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HTC One: ‘Mobile of the Year’ or ‘Over-Hyped Toy’?

Posted by Paul Sutton on June 10, 2013 in Mobile Web

Image Credit: DailyTech

When the good people at Phones 4u gave me the opportunity to get my grubby mits on the new HTC One smartphone, I jumped at the opportunity. As an Android devotee and a loyal HTC customer who has an upgrade due imminently, I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. How does the latest HTC handset cope as a full-on comms device? Can it really compete with Samsung’s Galaxy S4? And can it revive the ailing company’s fortunes? Let’s find out…

First Impressions
The HTC One is fast. Very fast. But more on that in a moment.

The first thing you notice about the One is its looks. Encased in cool aluminium and as slim as a post-detox Victoria Beckham, it really is a beautiful device. The second thing you notice when you turn it on is how bright and crystal sharp the screen is. It makes any other screen I’ve seen on a mobile look positively dull.

Performance
As I say, the One is an extremely fast and smooth mobile. Turn it on and it boots and syncs in seconds. And there’s not a hint of lag when opening or operating apps. The likes of Feedly, Zite, Evernote and Carbon work superbly, and even Facebook’s notoriously clunky mobile app is almost a joy to use. Almost. Syncing with and downloading from Dropbox is seamless and, furthermore, Google+ makes complete sense on a device like this, and sets the standard by which all mobile apps should measure themselves.

Transitions between apps and screens are almost suave on the One thanks to the Sense 5 interface, and it interprets Android Jelly Bean beautifully. Apps are downloaded, installed and updated in super-quick time and, furthermore, the speed is consistent whenever the device is in use. The One is as smooth and elegant as Sean Connery wrapped in a velvet jacket.

Battery Life
One of the things that immediately concerned me when I first got my hands on the One was the lack of access to the battery as the case is sealed. I’ve made a habit of carrying a spare battery with me over the last couple of years if I know I’m going to be out and using my mobile a lot, and a handset that dies before the end of the day is a deal-breaker. I needn’t have worried. The battery will easily last a full day on moderately heavy use, and in one test I carried out, it went well over two full days on light use without needing to be charged. Mighty impressive.

Features
At the risk of repeating myself, both the camera and the voice interface on this device are fantastic. The camera takes crystal clear, detailed pictures that look fantastic when put through the filters in Pixlr-o-matic, while the One is the first smartphone I’ve used that truly makes sense of voice commands. In combination with this device, Maluuba blows Siri completely out of the water.

As with all HTC handsets, some of the Sense features make the One standout from the likes of the Galaxy. The customisable BlinkFeed news stream and the Zoe gallery display are great additions that integrate the best of the Windows 8 devices out there, and even the Car app makes great sense in-situ.

Downsides
In truth, I really struggle to find any fault in the HTC One. If I had to be really picky, the lack of an SD card may cause storage issues for some, although with great apps like Dropbox and Spotify out there, this is increasingly irrelevant. Being even more picky, the One is limited to only five customisable screens, which may limit the number of information-rich Android widgets you can use. But that really is about it.

Summary
The HTC One is an awesome smartphone and a wonderful comms device. My last two mobiles have both been HTC devices; the Hero and the Sensation respectively. Both widely top-rated at the time of their release, HTC has since dropped the ball and been usurped by Samsung with the Galaxy S3 and then S4. Innovation dried up and revenues dropped. But with the One, HTC is firmly back at the cutting edge of smartphone design.

With the styling and smoothness of an iPhone, the great flexibility and feature set of an Android, and the tiled interface of a Windows 8 device, the HTC One really is all things to all men.

Disclosure: I was sent an HTC One smartphone for review. No payment was received for this post. All reviews are 100% honest.

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Posted by Paul Sutton

Tags: htc, reviews, technology Permalink

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Stats that Explode the Myth that Facebook Promoted Posts Suck. (Maybe)

Posted by Paul Sutton on June 5, 2013 in Facebook

Image credit: The Guardian

With Facebook becoming an increasingly pay-to-play platform for brands, Page administrators are often left with little choice but to use the promoted posts function in order to reach the very people who’ve signed up to get their news and updates. Promoted posts are widely rounded upon for being extortionately expensive, especially when compared to standard Facebook CPC/CPM advertising. I’ve not exactly shied away from vocalising my own irritation at this state of affairs, but the fact is that Facebook’s not about to reverse its business model anytime soon, so for some brands at least, it’s a case of suck it up and get on with it.

But over the last couple of weeks I’ve been running a small combined advertising/promoted posts campaign for a client in support of a specific on-page initiative. And it’s revealed something very interesting: promoted posts may be expensive in a true cost sense, but in an ROI sense, they beat CPC/CPM advertising hands down. In fact, they outperform the advertising model in just about every metric you care to measure. So maybe they don’t suck quite as much as you think they do?

Take a look at the following data:

Some of this is predictable. We know, for example, that promoted posts are significantly more expensive than advertising when it comes to reach, so you’d expect that the cost per thousand impressions (CPM) would be a lot higher. And indeed it is, incredibly so. Equally, as promoted posts target existing fans and friends-of-fans rather than ‘strangers’, you’d expect the click through rate (CTR) to be much greater and, therefore, the cost per click (CPC) to be lower. But I was surprised by the degree to which this is true. The CTR is in the region of 4000% greater for promoted posts, and the CPC is exactly half that of advertising.

This already reveals something about the ROI of the different pay models on Facebook. But it’s the other metrics that really stunned me when I compared them. Despite the fact that promoted posts are targeted in part at existing fans, whereas (in this campaign) advertising is targeted completely at non-fans, the cost per new fan (CPL) for promoted posts is less than a third of the cost of advertising! So which performs best for acquiring new fans? Promoted posts.

Furthermore, the cost per action (page likes, post likes, comments, shares etc) for promoted posts is less than 10% of that of advertising! You get ten times as much engagement from promoted posts in the 28 days following the promotion than you do from advertising. So not only do promoted posts attract more fans than advertising, but they also seem to attract fans who are more likely to engage with the brand, rather than click the Like button and then disappear, never to be seen or heard from again.

So yes, promoted posts are expensive. You can reach an incredible 30 times more people with advertising for the same money. But in terms of what matters, ROI, promoted posts are clearly superior.

Or am I missing something? What are your experiences of promoted posts?

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Posted by Paul Sutton

Tags: advertising, Facebook, ROI, strategy, tips Permalink

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How Mobile Devices are Changing Shopping Behaviour [Infographic]

Posted by Paul Sutton on May 30, 2013 in Mobile Web

The development of mobile devices is changing the face of online shopping. Over 85% of global internet users use the web to make purchases, resulting in a worldwide e-commerce economy worth in the region of $1 trillion.

A new infographic from Dell highlights some of the key changes in behaviour that smartphones and tablets are prompting. And a quick look at some of the key statistics reveals some of the psychology of shoppers using mobile devices.

Incredibly, 81% of smartphone purchases are spontaneous and unplanned. It would appear that the purchase barrier is significantly lower on a tablet or phone than on a desktop computer. And it highlights the importance of having a seamless browsing-to-buying e-commerce presence in order to enable people who are simply checking prices or browsing products to purchase there and then.

“People use their mobile devices to compare prices, check out reviews (a big factor in helping people decided whether to buy or not), and find deals”, explains Dell’s Alan McMahon. “But two thirds of shoppers also use their phone or tablet to make decisions about purchases that they’ll make later on a full-size computer”, he adds, referring to the behaviour of using multiple devices sequentially to shop online.

The other statistic that really struck me was that only 7% of people use social networks for recommendations, at least according to these figures. It’s something I’d seriously question, but if it’s true, where does that leave the social media word-of-mouth evangelists?

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Posted by Paul Sutton

Tags: marketing, psychology, retail, smartphones, tablets, technology, Trends Permalink

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Why Facebook Really Doesn’t Give a Toss that You Hate It

Posted by Paul Sutton on May 28, 2013 in Facebook

If you’re an admin of a Facebook page, you’ll more than likely be growing more and more pissed off with the way the site is developing. Advertising has gone from being an optional extra to being a front-and-centre, in-your-face necessity if you want to communicate with the community you’ve lovingly cultivated over the last few years. And yet when you use it from a personal perspective, you’re only too aware that the increasingly invasive nature of the ads in your own newsfeed is getting out of control and irritating. It’s impacting user experience, and that’s not good news for users or for those advertising.

So what do you do: advertise and hack people off, or ignore Facebook’s increasingly frantic attempts to get you to part with your cash and put up with a less impactful brand page?

Back in the late 70s, the fans of Millwall football club adopted a song in response to sustained criticism by the media for being hooligans. “No one likes us, we don’t care”, they chanted (and still do, see below). I’m starting to wonder whether Zuck & Co. sing it at strategy meetings.

Facebook purports to want to “make the world a more open and connected place”. Bollocks.

Facebook wants to “make money”. That’s all. Since its IPO it’s become very apparent. It has a billion users who pay nothing for the service (other than access to our data and, arguably, our eternal souls). And so in order to ‘make money’, Facebook has to extract every last pound and penny it can from commercial organisations using it through paid advertising. As I write this, I know that I can only reach 16% of the fans on any of the pages I manage through organic means alone. I’m painfully aware that I face a daily battle to get into my communities’ newsfeed, and that it’s nearly 30 times easier to get into Harvard than it is to achieve this!

I also know that Facebook’s increasing emphasis on images means that posting links is becoming fruitless. It’s no wonder our newsfeeds are stuffed full of pictures of cats and babies; it’s what Edgerank assumes is valuable social content. Give me a break… And I’ve also now heard strong (but so far unconfirmed) rumours that page activity no longer appears in the news ticker to the right of the main newsfeed AT ALL.

So where does all this leave us? Paying the extortionate rates to promote posts? (Or “boost” them, as Facebook now patronisingly terms it.) Play the game as Facebook begins to feel more and more like an advertising platform? Why do we bother with Facebook at all? Why don’t we go elsewhere? Why don’t we start building followings across other platforms and going where we can most impact them without being Fraped?

Because we’re not brave enough, that’s why. We put up with being rodgered on a daily basis because we’re scared of losing something. Something that, actually, we don’t really have. Well I for one will be taking a long, hard look at every single page I’m an administrator of with a view to evaluating whether it’s worth it any more. What about you?

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Posted by Paul Sutton

Tags: advertising, Facebook, ROI Permalink

The True Reason for the Death of Post

Posted by Paul Sutton on May 23, 2013 in Trends

The postal service has been under threat for many years. Since the widespread adoption of forms of electronic messaging (primarily SMS and email) in the late 90s, the death knell has been touted as just around the corner for ‘snail mail’. In retaliation and, perhaps, preparation for the inevitable, long-time post guardian the Royal Mail (in the UK) has attempted to modernise and to diversify; to drag itself into the 21^st century. But after listening to an interview on BBC Radio 4 yesterday morning on my way to work, I can categorically say that the postal service will die. Soon.

It seems odd, and rather twee, to be writing something about the Royal Mail in 2013. But there’s a good reason. For within this interview, it was stated that the major threat to the postal service was email. Email: a form of communication that itself is in dramatic decline and has been for a couple of years now to the point where teens and tweens see it as almost archaic.

There was not a single mention of technologies like Facebook messaging, or Skype, or Twitter, or even text messaging, none of which are exactly new. A senior spokesperson at the Royal Mail stated on a couple of different occasions that email provides the biggest challenge to the postal service. Really? It felt like listening to a conversation from ten years ago.

And it’s this lack of nous that signals the end of the postal service, rather than the technologies themselves. To be so far behind the curve is actually pretty shocking. For an organisation that is in the business of communications to be hanging its hat on a competitive medium that itself is already past it betrays a rather depressing and infuriating lack of intelligence and understanding. And given that, I for one will not be bemoaning the day the Royal Mail closes its doors for the last time. Will you?

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Posted by Paul Sutton

Tags: royal mail, skype, SMS, Twitter Permalink

Everything You Need to Know About Agile Marketing

Posted by Paul Sutton on May 15, 2013 in Social Media

It’s been given many names over the last few years, but whether you call it news-jacking, brand-jacking, piggybacking or its latest nomenclature agile marketing, when done well reacting to the news agenda can be one of the most powerful weapons in a PR or social media professional’s arsenal. Social networks, and Twitter in particular, have upped the agile marketing game significantly, with the likes of Premier Inn, Paddy Power and Oreo gaining significant buzz both on and offline as a result of timely interjections published through microblogging.

There are essentially two types of agile marketing: planned and reactive. But both must look reactive even if, in the case of the former, it’s planned to the minutest detail. If an initiative looks contrived it’s guaranteed to bomb, and it’s not an easy balance to strike. But much comes down to preparation (at least, as much as you can prepare for a story that you don’t yet know about…) and having the right mindset to be awake to opportunities and able to react quickly when they present themselves.

Five Secrets of the Agile Marketing Mindset

1. Planning is everything

The starting point of any agile marketing is being aware not only of the news agenda, but of the cultural agenda. True agile marketers know well in advance what major events are happening when, either for pre-planned activities or to enable them to cleverly hijack developments within those events. If you think Oreo got lucky when it published its Superbowl blackout tweet, think again. It had a team of people watching the event with news-jacking in mind.

2. Listening is everything

Having planned to be spontaneous, agile marketers have their finger on the pulse of breaking news. They’re aware of what cultural and political topics people are interested in today. They keep track of what’s forming the major talking points on Twitter. And they spend lots of time just watching and listening for opportunities. They live in the moment.

3. Relevance is everything

It sounds obvious, but not every news story, no matter how big, is suitable for every brand. Agile marketers understand the personality and persona of their brand, and they understand how the news agenda fits with this persona. For every activity they carry out, they’ve probably rejected ten or twenty ideas simply because they didn’t fit with the brand or the brand’s tone of voice. Topics that do make the cut are topics that resonate with the brand’s audience.

4. Timing is everything

At the very heart of agile marketing is the ability not only to spot a story but to respond fast. And with Twitter in mind, fast is measured in minutes not hours. Agile marketers look for stories that are literally just breaking, and they have a relevant, quirky response out of the door in double quick time. In order to achieve this, they’ve gained a position of trust within their company or with their clients. Approval loops are minimised or, in the best case scenario, scrapped altogether.

5. Originality is everything

Equally as important as speed is creativity. Agile marketers’ goal is to get a pithy, quirky or humorous comment out before anyone else can do so. If someone beats them to the punch with a joke (for example), the opportunity has gone. They want to ‘own’ an angle on a breaking topic. That angle may be a simple tweet or it may involve some super-speedy Photoshop work, but the creative element is a very important part of the equation in making something fly.

That’s my take on it, and I’ve had some real successes employing this approach. But am I missing anything? And what great examples have you seen recently of agile marketing in action?

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Posted by Paul Sutton

Tags: brands, company culture, content marketing, creativity, marketing, PR, social mindset, strategy, tips Permalink

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The Social Media Brand Winners (and Losers) in Fergie’s Retirement

Posted by Paul Sutton on May 9, 2013 in Social Media

Brand-jacking. Agile marketing. It’s the latest and greatest thing in social media marketing. Coral bookmakers got it spot on last summer when Robin Van Persie left Arsenal with a fast response on-the-ground stunt, and Oreo nailed it when the lights went out at the Superbowl with a now near legendary tweet.

And yesterday, as the news of Sir Alex Ferguson’s retirement as manager of Manchester United broke on Twitter, there was another fantastic opportunity for some brand magic. But while the social fleet of foot were quick to react to the news with some quick (and quick-witted) responses, there were also some notable absences.

The Good…

Of the many brands trying to strike up conversations around the day’s headline news, Nando’s saw a fantastic reaction to its #NandosFergieTime tweets stating that it would be opening its Manchester restaurants for an additional five minutes, mocking opposing supporters beliefs that United are always afforded additional time in which to equalise or score a winner.

In perhaps the fastest response of the day, Golden Wonder* published a special edition ‘Golden Handshake’ packet design inside half an hour of the announcement, poking fun at Fergie’s pensioner status.

And on Facebook, Kit Kat made reference to the infamous Ferguson dressing room ‘hairdryer’ treatment (pictured above), which he notoriously gave to under-performing players. Meanwhile, Premier Inn got in on the action by tweeting that, as a tribute to Fergie’s 26 yrs at United, customers can request a #FergieTime checkout this Sunday in Manchester to get an 26 extra minutes, while Hiring Bounty posted a reward of £99,000 if someone were to refer someone else successfully for the United manager’s position.

The Bad…

All these initiatives gained great responses and shares on Twitter and/or Facebook. But equally as talked about (if not more) was Wrigley’s, which gained over 1200 jibes on Twitter about it going out of business due to Fergie’s penchant for chewing gum continuously when around the football field (source: Brandwatch). And yet the brand was nowhere to be seen; a missed opportunity for some fantastic tongue-in-cheek social media buzz. And where were the hairdryer manufacturers? As Mark Perkins said on Twitter: “You guys are obviously all over Fergie retiring. If not you shouldn’t be in the game.” They shouldn’t.

And The Ugly…

And then there was Aon, Manchester United’s shirt sponsor. All it could muster was a (let’s be honest) mind-numbingly dull press release congratulating Ferguson on his retirement. “Aon…is also recognized as one of the leading firms on advising clients on the topics of retirement, talent development and succession planning”, it said. Jeesh…

So what are the rules of agile marketing? Why do some things fly and why do some things bomb? I’ll talk about some of the secrets of successful brand-jacking in my next post, so make sure you subscribe now in order not to miss it.

* Disclosure: Golden Wonder is a BOTTLE PR client
With thanks to Emily Leary, Rachel Miller, Paul Rayment & Barry Christie for their input.

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Posted by Paul Sutton

Tags: agile marketing, brands, content marketing, creativity, Facebook, marketing, PR Stunt, Twitter Permalink

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Is it Time to Scale Back on Social Media?

Posted by Paul Sutton on March 4, 2013 in Social Media

Image Credit: Mashable

Here’s a question for you: how many social networks are you a member of?

Three? Five? Ten? If you’re anything like me, and if you’re honest with yourself, you probably have no idea how many networks and services you’ve signed up to in the last few years and now have profiles on. I’m guessing (and it is a guess) that I probably have profiles on at least 30, maybe closer to 40 or 50 social networks and services.

Not only is that just plain ridiculous, but it’s nonsensical from an online security perspective. 40 accounts, many of which are dormant, all using the same email address, a likelihood that some share passwords and lots containing personal information. It’s asking for trouble. In fact, just a couple of hours after writing this I received a password reset security prompt from Evernote after it had been hacked.

There was a great, if rather lengthy, piece on Hubspot last week titled ‘How to Know When to Pull the Plug on a Social Network’, and it got me thinking about all of the rather pointless social media channels we’re a part of. And more pointedly, why. Why do we feel the need to check in on Foursquare if we never look at what other people do or claim rewards? Why do we insist on running pictures of our meals through an Instagram filter? Who really cares when we check in to a movie on GetGlue? And why do we even need an about.me or flavours.me profile if we never use them?

There was a trend around the turn of the year for people scaling back their number of connections on social media and I posed the question then as to whether the numbers game is over. What I wonder now is whether this does or should also apply to the networks themselves, not just the people on them? Different people love different networks, and that’s fine. It’s horses for courses. But we don’t all need profiles on all of these networks.

The Benefits of Multiple Social Media Profiles

There’s a definite argument to say that as someone who works in social communications (or communications in general, whether that be PR or marketing or advertising or internal comms) I/we need to have widespread profiles in order to keep up with and understand changes. It’s a view I’ve always subscribed to. Until now, that is.

If you want to understand the specific nuances of a network, yes you need an active profile. If you have clients who are active on a network, yes you need a profile. If you find a network useful, either personally or professionally, then yes you obviously need a profile. But outside of this, you can be on-the-ball without (necessarily) having an active presence on a network. So my advice: get in, test, learn, get out.

And for me personally, the ‘get out’ part is something I’m going to start doing more of. As of right now. So goodbye Foursquare; it was mildly interesting but ultimately completely pointless. Sayonara Instagram; there are only so many vintage pictures of food I can stand, and even Kelly Brook’s got boring. See ya Pinterest; I never did understand the fascination. A bientot Audioboo; I liked you a lot but never really found a use for you. And so long Quora; you were probably the most vacuous of them all.

And on it goes. I suspect that cleaning up my social web life will be a rather long and tedious process. But something worth doing. What about you? Any plans to strip your network use back to basics?

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Posted by Paul Sutton

Tags: foursquare, instagram, security, strategy, tips, Trends Permalink

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3 Killer Apps That Could Define the Future of SMS

Posted by Paul Sutton on February 22, 2013 in Mobile Web

Early in the 21^st century text messaging became the latest, greatest thing in the communications industry. It exploded firmly onto the scene in 2001 when the number of SMS messages went from 17 billion to 250 billion globally in the space of 12 months. By 2012 this number had climbed to nearly 10 trillion. That’s 10,000,000,000,000. Or ‘a lot’. (source: mobithinking.com)

But despite these huge numbers, the humble SMS seems positively clunky in an age of tweets, Facebook messages and even BBM. (Well, maybe not the latter.) While other methods of mobile communications have developed and progressed, the SMS hasn’t really changed in the last decade. And it’s only a matter of time before its appeal, no matter how enduring, starts to wane. Or is it?

Over the last few weeks I’ve been trialing several mobile apps that could either perpetuate or, alternatively, kill SMS. The future for text messaging is unclear, but the three apps below could have a big say in what that future is.

1 Mighty Text

The single biggest pain in the bottom about SMS is typing on a mobile. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a touch screen on a 4.8” Samsung Galaxy SIII or the keyboard on a Blackberry Curve (does anyone still use a Blackberry?), tapping out a message can be a little annoying at times. For a long time I’ve wanted a decent way of using SMS from my computer screen. Enter Mighty Text.

Mighty Text works as ‘hidden’ app on a mobile that syncs with a website (and optional Chrome extension) on a computer. When your phone receives an SMS, you can read and answer it via your computer keyboard. It’s a very simple concept, but it completely changes the dynamic of text messaging. It syncs your contacts, stores threaded discussions, displays MMS files, enables you to attach files, mark favourites, either respond to or start a new conversation and even monitor your battery level. All in all, pretty darn awesome.

Great if…you’re sat at a PC, particularly at work. Leave your phone in your pocket or bag, or on the desk, and text your mates without even touching it.

Not so great if… you’re an iPhone devotee. Mighty Text is an Android app, so if you’re in Steve Jobs’ pocket, you’re going to miss out I’m afraid.

2 Voxer

Have you ever thought how good it would be if you could send voice messages, rather than written text messages? How much quicker and easier it would be to speak your message, press one button and send? Voxer enables you do just that. Like Mighty Text, it’s a simple idea but, unlike Mighty Text, the iPhone crew will be happy as this works on both Android and iOS.

Voxer is billed as a ‘walkie talkie’ app, which sort of describes it, but sort of not. It’s more like sending short, instant voice mails than an ongoing conversation which, let’s face it, is called a phone call. Dead easy to use, you select a contact who’s on Voxer, hold a button down and talk, then let go and off goes your message. Receiving a Vox is just like receiving an SMS, except you listen to it. This is one you have to try to really ‘get’. But I asked a few friends to sign up and it’s become a primary form of contact ahead of SMS. It’s effective and it’s fun. Could it kill SMS in time? That may be overstating the matter, but once you’ve tried Voxer, you won’t go back.

Great if…you can’t be bothered to type out a text or want to say something a bit longer. Or if you’re in the car.

Not so great if…you’re in a public place. SMS is very private, whereas a Vox isn’t unless you’ve got headphones.

3 Maluuba

You may have heard of something called Siri? You may have heard how Siri is pretty useless? Imagine if Siri was good. Imagine if it worked. It’s called Maluuba. Maluuba is Siri times ten; voice-controlled mobile at its best. And for SMS, it provides an alternative input mechanism that takes the pain out of typing text messages.

If you’re on Android, that is. This is another one that, if you’re on iOS, I’m afroid you’re stack woth Siru. (Sorry, a little Siri humour there.) As a ‘personal assistant’ app, it does far, far more than write text messages for you too, so definitely worth a try. For sheer genius humour, whether you’re on Android or Apple, take a look at the video above.

Great if…you want a voice-control system that actually works.

Not so great if…you’re in loud places as this interferes with the voice recognition. Or you have an iPhone…

What else am I missing? Have you tried or do you use something that could kill or cure SMS?

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Posted by Paul Sutton

Tags: apps, mobile, SMS, technology, tips, tools, voice recognition Permalink

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Overcoming the Challenges of Blogger Outreach

Posted by Paul Sutton on February 20, 2013 in Blogging

A couple of weeks back, blogger outreach platform InkyBee finally came out of private beta after two years in development. Having been party to the development process, I was keen to find out more about what looks like a promising UK-based start up. So I asked Co-Founder of Forth Metrics (the company behind InkyBee) Hugh Anderson all about it…

———————————————————————————————

Where did the idea for InkyBee first come from, and why?

Having worked with lots of small businesses, we were aware of their pains of being unable to measure their web-based activities. There are lots of monitoring tools which track the “buzz” or the “chatter”, but very little that take a step further to actually measure the impact. We market-validated this pain and whilst pretty much everyone “got it”, PR professionals were by far the most enthusiastic. So we set out to build a measurement tool to measure web-based outreach. In discussions with testers during development we identified the further pains of “where do I target on the web?” and “how do I track my progress?”, so we built Inkybee to do it all!

What were/are the major challenges of developing a tool like InkyBee?

It has been immensely challenging, but we do believe we have now created something quite special and valuable. The challenges lie in the areas that will be familiar to web entrepreneurs – collecting, storing and analysing huge amounts of “big data” (hundreds of thousands of blogs and many millions of posts, tags, social media profiles, etc), making the proposition scalable, and, at the same time, making sure the user-interface is slick and user-friendly. It should be said that whilst we believe Inkybee does already deliver value and a great experience, there is a lot more clever stuff to come that is not visible in the beta phase.

What problems and issues do you think InkyBee resolves for those undertaking blogger outreach?

The four principal pains Inkybee solves are:

Finding the most relevant blogs to target;
Deciding which ones are the most “influential”;
Managing the whole process in one place and keeping track of the work done in building relationships with bloggers; and
Measuring the results of any outreach.

All automated, simple, user-friendly and affordable.

You talk in your launch materials about the PR industry specifically, but who are the primary targets for InkyBee? Who do you see using it?

You are right that we see PR professionals as the primary target audience, both agency and in-house. Web-based outreach and its derivatives such as influence marketing are growing and all indicators suggest that blogs will remain a strong element of that. There are lots of other professionals working in this area, including social media managers and digital marketers. Plus, after the Google Panda and Penguin updates, blogger outreach’s importance to SEO professionals has increased dramatically. Finally, we see that it could also be useful for bloggers themselves – just to understand their own niche better, or to look for guest blogging opportunities.

There’s a big emphasis on education when a user first logs in to InkyBee, with video guides as well as downloads of the two free blogger outreach guides you put together. Why is this?

We don’t want to just be seen as a software tool. Web-based outreach is still a relatively new concept, so we see the need to help people to understand what it is, why it is important and how to do it well. The PR industry is getting a bad rep for doing it poorly, so we recognise the importance of helping everyone improve. We see this as win-win for comms professionals and for bloggers who are frustrated with the approaches they currently get. Helping the comms industry do a better job in terms of outreach and measurement is a core objective of ours.

The InkyBee interface is very minimal and clean. Where did the balance lie between the UI and functionality/detail when developing InkyBee?

It’s a difficult balance and there are big improvements still to come in both the UI and the functionality, but the start point is functionality that works and delivers value – we needed to make sure that what we were building did deliver tangible value to users. Only then did we focus on designing a slick, user-friendly UI. We want Inkybee to be a pleasure to use, not a chore and we want it to deliver fast, valuable insights – to do both of those requires excellence in both UI and functionality!

InkyBee makes it very easy to compare blogs according to a number of factors, including potential audience, social network followers and various SEO factors. But a request I receive a lot and something which I noticed was missing in InkyBee is an option to filter blog searches by country. Is this something you have planned?

That old chestnut! The short answer is yes, but it’s difficult. At the moment it is possible to sort by location sourced from the social media profiles and a user can also add a location as a discovery keyword, but we appreciate that this is far from perfect. We are working on geo-targeting and aim to have this running in the months to come.

What do you think makes InkyBee different to similar tools like GroupHigh and Traackr?

I’ve not had access to either of these tools, but from what I’ve seen, GroupHigh does a similar job of finding and comparing blogs. Inkybee’s measurement capability is an area of focus for us – providing an easy way for comms professionals to objectively understand the value of their work and learn from it. Plus, we will shortly be doing some really clever stuff with blog relevancy and context that will greatly improve the blog discovery results. Traackr are also doing some great stuff, but I believe they are specifically focused on “influencer” identification which is very different to our proposition of helping comms professionals with their outreach. There is no scoring system in Inkybee; it finds the most relevant blogs and let’s the user decide which ones are the best based on a variety of metrics.

You’re in early public beta, which obviously means there’s still plenty of development to be done. What timescales have you set for coming out of beta?

It might be an early public beta, but we’ve been in private beta for a long time, as we’ve been developing for over 2 years. Development will inevitably be ongoing to make Inkybee all we want it to be, but we aim to commence a 30-day count-down to a paying monthly subscription model in the coming weeks. It will be very affordable with options for individuals and agencies, there won’t be a contract and all beta testers will get a significant discount.

And finally: the name. What? Why?

Inkybee! It’s a bit of fun really. We don’t want to be boring and we liked the concept of the bee buzzing around the web and I suppose the “Inky” bit is the stories and content that he finds. It’s got a buzz to it!

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Posted by Paul Sutton

Tags: blogger outreach, Blogging, content marketing, PR, PR activity, SEO, tools Permalink

The Value Conundrum and Why it Threatens PR

Posted by Paul Sutton on February 12, 2013 in PR

Image credit: EasyScienceExperiments

The monotonous ‘PR is dying’ meme has been covered to the point of tedium and is something I’ve been highly dismissive of/ranted about in the past. I’m not about to change my mind on that any time soon, but I read something last week that got me thinking and has stuck with me. Jed Hallam wrote about the differing perceptions of pricing in the PR and advertising industries, and how the latter can far more easily garner large budgets for social and digital media projects as, quite simply, clients are used to spending more money with advertising agencies.

This makes complete sense to me, and is the first time in a very long time that I’ve read a reasonable argument about why some (not all) PR agencies are under threat. The psychology is important here, and Hallam references Johan Lehrer’s book ‘How We Decide’, and Lehrer’s assertion that the distraction of numbers gives us a twisted view of the value of things. Essentially he says that regardless of the actual value, the more something costs, the greater the value we perceive it has. So with that in mind, think about it for a moment: if Brand X is used to paying its PR agency £10k per month and, due to media spend, its advertising/marketing agency £250k per month, which agency is it more likely to feel comfortable spending £100k with for a social communications project?

The Value of Results

Not only is the marketing agency more likely to get the project in the first place due to a higher perceived value, but very importantly, it’s more likely to get a larger budget. And with more money, the marketing agency has more scope for creativity and more time for comprehensive implementation. Which should mean it achieves better results than the PR agency could have done if it was struggling to achieve the same thing on half the budget.

That, my friends, is a vicious cycle. Advertising agencies have already started to hire people with a PR mindset to help them secure this type of business, and if/when that cycle catches it will be very difficult, if not impossible, for PR agencies to halt. And it throws up a challenge for the PR industry as a whole: to start proving the value of PR in a digital marketing context. It’s something we’ve discussed recently within the PRCA Digital Group, for which I’m a member of the steering committee. Traditionally PR has been fighting a battle to demonstrate that social media can fit within the realms of PR, but now advertising and marketing agencies are bringing the fight to us and taking us on on our own turf. It’s time for the PR industry to step up a gear. And if we don’t, advertising and marketing agencies will start to steal our lunch.

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Posted by Paul Sutton

Tags: advertising, evaluation, marketing, PR, strategy Permalink

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Social TV and the Huge Brand Opportunity

Posted by Paul Sutton on February 6, 2013 in Trends

Social TV is where it’s at in 2013. It may be a bold statement, but it’s been threatening to go mainstream for a couple of years now. Back in October 2010 I made a prediction that social TV would be the big thing for the following year. I was wrong. Rather than being one of the major trends in 2011, social TV bubbled away gently and it’s really only been in the last six months that it’s started to get the attention it deserves. And so well over two years since my initial prediction, I’m repeating it.

Last week I attended the Social TV Conference in London, organised by Steve Ward of Cloud Nine Media Recruitment. It was an enlightening day that delved into how behaviour has changed over the last couple of years and the strategies that more forward-thinking brands are adopting in order to capitalise on those. With the ubiquity of mobile devices, second screen media should not be a concept that raises eyebrows at this stage of the game, but did you know that a huge 40% of tweets during peak TV viewing times are about TV programmes? Or that 90% of online conversation about television takes place on Twitter? (source: SecondSync).

The Phoenix of Television

Matt Locke spoke at the conference about the fact that, due to social media and mobile devices, TV is becoming a truly inclusive and visceral experience again for the first time in decades. It’s become the norm to watch and converse about TV with friends in real-time through the second screen (which is arguably now the first screen) and, according to the BBC, the traditional 90-9-1 rule (90% of social media users being lurkers, 9% being participants and 1% being creators) has now shifted to a 23-60-17 model where people are actively driving and participating in live conversation about television.

‘Slippy content’ was a phrase used by Tiffany St James to describe the challenge for brands of capitalising on these trends by creating content that gets shared around in such conversations, and in the last couple of days a brilliant example of what she was talking about was the Oreo blackout tweet during the Super Bowl, probably the world’s largest social TV event. This genius move is quite possibly the most successful example ever of a brand hijacking social conversations about a live television event.

Jadis Tillery explained how live broadcasting is continuing to become a major trend, with special shows and series bypassing TV altogether and instead being streamed into YouTube or Facebook and actively inviting viewers to take part in real-time. And Ted Littledale took the real-time theme further by looking at how Twitter has become the de-facto currency for social TV due to its open and instant nature.

An Open Opportunity for Brands

But while Oreo got it spot on many, if not most, brands haven’t caught on with this yet. While Garret Keogh showed some lovely examples of the tone and mindset that works in this area (it’s worth checking out the Merlin Facebook page), Littledale spoke of the need to integrate social media deeper into campaigns while James Whatley challenged companies to do more in the space rather than simply undertake a brief activity around a programme or event and then let it die.

Overall, the opportunities for brands in the social TV arena are huge. And I for one will be paying this a lot more attention in the coming months specifically with my clients in mind and how they can work with those in the social TV space for their benefit.

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Posted by Paul Sutton

Tags: brands, content marketing, marketing, social impact, social media, social mindset, television Permalink

21 Comments

Is EE’s Advocacy Programme Brave, Smart or Crazy?

Posted by Paul Sutton on January 24, 2013 in Mobile Web

Image from http://www.slashgear.com

I recently read about the launch of UK 4G mobile provider EE’s new ambassador programme, and was immediately intrigued. Advocacy and the power of online influencers is one of the (continuing) hot themes for the next few months, and this particular programme could be one to watch for a great example of either how to do it or how not to do it, depending on how it works out for EE.

It’s intriguing for several reasons. It’s a brave move on the part of EE given not only the criticism it has already received from influential people, but also the social footprint and combined voice of the advocates involved. But the thing that really makes this programme stand out for me is the way it has come about. There’s a back story that involves a viral blog post, national newspaper interest and an association with influencer scoring platform Kred that really spices things up, and it’s worthwhile catching up on this by reading Andrew Grill’s original (and updated) post on London Calling.

Given my interest in the programme, I wanted a bit more of an inside track as to the hows and whys, so I asked Andrew, the instigator, a few questions:

How did your original meeting with EE come about? Did they invite you or did you approach them?

I was contacted by their external PR agency about my blog post, so I asked to meet Olaf Swantee (CEO of EE). For my first meeting at EE HQ I was greeted by Stuart Jackson, who now works in the CEO office, and also met with some key figures such as Pat Coxen, the EE Project Director who has overseen the entire technical and branding exercise; Mat Sears, Head of EE PR; and Tim Pritchard, who runs the digital team and is behind @EE on Twitter. I have also had three more follow up meetings with EE to formulate and activate the EE Advocates program.

What was their reaction when you suggested the ambassador programme?

Very positive: let’s do it and who do you suggest. I also proposed that those I selected should also be able to select one other person and give them the same benefits, thus extending the program to the advocate’s own network

How did you choose your five person team? What factors came into play?

All are personally known to me and represent a bread spectrum. Gabrielle Laine-Peters has strong social media ties and is a live blogger who is glued to her iPad, so a 4G version makes sense. When I first showed her the speed of 4G on my iPad, she was very impressed. Paul Clarke is a photographer, so a great use case of using 4G to get photos uploaded from the field. Neville Hobson is a well-respected tech blogger with great reach, and Ewan MacLeod is a recognised mobile blogger who tells it like it is. Neville and Ewan have already both posted positively about their EE 4G experiences.

(L-R) EE Ambassadors: Gabrielle Laine-Peters, Andrew Grill & Neville Hobson

What do you think EE’s expectations of the programme are?

To generate positive coverage via non-traditional channels, solicit feedback and diffuse initial influencer backlash.

How much of a risk do you think EE is taking implementing this at such an early stage in its development, and given the issues it’s had already?

They know as a well-established carrier that the existing issues of customer service, coverage and activation won’t go away. If anything, the problems faced are being raised to senior management faster than before. When I posted about SIM activation problems they quickly identified the process issue and fixed it. Had I not posted, it could have gone uncovered for much longer.

And do you think that EE truly understands that risk?

Yes, they know they have a lot at stake. But this is a ‘managed risk’ as Senior EE staff have met me and a number of the advocates, who have all been recommended by me, personally. I am, in fact, taking some of the risk in being in the EE advocate program itself as, if it fails, my brand will suffer. By brand is also at risk from the advocates I’ve recommended.

What’s in it for you (other than a free device)? Why would you want to be an ambassador for EE?

Having been in the mobile space from the last 22 years, I believe passionately about the benefits of mobile, and in particular new innovations such as 4G. Only by waking up mobile operators and placing a greater focus on customer service issues can the industry grow. Also I feel I have a duty to my London Calling readers to be a true advocate and get their problems fixed, so they keep reading the blog and believe in what I am saying.

In monetary terms, how do you think the programme will benefit EE?

It’s potentially millions. I estimate my blog post wiped £1m off their revenue, so being able to claw back that would be a start. Once The Telegraph picked up my blog post, visitors changed from social media types to large banks and FTSE100 companies (and this continues today). These companies probably read the Telegraph article and thought ‘let’s hold off switching our entire mobile workforce to 4G until they sort the teething problems out.

Is the programme something that you see EE expanding in the future?

EE has its own market segments it’d like to tap into, so yes I believe the programme will expand. Personally I’d like to see this model working in more companies, powered by Kred of course!

So there you have it. A brand in trouble, if you believe some sources, reaching out for help among the very communities that have been leading the backlash. Brave? Stupid? Or extremely progressive and intelligent? I’d love to hear your thoughts below, and if you have any further questions for Andrew, please leave them and he’ll answer them for you…

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Posted by Paul Sutton

Tags: advocacy, brands, customer service, EE, influence, mobile, PR, strategy, technology Permalink

7 Comments

Tesco’s Handling of Twitter is Neigh Joke

Posted by Paul Sutton on January 18, 2013 in Twitter

Horse meat in food meant for human consumption isn’t a laughing matter. But try telling Twitter that. After revelations about burgers on sale in Tesco containing 29% horse meat hit the news on Wednesday, the hashtag #TescoProducts went ballistic, with hundreds of jokes and humorous comments flying around the network.

“Horsemeat has been found in #TescoProducts, but a spokesman says it’s bollocks”, said one person. “A woman has been taken to hospital after eating horsemeatburgers. Her condition is said to be stable”, said another. “Are you in favour of Horsemeat in your burgers? Yay or Neigh?”, cracked someone else. And “Scientist: Sir, we’ve discovered horse meat in your burgers. Tesco boss: Why the long face?”, joked another. One joker filmed a video of a pantomime horse mourning the loss of his parents in a Tesco aisle! I even got in on the action myself yesterday, tweeting “Horses for courses #TescoProducts” when referencing how people have preferences for different social media platforms. And on, and on, and on…

No Sense of Humour

Sadly though, Tesco didn’t get the joke and has been fighting fire ever since. Yes it’s a PR crisis of pretty huge magnitude if some of the stories of fines and possible prison sentences in today’s papers are to be believed. But a little humour goes a very long way when it comes to social media, and I do wonder whether Tesco could have handled things far, far better by adopting a slightly lighter tone when dealing with the Twitter firestorm. Instead though, it’s been made into a laughing stock, not helped by two simply awful tweets.

The first, shown below, is naive and misjudged. Given all the cracks about horses flying around, you’d think the person running the Twitter account that morning might possibly have had their eyes open for this type of thing.

But the second is, for me, simply unforgivable. I’ve been laughing at it all morning. At first, I thought the tweet shown at the top of this post was a genuine light-hearted moment from Tesco. And I thought it was genius. A hay joke…in the middle of a horse meat scandal But it soon became apparent that it was another naive mistake, having been scheduled ahead of the crisis. And Tesco has now spent hours apologising. Oh dear. Oh very dear.

Whoever is in charge of the Tesco Twitter account shouldn’t be. It’s that simple. Handled well, social media and Twitter in particular can assist greatly in a crisis situation. Handled poorly, it can (and will) make things worse. Has Tesco handled things well? Without doubt, neigh…

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Posted by Paul Sutton

Tags: brands, crisis management, customer service, PR, retail, strategy, Twitter Permalink

10 Comments

Why Blogging is Critical to Your Online Reputation

Posted by Paul Sutton on January 16, 2013 in Blogging

What’s the first thing you do if you want to know more about an individual? You Google them. And so online reputation management has become extremely important for anyone who wants to get ahead in their career or their business. Social media is a fantastic and relatively easy way to build a beneficial personal reputation on the web within your industry. And the recent advent of Google Author Rank has, arguably, made this even more critical.

And yet there’s an awful lot of conflicting advice about the best way to create a great professional reputation using social media channels. Are you best spending the limited time that you have writing your own blog? Or guest posting on others’ blogs and websites? Or contributing to LinkedIn groups? Or tweeting? Or getting on Google+? Or any of the other numerous social networking platforms out there?

I asked some influential people working in social and digital communications what they think. And here’s what they said…

NOTE: If you have trouble loading the Prezi, you can view it here

What are your views? Do you agree with these opinions?

[And incidentally, I'd love your feedback on this visual form of blogging using Prezi, which I've coined 'Plogging' Let me know below...]

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Posted by Paul Sutton