Rob Blackie's blog

How can you make your events successful?

2011-11-11T14:40:00.001Z

How can you get people to attend your events, and to stay involved as part of an all year round community?

That's what I tackled this week in a presentation I gave at Internet Week Europe:

I’m here today to talk about how you can turn engaging events into longer term communities based on experiences that you have told me that you want to hear about.

So what I’m not going to tell you to do today is to create a great event - I’m working on the assumption that you’re going to try and do that anyway. You told me that you were trying to do that anyway.

And when I wondered around asking people before this session what they wanted, you told me that you weren’t sure how to turn an event into a community.

So I’m going to try and show how behavioural economics and digital intersect - and what this means for creating a successful event. And the key insight of behavioural economics is that simple small changes can sometimes make huge changes to outcomes.

So here are five areas for discussion about how you can make your event into a community.

Firstly make it incredibly easy to participate. People are getting used to online interfaces which require almost no effort to use. Think of Amazon’s Buy-now-with1click service. Rory Sutherland points out that reducing the number of clicks required to buy a product from 4 to 3 can add 40% to your sales. And Amazon reckon that every 100ms of additional load time for a page reduces their sales by 1%.

Yet most online event services make it unnecessarily difficult to actually register. And often we make it easy to turn up for an event, but don’t capture people’s data and recruit them into our community.

A common mistake is to not take mobile seriously enough. People with smartphones, which is most people who will come to your events, read email heavily on them. And they love crossing things off their to do list - so if you can make it very easy to register on mobile, then many more of them will, and they will sign up to stay involved in the community afterwards.

Secondly use peer pressure. There is vast evidence of the power of peer pressure. And in Facebook, Twitter and other social networks we have built in peer pressure. If you visit an event page and see that a friend is attending, then you are much more likely to attend.

Equally post event the participation of your friends and peers will keep you participating in the community.

At a minimum you should never organise an event without a Like button on the event page.

The easiest way to build peer pressure is to contact a bunch of peers - and try to build momentum among them. So don’t just email your list and update your Facebook page. Also create a feedback loop by actively encouraging your attendees to invite their friends.

Equally during and after the event if you profile a wide series of attendees, even with simple mechanics like vox pops, then you’ll strengthen the peer effect.

Thirdly get people to commit. Ticketing agencies are great at getting people to book with early bird discounts - knowing that they will pay up front, even though many won’t turn up.

You can do this without getting people to pay. So give people exclusive access to something if they book early.

People hate missing out - the idea of all of your friends or peers having a good time without you is horrible.

So set a very low bar for tickets, tell people when the Gold tier is about to sell out. And then when it’s sold out, create the same shortage with a silver tier, bronze tier and so on until you reach the event.

You can use this to build a longer term community, for instance by getting early registrations to input on event content, as well as starting to build your community from earlier. Since time is one of the crucial ingredients to build a community then extending community building to before an event is a good way to strengthen your community.

Fourthly create your own media gathering operation for your event.

My friend and colleague Ryan Davis ran the social media for the X Factor auditions in the USA recently, which was phenomenally successful at creating buzz round the event.

The key to this was having a content gathering team - a couple of young guys who went around photographing and filming wacky contestants, and bringing them back to Ryan, who edited the highlights, tweeted them and interacted with the contestants.

Not rocket science - but there’s an underlying truth here about events. Which is that if you are at event, then you always have a nagging fear that something exciting is happening just round the corner. But if you’re normal height then you can’t see beyond the closest few people to you. And if there’s somebody incredibly high profile, like Mark Zuckerberg speaking, then you’re probably watching them.

But most of the time there are lots of potentially interesting people there - but you don’t know who they are, where they are or what they’re saying. So social media has a huge ability to act as your radar.

Now it’s often assumed that this will happen spontaneously. Actually only a small proportion of people will be creating content at any one time, it’s not necessarily covering the full range of stuff going on or promoting your agenda. So you can easily boost this at low cost. Get some journalism students to work for you for the day for instance.

Again what creates a great event also strengthens the longer term community, by making it a better event, by creating content that people will return to and my making a wider range of event heroes.

Finally understand why people come to events.

And this is an interesting question to ask in Internet Week.

Why, in fact, are Internet Week events face to face?

Well it turns out that we quite like meeting other people. In fact the main point of these events is to meet other people - presentations like mine are really just an excuse to mingle over coffee.

So the most valuable things you can do are to make it easy for people to find each other and to create and maintain links to each other.

The simplest, and one of the best, examples of this I know is the E-Campaigning Forum conference that happens annually in Oxford. A couple of hundred NGO campaigners come together and then stay together over the year through an email list.

So my challenge to everyone here is to create something for their conference that replicates our two most successful professional social networking apps.

LinkedIn has overcome our British aversion to becoming friends with people we don’t know.

And Grindr has been phenomenally successful at adding location and real time to internet dating.

If you combine the two, which is reasonably easy to do, then you have a locational app which allows you to find people at an event, connect with them after the event and share content while at the event. There are already numerous apps that do this, like Gruppio.

Or if you want to do something simpler, simply create lots of content during the event and email it to people afterwards.

So my final question for everyone here is who has already done this and how has it worked?

I've got a new job

2011-09-26T08:51:00.001+01:00

I'm extremely pleased to announce that I'll be Managing Director of Blue State Digital in London, starting on 12th October.

Here's the press release announcing it:

Blue State Digital London Appoints Rob Blackie as Managing Director

London – Blue State Digital, Inc. (BSD) has appointed Rob Blackie as Managing Director of their London office. In his new role, Blackie will be providing leadership to the agency’s growing UK-based operations and assume responsibility for BSD’s continued expansion in the European markets.

Blue State Digital, which was acquired by WPP Digital in 2010, is known best for its work on U.S. President Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign. Founded in 2004, the firm has achieved strong growth by successfully applying digital organising and advocacy strategies to the commercial, NGO and public sectors.

BSD’s client roster includes American Express, Ford Motor Company, Microsoft, Recylebank, and dozens of the world’s leading non-profits including the Red Cross, United Way Worldwide, and the Sundance Institute. The firm also works with political candidates and parties around the world.

Commenting on his appointment, Rob Blackie said:

“BSD-London does brilliant work with clients like the Tate, Hope Not Hate and the music matters campaign for the BPI, among many others. There’s great potential for BSD to gain recognition for this work, and to grow our client base across non-profits, government and corporates.”

Blackie comes to BSD from Blue Rubicon, which he joined in 2005 with a background in traditional media relations, and was Blue Rubicon’s founding Head of Digital from 2007.

Blue Rubicon’s digital work now covers almost all client accounts, from Facebook’s multi-award winning Democracy UK campaign to McDonald’s. Under Blackie’s guidance, Blue Rubicon was shortlisted for 13 digital awards in the past year alone.

BSD Managing Partner Thomas Gensemer said:

“Rob will be an incredible asset for Blue State Digital. We’ve seen his proven ability to introduce online communications for a broad spectrum of clients, and we’re excited to bring his knowledge, and tremendous business intuition into the fold. We know his experience will be instrumental in BSD’s continued success in Europe.”

About Rob Blackie  Prior to joining BSD, Rob Blackie was Head of Digital at Blue Rubicon. He has a background in traditional media relations and has headed Blue Rubicon’s digital team since its formation in 2007. He advised a wide range of corporate and public clients—from large-scale government campaigns to Facebook and McDonald's —on integrating online and offline communications. Prior to joining Blue Rubicon, Rob played a large role in advising the central government Directors of Communications on the integration of digital into press office communications, and trained more than 500 government communicators on how best to implement these practices.

About Blue State Digital

Blue State Digital (BSD) is a full-service agency that provides integrated digital marketing strategy as well as a Web-based licensed software platform to help organizations drive concrete results by building communities online. BSD provides clients with a variety of strategic services, including program development and management, mass email strategy and execution, website design, content development, video and motion graphics, offline PR and social media outreach, analytics and online advertising. In addition, the BSD Online Tools, the company’s licensed software toolset, offers organizations of any size a core CRM/CMS technology platform for community-building and other advocacy initiatives. BSD has offices in New York, Washington D.C., Los Angeles, Boston and London.

BSD is part of the WPP plc, one of the world's largest communications services organizations (NASDAQ: WPPGY, www.wpp.com). For more information, visitwww.bluestatedigital.com and www.bsdtools.com.

Help. I've become a swear word

2011-09-20T14:46:00.004+01:00

I have a slightly unusual surname. Not wildly so, but Blackie isn't like Smith. Our numbers are in the thousands though.

And like everyone else I occasionally have my emails go into people's junk mail folders.

Well I'm mildly distressed to see that my name is considered a profanity by a leading provider of online moderation tools.

This means that if I comment on Facebook pages or some websites and mention my surname then I'll be automatically put into a moderation queue, and disappear from websites. And it might explain some of my emails disappearing.

This feels like the first step on the slippery slope to being airbrushed out of history.

Still as my colleague Karin Robinson points out, Olympic gold medal gymnast Mitch Gaylord must have it much worse.

August round up - Facebook, QR codes and more

2011-08-30T11:00:00.000+01:00

Here are a few great little articles that we’ve seen recently that you might find interesting.

A guide to the Facebook Edgerank algorithm

The Edgerank algorithm is used by Facebook to decide which content to display in your news feed and when you search for content. It, for instance, shows me Diet Coke rather than Coke when I search for Coke on Facebook, because more of my friends are fans of Diet Coke than Coke.

This guide is the best explanation of Edgerank I’ve seen.

How connected are you?

We’re proud of this app we produced for Western Union, that shows you how globally connected you are compared to your friends. I’m currently ranked 138,084^th out of 225,000 app users.

What does mobile mean for marketing?

Rory Sutherland’s talk at Google’s Think Mobile conference is characteristically entertaining and insightful on how mobile’s ability to provide contextual relevance can be influential for marketers

Misuse of QR codes by Crowne Plaza

Crowne Plaza’s recent advertising campaign that uses QR codes is nicely analysed here, explaining why a much simpler mechanic would probably have been successful.

When online PR goes wrong

This write up of a PR paid blogger trip to Magaluf is a great example of how badly executed blogger relations can go horribly wrong. [Warning – not for the faint hearted].

Google Plus round up

2011-08-26T11:23:00.000+01:00

A lot has been written about Google Plus. While I’m a fan of its functionality, I’m not convinced that it’s taking off in the UK. With a relatively digital set of friends and colleagues I’ve only seen one update in my G+ stream in the last few days.

Here are two views that are worth reading:

‘What Google Plus is really about’ – a view that it’s mainly about moving paid services to the cloud
‘Is social in Google’s DNA’ – a comparison of Google’s algorithmic approach to Facebook’s more behavioural approach to relevance by Tom Anderson, the founder of MySpace

Data use by Tesco, Capital One and dating websites

2011-08-22T10:54:00.000+01:00

McKinsey’s recent report on ten major trends includes a number of trends driven by data, including product testing and data mining by corporates such as Tesco, Capital One and Ford, and crime mapping to identify problem areas.

On a similar note, Marketing Week’s feature on the use of data by online dating companies has a variety of useful insights. Lovestruck.com’s use of behavioural data with people’s stated preferences is interesting in that it’s a the centre of their business model, not just in their marketing:

Lovestruck has two types of algorithm. When users first join the site, they will be matched with potential partners using Lovestruck’s in-house algorithm based on interests, what they are looking for, age, location and so on.

But when they start to use the site, that data is overridden by an IntroAnalytics matching algorithm which learns from the user’s behaviour.

What is Google Plus?

2011-07-04T17:56:00.002+01:00

Google Plus attempts to capture ‘social’ from Facebook*. In other words it tries to mix Google’s successful search, mobile (Android) and Gmail businesses with Facebook’s successful social business.

Why is Google doing this?

Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, once said that everything is better if it’s social. By this he means that we are interested in what our friends do about almost anything, whether it’s a film they watch, their job or a restaurant they visit. Market research and data show that people are far more likely to buy a product, and to pay a premium for it, if a friend recommends it.

If a friend of yours clicks ‘Like’ on the new Transformers film, then you are more likely to watch it. If you see a Transformers advert, showing you that your friend John has ‘Liked’ Transformers, then you are hugely more likely to click on the advert and to actually watch the film. This means that social advertising is massively more effective, and lucrative, than simple Google advertising that is based on what you search for or the words that appear in your emails.

How does it work?

Beneath it all Google and Facebook have created two similar systems:

· A stream of content that your friends have posted up. So your sister posts up a video of your nephew, and you can see it.

· Email, messaging, video and phone chat and other communications tools are integrated, so that all of your history of communication with a friend is captured. So if you’ve emailed a friend, shared a photo with them and organised a BBQ that you invited them to, this is all obvious to you.

· When you ‘Like’ or ‘+1’ a piece of content (e.g. the new Transformers film) your friends are told, and this preference appears in their search results.

· Social tools, so that, for instance you can see who your mutual friends with people are.

So what’s the difference between Google Plus and Facebook?

The key difference is how friends are treated. In Facebook the default choice you make is between a piece of content (e.g. your holiday photos) being public or restricted to your friends. More sophisticated settings exist, but people usually just share things with their friends.

The problem with Facebook’s default[1] is that most people have very different groups of friends. So their work friends and friends from university may be very different. And many people have had a mildly embarrassing situation when these two groups have seen the same content. For instance their work friends see photos of them at Glastonbury, or an ex-boyfriend sees your holiday photos.

Google Plus’s approach is to force you to create ‘Circles’ of different friends, so that you can share content with specific groups of people. By doing this they hope to get people to use Circles to share more information, and to spend more time on Google sites.

On top of that Google Plus has many of the useful functions that Facebook has, as well as a few additional ones. In particular, for Android users of Google Plus, any photos taken on your phone will be automatically uploaded to a private website, ready to share with your ‘Circles’.

Who will win?

Both Facebook and Google have huge audiences, lots of experience at creating usable products and very sophisticated strategies. But even if its strategy seems right, at the moment Google Plus feels a bit dead and is not terribly intuitive.

If we had to bet, we’d go with Facebook, but the chances are that both will flourish in time.

Comparison of features between Google Plus & Facebook

Activity	Google	Facebook
Show that you like content	+1 button	Like button
See what your friends are doing	Streams showing what friends are doing, split by circles	Home page showing your friends, and brand, updates
Messaging tools	Email, IM. Unlimited size IM groups via Huddle function	Messaging includes email, IM and Facebook messages
Search	Google search shows you what your friends have +1’d	Bing search shows you what your friends have ‘Liked’
Mobile & location	Integrated with Google’s Android operating system for mobiles. Check In system is very similar to Facebook, using the popular Google Maps service	Facebook Places shows you where your friends are
Voice and video	Multiple video conferencing	Skype partnership
Photos	Photos from Android phones are automatically uploaded to your Google Plus account – encouraging you to share them.	Tagging of friends encourages sharing
Recommended content	In home feed, as with Facebook, as well as the ‘Sparks’ feed which caters for things you are interested in, but that come from strangers.	Just appears in your home feed, though you can review content from fan pages and groups later if you missed it.

*Facebook is a BR client. However I’ve tried to be as dispassionate as possible in writing this.

[1] A problem explicitly addressed by Mark Zuckerberg when launching their new groups function. http://mashable.com/2010/10/06/mark-zuckerberg-on-the-biggest-problem-in-social-networking/

Digital campaigning

2011-07-04T11:21:00.003+01:00

You can find some great views on what great digital campaigns looks like in the PR Week / Blue Rubicon Digital campaigning supplement, which you can find here.

Articles include:

Aviva on the YouAreTheBigPicture campaign
GiffGaff on their innovative use of members to provide customer services
Facebook on social

When should you send emails?

2011-04-25T12:05:00.000+01:00

Emails are slightly more likely to be opened when people are at work, particularly on their lunchbreak. This is changing though as people get more access to the internet on their mobiles, so are more prone to open their emails on the way to work or while at home (often while watching TV).

However a major study by Mailchimp shows that people are more likely to take an action resulting from an email if they receive the email over the weekend. This is probably because they have more time to consider the email and take action over it, particularly if it involves an action that requires typing (trickier on mobiles than on laptops/desktops) such as paying for something, booking tickets or signing a petition.

Takeaway for me:

Weekdays - best for informational / brand building emails that don't require an action
Weekends - best if you want people to buy something or do something

How to stop your email list from dying

2011-04-15T15:26:00.002+01:00

It's common for organisations to build up an email database or a Facebook page, which they then forget for a while and abandon. At Blue Rubicon we've been doing some comparisons of how people react when you start using the database again, and there are some interesting common patterns:

Response rates are significantly lower than they were previously. One email list we're reviving had a 35% average open rate in summer 2010 - which has fallen to 25% in the first few emails we've sent to it.
Unsubscribe rates rise significantly compared to previously
Bounce rates increase - because people have moved job or changed email address for another reason

When we've investigated these, they are unsurprising. People have forgotten who we were, so didn't bother opening our emails, or, worse, unsubscribed. And if they moved job they forgot to tell us that they'd moved, because they hadn't heard from us for a while.

The best advice to keep email lists and Facebook pages alive is to regularly (i.e. at least monthly) contact them. This helps by:

Reminding people how wonderful you are so that even if they don't open the email, they remember that you are there. So they don't unsubscribe, and they'll occasionally engage.
Reminding people to tell you when they move email address.

If you have let a list go some months without being emailed, then the best ways to revive it are:

Start with content that reminds people of why they are subscribed. So if they subscribed for local news, start with an exciting bit of local news
Make sure that the emails come from somebody they know
Take it easy - if they haven't heard from you in months then only email them once every few weeks at first, otherwise it will feel like a shock

Best email I've seen in a while

2011-03-28T13:36:00.002+01:00

Very simply formatted, but a brilliantly told story from the Obama campaign.

Joe Biden email on healthcare

It's time for a no-fly zone

2011-03-14T14:14:00.000Z

In 1984 a young aeronautical engineer called Al-Sadek Hamed Al-Shuwehdy,an opponent of Muammar Gaddafi, was hanged in a basketball stadium in Benghazi. As he hung from the rope dying, he was grabbed round his legs and dragged down until he stopped moving by a brutal young woman called Huda Ben Amer. Ben Amer was appointed Mayor of Benghazi, and went on to terrorise the people Benghazi for the decades since. She escaped the Benghazi uprising, and is waiting to return if the Libyan army retake control in the next few days.

Al-Sadek’s story matters, not just because of the horror of his death.

In the next few days Britain will have to decide whether to lead efforts to create a no-fly zone in Libya. No liberal can deny that the rebels are preferable to Gaddafi’s tyranny. But a few people are still questioning whether we have a right in international law to intervene if the UN Security Council refuses to authorise a no-fly zone.

In fact international law, as used in Kosovo, allows unilateral intervention if it is going to prevent an imminent humanitarian catastrophe. In Libya this week we can reasonably judge that there is an imminent humanitarian catastrophe. Thousands of people have already died - and with Gaddafi’s murderers like Huda Ben Amer waiting, we can be sure that thousands more will die if they win.

We need a no-fly zone as soon as possible - and as liberals we should be proud to support one.

Fundraising metrics

2011-02-25T18:05:00.003Z

I've just done a fundraising campaign for my run up Tower 42 next week, and I've used it to do some basic analytics of how reach turns into donations.

My rough estimates, gleaned from bit.ly links and Mailchimp, are that the click rates for this campaign are:

· Mailchimp emails – 7%

· Ordinary emails – 4.9%

· Facebook – 0.3%

· Twitter – 0.25%

Mailchimp is unsurprisingly high – people have opted in to these emails, know me and the emails are well formatted and likely to actually get delivered into people’s inboxes because of Mailchimp’s reputation. Plus I actually tested them.

Ordinary emails I assume to be a bit lower mainly because there are some people in there who won’t have heard from me for a while, and who may have abandoned their email addresses or only check their secondary email occasionally.

The timing of the clicks on Bit.ly indicates that some people who received both a Mailchimp email and a Bit.ly email were prompted into action by the ordinary email, which came a few days later.

Facebook feels like a bit of a missed opportunity, but the figures may be slightly underestimated since I’ve put in a few non-tracked links to the site.

Twitter also looks like a low engagement channel from my colleague Josh’s metrics on the same campaign too. My instinct is that it’s quite hard to get much emotional engagement from a Tweet.

A basic online campaigning guide - Part 5a - Local campaigns

2011-02-08T08:28:00.005Z

Once you know what to say, what are easy ways to tell your audiences if you are running a local campaign?

1. Email newsletters

Local newspapers are slowly dying, and their quality has been falling for years, while council freesheets tend to be full of uniformly positive propaganda.

This leaves a large gap in the market for local news - both political and non-political. Here's an example of a basic newsletter for residents of the Crofton Park area of Lewisham.

A newsletter once or twice a month will strike the right balance of being fresh, but not too often.

2. Breaking news

Local news is rarely local enough for most people. So if you email people with breaking news, then they are usually very grateful.

Here's a good example that Tom Brake, MP for Carshalton & Wallington, did during the early 2010 snows.

3. Post it to your website

Email newsletters usually translate to good news items on websites, where they will continue to get a trickle of traffic for years afterwards.

4. Tweet the headlines

Tweet the headlines in your email out to your followers over a few days, linking to the email text on your website.

5. Publicise through your Facebook page

As with the Tweets simply split out each story from the email into a series of stories that you release over a few days (or weeks).

Hootsuite is a useful tool that allows you to schedule Tweets and Facebook updates simultaneously, so you can set up several weeks of tweeting and Facebook in one go.

6. Email supporters of a specific campaign

Quite a lot of people will only want updates on specific local campaigns you are running, but will happily receive an email newsletter than contains these updates. This can be a good way to encourage them to convert from being a supporter on a specific local issue to receiving your general email newsletters.

7. Publicise your news in offline materials

Reference and cross-promote your email newsletter in your leaflets, local visits and meetings. At worst you'll get credit for being hardworking, at best you'll get extra subscribers.

Tom Brake Snow email

Blue Rubicon's digital inspiration for January

2011-01-21T17:21:00.002Z

And here it is - feel free to drop us a line if you want to find out more about any of it.

Slides - Jan 2011

Inside stats on a Sarah Palin viral sensation

2011-01-12T09:40:00.003Z

My colleague on Blue Rubicon's digital team Karin Robinson also writes the excellent Obama London blog.

On Sunday night she found herself at the centre of a viral sensation when she spotted that Sarah Palin's Facebook page moderators were deleting anti-Palin comments, but not a comment that implied that it had been right to kill a 9 year old girl.

The post rapidly circulated on Twitter - from where the Huffington Post picked it up. It rapidly became the most re-tweeted item globally, generating over 400,000 views of her post in the following two days, and over 9,000 comments on Facebook, as well as extensive pick up in traditional media.

Karin's given a brief explanation of what happened on the Blue Rubicon website. But she's also kindly given me the Google Analytics for her blog in the last few days, which I've put below.

This is a good example of the value of building websites on platforms such as Blogger. Most hosting services would not be able to cope with such a huge surge of traffic, while, as far as I'm aware, Blogger didn't wobble once.

Karin Robinson Blue Rubicon Digital viral success

What would World War I blogs have read like?

2011-01-07T08:40:00.002Z

My great-uncle has recently written up his father's letters, written while fighting in World War I in Iraq.

The interesting thing for me is quite how factual, dry and stiff-upper lip they are. After describing his injury and subsequent carriage to a hospital, he signs off, as if nothing terribly serious has happened.

My great uncle has added a note below the letter, describing what really happened:

My father doesn't mention the blood loss, pain, being left for dead among the dead, building a coffin of mud around him for protection and the rain filling this coffin with bloody water, twice falling off the stretcher, or the unsprung cart that transported his wounded body to the river Tigris.

I wonder how it would have been written if it was in 2011?

Three trends for 2011

2010-12-16T12:10:00.003Z

What are the three key digital trends for 2011? Here are some thoughts.

1. Location

Location based services haven't taken off yet, but smartphones are starting to go mainstream. 20% of adults currently have a smartphone in the UK, and this will rapidly increase in 2011.

Expect consumers to start using location to find their friends when they are out socialising. And expect retail brands to quickly start offering deals to groups of people who buy or eat together, as Gap, H&M and McDonald's (client) have already done in the USA. 48% of 18-24 year olds already have smartphones, so expect all of these to take off fastest for youth brands.

Smart brands will start to think about how to use this in more imaginative ways. Trade conferences, party political conferences, meetings, festivals and live music events are all obvious places that could use location effectively.

2. Social

Facebook's founder Mark Zuckerburg has repeatedly said that almost any experience is better if it's social. In other words our offline friends really matter to us - and make our online experience much better.

And Facebook's Like button has spread like wildlfire across the internet, showing that people love 'liking' things.

Personal endorsement by a friend is massively powerful - so it's not surprising that corporates are quickly catching on to the value of social plug-ins (such as 'Like' buttons and embedded Fan page boxes which show you what your friends have liked, commented on or shared). 2011 will be the year that social plug-ins move to become as popular as sharing buttons have.

And expect marketers to start becoming much more inventive in extending the socialness of their campaigns, whether it's photo tagging, Facebook's social plugins or simply incorporating fan pages into advertising and PR.

3. Data

Direct marketers have known the value of CRM databases for years. And webcentric businesses like Amazon have been very effective at using customer data to provide quality recommendations.

In 2011 more and more marketers will extend the use of this data across their marketing strategy. For instance:

Web traffic analysis from firms such as Hitwise (client) allows firms to understand what their target audiences do online, cross referenced with customer databases such as MOSAIC, and to benchmark themselves against their competitors.

Auditing and monitoring online allows firms to use the internet as a continual rolling focus group - telling them how consumers are perceiving advertising and experiencing products every day.

Narrative and messaging can be easily tested online before launch. A/B testing on websites, and pay-per-click advertising on Facebook (client) and Google allows firms to quickly and cheaply test creative concepts, tactical approaches language and competition.

Crowdsourcing and customer forums, such as those run by GiffGaff (client), Starbucks and Dell are a great source of creative ideas and day-to-day feedback on product experience.

Why digital can transform organisations

2010-12-14T09:20:00.001Z

Here are three good reasons that digital can make organisations much more effective:

a) You can join up communications that are currently done separately - so reducing duplication and wasted messaging. So for instance you can create an integrated stakeholder, consumer and internal communications programme, rather than paying for 3 streams of activity.

b) You can also reduce duplication between the functions of the main business and communications. For instance integrated customer services and communications potentially allows your brand marketers to get daily customer insights at very low cost.

c) Measureability of digital is far better than conventional communications - so it's easy to rapidly understand what is and isn't working. This can be applied both at the strategic end of planning a campaign (e.g. testing alternative competitive spaces, testing messages) and at the execution end of the campaign (which media coverage actually drives sales?).

For a great example of a company that has put digital at the core of its entire corporate strategy, have a look at GiffGaff (a client of ours):
http://www.lithium.com/pdfs/casestudies/Lithium-giffgaff-Case-Study.pdf

Improving your personal brand online

2010-12-07T16:46:00.001Z

How can you make sure that you have an effective personal brand online that attracts potential employers and clients?

It’s surprisingly easy to rapidly improve your showings in search engines and make yourself more findable. Here are five easy things to do:

Keep your LinkedIn profile up to date and complete. And make sure that your ‘public profile’ (which is what Google indexes) is complete. Somebody we know recently updated his profile and got a series of former colleagues to recommend him. A month later he was working in 10 Downing Street.

Invite your contacts to be your connection on LinkedIn. It’s extremely easy to upload your entire address book from Outlook and invite hundreds of contacts to connect. The more people who are connected to you, the easier you are to find.

Get a vanity URL (e.g. http://uk.linkedin.com/in/robblackie) for your LinkedIn and Facebook profiles.

Link up your Facebook profile, Twitter account, LinkedIn account and anything else you do online. Services such as Posterous and Hootsuite make it very easy to share one piece of content (for instance an article you have written) on your blog, Twitter feed and Facebook page / profile all simultaneously.

Upload any public presentations you’ve done recently onto Scribd. Presentations on there are very visible for search engines – especially if you tag your presentations appropriately.

And if you want proof that these points work – Google ‘Rob Blackie’.

Getting people to attend your events

2010-11-30T17:12:00.001Z

Thanks to my colleague and campaign guru (and author of the great Obama London blog) Karin Robinson for these hints about using email to get people to attend events:

Most people, if they see [an email telling them about an event]... might think, "That sounds interesting, I might try to come along" but having made no explicit commitment they are highly likely to be "busy" when the moment comes.

However, if you ask them to e-mail you if they want to attend then 1) you can hint that there are limited spaces making it more attractive because a slightly rarer opportunity 2) you can then reply to them saying "Thanks for coming! I'll let the team know you're coming and we'll make sure to save you a place." - thus manufacturing a deeper sense of commitment and 3) You can then follow up with an e-mail just to the RSVPs reminding them that they've confirmed to come - people are more likely to attend an event if they get a personalised reminder.

What can we learn about digital from JFK?

2010-11-26T09:45:00.001Z

In 1960 the first Presidential debates were held.

Richard Nixon, incumbent Vice-President, campaigned until a few hours beforehand, hadn't fully recovered from an illness and refused make-up (which he thought was effeminate).

Among voters who heard the debate on the radio Nixon's experience trumped Kennedy's youthfulness. But the larger audience who watched on TV thought that Kennedy had won. Kennedy subsequently pulled ahead in the polls and went on to win the election by a nose.

Nixon essentially lost the election because he didn't put on make-up. Or more broadly his advisers didn't understand that TV debates would be different from traditional town halls or the radio. The technology had changed, but their strategy hadn't.

What mistakes are being made in communications today which will look as basic as refusing make-up in 1960?

My starter would be mistaking digital for just another way of broadcasting your message to your audience. Yes it is valuable for broadcasting to large numbers of people - but that's a very narrow way to see it. Facebook's genius is that it realises that a lot of the time, most of us prefer spend time consuming relevant content produced by our amateur friends than from professional entertainers.

Tracking the impact of a story online - a partial solution

2010-11-19T10:48:00.002Z

Many 'influence trackers' online implicitly assume that all mentions of an issue online are equally meaningful. This is clearly rubbish - not least because different websites have very different sized audiences online.

There's no easy way to crack this - because there isn't a public directory of the number of users that most websites have.

However on Twitter at least you can see how many followers a user has - which allows you to have a decent stab at estimating reach for stories which are discussed on Twitter.

The helpful Backtype.com website aggregates followers for each mention of a specific URL and gives you a reach figure. So for today's BBC story on a camera that can take photos round corners, it gives a Twitter reach of 281,000.

A basic online campaigning guide part 3 - message

2010-11-07T11:55:00.003Z

Your overall messaging is a bigger picture than will be covered by this guide. But people often neglect how online analytics can help you refine your message.

Here are four easy things you can do to test your message:

1. Do split tests on emails that you send out - with different messages in the subject lines of messages to different people, to see what is most likely to persuade people to open the emails.

2. Use the click analytics on these emails to find out which subjects people want to find out more about. This is obviously has similarities to 1. but you can test a wider range of subjects.

3. Web page comparisons - as with emails test how people respond to different messages. An excellent example of how this was done is provided by the Obama Presidential campaign.

4. Use advertising metrics. Facebook and Google adwords make it very easy to test different versions of adverts that are shown to the same audience. You can rotate primary messages, wording, pictures etc. and measure how your audiences react.

Corporates routinely use market research to inform their campaigns. And they routinely use message testing tactically for individual email campaigns. But it's surprising how few are using online testing to test their overall corporate narratives, or even competitive creative treatments on different marketing campaigns.

Why influence scores are fairly meaningless

2010-10-29T17:40:00.002+01:00

Number 10 Downing Street is given a Klout score of 51. While WiredUK is given a (higher) Klout score of 56.

Nicely illustrating that your ability to gather lots of friends, and even disseminate your message online, is not really the same thing as influence.

Tools like Klout, and the influence tools offered by most online monitoring services, aren't completely meaningless. But without analysis and insight they are fairly meaningless.

A basic online campaigning guide - Part 2a - Strategy for building your databases -Building your Facebook support

2010-10-25T20:25:00.004+01:00

The most important single thing you can do to boost your support on Facebook (a client of mine) is to use Facebook pages.

Why Facebook pages

Facebook page status updates appear in your fans' newsfeeds, so allow you to appear where people spend 80% of their time on Facebook.

Unlike a personal Facebook profile, where you are limited to 5,000 friends, there is no upper limit on the number of fans you can have.

Install a Facebook page widget on your other websites

If you do this people who visit your other websites will see a window on your site showing some of your fans on your Facebook page. People who visit your page, who are also logged into Facebook (extremely common now), will see their friends who are already your fans endorsing you.

Obviously since a personal endorsement from a friend is extremely powerful, this is a great help in recruiting more fans.

Look to the right of this post to see an example for me.

Advertise your page in offline materials

The easiest way to promote your page in offline materials such as leaflets and advertising is to get a vanity URL such as facebook.com/rob.blackie - which is both easier to put on offline literature and better optimised for search engines such as Google.

Advertise

Facebook's self service advertising can be highly targeted based on a combination of:

Workplace
Education
Age
Gender
Location
Interests

The quality of the targeting means that a high proportion of clicks should convert to fans - so in some circumstances it can be very valuable. I find it particularly valuable where a brand has a well defined set of fans who are already enthusiastic.

The official Facebook guide to adverts is worth a read.

A basic online campaigning guide - Part 2a - Strategy for building your databases

2010-10-24T10:00:00.000+01:00

Most online campaigners naturally want as much control over when they send out their messages, to who and exactly what they say.

The most common online databases that need to be maintained now are:

Mobile numbers (increasingly there is an overlap between mobile text messages and internet use)
Email addresses (used by almost everyone online)
Facebook (used by the majority of the online population)
Twitter (still relatively small but useful in many circumstances

Here are some simple things you can do to boost the numbers of people you have in each.

1. Building email and mobile phone number lists

Gather up all your existing emails from everyone in your organisation. Clarify the permissions you have, and, if necessary, contact people to re-confirm their opt-ins
Make email sign up forms prominent on your website, and on every offline response slip you create
Use email as the primary way to register for events
Collect emails at events
Use petitions where the primary way of signing up is by email. This is the main recruitment mechanism used by Avaaz.
Create a funnel of people who might be interested to sign up and ask them if they want to sign up. Conversion rates can be very high. Sources include Facebook friends and pages, Twitter followers, email contacts (many people have hundreds saved so even in a small organisation there are a lot) and Customer relationship databases / other general databases. Simply contact these people and ask them to sign up.

Facebook

This will be the subject of a separate article, but in brief the key things you need to do are:

Use a Facebook page, not a group, because your status updates appear in your fans' newsfeeds (where people spend 80% of their online time)
Get a vanity URL such as facebook.com/rob.blackie - which is both easier to put on offline literature and better optimised for search engines such as Google.

Twitter

This will also be the subject of a separate article, but as with Facebook and email one of the crucial elements of building a following is to cross-promote your Twitter feed via Facebook and email and vice versa.

A basic online campaigning guide - Part 1 - Contents

2010-10-23T11:23:00.005+01:00

Over the next few months I'm creating a brief guide to basic online campaigning - one piece at a time, as a reference material for all the people I work with on this.

Here's a brief overview of the process:

1. What's your objective? Commonly this might be to gain votes in an election or to persuade a council to build (or not build) something.

2. What is your strategy for using online campaigning? Which online channels do your audiences use most? How can you build your support on Facebook, increase the number of email addresses you have or increase your number of Twitter followers?

3. What's your message for your campaigning?

4. How can you get your message to as many people as possible? Usually this is a mixture of outreach to popular websites (etc.) and using your own databases to direct contact people.

5. How can you creatively make your message as effective as possible at translating into action? What has worked in the past?

Google's creative internet

2010-10-13T15:38:00.001+01:00

A great source of ideas here from Google. 119 slides - so exhausting to try and consume in one go.

September digital inspiration from Blue Rubicon

2010-10-01T16:17:00.001+01:00

Blue Rubicon Digital Delights Sept 2010

Blue Rubicon online

2010-09-14T15:04:00.003+01:00

Here is a brief list of some of the things we do online at Blue Rubicon.

Our Twitter list: http://twitter.com/robblackie_bob/blue-rubicon

Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Blue-Rubicon/#!/pages/Blue-Rubicon/329545317397?ref=ts

Our digital inspiration and ideas email list: bit.ly/bAO7pn

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/companies/blue-rubicon

Some Blue Rubicon blogs:

http://www.obamalondon.blogspot.com/

http://sociable.net/

http://dalstoncookbook.blogspot.com/

http://internsanonymous.co.uk/

Documents and presentations: http://www.scribd.com/BlueRubicon

Facebook group (for current & former employees): http://www.facebook.com/#!/group.php?gid=62324994761&ref=ts

And finally Blue Rubicon’s website: bluerubicon.com

	Lab	Con	LD	Other
Snap poll results	29.0%	32.7%	19.1%	19.2%
Weighted by age	28.6%	33.0%	17.5%	20.8%
18-24	29.5%	32.1%	21.5%	16.9%
25-34	27.5%	35.3%	17.8%	19.4%
35-49	28.9%	32.1%	15.6%	23.5%
Male	29.0%	33.0%	18.4%	19.6%
Female	29.0%	32.0%	20.1%	19.0%
Projected seats	293	265	59
Projected seats (weighted by age)	288	272	57

	Decided	Undecided
Snap poll results	79.2%	20.8%
Weighted by age	77.5%	22.5%
18-24	81.3%	18.7%
25-34	77.7%	22.3%
35-49	75.8%	24.2%
Male	85.4%	14.6%
Female	70.8%	29.2%

Rob Blackie's blog

How can you make your events successful?

I've got a new job

Help. I've become a swear word

August round up - Facebook, QR codes and more

Google Plus round up

Data use by Tesco, Capital One and dating websites

What is Google Plus?

Digital campaigning

When should you send emails?

How to stop your email list from dying

Best email I've seen in a while

It's time for a no-fly zone

Fundraising metrics

A basic online campaigning guide - Part 5a - Local campaigns

Blue Rubicon's digital inspiration for January

Inside stats on a Sarah Palin viral sensation

What would World War I blogs have read like?

Three trends for 2011

Why digital can transform organisations

Improving your personal brand online

Getting people to attend your events

What can we learn about digital from JFK?

Tracking the impact of a story online - a partial solution

A basic online campaigning guide part 3 - message

Why influence scores are fairly meaningless

A basic online campaigning guide - Part 2a - Strategy for building your databases -Building your Facebook support

A basic online campaigning guide - Part 2a - Strategy for building your databases

A basic online campaigning guide - Part 1 - Contents

Google's creative internet

September digital inspiration from Blue Rubicon

Blue Rubicon online

Digital trends and inspiration for September

Blue Rubicon Digital trends and inspiration July 2010

Is this the beginning of the death of magazines?

Crowdsourcing an iPhone app

Building a website for free in 15 seconds

The worst use of polling I've seen for months

Social media monitoring

Crowdsourcing stops human trafficking

Huge Facebook poll points to hung Parliament

Hyper local bloggers report better than the Guardian

Demon Sheep running for Senator in California

Blue Rubicon visits Facebook

How good is the Taliban internal communications department?

London Data Store goes live

Google goggles

Why the Australians are great communicators

A PR triumph that has gone un-noticed

Is email dead?

Jan Moir - advertising is removed

Jan Moir's homophobia puts her top of Twitter

Using the internet for basic communications

PR Week on Trafigura

Will the #Trafigura injunction hold?

Castrol's mass personalisation

Astoundingly stupid advertising

Back at work

Bo Blackie born this morning at 11

Ten email tips

Two I prepared earlier

Useful website of the week

I want to be Dennis Thatcher

How has the Prime Minister got almost a million Twitter followers?

Using the internet for better public consultation

Rob has got Posterous automatically cross posting emails to Facebook, blog and Twitter. :)

Posterous

Who is least trusted?

How are the political parties doing campaigning online

Seeing people not stereotypes

Minor internet trend of the week

TFL's great use of text

The elections online

The brilliance of Boris Johnson

Why don't organisations really care about communicating with their staff?

The incredible rise of free council newspapers

Tam's pregnancy - part II

Tam is pregnant

Jon Stewart on Twitter

Local news websites mapped