I've got a new job

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

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

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

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

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?

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.

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[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

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