Sharing purchases via Twitter

I've just recently stumbled upon services such as blippy and swipely that allow you to share purchase information via social channels. I must admit, I'm in two minds about this.

My marketing mind says: 'woo hoo! What a great way to spread positive buzz about a product through the social graph'.

My cynical old fart mind says: 'You want me to tell the world what I've bought, from where and how much I paid? Why don't I just publish my bank statement while I'm at it?'

It reminds me of what Facebook tried with Beacon. And we all know that didn't work out too well.

So, I think it's a neat idea to enable people to share what they've bought through Twitter etc, but I'm not sure how many people will actually do it. I don't think I'll be rushing to sign up.

A solution to ghost blogging?

The debate over ghost blogging has been raging for a while now. This post by Mitch Joel covers a lot of the arguments against it.

Listening to Inside PR podcast this week, it seems the Canadian PR gurus might have come up with a great way for PR types to be able to help companies with their blogging, without pissing people off by pretending to be someone you are not. Namely, using:

"as told to".

For example, say I was helping Jack Bauer write his blog, it would be titled:

"Jack Bauer's blog, as told to Robin Wilson"

I like this approach because:

1. Readers are not deceived. It is clear that the blog contains Jack Bauer's thoughts and that I have helped him produce the blog.
2. It differentiates between impersonation and publishing. Helping someone publish their blog by ensuring the posts are structured the right way, the necessary keywords are included and tags are set up, is very different from writing a blog on someone's behalf with minimal input from that person.
3. It's still human. The reader is still getting the thoughts of Jack Bauer, not mine.

IMHO I think it's OK for comms types to help people communicate - on any platform. Where I think the line should be drawn is when people are communicating with a certain person, when they actually communicating with that person's comms officer.

Social media used for healthy eating

I really like this new Children's Food Campaign initiative that encourages people create their own spoof ads to illustrate the conflict on interest that could come from the govt's announcement to get snack makers to run the childhood anti-obesity campaign.

The Children's Food Campaign provides templates in the style of Change4Life and you make your own poster. The best will be sent to the dept of health next month.

It is good to see sarcasm and social media being combined for a good cause.

Human powered car

I saw this on PSFK - a car powered by human kinetic energy.

It reminds me of the bugs bunny and Yosemite Sam rail road chases on hand powered rail road cart.

I'm sure it's a brilliant invention, but I can't help thinking that if you are going to put that much effort into getting from A to B, then why not just buy a bike [which I'm guessing will be a lot cheaper].

Social Media ROI

Last week I was set a challenge by a colleague/boss to calculate how many people a social media campaign would reach / engage with.

So, I used the 1:9:90 rule of participation, which states that in online social communities:

• 1% of the audience create stuff: Creators
• 9% comment or edit content: Commenters
• 90% just watch, or read stuff: Spectators

Taking a community that has 4,000 people actively creating stuff that can be considered content about a brand, then you get:

• 36,000 Commenters
• 360,000 Spectators.

What I also did was look at the impact of the 36,000 commenters' social graph. Based on the community being in Facebook [which in the challenge, it was], then the commenting and editing of brand content will be spread through each Commenter's social graph i.e the Commenters' Facebook Friends will see that they have commented on the brand's content.

The average number of Friends a person has on Facebook is 150. So, the total reach of the campaign is 36,000 multiplied by 150 = 5.6M.

I know I've made a lot of assumptions, but so does the TV advertising industry and print media advertising industry - they extrapolate behaviour for the nation based on a sample size and assume that no one walks out of the room when the adverts come in and that everyone reads every page of every issue of a newspaper.

If we get to do the campaign, then I can put my theory to the test. Fingers crossed.

Twitter newspaper

I heard about this fab application called Paper.li where you can create a newspaper made up of all your twitter followers conversations. Here's one I prepared earlier.

You can create a newspaper by putting in a users Twitter name, a Hash Tag or a Twitter list. You can promote it via social media and send to people.

As well as just being really cool, this will be great for creating communities around hashtags, creating Twitter Newspapers for brands or bringing together people at work on a project.

Pay with a tweet

My colleague Christophe told me about this cool new social payment system, called Pay With A Tweet. You get content such as eBooks and in return you tweet about the book you have received 0r post about it on Facebook. Very nifty.

Could be a great way for brands to create buzz around interesting content they have produced.