Project Metal

The word of last week was definitely Tummler (definition: an entertainer, or master of ceremonies, especially one who encourages audience interaction – from Yiddish Tummler). Before the week started, I had no idea what a Tummler was and by the end of the week I felt I knew him well. I attended two events this week as part of Social Media Week and the word Hummler and to Hummel were mentioned three times. The first was by Kevin Marks of Ribbit who gave a great presentation at social media camp on The Art of Tummeling. It was also mentioned by Deborah Schultz of the Altimeter Group at the event organized by Sprout about building brands on social networks.

Tummler - from Yiddish origins

The idea of the Tummler isn’t new. It is the person who – aids, facilitates, enables, brings together, joins, encourages –people to have a conversation. The question I keep finding myself asking is where should this person hang out? The obvious answer is: go to where the people are. However that isn’t always that easy to determine. If you are a consumer brand then Facebook is probably as good a place as any but it isn’t as easy as that in the B2B world.

If you remember the big reveal of the Skittles site a while ago, the company thought that the Tummler could use Skittles.com as his playground by making the site entirely social. However, I noticed recently in an article  that Skittles has changed its mind because the conversation got out of hand. The site has now been totally changed.

For a B2B brand, I have certainly seen companies use blogs as an effective place for the Tummler to work his/her magic. But equally it is important for the Tummler to be out there in third party earned media channels driving the conversation forward.

In many senses the Chief Tummler, or Chief Conversation Officer, needs to set a strategy that enables all the Tummlers in the organization to be as effective as possbile. This probably means combining the roles of the Chief Communications Officer and Chief Marketing Officer into one. The successful Chief Tummler is the one that ensures that strategies are in place to facilitate conversations across earned media, branded channels such as Facebook and LinkedIn and on the brand website itself. Tummling is a delicate art but there is a fair amount of science to it as well.

As the election battle hots up in the UK it will be interesting to see how all parties use the web to their advantage or if it will be a catalyst for the downfall of some. The take on David Cameron’s advertising made me smile, once when I saw it on Rishi’s blog a few days ago and again this morning when I heard that the mydavidcameron.com site had made it onto national radio (BBC Radio 5) – A few examples below of how people have manipulated the original  Conservative Party advert- A Toff on crime, A Toff on the causes of crime…a play on the Daily Mirror article from 2005.

Two things struck me about this:

1)      This is a great example of using the web to generate creative ideas from a distributed workforce (even though the people involved aren’t employees)

2)      It is another example of how digital networks are feeding stories to national news

Courtesy of The Guardian…

I heard that the instigator of this has also purchased mygordonbrown.com so I am looking forward to the follow up.

Last week saw the first steps for Project Metal in building out its digital consultancy capability, so I thought it worth summarizing what we are doing in a short video clip. Bringing Context Analytics into the business gives us a really strong analytics basis to build on. The other two key bits of the jigsaw are building out a search and digital creative capability. Perrin Doniger, research manager at Context-Analytics, asks the questions in the first of our video blogs.

It’s a pretty exciting day as we take the first steps in setting up the new Next Fifteen digital consultancy as covered in PR Week. While we are going to be making further announcements over the coming months, today marks a pretty significant moment in our brief history as we bring the capabilities of Context Analytics www.context-analytics into Project Metal.

courtesy of Sean Dreilinger

It is no secret that data plays an increasingly important role in the world of earned media and in particular, in defining digital strategies. Our first move in building out a sophisticated analytics capability with the merging of Context Analytics into Project Metal, brings some of the best analysts and researchers in the business into the Project Metal team. Unlike most measurement companies out there, which rely almost exclusively on their own proprietary platform, Context Analytics chooses the best platform for each assignment because it believes that no one platform can do everything well.  Its philosophy is very much that true insights and business value is created by the interpretation of data by statisticians rather than by the technology. How many times have you got a bunch of data out of a platform and then thought, now what?

Probably the most exciting part for me is the development of a distinct methodology, Dynamic Conversation Analytics, which takes analyzing media content to the next level. It combines media measurement data, web analytics, audience data and search data to enable brands to measure sales that come directly from earned media campaigns. You can tell I am really excited about this because I also wrote a post on Context Analytics blog this morning on this very subject.

This is only the start of a journey, but we are really excited at the ways in which we are already using data analytics to measure the business impact of earned media campaigns. This is just the start, but there is a lot more to come.

I have spent the last couple of weeks meeting with a lot of SEO sepcialists as well as a couple of SEO agencies. I know the colliding of search and PR disciplines is nothing new. In fact, I remember interviewing an SEO expert for a job in a PR agency back in 2007. What is new is that they are now totally inseparable. Well, certain parts are at any rate. I’ll leave all of the onsite technical stuff to the techies and SEO specialists.

According to a recent Marekting Sherpa report, Social Media SEO is one of the most effective marketing  tactics when judged on a effort vs reward basis. So why, if this is the case, aren’t more clients really trying to integrate SEO with their social media efforts? The bit I am totally bewildered by is, why SEO agencies don’t try to actively engage with PR agencies or why clients don’t more actively try to join up the disciplines? In twenty years in the PR industry, I have never once been approached by an SEO agency to partner with them or a client trying to bring together the disciplines. (I should say I have worked with some great individuals in the space). It left me wondering why?

Maybe it is because they see PR agencies as a real threat to their discipline (they certainly shouldn’t). Most PR agencies only dabble in SEO by doing a bit of key word analysis rather than driving a comprehensive all embracing SEO strategy. At the same time, most SEO agencies only dabble in creating genuine journalistic content and placing it in the right media outlets.

The irony is that most PR agencies make a much bigger contribution to organic search than they realize. The difference is that we just don’t shout about it and market our contribution to clients or internally. That being said I have had two conversations with clients over the past week where they recognize the contribution that a great blog makes to organic search and who now see blogs as an important component of their organic search. For PR professionals that peel back some of the fundamental principles of SEO, overlay a comprehensive approach to SEO onto the existing PR planning process and then talk the right language, the pickings will be big.

Having immersed myself further in the world of SEM, I believe one of the goals in digital marketing must be to create conversational loops, to interest stakeholders and encourage participation in what the company in question is doing/believes in – to get people more engaged. It should work on the same principle as the viral expansion loop (but on a smaller scale) provided the content is right.

To make this effective, it seems to me we not only need to create interesting content, optimise it so people can find it, distribute it so people can interact but, to do this effectively it needs constant monitoring of the conversation that results and the ability to add in more content to keep the conversation going.

A question here is, if monitoring a full time role that companies need now or that should be outsourced or kept in-house and how should it be resourced? The role requires good editorial skills and probably a piece of real-time monitoring technology to help. It is time consuming and possibly costly but a role like this would have helped companies like Eurostar avoid mishaps over the winter.  But where would it sit? In marketing, customer service or within an agency…

As we put together the proposition for Project Metal, I have spent quite a bit of time talking to clients and also to agencies that build web sites. I can’t help but notice that attitudes to a brand’s website, or a campaign microsite, seem to be changing pretty quickly. There appears to be a fairly dramatic shift to the view that a web site should change from its current form to one that is an aggregation of all the conversations about a brand and the issues that represent it.  This is a good recent post I have seen on the subject.

Courtesy of Toffehoff

While this is no great surprise in its own right (Jermiah Owyang wrote a post in 2007 about it)  I do think the fact that it is now happening is significant for people in the communications industry for a number of reasons:

1. It means a web site is suddenly only as good as a brand’s ability to engage in and drive relevant conversations
2. It escalates the importance of the communications function in creating an engaging property
3. A brand web site becomes a focus for aggregating the content and conversations generated through a PR campaign thereby increasing the perceived value of the campaign to the organisation
4. It provides the PR or comms team with a powerful seat at the table in acting as a guardians of the website content
5. It means that the automatic sole ownership of a web property is no longer the ad agency or brand agency. 

How brands come to terms with this changing dynamic and reorganize internally remains to be seen. I suspect there will be two ways in which this could pan out. It might mean that marketing departments try to recruit comms and PR people to help create compelling web properties or it might just mean that the comms team need to find ways to circumvent the traditional marketing team in getting their content onto the brand web site.

As we build out the proposition for ProjectMetal, this is a question I have been giving a lot of thought to recently. As such it is interesting to see the announcement  made by Powered yesterday as it acquired three agencies to create a full service social media agency. Just looking at the collective capability of these three agencies they have put together an interesting set of capabilities as the key components of a full service social media agency:

-          A consultancy lead firm: Crayon

-          A company to activate ambassadors offline and bring them online: Drillteam

-          A company that can build highly social web properties using standard platforms: Stepchange  

-          A technology platform company for building and managing branded communities: Powered

It looks a pretty exciting combination and one which definitely sets the pace for both specialist independent social media boutiques and also for established PR agencies that traditionally don’t have any of these capabilities. There is a good analysis of the deal here  from Jermiah Owyang.

In many ways this bold move by Powered is further evidence of the need for PR agencies to either build their own digital capability or partner with firms that can provide a range of specialist capabilities that a traditional agency just cannot provide.

Project Metal is different in some ways because we are focused on providing complementary services which when put together with the skills of traditional PR agency is able to help them compete more effectively against groups such as Powered but also against specialist Digital Agencies.

So what are the services that a full service, earned media, digital agency should provide? In thinking about it, I refer back to a diagram I first put together with Bite which certainly resonates with a lot of clients.

 Here are the elements that I think clients are looking for from a team of specialists:

-          Ability to analyze conversations, identify key influencers and measure engagement (Analytics)

-          Ability to use data-driven insights to recommend digital strategies (Digital consulting)

-          Ability to create rich media content (apps, widgets) that will engage the audience (Digital Creative)

-          Ability to optimize content whether rich media or textual (SEO)

-          Ability to build highly social branded properties such as standalone web sites, loosely branded communities or channels that leverage popular platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube (Digital Creative)

-          Ability to execute social media engagement of third party channels and influencers (Social Media relations)

-          Full analytics capability to measure the impact of campaigns from share of conversation to web sales (Analytics)

So how does this differ from what Powered has built? I think the main difference is whether or not a full service agency should be powered by a proprietary platform. From a business point of view this makes perfect sense: it should increase margins and make it hard for the client to move. However from a consulting point of view it will be hard to recommend a strategy that isn’t tied to the platform. That aside you have to take your hats off to Powered for making such a bold move. Good luck to them.

Having said all of that if you took ten comms experts and asked them all to list the key components of a successful digital agency today I suspect you would get ten very different answers? Be an interesting excercise to go through though.