Our 5 favourite social media stories from the past week and  5 other random things that may or may not be interesting. Also if you like it, Retweet now there’s a good boy/girl (delete as applicable).

5 of the best

Let’s Kill The CPM

A really great article that you should go and read now!

Done that? Good. my only slight problem is Shelby doesn’t offer enough solutions, but I will! Obviously I am talking about social media, passive advertising might generate big numbers but is it really creating advocates and giving you value for money? As people become more immune to the banners are your impression numbers even reflective of how many people are paying attention?

Gov 2.0 in action

I think government at large has been slow to keep up with the internet age. We need more information now with better levels of access. Movements like rewired state are giving us some really interesting projects, but we need more involvement from the top. Britain will get there, we just might need to follow America’s lead.

Fifa 10 and the smart media partnership

Games are starting to converge more with our social media and Fifa is using the game itself as way of building awareness and engagement. Users are sharing their experiences away from the game in social spaces, the videos just help to facilitate and create the conversations. On that note, what do you think about my sweet goal with Frank Lampard?

Sport England teams with Facebook to get people playing sport

I think this could be a great way to reach people and get involved with them about sport. Sport is such an important part of our society and it is nice that the powers that be realise that just because we like to spend time on the computer does not mean we don’t want to go out and play!

AskPeopleYouKnow.com

An interesting idea currently in its beta phase. I think it is worth keeping an eye on but for now I get my knowledge and recommendations from asking my connections on Twitter or Facebook.

5 of the rest

Charlie Brooker’s Gameswipe

Whether you are an avid gamer or not I think you will find some entertainment value in Charlie Brooker’s latest installment of his Wipe format. More of you than not should be interested as a recent survey says that 73% of the country are gamers!

Today Now! / Facebook, Twitter Revolutionizing How Parents Stalk Their College-Aged Kids

Fantastic satire from the Onion with a creepy underlying truth.

MacLane’s photostream

A really cool collection of geeky Lego models! I heart Wall-E and Optimus Prime. Also who doesn’t love Boba Fett?

A periodic table of visualization methods

If you ever need something visual to help you explain a concept or make some data more interesting check out this table! It is a little dry at face value but full of really great ideas.

People of Walmart

Oh internet you do seem to revel in finding the quirkiest and weirdest people in life. Check out this collection of Walmart shoppers and be glad you are not one of them (hopefully)

The more we spend time online the more it makes sense for businesses to try and reach us there. The tumbling prices of banners ads may sure look enticing, but the price is dropping along with their effectiveness. Companies spend huge amounts of money on online marketing but as we move forward more and more users will start to become banner blind. This means they will need to find new ways of reaching them.

This might explain why in a recent survey we conducted with the games industry spending on Social media was on the rise. We found publishers were looking to increase their social media spend with a quarter of them saying 21-30% of their budgets would be spent on it. All of our contributors also said they would be spending money on social media this year compared to previous years in which some had opted not too.

Social media helps to create real and memorable engagement with your consumers and is much less passive than the aforementioned banner advertising. The games industry and its consumers are largely tech savvy people so it would make sense that they would be among the first to start to become numb to traditional online advertising. I expect this to start becoming a trend across all industries with an online presence.

The growing sophistication of buzz monitoring tools is leading many to suggest we don’t need traditional research analysis skills.

Tools such as Brandwatch and  Scoutlabs can gather huge amounts of data so you can keep up with what your customers are saying online – not just about you but about your competitors. It’s a fundamental part of modern day business.

They search across a huge range of communities and websites to pull out information relevant to your brand. This makes them perfect for collecting huge amounts of data that would take forever to do manually.

Machines don’t think like people

What they can’t do is tell you what it all means for your business. Buzz tools still require people, because analysis is a job for people. Machines can’t think like us yet and until they can, the technological part of buzz monitoring is just part of the mix. And this is where many companies get it wrong.

Tools can offer a variety of ways to track buzz, such as sentiment analysis, but they can’t interpret things like a human being. They can’t understand sarcasm and social nuances like we can.

Pulling out key quotes relevant to you, recognising top online influencers and  spotting marketing and research opportunities requires a personal touch. A human touch. Analysing what people are interested in, what they like, what they don’t like in the context of your business goals requires research expertise, not technology.

Each buzz monitoring tool has its own set of strengths and weaknesses and by using a combination of them alongside human analysis, you can gain valuable insight into your target audience; you can develop new and improved ways to market to them and even develop new products that will appeal to them. You can also discover ways to differentiate yourselves from your competitors.

Stats, info, words and numbers

Without the human, buzz tools spew out stats and info, words and numbers. These need conversion to something meaningful. Buzz tools pull in huge amounts of information but they also create a lot of white noise.

Working out who your key communities are and how their internal cultures work takes time. Your buzz tools will help you find some – but not all – of them. They also won’t help you to prioritise which communities you should pay more attention to.

If you spend the time really listening to the communities that have the most value to you by combining your buzz tools with manual research and analysis, you’ll truly reap the benefits of buzz monitoring – but don’t fall into the trap of thinking that you can pay simply for a key terms to be tracked and that’s it. Job done. You’ll just be wasting your money. True buzz monitoring requires financial investment – but it reaps real business rewards.

Listen, listen and listen again

The only way to get a true feel of what a community is like and what they are talking about is to have an expert in there really looking at it. Use buzz tools to help identify communities and comments but you should always spend the time to get the context from the community.

Social media – including buzz monitoring – is all about people. It doesn’t just stop at choosing a tool and letting it get on with it. Get an expert to spend the time delving into what the results mean in the grander scheme of things and you’ll see the true value of buzz monitoring.

The basic principal of social media marketing is to engage people.If charities engage more people, more money will be donated.

But fund raising is only part of the picture for charties – they also have a cause (eg stopping cruelty to children, protecting animals, supporting victims of disease, providing supplies for those in need.)

So whilst raising funds is fundamental, there are other considerations like:

• service delivery
• membership engagement
• providing space for peer to peer support
• recruiting volunteers
• raising awareness
• behaviour change
• lobbying governments and so on.

This is where social media excels over other types of marketing. Used properly, it can reach millions of people and more importantly, engage them.

The great thing about charities and not for profits is that they have what it takes to engage people by their very nature and people want to be involved with them.

A recent Social Media for Social Causes study published on Mashable indicates that major donors aged 30+ want to be involved with their charities conversation about the following:

• organizational impact
• success stories
• learning more about the organizations they are participating with
• want information on causes they care about
• want information on financial accountability

The study also showed that donors want to interact with organization experts and with other donors.

This post is co-authored by Qui Diaz, Beth Kanter and Geoff Livingston, authors of the Community Philanthropy 2.0 survey and they state that:

“ What we found was a tremendous opportunity for nonprofits to participate as trusted providers of credible information and ultimately cultivate the next generation of major donors through the social web”

Pretty powerful stuff and quite compelling?

OK so there’s the theory and the research but what about non profits actually using social media successfully? Here are some examples I found from around the web, but please feel free to add to the list and spread the word.

Let’s start big with the seemingly over used example of Barak Obama’s presidency campaign using social media to gain votes and raise funds (I say seemingly ‘cause it was so successful I don’t understand why the whole world hasn’t jumped right on the band wagon) Check it out:

http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2008/12/04/felesky-rahaf.html

Charity : Water has successfully raised $10 million (most of that last year alone) from 50,000 individual donors. This case study outlined by Mayank Dhingra explains how they use social media for relationship building, maintaining transparency, experimenting with new things and stakeholder involvement. Great stuff

http://mayank.name/2009/07/26/social-media-case-study-charity-water/

And here Qui Diaz lists a myriad of ideas and ways to donate time and money to charities. Really good for ideas and getting a feel for how the not for profit sector can benefit from using social media.

http://mashable.com/2008/12/17/digital-charities/

Here are some of the Qubites favourite tweets from the past week

@MrTomaz’s favourite tweets

@thepetnet: Gallery 1 of Photos from the Puppy Party courtesy of GSM photography. Tweet if you want any of the photos. http://ow.ly/r0vI

@thedailymash: MOON COULD SUPPORT MIDDLE-CLASS LIFE, SAY EXPERTS http://tinyurl.com/yegbwk2

@killer_bunnie Top 20 Celeb Artworks, some are crap, some are very good http://digg.com/d315ECY <- I have No. 16 hanging in my bedroom!!!

@MonaWalsh’s favourite tweets

@BrightonArgusJo Which was the cutest pup at Saturday’s puppy party? Vote here: http://icanhaz.com/puppyparty

@Nijay’s favourite tweets

@alexcowell: I’ve blogged for @cubeworks: Is today’s economy the “new normal”? Join the debate! http://bit.ly/12d9zo

@kindleresearch: This is clever. How observant are you? http://bit.ly/10hMJr (I got 1)

@orbific: Perception is a funny thing. The more Gordon Brown denies being snubbed, the more left out he seems.

@BrightonArgusJo often wondered whether you see the same “green” that I do. So this “illusion” is pretty awesome http://bit.ly/2luGBt

@Seelpod’s favourite tweets

@styletime @brandonacox: Every social media expert/guru/maven/etc must read this! http://bit.ly/6QRDi via @thebrandbuilder

@tweetmeme Advertising Agencies & Social Media: A Culture Clash | Social Media Explorer http://retwt.me/8E6X

@Glennw’s favourite tweets

@gwarek: Honda unveils Segway-style unicycle http://tinyurl.com/ycxtkcm (via @TEDchris) Looks hilarious.

My Starbucks Idea

Starbucks fortunes have been a up and down a bit over the last few years. To tackle this they decided to jump into the arena of crowdsourcing and build a community of customers to help them improve Starbucks.

They created a special website separate from their main corporate site, My Starbucks Idea which works in a similar way to a real-life suggestion box, only it’s much better.

They invite users to ‘help shape the future of Starbucks – with their ideas’. Basically users are able to add suggestions on ways to improve Starbucks.

They are able to read all the latest ideas and vote for their favourite. The most popular ideas rise to the top. There is also the opportunity to comment on and discuss any of the ideas.

Starbucks’ aim is to implement the top suggestions where possible or use them to inspire new ideas.

They’ve set up a team of ‘Idea Partners’ who review the ideas. They keep things transparent by feeding what they’re doing with the ideas back to the community through the Ideas in Action blog.

Has it worked?

To date they have had nearly 77,000 ideas submitted since March 2008.

Ideas that have launched include:

• Treat receipt
• Free Wi-Fi for Apple iPhone users at Starbucks
• Reintroducing Yukon Blend coffee
• Reusable bags

The spin off marketing benefits through increased exposure of Starbucks online has been vast.

Starbucks have successfully shown that by engaging with your customers online you can not only improve your product or service and quickly resolve any problem areas, but you can increase positive awareness of your brand across the web and encourage your customers to become your advocates.

Take a look at our Social Media for Research services to find out more about how you can improve your business by engaging with your customers online.

Our 5 favourite social media stories from the past week and  5 other random things that may or may not be interesting.

5 of the best

Did you know 4.0?

Statistics can be quite interesting…then again they can also be a bit dry. So seeing interesting statistics and figures in a nicely presented video is always appealing to me . It is certainly something that can wow a skeptic of the digital future.

Ten things businesses should do before starting with social media

When there is a lot of buzz about something lots of businesses will want to jump in feet first. Social Media shouldn’t be something you rush into without really working out why you are doing it first. I would recommend reading this article and taking some of the steps before you go and set up your company’s social media profiles.

Advertising Agencies And Social Media: A Culture Clash

I think a lot of ad agencies have a problem understanding how to bring social media into their services. Trying to shoe horn old school advertising techniques into a medium in which they don’t necessarily fit.

Thomson Holidays – how a blogger can impact your brand reputation

Not all of your customers will ring you up or send you a letter to complain, but that doesn’t mean they are satisfied. Consumers will however use social media to tell their friends and family about a bad experience. Finding those comments and being aware of them can have a huge impact on your brands reputation. You can take a dissatisfied customer and turn them into a happy one and with a little more effort they may even turn into a brand evangelist.

Copyright and Fair Use in Social Media

A blog post by Lily Allen sparked a wider debate about fair use online. She managed to take some text from another blog ad verbatim and put it into one of her posts without credit. Ironically she was making a point about people stealing intellectual property.

Vitaminwater’s new flavour created with Facebook app

An interesting use of social media and crowd sourcing. How could you use the wisdom of a crowd of your customers to help create interesting new products?

5 of the rest

80+ Strange and Fantastic Buildings Architecture

Architecture fascinates me and I always get frustrated when a new building or shopping centre is a b0ring grid of bricks or giant metal shed. However this set of buildings excites me more please!

Courier: First Details of Microsoft’s Secret Tablet

I like exciting concepts, the beauty of seeing a product before it is finished, is that we can imagine a huge range of possibilities. I fear this device will not live up to the exciting ideas in my head and will no doubt cost a pretty penny! However I wouldn’t be surprised to see something similar taking off in the future. So make sure you watch the video.

James May and his full-size Lego house nobody wants

A few weeks ago in 5 of the rest we posted about James May’s Lego house. Unfortunately it now looks like the whole thing might be coming down!

Over 1,200 NYC Trash Cubes Sold

This gives me an idea! Anyone interested in a Brighton box o’ rubbish?

Wants for Sale

A cute concept. Buy a painting of what the artist wants and then they can go and get that item. The paintings sell for the cost of the item they want. I would quite like to paint a “financial security” painting of my own!

I spoke a couple of weeks ago about how games are becoming more integrated into our social networks. Then not much later one of Sony’s big Christmas games, Uncharted 2, showed how it was integrating Twitter. Firstly here is a screen shot of said feature and the original article that alerted me to it.

Source: Uncharted 2 features Twitter integration

My first thought was great! However that excitement quickly turned into fear. Twitter is inherently a broadcast medium but it also has an instant messaging quality to it. The problem with this integration of Twitter is that most of the tweets it spits out are inherently anti-social and begin to move towards spam. This could quickly become annoying to followers, especially those that are not interested in the game or games at all!

Obviously this is an optional feature and alerts can be turned on individually, but for me it largely misses the point. Tweeting when you have started playing the multiplayer or when you upload a cinema file has some social value to your followers but I find it unlikely that anyone would be interested in when I have completed level 3. Twitter integration needs to have value and not just supply you with automated announcements that, if they were really worthwhile you could do yourself.

Hopefully Twitter will start to allow for better filtering so that when a device is tweeting for someone it can be easily silenced. I would hate to have to un-follow an interesting person just because they chose to spam their stream with trivial game progress.

I am interested to see how social networks integration into games progresses and will be keeping a close eye on the results. What do you think? Is Twitter doomed to collapse under a weight of spamming applications?

The Qubite’s favourite tweets from the last week bought to you in glorious technicolour (sort of).

@Glennw’s favourite tweets

@Kerb: Amazon customers who bought this aluminium baseball bat also bought.. http://bit.ly/QOBoa

@emma_beecher amazing shoes by @jonburgerman http://tinyurl.com/kpa7k5 i effing love his work

@MrTomasz’s favourite tweets

killer_bunnie: H from steps has died http://twitpic.com/h6b11

@rah_rah: a custom-made cuss is the latest prize donated to @brightwest by the awesome @stephenfry!

@MonaWalsh favourite tweets

@BrightonHoveCC: Balanced & independent blog on our Social Media Officer post.http://bit.ly/Kfee8

@Nijays favourite tweets

@davelaw00: Social media mistake no.5643 Don’t tweet about defacing university property http://is.gd/31Mj2 (LOL)

@euzie: NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO , Courteney Love might be moving to Hove, ffs

@JustinSMV: 5 Straw Man Arguments to Take a Pass on Social Media http://bit.ly/3lsODy

@rapella {reassuring} So we’re all a bunch of mutants http://bit.ly/a1s6S (I love this, it’s made me very happy).

A game built for social networks is very different to a game with added social features.

The “traditional” games are starting to incorporate more social features outside of simply allowing them to be multi-player. There are now games that incentivise through your friends high-scores (Burnout Paradise) allow you to share you creations (LittleBigPlanet, Spore) or incorporate them into your social spaces with Youtube (Noby Noby Boy) and Twitter support (Blur).

The majority of these are designed as games first, with social features playing a supporting but not necessarily crucial role. One of the core reasons for that is there are still a high number of people who do not have their games machine hooked up to the Internet. Their machines are used for single player or local experiences with friends.

As we move forward the gap between offline and online users will fall, but one place where this issue has already been removed is in the social networks we use. When a game exists on a social network you know that the user is always going to be online when playing and have a rich amount of information to be able to tap into such as who their friends are or what pictures they are in. I am looking directly at you here Facebook. This neatly brings me on to a company that has fascinated me for a while, Playfish.

Playfish was founded in 2007 and is now a multi million pound company with millions of customers. Not bad for a couple of years work!

All of Playfish’s games are free to play on Facebook and all of them incorporate elements of your profile. Rather than go really in depth as to why Playfish have been so successful or how they make money (save those for another blog post!) I thought I would just pull in some examples of how Playfish use the benifits of being on a social network to the fullest advantage.

Crazy Planets

In Crazy Planets your character’s head is made from your profile picture, new units are given faces from the friends of your choosing. Making me feel that much more guilty when I accidently walk my girlfriend into a pit of lava! Sorry hunny…

The game also gives you higher in game rewards based on how many of your friends play, incentivising the player to encourage his or her friends to join in.

Mini Golf Party

In mini golf party players will see their friends watching them on the course and have a constant reminder of their friends scores (see above picture). Not only does this increase the social feeling of the game it encourages players to try and compete with their friends and continue to play.

Pet Society

In Pet Society players are surrounded by a village that is unique to them. It is made up of houses designed and decorated by their other friends playing the game. Even when their friends are offline they can visit the other pets, share items, play or just see what they have been up to. This is a game all about social interaction and personal expression and is now 14m users strong!

Overall the best thing about these games is always feeling connected to your friends whether they are online or not. The social experiment is just beginning and as more games move towards our social networks the more connected they will become to our lives even when we are not playing!