com.motion Poll - Part 1

When we launched com.motion, our new social media division, we knew we wanted to get coverage in traditional media outlets. After all, breakthrough public relations is what Veritas is known for. And indeed, we received great coverage in outlets including the National Post, Marketing Magazine, CBC Radio, CFRB and the Globe and Mail.

But we also recognized that for an offering specializing in social media marketing and online public relations, it was critical to reach out to bloggers covering the space.

Since it's always better to experiment with your own business than your client's, we tried something new. Ahead of our official launch date, we reached out to key social media bloggers and offered them exclusive results on one or two questions in the social media poll we commissioned to promote com.motion's launch. A couple replied that exclusives don't matter in the blogosphere.

But about a dozen social media bloggers have covered our launch and/or the poll results. In the coming weeks, I will be digging into some of the juicier findings in the poll. But first, I wanted to take a look at how some other bloggers have covered our launch and survey.

Kristen Nicole at Mashable looks at the finding that two-thirds of business leaders surveyed don’t want employees using social media sites at work, while 34% want employees to know their way around a social media site:

That means, spend lots of time at home getting to know your way around social media so you can impress your boss with all the creative ways you’ve found to make him more money by advertising on blogs. Hop to it.

Canuckflack says the results seem to expose senior executives lying when three-quarters of them say they're as or more familiar than their customers:

To be fair, they could be glaringly unaware how little they know about new technology. Or, they could be underestimating the extent of their clients’ knowledge.

iAnts, a blog about digital music marketing, points out that marketers don't appear to be putting their money where their mouths are:

The good news is that one in two business leaders say social media is becoming more important than mass media. The bad news, half of them feel that employees shouldn’t use social networking sites at work. Makes no sense to me, it’s like the blind leading the naked. How do you expect your employees to understand the medium and educate themselves if they cannot participate.

And Sean Moffitt of Buzz Canuck has some very kind - and much appreciated - words about the way we launched com.motion.

...no grandiose statements on being an unsubstantiated first, an appreciated overture to seed some of the findings of the study ahead of time with resident bloggers like myself, a double barreled insight approach from polling Canadian professionals, a nice social media-friendly PR release and consumers and what appears to be a very smart extension of Veritas' brand into a new media space.

To view all the coverage, please check out this del.icio.us page.

mcarthur (at) veritascanada.com

Post on Facebook:


Bookmark:

Marg Delahunty confronts bigtime ad execs on YouTube

When I covered the airline industry at the Globe and Mail, I got to write about some great characters, including Robert Milton, Clive Beddoe, Mark Hill, Michel Leblanc and Angus Kinnear. But that was nothing compared to the characters I encountered when I moved over to covering the advertising business.

One of the biggest personalities in Canadian advertising is Geoffrey Roche, chief creative officer at Lowe Roche in Toronto.

Check-out what happens in this video when Marg Delahunty confronts Geoffrey on behalf of OXFAM.







Oxfam has produced similar videos with other personalities including Glen Hunt (the man behind Molson's famous "My Name is Joe and I am Canadian" spot and Nancy Vonk (one of the creative directors behind the team that created the Dove Evolution spot.

mcarthur (at) veritascanada.com

Post on Facebook:


Bookmark:

Causing a com.motion

This a very exciting day for all of us here at Veritas. Today we have formally launched com.motion, our social media division.

Our offerings include:

• Blogger relations and blogger events
• Online reputation management
• Social networking campaigns (Facebook, etc).
• Building movements online through the proprietary Grassroots Multiplier
  
• Social Media Releases
• Blogs and podcasts
  

As part of the launch, we worked with Pollara Strategic Insights on a survey that measured attitudes and opinions about social media marketing among business and marketing leaders as well as the general population.

I'm going to blog more about the survey results later, but here is the social media release we created for the announcement.

There is a tremendous team of people here at Veritas who made this new division possible. Thanks so much to all of them. Watch for us to cause many more com.motions in the months ahead.

mcarthur (at) veritascanada.com

Post on Facebook:


Bookmark:

PR people, journalists, bloggers: How they stack up in high-mindedness and credibility

As a PR guy (I mean communications professional) who only recently left journalism, I was interested to read my former colleague Jeffrey Simpson's take on the difference between the two jobs. It's contained in his Saturday column about Brian Mulroney (paid subscription required). He writes:

"Mr. Lavoie, fondly remembered as talented journalist some years ago, since leaving that occasionally high-minded but usually underpaid occupation, has devoted his considerable talents to the seldom high-minded but often overpaid business of advising various companies and individuals on their public relations, notably Mr. Mulroney for whom he once worked in office."

Later in the day, I came across a blog post from Mitch Joel of Twist Image with the intriguing title Bloggers Pass Journalists On The Credibility Barometer - Mark This Day. He relates his recent experience with an unnamed Marketing publication. When he asked the editors to write about an award won by his agency, he received an e-mail back telling him that if he expected coverage, he should subscribe to the publication:

"We have an overload of information to publish every week, so we have to give priority to our paying subscribers. If we are important enough to promote you, we should be important enough for you to count you in as subscribers."

As a former journalist, I find this morally offensive. There's a fine line between writing stories about subscribers and writing stories for brown envelopes full of cash. My concerns as a PR guy are more selfish. In a pay for play world, the importance of our craft gets diluted.

Joel goes further: He says the days of blogging without authenticity are dead, but suggests the opposite is true in journalism.

So journalists are more high-mined than PR people, but bloggers are more authentic than journalists. I've done all three jobs. I've loved all three jobs. I respect people in all three jobs, and disrespect others in all three jobs. Is that high-minded enough?


mcarthur (at) veritascanada.com

Post on Facebook:


Bookmark:

Is was and has been on Facebook

Much excitement in the blogosphere today about news that Facebook is eliminating the requirement that users build their status updates around the word "is."

Effective tonight, status entries such as Keith McArthur is blogging, Keith McArthur is tired and Keith McArthur is writing a press release can be replaced with gems like Keith McArthur blogs, Keith McArthur dreams of sleep and Keith McArthur shall save the world one press release at a time.

As Betsy Schiffman at Wired points out, some Facebookers chose to ignore the structure, leading to status entries such as Betsy is loves to dance.

Virtual champagne will no doubt flow tonight in Facebook groups like I die a little bit inside when I see grammatically incorrect status updates (411 members) and Facebook Petitition to Remove the World "IS" from the Status Updater (995 members).

Update: The is is still there. Betshy Schiffman reports that a note went out to developers last Monday saying it would disappear, but it (is) stubburnly refuses to die.

Fun with Facebook Flyers

Before I switched careers, I did a big feature in the Globe and Mail on Facebook marketing. At the time, Mike Murphy, Facebook's vice president of media sales, told me that while Facebook could theoretically target ads to consumers based on the personal data they entered into the site -- hobbies, political leanings, favourite TV shows -- it chose not to do so.

Back then, Facebook was weighing its revenue goals against potential privacy concerns, and determined that it was best to segment ad audiences according to a small number of criteria, such as network and gender.

Not anymore.

Now advertisers can take advantage of Facebook's vast gathering of personal user data and segment to their heart's content.

But what's really cool is that the data is all available for free to play with on the Facebook Flyers page. By way of Mashable, I found this post from online political strategist Patrick Ruffini, who used the tool to learn that while few Republicans were fans of the band Radiohead, they did love playing Halo 3.

I've had some fun running similar statistics on Facebook's Canadian users.

Take the New Pornographers, one of my favourite Canadian bands. There are 10,880 people in Canada who have them listed as a favourite band. Of these 3,280 people list their political view as Liberal versus 200 for Conservative. 4,800 fans are male, versus 5,120 female. 3,440 are single, versus 4,320 that are in a relationship, engaged or married.

But among the 35,020 Canadians who list the Bible as a hobby, just 2,120 are Liberal compared with 8,180 who say they are Conservatives.

(One caveat: Facebook capitalizes Liberal and Conservative, although the terms are intended to refer to ideology, rather than party affiliation. I would guess that some Canadian Facebookers use the term one way and some the other).

Facebook is dead; long live Facebook

There's much debate on the blogosphere today about whether Facebook is dead or dying.

The latest U.S. Comscore statistics suggest that Facebook's unstoppable climb is, well, stopping. The numbers point to a 9.3 percent decline in unique visitors and 3.8 percent decline in page views compared with August.

But before we bury the social network that swallowed Canada, a bit of a reality check is needed.

First, September contains one day less than August, which means that even if traffic stayed steady, a three percentage point decline.

Second, Facebook traffic also declined in September of 2006, when compared with August. That's because the ratings system has a bias towards home computers. When September comes, students log on more often from public terminals at school.

And third, these numbers only apply to U.S. users. Facebook points out that its Global page views rose to 57 million in September, up from 54 million in August. Year over year, it ended September with 44 million active monthly users, up from 9 million a year earlier.

But the numbers do serve as a reminder that it's still too early to know if Facebook will achieve the level of market dominance in the United States that it has in Canada. Will the Facebook craze in Canada and England bring the United States along, or will U.S. consolidate around Myspace or opt for some new social networking site. And if so, will the dominant U.S. social networking site eventually drag the rest of us in?

Dove is back and so am I

Back in my last blogging gig at The Globe and Mail, I wrote about Dove's "Evolution" more than any other spot. And with good reason. It is arguably the greatest ad every made in this country, winning the Grand Prix in both the film and Internet categories at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival.

Ogilvy & Mather's Toronto office has just released the long-awaited follow-up to Evolution. It's called "Onslaught."




First let me say that while my last blog was about marketing with a heavy slant on advertising, this one is not. This blog is about social media tools like Facebook and YouTube and blogs themselves -- and how marketers can use them to connect and engage their most fervent supporters.

But Evolution is as good a place as any to transition. Before Unilever spent a penny to buy advertising time, the ad was viewed more than four million times on YouTube. It was a huge viral success story, an early indication for many marketers that the social media had forever changed the marketing communications landscape.

This was the kind work that inspired me to leave my comfortable job as the Globe's marketing reporter to take on a new challenge -- to help brands and organizations figure out how to navigate and thrive in this new world.