If you’re not down with the Google+, in a nutshell, it’s Google’s social offering which smoothly integrates its existing online product suite – including Google Places and Maps, Web and Image Search, and YouTube. Connections are allocated to ‘circles’ allowing for topic-focused discussions to be limited/shared among relevant users.

At first glance, Google+ may appear as a hybrid of Twitter and Facebook however it is unique in what it offers brands, now with the introduction of brand pages.

The current user base is quite niche (40 million strong) consisting of mostly the very tech/media savvy – however, how many of these users are actively engaged is a contentious point. FMCG brands (like Coca-Cola) are experiencing low levels of engagement whereas Mashable, Toyota and even The Muppets are performing very well.

In summary…

Pros:
- Great from an SEO perspective as posts are returned in Google search results.
- Google+ offers live, group audio/video chats called ‘Hangouts’, between itself and its audience. Hangouts provide an opportunity for brands to directly engage in discussions with its audience.

Cons:
- For brands, there can only be one admin per page.
- Pages can’t add people to circles until the a user has first circled or mentioned the page in a post.
- No official vanity URLs.
- No official insights.

Recommendation:
Know your audience and do some research. If they have a presence on Google+ then this is your opportunity to engage with them on a less news saturated platform. Be sure to update regularly upon creating the page – don’t let it die. Like other social media platforms, your presence needs to have longevity.

Only until standard consumers catch up, should FMCG brands put efforts towards engaging with the community – unless they form a unique selling point like Pepsi. Alternatively, efforts/resources/money will go to waste.

As someone who is tweeting before the birds most mornings, I realise that I’m probably the wrong Gen Y representative to be having this proverbial whinge, however I do feel a strong sense of kinship with my unfairly burdened peers.

To give you a bit of perspective: I completed my PR degree at UTS – arguably the best communications course in the city – in 2009, and not once do I recall a mention of social media in the curriculum. I believe it’s changed now, but it’s a fair warning that even 24 year olds with a university degree may not have not been trained in this field. In the online community right now, “Social Media Experts” seem to be Gen X for the most part – and this is true of the most experienced social media user in my agency.

In my opinion, the root of the problem is that whilst most business owners and managers have begun to realise the value of social media – they are not actually using it. This is fine, it’s a personal choice and I’ll be the first to admit that social media is not for everyone, but it does make it hard to manage a project or delegate tasks when the area you’re managing is so foreign.

For those that are not on social media, I would like to give you a heads up. Yes, most of us Gen Y kids do consider Google to be a part of our cerebral cortex and the iPhone an extension of our index fingers, but what you (and your business and your clients) need to know is:
- The fastest growing demographic on Facebook is the over 55s
- On Twitter, 53% of Tweeps are over 25 years old, and a third are earning more than $70,000/year
- Less than 14% of Australians on facebook are under 18
- Australians make up for just 0.3% of the world’s population, but are responsible for 11% of all social media traffic

Social media has a higher circulation and readership than any national newspaper. The audience is mature, active and engaged. Are you going to let the youngest junior manage this communications campaign, just because their birth decade begins with a ‘9’?

**This blog post first appeared on the Public Relations Institute of Australia website, written by Margarita Peker

Getting your story placed on a high profile blog is a good thing, right?  Lot’s of eyeballs eyeing your clients story.  One of these high profile blogs, the Huffington Post, is eyeing new readers with it’s Patch network of hyperlocal sites, and a new venture aimed at teenagers.

This news dropped friday around lunch time in North America so it mostly didn’t get a lot of play, but it’s picking up steam on monday as (paid) bloggers are latching on to the HuffPo’s business model: we pay in Whuffie.

There’s an unending supply of fresh graduates and inexperienced writers for whom the opportunity to work with a real editor (probably) is a good payment for 500 words of churn.  I’m not going to go deep into the morals of this business model (it’s short-sighted and exploitative) or into the economics of new media journalism (it’s broken). For the purposes of this blog, I bring it up to call attention to our audience as marketers.

This is who you’re pitching to.  For the unpaid writer, putting out something that will pull a lot of eyes might get them a paid gig writing elsewhere.  Their byline (and personal brand) are going to be all over their stories and the further those stories go, the better.

And for the paid writers, many of whom are working on a churn business model, they need their prose to be quick, snappy and most of all effortless.  Even paid bloggers need to produce a lot, which doesn’t necessarily give them time for thoughtful analysis or even careful reading of a press release.  A snappy paragraph or two might be all they could manage about your product, event or service.   A quick look at “cool tools” sites like “The Awesomer” or Uncrate” gives a sense of their output.

It’s a copy of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughter House Five that is ad supported. On the cover, or in the pages, a company called WOWIO will insert an “unobtrusive advertisement” to subsidize the cost of the publication.

I see a lot more of this lately: creative placement of ads in heretofore unseen places. It follows behind these clever billboards and these unfortunately placed ads.

It is the result, i’m sure, of millions of dollars worth of agency time and effort. Creative people pouring their brain power into figuring out a new cool place to grab your attention.

I’m sure you’ve seen ads that you find offensive, not in their content, but in their placement. The easy gag here would be, say, an ad for a divorce lawyer outside a wedding chapel, but you get the picture. The question we face in the age of the attention economy is this: what are the sacred spaces? Or more accurately, how can we not be icky?

While an ad on the front of Slaughterhouse 5 for dish network is one thing, an ad for, say, a gun manufacturer would probably be pretty inappropriate.

Most people who refer to themselves as “Social Media Gurus/Experts/Ninjas/etc” talk about engagement, and audience, but they don’t often speak of that old tenet of real estate: location location location. A big part of social media (i would argue the most important) is the ecosystem. Know who you’re talking to and how they talk and (CHIEFLY) what their sacred spaces are. If you don’t know what “Duke Sucks” means, you probably shouldn’t try to get placement on fark.com. “Know thine ecology” should be rule two of social media advertising, right after “content is king”.

First Post T-shirt

For many blogs, the first comment is always “First!”.  Older, more established blogs (which, believe me, is as weird a thing to type as it is to think about) have established policies around “first” posters.  Some get buried, others backdated. Occasionally a blog will go so far as to ban the “firsters” for a 24 hour period simply because the editors find it annoying.  Commenters who post “first” are declaring that they, above all other users, managed to scroll to the bottom of the article and get their user credentials in before anyone else.

That’s all.  For a more detailed examination of this meme, check out the always awesome Know Your Meme, but for the most part just know that it’s mostly considered trolling in these here digital parts.

I bring this up as Google announces it’s latest salvo at Facebook in adding social to it’s search.  My twitter feed this afternoon was splodey with people either asking for an invite or prognosticating on how Google + is destined for the same graveyard as Google Wave and Google Buzz.  But those desiring early invites were interesting in that they weren’t sure what they were in for…they just knew they wanted to be a part of it.

As digital marketers, it behooves us to be aware of these tools, perhaps even register our names on them for future use, but to really invest in them properly takes time.  The equivalent time of reading, digesting and responding thoughtfully to an article before pronouncing “First” (for example).  And nobody wants to be the last person at the party who has to take “Firstname_lastname__1944″ or “clever misspelling” as their handle.  But as we expand beyond the social media gang of three (Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare) and start looking for the next big thing, I’m reminded of Best Buy’s expensive bid in Second Life, a social media network with a diminishing die hard fanbase of animated-penis enthusiasts.

So in a world of QR codes, Quora, Orkut, Minecraft, and important as we figure out how social media fits into the real lives of real people such that we’re not just stuck talking to Robert Scoble and other PR flacks like ourselves.  I mean, I’m happy to drink my own Kool-Aid, but let’s check our feet to see who else is wearing Nikes.

In a meeting with a potential client last week, it became very clear, very quickly that it was going nowhere.  It all began with the following phrase:

“I want it to go viral!”

…a phrase which I’ve bitched about before.  But it got worse when the client (let’s call him Brian) told me his target goals:

“Can you get this up to a million views?”

Now, sure.  I can get you a million views.  I can get you a million fans on Facebook.  Just like I can get you a job working from home and I can make your dick longer.  It’s all gonna cost ya.

The meeting ended when Brian told me the budget:  “Can you do it for under 5 grand?”

For those of you not following along, here’s what I was being asked:  Can I pay you five thousand dollars to use your years of expertise to craft a script that will then be performed, shot and edited and uploaded onto the internet, that will be so compelling, so original, and so universally true that one million people will take time out of their busy day to click on it and watch it all the way through?  And can you make it so that my product (let’s say it’s a dog toy) will be featured prominently.

The answer, of course, is no.  When I get that idea, i’ll be putting it on my own damn youtube channel.

But up that number and we might be talking.  It’s not really a secret that you can buy a certain number in your social media dealings.  Barack Obama has over 21 million Facebook fans and a $150 million dollar social media budget.

So…is it icky to pay for views/fans/followers?  No, despite the expectation that social media is free*, and organic, any SM campaign without an ad budget is either faith-based or delusional.  It’s a busy world out there, and even if someone loves your dog toy, you’ve got to shout a bit to be heard.

But to me the focus on the number is a bigger problem.  These clients are like size queens: worried about the width and girth but not about the skill.  Regardless of what your number is, be it one million, one thousand or 20, can we agree that engagement is a better metric?  Facebook has a nice little percentile that shows how much your social media presence gets re-shared…in other words, that a post resonates.

People use social media for meaning…not to connect with companies they like.  So when you want someone to connect with your company, keep in mind what kind of meaning you’re offering them.  Aim to surprise, delight, amuse, fascinate.  Would you rather be 9 people’s favorite thing, or some spammy thing that someone clicked on once to get a free coupon?

*There’s a larger question here about what people give up in terms of control and privacy in exchange for free access to these platforms, but that’s for someone much smarter than me to debate.

Just a brief note here on facebook’s recent release of their marketing best practices guide.

While one could take issue with their opening statement (“At Facebook everything we do is about making the world more open and connected.” (emphasis added)),

the focus should be familiar ground for anyone in the digital marketing space:

1) Build a Strategy That Is Social By Design

2) Create an Authentic Brand Voice

3) Make it Interactive

4) Nurture your Relationships

5) Keep Learning

Drilling deeper, the Facebook marketing guidelines emphasize flexibility and experimentation.  “Try different combinations of likes and keywords.  Ask questions and listen.  Alter your content to suit your audience.”  Sound advice.  It can be difficult in a world where campaigns are planned out months in advance, but you audience, it should be noted, does not.  Their lives happen day by day, and the world changes…your ability to react will keep the content you create relevant.  A fully planned Facebook campaign with no deviation is like filming a months worth of weather reports in advance…you might get lucky, but most likely you’ll just end up all wet.

Click the link to download the PDF directly.  And perhaps you can hit our facebook page and keep the conversation going.  What do you think about facebook’s official guidelines?

Recently Klick represented at the Public Relations Institute of Australia.  The theme of this month’s talk was “Creative Juices”, though the talk was quite juicy as well.  Two Americans took the stage, and despite their funny accents, gave a great talk on inspiration, perspiration, and a little how to.

The evening started by hearing from Klick’s own, Scotty Iseri.  While we get enough of his Shenanegins here at the office, the PRIA crowd had a great time with his talk.  Scotty spoke about creativity as a muscle to be exercised, and proved his point by having the audience create a short film, live on the spot.

Pulling up audience members from the crowd, and taking suggestions for dialogue and plot, the film was…well, not great.  Which spoke to Scotty’s other point:  create a safe space to “fail” creatively and get the bad ideas out of the way early.

Ryan Peal has the enviable title of Director of Imagination for Momentum Worldwide.  He’s an experienced comms man with work for a lot of the big names in PR, Hills and Knowlton, Fleishman Hillard, and he’s worked on some amazing campaigns.  Ryan gave plenty real world suggestions for helping your brainstorming sessions thrive.

His top tips, or my favorites at least, were all about getting out of the office and using the outside world to fuel your creativity.

-Take a cab ride around the city.

-Have lunch in a different neighborhood.

-Hop on the monorail and do some epic people watching.

All of Ryan’s tips were about shaking things up a bit…changing your perspective.  It’s hard to be creative on a 9 to 5 schedule when you’re stuck behind a desk.  Changing your environment can do you a world of good.

The full presentations are available as a podcast on the PRIA website, though for some of the fun, you really had to be in the room.

The other night I went to see a band called “Telekinesis” at the worst bar in the Pacific Northwest. The band was fine…a tight three piece that made me reconsider my policy of avoiding bands where the drummer is the singer (apologies to Phil Collins). But they were just…y’know…fine. I’m not gonna quit my job and follow them around all summer. There were a handful of people there who went absolutely insane for this band though. This leads me to “Scotty’s Unified Theory of Undistinguished 3-6 White Guy Bands“.

There are bands that I Absolutely Love and they are functionally identical to bands that I could not possibly care less about. For example. I Absolutely Love Possum Dixon. And yet while I don’t hate Yo La Tengo, I could not possibly give less of a crap about them. Certainly these bands sound a little a like, but for the most part, they are competent rock groups, that play some semblance of indie/alterna-rock, and consist of between 3 and 6 white guys.

These 3-6 white guy bands have existed for awhile, but lately consider Guster, Low, Helmet, Spoon, The Vines, The Strokes, Semisonic, Kings of Leon, Dr Dog, Interpol, Hot Hot Heat, MGMT, The Gaslight Anthem, Cold War Kids…I could go on. These bands aren’t multiplatinum, stadium selling hit makers, but nor are they crashing on friends’ couches when they go on tour. They’re the great unwashed middle of “meh” that for some people mean everything and for others mean diddly squat.

The secret is this…it’s an emotional connection. While there may be technically no difference between Possum Dixon and Hot Hot Heat, it was a Possum Dixon album that was playing when I was in college and stole my professor’s camera to take naked pictures of myself. The emotional connection between track 8’s “Executive Slacks” and the cool night air on my rebellious buttocks firmly cemented my love of this band…this band which I admit, sounds very much like other bands.

And I think that’s fine. Not every band is going to be The Beatles (or the Biebers), just like not every brand is going to be Starbucks, Old Spice, or Converse All Stars. In a previous era, creating this emotional connection was purely the purview of advertising. Watch any episode of MadMen to see how this works. But in a connected age, an emotional connection can be created through social media. Whether it’s sponsoring a christmas special and giving away an Xbox , to setting a world record, we’re way beyond the Kodak Carousel in terms of building an emotional bond between consumers and the brands they consume.