list of 33 things to do before you're ten. Contrast this with Samsung's alleged Big Idea: 'Imagine'. There's no point of view there, nothing to engage with. So 'Imagine' ends up shoehorned in as the opening to its line of copy. Russell Davies nicely mocked what happens to meaningless Big Ideas online: "It was OK when a Big Idea had to support three TV scripts and some posters, but its flatness shows when the poor digital agency has to turn it into an immersive, online experience, not just a silly game of whack-a-mole with the brand mascot."
2. A Big Idea Cannot Depend On A Line
This seals the deal for me. The real growth media of recent years - music festivals, mobile phones and Facebook applications - don’t have room for them. The fragmentation of media and the shift to global marketing means that Translation, whether in to different channels or different languages, is the priority.
3. One Big Idea Doesn’t Mean One Big Execution.
Historically Big Ideas came in the form of big executions. I first encountered The Future’s Bright, The Future’s Orange through an epic cinema commercial. I thought it was dazzling at the time; I suspect I would find it indulgent today. The best way to manifest a Big Idea today is through a whole bunch of activity. The same positioning could inspire a series of 'marketing molecules' that make the most of the media and the audience. No one molecule is the high point of the brand; all contribute to it. Nike is the brand of Joga Bonito, 10K and Supersonic. Top Shop is the brand of personal shopping, vintage and the Kate Moss range. To steal a quote from Ben Malbon of BBH: media fragments, ideas don’t.
4. Align Your Big Idea To Your Business
Big Idea marketing is most powerful when it brings people along with the business. A truly robust Big Idea should be rooted in how the business generates value, where the business is going, or in the culture of the brand. Apple's 'Think Different' works on all these levels. It’s difficult getting an organisation to buy in to a Big Idea if the accountants and engineers suspect that it's just sugar sculpture from the marketing department. It's easier to get alignment and results out of something that is commercially true. I'll bet that Orange's new 'I Am' idea has more trouble taking root in the company than See What You Can Do had at 02.
5. Match Your Brand Behaviour With Audience Behaviour
A traditional Big Idea didn't care who you were or where you were. But today channels make such a difference to how people deal with ideas: quick, useful interpretations of the brand idea for mobile phones; rich, interactive ones for the Internet, visual spectacles in-store. Brand strategists used to understand consumers as consumers of the brand. I wasted my early days in advertising like a Victorian botanist trying to establish whether buyers of Felix cat food were a different species from people who bought Whiskas. Now brand strategists need to understand their audiences as consumers of media. The most useful channel-planning tool today is probably a Venn diagram of how the brand behaves and how the audience behaves. The overlap should always inspire something interesting.
HT @ouilouis
My presentation from last week's Social Media Forum with some hands-on advice on how to create and manage content on social media.
