Matt Rhodes

When brands are getting started in social media, they really benefit from understanding who is currently talking about them online, what they are saying, to whom and where. After auditing what your brand footprint currently is, you can begin to make decisions about where you should have a presence, the issues of interest to people in social media and the discussions and debates that your brand can both benefit from and contribute to.

Last week, I was interviewed for an article in the Independent about how brands should be using social media. Whilst some of the other interviewees talked about how brands could use the like of Twitter, I took a step back:

Two things this week have shown the weakness of the traditional media outlets in the face of online communities of people. On Monday a judge issued an embargo on the Guardian newspaper to stop it reporting a question that was asked in the House of Commons. Within 18 hours not only had this embargo been lifted, but the question itself had possibly become the most reprinted and widest spread question ever raised in the British Parliament.

An experiment by students at MIT has shown that they were able to ’successfully’ predict the sexuality of people based on their friends on Facebook. The so-called ‘Project Gaydar’* showed that by looking at information that a person’s friends share online (in this case, their gender and sexual preferences) they were able to learn something about an individual themselves, even if their profile had high levels of privacy.

People often describe Twitter as “Facebook reduced only to the status update”. I always found this a poor description, as there was always a significant difference between my Twitter updates and Facebook statuses. With Facebook I can only tell people about me; with Twitter, I can include other people and other topics in the conversation. This is what @ replies do on Twitter – they let me include other people in my updates and associate it with them as much as it is associated with me.

FMCG brands are often some of the most innovative in their use of digital and social media but this great presentation from Helge Tennø shows the importance of staying ahead of the market. And of continuing to innovate what you are doing, to avoid becoming what he calls a Big Lazy Brand.

A couple of weeks ago, we wrote about how to write your firm’s social media policy. How it was important, first and foremost, for firms to have a social media policy. And  that it is best to involve employees throughout the process of developing and implementing it.

For any firm, a social media policy is sensible. Your employees are already all using social media, they are talking to each other on their, they  might say who they work for, they are giving advice to friends and maybe to customers. Having a vibrant and active set of employees online is great for any firm, but a simple set of guidelines helps both the brand and also the employees.

We’ve written before about the size of the Russian social networking market, and the fact that Russia has the world’s most engaged social network users. And this weekend it was reported that one of the largest, Russian-language, social networks might be plotting an international roll-out.

One powerful use of online communities is to help get new ideas into a business; taking advantage of the fact that many (if not most) of the best ideas for your business are likely to come from outside, from people who don’t work for you. There are some well know examples of businesses working with consumers on co-creation in this way: MyStarbucksIdea and Dell’s Ideastorm being among the most well known.

Online retailers are doing relatively well in the current economic climate. Whilst spending is down across the board, online retailers are doing either significantly less badly than their traditional competitors, or they are actually performing strongly. Both ASOS and Vente-Privee are seeing relatively strong performances in a weak retail market.