Two years we highlighted the UK government’s decision to shun social media and opt for magazines and television in educating the young of Britain about the dangers of Chlamydia, Gonorrhoea and other sexual diseases. This decision flew in the face of research showing that most young people took advice about sexual matters from their peers (=social networks) rather than from information campaigns of any kind. The decision has had disastrous consequences for many young Britons. A report now highlights that sexually transmitted diseases are running at their highest rates since the 1970’s, particularly amongst the under-25s.

[Update] More on the woeful uptake of Chlamydia testing. “The shortfall has been blamed on … problems engaging young people,” writes the BBC’s Nick Triggle.

Some scientists at Microsoft have applied to patent a method of recommending contacts in a social network. For social networking nerds it is worth looking at the claims and the prior art responses. Social networking is now close enough to the mainstream of web activity for this patent claim to represent a serious business opportunity. Some of the prior art appears persuasive.

Roger Cohen writing in the New York Times points to the success of Barack Obama’s campaign as an example of the role of social networks in 21st century marketing. It is an example of the power of the many and shows up Hillary’s somewhat narrower base. Quoting from Joshua Green in the Atlantic Cohen writes:

“Obama’s claim of 1,276,000 donors is so large that Clinton doesn’t bother to compete.” [Green] gives some other Obama campaign numbers: 750,000 active volunteers and 8,000 affinity groups. In February, a month in which he raised $55 million ($45 million over the Internet), 94 percent of donations were of $200 or less, a number dwarfing small contributions to Clinton and John McCain.

via Valdis Krebs.

H&R Block used social media marketing to boost their profile and raise awareness of their digital accounting product, reports Ad Age. The lady responsible was Amy Worley (Photo: Jonathan Fickies). They used YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and Second life. As AdAge comments, this kind of marketing in social media is “about stacking up many small ideas to create a big total impact”.

Key stats:

H&R Block boosted overall brand awareness by 52%.

They spent 0.5% of their ad budget in doing so.
…

Yes, 0.5%`

[UPDATE] More details on the H & R Block campaign including an interview with Paula Drum, VP of Marketing on Podtech’s Marketing Voices talking about how the campaign played on YouTube and SecondLife. Here is their social media site Digits.

Internet World took place in London this week. Jonny Rosemont of Weber Shandwick has posted a nice summary of the key lessons. Here is part of it:

“Digitising is changing the world but it shouldn’t change communications strategies i.e. it is still all about giving people what they want

Consumers have to be co-opted into the marketing process, they are the new brand managers …”

This chimes with some thoughts that have been percolating in my head for a while.

Brands find it harder currently to respond to all their customers and stakeholders in ways that satisfy them.

There are three reasons for this:

a) It is now easier for the consumer to address the brand. Brands can no longer hide behind call centres and complaints procedures. Customers can discover email addresses and when they email they expect a response. When they don’t get that response, or aren’t happy with it, they can make a post on a message board, or post a hostile review, or blog.

b) It is now more difficult for the brand to address the consumer. All of the various “channels” have broken down, eroded, become one. All communications by the brand have become part of one general conversation. The comments of a tired call centre worker, or the carefully judged explanations of a chief executive briefing analysts all represent the “brand”. And they have as much, if not more currency than conventional marketing and advertising messages . It doesn’t necessarily all take place online, but 80% of it is recorded online. Worse, the relationship between the brand’s message and the consumer is mediated by the search engines, and that means that the brand’s message gets mixed up with the comments and statements of all of its other stakeholders, including the disaffected consumers mentioned above.

c) The expectations of both consumer and brand are out of whack. The consumer expects the kind of response he or she might get from the local dry-cleaner (”I’m sorry about that, we’ll clean it again”); the brand expects to be able to choke off the access of the consumer to dialogue (restricting access to call centres by ensuring wait times are long, and concealing emails and phone numbers). Neither is realistic. The consumer will have their response, but this cannot always be a one-to-one experience. The brand will have to communicate with the consumer, but will have to find ways of doing so without setting up a response centre the size of the Inland Revenue’s.

In these circumstances brands can learn much from the lessons of the early community builders online. They need to give some of the work of communicating their brand values and compiling their FAQs to the broader stakeholder group. When we set up the message boards in the early days of BBC online we discovered (copying AOL) that it works better to recruit online moderators (brand advocates and protectors) from amongst the stakeholder group (EastEnders fans, or mums with kids) than it did to use paid employees. The EastEnders or Doctor Who fans cared more about the forum and worked harder at maker it a success than the paid employees.

Similarly a Land Rover aficionado knows more about Land Rover than any product manager working for Land Rover ever will. These are the new brand champions, and the constituency who can do most to create a channel with that vast, mass amorphous group of Internet searchers and (potential) customers who are so hard to reach by conventional means. What a brand needs to do is to figure out how to get their stakeholders to do some of their communications for them, to empower them. What is the good news about the brand? What are its responses to key challenges? Brands can use the tools of social media research to learn how to identify and to speak to its key stakeholders: who are they? what messages do they respond to? what messages do they reject? If they communicate based on that understanding there is a chance that the positive message will spread.

This is an argument which is inspired by customer service, but it applies as well to investor relations, marketing communications and - perhaps most urgently - advertising.

Recent figures from the IAB indicate that UK online advertising has reached £2bn. This number has already outstripped radio and newspapers and is chasing down television (at £3.9bn). The internet’s proportion of ad spend in the UK is the highest in the world.

It is worth a second look at the trends hidden in the figures. The online advertising total was up 42% year on year. Paid search, however, grew at 52% (above the trend). Display ads grew below the trend at 35%. Display ads - which were the dominant form of advertising during the internet bubble - now represent only 22.6% of the total advertising spend.

The reasons are not hard to find: an excellent click-through rate on a display ad is 1%. Most click-through rates are far lower. The web surfers who click on a banner are poorly qualified as prospects. They may become customers, they may not. Even back at the height of the dot-com boom, frustrated ad analysts were writing columns like this - failing to find any way of showing that online advertising had any impact on buying decisions. It is still hard to track the impact of online display advertising and advertisers have found that frustrating.

Compare paid search: here customers have qualified themselves as having an interest in the topic chosen by the advertiser. It is a far more effective way of capturing monetisable online transactions and product searches (58% of the total £1.2bn is now going on paid search). But paid search remains a medium for calls to action, not for branding. It is very hard to give much of a flavour of your brand in the haiku-like format of a Google paid search advertisement. For that you need to find a way to connect emotionally with your audience, to make them feel happy, sad, excited. This remains a huge challenge online.

An upcoming conference organised by our friends at Search Engine Strategies looking at advertising through social networks. Clever approaches here seem much more likely to drive brand value than paid search. If I become the “friend” of Lily Allen, I am clearly qualifying myself much more as a potential buyer of her future output. The same goes for anything entertainment-related. But it is much more of a challenge for brands which are not entertainment related. Social networks pose them exactly the same problems as normal web pages. They either have to post a banner or sponsor an event. They can’t rely on pull, because (as sellers of motor insurance for example) they can’t compete with the Arctic Monkeys. No one on a social network like MySpace will publicly identify themselves with a functional brand - however useful they may find it - in the way they might with a star.

So where do brand builders go? The answer is that they need to identify their own target networks. Every brand has its own universe of key authorities, people who do spend their time talking about motor insurance or pension provision. We have recently been working for the car rental giant Avis Europe alongside our colleagues at UK digital agency Web Liquid. One of the things we helped Avis Europe to do was to identify:

a) who was talking about them and in what terms; b) who was talking about car hire/rental in general; c) the key authorities with whom they needed to connect;

This work identified those who could be thought of as Avis’s own “MySpace” - that is: a community of people who hire cars, talk about car hire and are authoritative on car hire. Our work enabled Avis Europe to identify the key topics that car renters were concerned about, and to help align their product with the needs of that market. We showed them who were the key authoritities in “trustworthy car rental”. Where they sat in that in conversation, and who they needed to impress to be talked about in a more positive way. We identified the key hot topics of those influencers - what language they were using, what their concerns were.

As a consequence of this work, the marketing team at Avis led by Xavier Vallée and Rob White, and the customer service team led by Eibhlin Payne and Stephen Spiers have been doing a lot of product and service development in the background and they have just now begun to talk about that in the form of a blog wetryharder.co.uk. The aim of the blog is to open a dialogue with the marketplace.

This kind of approach sets a benchmark - in our opinion - for what online brand building needs to become: a process of engagement with the online marketplace.

1. You find out what your brand is - by listening to the way it is discussed, by monitoring and measuring those conversations. How important are you? What are your key strengths, your weaknesses? What are your supporters saying? What are your detractors saying?
2. You start acting on the insights, improving the product, becoming if you like more like the best self you can be;
3. You start - very cautiously - to talk about what you are doing, trying to attenuate your voice not to the slogans of the marketing department, but to the words of your consumers;
4. You measure how you are doing. What is the change in sentiment around your product? Are you now preferred to your competitors? On what grounds?

Then you repeat the process. Slowly, and in lock-step with your customers, you build your brand. This process is not just about good market research, or good advertising: it puts both to the service of creating an impregnable place for your brand at the heart of the most valuable place you can be: the place where you solve problems for your customers.

The problem created by two or more users SHOUTING at each other online is entertainingly diagnosed by Clay Shirky. He makes some profound and pointed observations about how groups behave online, pointing out that computer software regularly ignores that people make most use of computers as part of social networks.

Shirky argues that open communities represent the “Tragedy of the Commons” where the group’s resources are owned in common, but each has an incentive to overuse those resources. He suggests that blogs work because they represent “enclosure”: an individual’s space can be coralled and protected without stopping being part of the commons.