Gray Dudek

On the 15th April 2010 a UK first happened where we saw the 3 main political party leaders engage in a live TV debate – much like US guys have been doing for many years.

While the debate had 70 or so ‘rules’ that the leaders had to abide by it has to be said that the debate lived up to it’s billing drawing in a huge audience of nearly 10million people doubling the size of the usual ITV audience.

So, if nearly 10million people watched the debate what did they think?

We used Social Radar to find out.

First stop was to look at the volume of conversations, be they on Twitter, blogs, forums, etc that each of the leaders and parties attracted over the coming days.

It is very evident from the above chart that the dominance of Nick Clegg and his approach to the debate has catalysed online conversation around him as the leader of the Liberal Democrats and also his party. Surprisingly David Cameron managed to gain more conversation online than Gordon Brown but as always was this conversation of a positive or negative persuasion?

As we can see from the above chart the online conversation volume around David Cameron, whilst being larger in volume than the other two leaders, was almost 20% more negative towards him and the Conservative party proving that in this scenario more is definitely not better. Amazingly Nick Clegg steals a sentiment score of or around 75% positive which, to his credit, seemed quite deserved from the way in which he came across on the night.

We then took a look so see what the major topics were that people were aligning with the Leaders Debate over the following 48hrs.

We cross tabbed the most popular terms / words being used in the discussions with sentiment to achieve a holistic view on how the debate was received in general but also to see what the most discussed themes were and whether these were agreeable with the audience or not.

The Leaders Debate was received very well indeed across Twitter as a general theme. Nick Clegg, as we know, was received very positively and was discussed frequently. However, David Cameron as the most discussed topic, second only to the actual debate itself, was simply received well. Diving deeper into this area we were able to see that the online public just did not understand the position he took on the night, didn’t like the way in which he seemed to be ‘buddying up’ with Nick Clegg (Hung Parliment springs to mind!) and overall his Angry Dad persona was just not liked.

So, over the coming weeks I will continue to monitor the Leader Debates and report back the top-line findings from Social Radar as the debacle unfolds…

So the Tories decided to aggrgate all the links to the sites where Gordon Brown had potential had ‘dealings’ that were supposed to be of a back-handed nature.

Nice idea, but not thought through.

Launched at the weekend on Facebook and Twitter, the site – claimed to have cost $15,000 – was intended to engage voters who could earn “points” for reading a speech by Michael Gove, the shadow education minister, or bombarding Charlie Whelan, the ex-Labour spin doctor now working for Unite, with hectoring tweets.

It worked, up to a point: it certainly engaged voters.

Unfortunately, many of them weren’t Conservative voters.

And it seems that the team behind the Tories’ site hadn’t learned the lesson of the Daily Telegraph, which last April saw its site peppered with swearing and insults aimed at its owners, the Barclay Brothers, when it automatically republished any tweet containing the text “#budget”. (”Telegraph wankers #budget Didn’t work” being one of the more polite.) So history repeated itself – for a change, both times as farce – after Twitter users quickly spotted that any tweet containing “#cashgordon” would be reused immediately on the site, regardless of whether it agreed with the Conservative view or not.

So what was the impact on the conversation volume surrounding this?

It’s clear to see from the above how quickly the trend kicked-up. Analysing the Tweets that were driving this spike using Social Radar we were able to see that the hockey-stick was not due to the kind of posts that the Tories were really after.

Porn, profanity and Rick Astley were the main contributors towards this!

So what was the sentiment towards the campaign?

Quite easy to see that although the volume of converation increased dramatically the negative conversation went up also.

The topics that were being ‘discussed’ were:

So what have the Conservatives said about the campaign? How did they spin this one?

“So it looks like some people took the fun a bit too far and hacked #CashGordon. Full service will resume very shortly …”

A bit of fun they say? Campaigning against their nearest rival using Digital is meant to be a bit of fun? I am pretty sure that if the site would have worked out how they wanted it to this ‘bit of fun’ would have turned into a ‘major triumph for the people’ or some such political spin-mastery…

And poor old  Gordon Thompson in Nova Scotia, @CashGordon – he had to change his Twitter bio as people were coming to his Twitter feed to find out what was going on…

2/10 Tory Party – must try harder…

Excellent listing of the Socialnomics stats from @PiSociaMedia

1. 1. By 2010 Gen Y will outnumber Baby Boomers…96% of them have joined a social network

Source: Grunwald Associates National Study

1. 2. Social Media has become the #1 activity on the Web

Source: Huffington Post

1. 3. If Facebook were a country it would be the world’s 4th largest
   

Source: Facebook

1. 4. 1 in 6 higher education students are enrolled in online curriculum

Source:  Attempting to relocate

1. 5. % of companies using LinkedIn as a primary tool to find employees – 80%

Source: Jobvite Social Recruitment Survey

1. 6. Ashton Kutcher and Ellen Degeneres have more Twitter followers than the entire populations of Ireland, Norway and Panama

Source: Twitter & World Population Data

1. 7. 80% of Twitter usage is on mobile devices… people update anywhere, anytime… imagine what that means for bad customer experiences?

Source: Attempting to relocate

1. 8. Generation Y and Z consider e-mail passé… In 2009 Boston College stopped distributing e-mail addresses to incoming freshmen

Source: Metro Newspaper

1. 9. The #2 largest search engine in the world is YouTube

Source: TGDaily

1. 10. Wikipedia has over 13 million articles… some studies show it’s more accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica

Source: www.wikipedia.org

1. 11. There are over 200,000,000 Blogs

Source: China Internet Information Center, Technorati, Wikipedia

1. 12. 25% of search results for the World’s Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content

Source: Marketing Vox and Nielsen BuzzMetrics

1. 13. 34% of bloggers post opinions about products & brands

Source: Universal McCann’s Social Media Research Wave 3

1. 14. If you were paid a $1 for every time an article was posted on Wikipedia you would earn $156.23 per hour

Calculated based of Wikipedia article data found at www.wikipedia.org

1. 15. 90% of consumers trust peer recommendations

Source: July 2009 Nielsen Global Online Consumer Survey

1. 16. Only 14% trust advertisements

Source: “Marketing to the Social Web,” Larry Weber

1. 17. Only 18% of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI

Source: “Marketing to the Social Web,” Larry Weber

1. 18. 24 of the 25 largest newspapers are experiencing record declines in circulation because we no longer search for the news, the news finds us.

Source: Yahoo Finance

1. 19. In the near future we will no longer search for products and services they will find us via social media

Opinion from Socialnomics

1. 20. More than 1.5 million pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) are shared on Facebook… daily.

Source: Facebook

Thanks to blog.pibusinessresearch.com/ for the stats compendium and Socialnomics for the original mashup.

Ok, so there have been millions of ‘what 2010 holds’ or ‘predictions for 2010′ articles written but to save time I decided to digest all these and then write a succinct list of things I truely believe we should note or act upon.

Many of the ‘lists’ thus far have been truely up for debate and some have agendas I’d say.

So what can we realistically expect to play out, become very real and change the ways in which we must work?

Easy…hmmm…

So, the top ten I believe are as follows:

• The lines have truly blurred. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to draw a line between different forms of communications, especially when considering the online space. So why try and do it? Consider everything within the mix and do not try to separate.
• Successful communications programs need to integrate owned, earned and paid media to achieve their goals. Dave Fleet talked about this Forrester view and it couldn’t be more important through 2010 with reduced budgets and increasing pressures.
• Two-way communication is increasing. Wherever you look, previously one-way information flows are becoming two-way. Mainstream media feed off social media while also driving it. Advertising drives attention but also content strategies.
• Marketing is turning “inbound”.
• Products are evolving into Services.
• Consumer dialogue and co-creation are becoming the keys to Relevance and Brand value.
• Local should be key for a step by step Culture shift.
• Digital Energy will be “liquid”, as opposed to “budgeted”,which necessitates a new type of metrics and expertise.
• Measurement is key if we are to take bold steps within social comm’s.
• Reporting ‘meaningful numbers’ (not followers, members, etc) such as sentiment and comm’s reach.

There are many more for us all to consider but try as we might we can only head of a few over the coming months of planning and executing.

So above are my top ten that I’ll be focussing on to either consider, integrate, change my thinking or execute.

Wishing you all a happy and thought-provoking 2010.

I’ll post my next ten in March (if I can crack the above by then!)

While I am not a huge fan of the ‘free’ tools that are out there for social media monitoring (let’s not call it measuring coz it really isn’t with the free stuff!) there are a few that I have stumbled across, been told about, been sent, used, etc so I thought I’d drop a list together that I found quite useful.

As long as you always remember what your parents probably told you ‘you get what you pay for’ then you will get some benefit from these tools.

If you’re looking to perform large campaigns, assess sentiment shifts accurately, look for influencial bloggers/blogs/forums/tweets/etc to plan a social media campaign then check out Social Radar.

In the meantime get a few of these loaded and get started…

1. Google Alerts
This an absolute must. Any time your business, brand, or name appears on the Web you can receive a notification in your email with a link to the content mentioning you.

2. Social Mention
Social Mention is a ‘real time social media search and analysis’ engine. You can set real time alerts delivered to your email, and the best part is you don’t need to register with the site.

3. BackTweets
BackTweets lets you search for links on Twitter. It’s handy for when post links to your site without mentioning your name or using an ‘@reply’.

4. Social URL
How often do you find yourself jumping from one window to another to check up on your numerous social profiles? Social URL showcases all of your network profiles on a single Web address.

5. NameChk
Managing your reputation is important, but first you must secure your name/s across all of the major social networks. This is key to avoiding ‘brand jacking’ from people with bad intentions.

6. Monitter
While Social Mention is best for Twitter email updates and search, Monitter provides you with a stream of updates based on the specific people and terms you wish to follow. It’s like a hyper specific Twitter filter. No registration required.

7. UserVoice
Online Reputation Management is more than just playing defense. UserVoice gives you the ability to ‘harness customer feedback’ so you learn about concerns before they become problems. The most basic plan is free.

8. RapLeaf
RapLeaf is another proactive tool to use for identifying others, using their email address, on numerous social media networks. This is handy for looking up potential customers on the social Web (pull out all those business cards you picked up at your last networking event).

9. Board Tracker
So far we’ve covered the social Web and the Internet at large, but there’s still a wide world of discussion forums out there you may overlook. Board Tracker ensures that mentions of you in discussion forums are covered. This is important because lots of negative press begins on the boards.

10. Who Links to Me
Find out who is linking to your websites. This is a great tool for identifying positive and negative posts and press. Use ‘Who Links to Me’ to turn fans into brand advocates, and try to convert pessimists into believers (don’t bother with hate speech — just try removing that noise entirely).