Microsoft word - katybeale _3_.doc

Katy Beale, freelance marketing and communications consultant
The art of conversation: writing and creating ideas for the social web
Katy Beale is a freelance consultant who helps arts, cultural and third sector organisations
get the best out of digital. She has recently worked with Tate, Crafts Council, Arnolfini,
London Development Agency, Oxfam and South Bank and Bankside Cultural Quarter. She
also works with marketing agencies on strategy and creative ideas for brands such as
Orange, Philips, Smirnoff and Guinness. She regularly talks and presents on the subject of
social media. www.katybeale.com
I’m Katy Beale, if you’re tweeting I’m on @katybeale. If you’ve seen me on Twitter, I’m the
one with the monkey mask on and now this is me in real life. I do a lot of work with arts
organisations and also brands as well on social media strategy, digital strategy, so recently
I’ve been working with Tate, Crafts Council, Art Angel, Camden Arts Centre, to name a few.
I wrote a chapter on the Twitter museums book for Tate and I also work for a lot of
agencies with silly names, like Poke and Hyper on digital strategy for brands like Nokia
and Orange and Philips. So, the presentation I’m going to go through today has got a
good smattering of examples from across the arts and also outside the arts. When looking
at brands I think there’s really good value in looking at lots of different sectors. We’re
looking at how people are using social media, how can we use it more effectively and then
some ideas around measuring its success, so some tools that we can use monitor how
successful we are being. And then there will be some time for group work to develop your
own ideas with some case studies that I’ve created.
Setting the scene from the beginning, the social web has expanded at a massive rate.
People's online behaviour has changed from a more traditional web usage, through to
interactive and contributing to digital communities. A good example of how things have
changed is the Encyclopaedia Britannica, starting many years ago with a hundred
thousand examples, moving up to Wikipedia where we’ve got three million articles made
by 100,000 people.
Communities existing in a whole new scale, there are 400 million people on Facebook
now, it’s been going since 2006 and it’s now in 260 countries. But essentially social media
doesn’t really change the way our brains work. Social networks are not new, the
emergence of the social web is simply our online world catching up with our offline world
and the two worlds are basically merged now. But what technology does is give us the
tools to communicate with the same behavioural patterns that we’ve evolved over
thousands of years. Essentially it's about relationships rather than the technology. So the
problem often is where people build something and don’t really know where they’re going
with it. The Starbucks Facebook page has a ridiculous amount of fans – 10 million fans or
more and there’s no real interaction or conversation going on. People are going there and
posting one post and saying I love a skinny latte frappuccino, whatever it is that they like
and that’s it, they’re not really getting any conversation or interaction there. We need to
think about how is this adding value to our audience.
We need to look at how people use the social web. When we look at a diagram like this, it
kind of makes my eyes hurt so I’ve been trying to think of some other ways in how we can
segment the social web and work out how people are using it. So we can think about how
people share. Sharing essentially is a key part of the social web, it could be sharing
anything from a piece of content to sharing some news, and people share for all sorts of
reasons around gaining knowledge, or signposting interesting content or collaborating -
essentially for a greater good.
Connecting
I’m sure everyone in some way has used the internet to connect with other people and
created a community or gone to a community to connect with Facebook probably being the
simplest one there.
We’ve also got newer ones like Chat Roulette. Has anyone been on Chat Roulette here?
Try it out later. Then there are others such as Daily Boost, which quite a few teams are
using and instead of having a status update in words, you have a status update in a photo.
There’s also Buddy Press, which is an add-on to Word Press, which essentially creates a
social tool within Word Press blogging.
Then there are communities around shared interests, so things like Mums Net, where one
million parents on Mums Net, share some commonality. Etsy www.etsy.com/ is for sharing
ideas around crafting.
Smaller niche micro communities exist within other communities, i.e. Facebook groups or
Twitter hash tags, connecting people around a shared interest. Amplify allows people to
have a conversation around web pages and link together items that make people think,
creating that back channel that we often talk about.
My Space is where people would go if they’re expecting to experience music together.
Twitter’s a good example for sharing passions and stories and works across quite a lot of
the examples I’m talking about. Blogging seems to be the main way that people are
sharing their passions and stories. The Sartorialist http://thesartorialist.blogspot.com/ is
about street style, using Tumblr and then SoundCloud, which is a way of allowing people
to upload and share their sound samples and their music samples.
Content-based communities are sites like Vimeo and YouTube allowing film content, Flickr,
Audio Boost Sound Content and Picasa being similar to Flickr as well.
Filtering and signposting
I think this is one of the most useful tools the social web has brought us to say 'I’ve seen
this, have you seen it?' in the same way that your mum might have cut out an old
newspaper article and sent it to you in the post. We can now just do that with the click of a
button. So we are now tapping into people's recommendations – and I think what’s really
key about this as it’s not just people that you know, it’s total strangers, but you’re trusting
what they’re saying because of what they’ve already said before or their background or to
whom they are connected. So, examples again here, Twitter, Four Square, while you’re
checking in and looking at what other people have said about that location, Dig and
Delicious, the bookmarking tools and then Group On where people gather together to buy
things together and essentially bring the price down, because you’re buying it as a group
and obviously Amazon.com is a really good example where you’re looking at how people
have rated and reviewed items when you’re buying it.
Competitive such as Four Square or Bright Kite, allow you to go to places.
Gaming
Essentially, as Shelley mentioned earlier, you’re trying to become a mayor or you’re trying
to get a badge, it’s adding a gaming element to what you’re doing and then there’s also
communities around things like World of War Craft, which I think has around 11 million
players online every day playing, which is pretty insane, if you think about the numbers
there and they’re all collaborating online to play games together – the same game.
Collaboration towards a shared goal
Collaboration towards a shared goal is when it gets really interesting. You’ve probably all
heard of the YouTube Symphony Orchestra, where it was crowd sourced, the orchestra set
up tutorials on YouTube, inviting people to join in, play clips and essentially it was all
collaborated into a concert that was performed in Carnegie Hall, so they chose people to
go and play there. Pro Create London allows people to submit ideas that they think could
work for a better London and people go on there and vote for these ideas and hopefully
some of them will happen. The Twitter Opera is about creating an opera out of Tweets and
then the Bring Back Wispa campaign, which was about people saying we want this
product back and it was totally crowd sourced and Cadburys had the nowse to say, okay,
there’s clearly a demand here, let’s do something about it. What was interesting was the
way that they then progressed with that, they did a whole marketing campaign, thanking
people and I think they did a whole front cover of the Metro and thanked all the people that
had contributed to bringing back Wispa, so it was pushing it back in the peoples’ hands.
Cultural Movements
This is one step further from the collaborative element. The Rage Against the Machine
Facebook page, managed to sell 50,000 copies at Christmas time to beat the X Factor
winner to get to number one, the Save Six Music Campaign, which I think is on its way,
doing good and saving BBC 6 Music. The campaign Saving Bletchley Park, about
Bletchley Park museum, tapped into the geekerati on Twitter to stop them closing the
museum and raising funds to keep it going. This advertising campaign that happened in
January of this year had Career Women Make Bad Mothers and because of the uproar
that happened on Mums Net they pulled the ads, issued a formal apology and the
advertising agency replaced it with a new advert that said Sexist Adverts Damage Us All.
There are lots of different ways that people can share, but what we really want to be
asking is why does this matter to us as arts organisations and how can we make this work
for us? We need to know how people are using the social web, so that we can tap into the
power of word of mouth. Blake Chanley from Facebook 'a referral from an independent
entity is more powerful than any kind of advertising or marketing or PR in spreading that
word of mouth' and that’s why we need to understand why people are using the social web
in certain ways. One good example is looking at something like Trip Advisor, where trust
and influence is a really powerful tool. Apparently 72% of people said that their online
travel choices were influenced by other peoples reviews and interestingly enough one in
six Britons also said they would post a review after they’d been on holiday, so it’s not just
about people having an appetite for looking at these recommendations, it’s also saying
that I will contribute to this as well.
We need to create this two-way conversation to help people talk to us and talk about us,
so this could include everything from marketing through to education and learning to
having a community voice, getting feedback, having a good customer service channel, but
essentially it’s about creating a culture and a conversation and not just about creating a
marketing channel through the social media.
Zappos, is an online US shop and it’s whole idea is it’s very open, it has a warehouse
that’s open 24/7 which allows products to be shipped out immediately, they have a free
year-long return policy with free shipping and to bring this personality and this brand to life,
their CEO, Tony is on Twitter and he mixes up his professional and his social life on the
Twitter feed and really brings to life what Zappos is about. He responds to people in a very
proactive way and it basically puts him in a very accessible space for the customers, and
they can relate to that. I’m not saying everybody should do this, but for what Zappos wants
to do and what Zappos says it is, as far as its brand values are concerned, then it’s very
valid. What it comes down to is the relevance that social media and everything we do
around social media should be linked to our key values, our key brand values for what
we’re doing and essentially then your message then makes sense, because people can
relate that to what you say. So, create social ideas.
I mentioned earlier that social media is about relationships, not just technology, so we
need to create these social ideas, not social media and here’s some examples:
• Baker Tweet is a bit of technology that when some fresh pies or bread come out of the oven in the Albion in Shoreditch it sends a Tweet out to all of its followers telling them that it’s ready. I think that’s quite an interesting little innovative way to engage people about something that isn’t necessarily that interesting, but it makes it sound more interesting. • Then we have the Such Tweet Sorrow where we followed the five weeks of performance of Romeo and Juliet with Mudlark and the RSC. Things were happening at the same time as it would in real life meaning that even in the middle of the night you could follow the different characters on Twitter, you could also follow it via tracker on the website, so you could see what was going on, you could follow the hash tags and the story unfolded over time. People could comment and really take part in that drama and what was interesting, I think, was the element of this back-channel again, where people are able to comment about what’s happening and respond to that. I pulled up a few of the Tweets which were just at the end where Romeo was dying such as; ‘she isn’t dead, you daft git,’ but also 'I’ve just woken up to find that Such Tweet is nearly over, I’m staying glued to my computer this morning'. So that total engagement and rapture around the art form and what’s going on is fantastic. • The game Chrome Aroma has just been launched. You play it with your Oyster card and you check into different places using your Oyster card and what it does is it creates a wider community, like Four Square or similar which tap into that recommendation from others. This is just in the early stages, but check out Chrome Aroma and see what they're doing, because there’s definitely more involvement that we can be doing around that and perhaps linking into the organisations that we’re involved with too, if you’re London based, that is. • The artist Joanna Bassford created a crowd-sourced Twitter picture, where she asked people to send in Tweets over a forty-eight hour period telling her which bits to draw up on this and it was live-streamed over the web, her drawing this giant picture. The Edinburgh Festival Fringe picked up on it and they created a programme using the same process as well with around a thousand suggestions from different people and creating it into an artwork.
What else can we do to get people involved?
Make long-term commitments, so when doing a campaign, it’s about committing and
proving that you should be listened to. Some examples of people who have done that are
the Cadburys caramel bunny on Twitter and Facebook embodying the tone of voice and
character of Cadbury’s caramel into a Facebook feed. The quality of the interaction is
really great here, people are not just posting up one post on Facebook, they’re coming
back, they’re having a conversation, it’s all done in the tone and the style of the caramel
bunny, they’ve got a really hardcore fan base here of people who are coming back and
feeling like they’re really part of a community.
What’s also interesting is that they work with collaborations as well. So they’ve tapped into
ASOS (As Seen on Screen) to do a collaboration where people could create their own
fashion mood boards, which then created content to post the Facebook page and put
wherever else and I think what’s key there is thinking about 'okay, well, where else are
your audience, how can we tap into other networks and get them involved and essentially
invite that audience as well?'
Marmite capitalises on people ‘either loving or hating it’, which might be similar to some of
our art forms, I don’t know, but fans become quite evangelical and super fans and once
given a platform to talk they will wax lyrical. So it’s about how are you, not necessarily
reigning that in, but how are you engaging people, and Marmite are good at managing to
talk to people in certain ways and bringing up topics of discussion and also engaging
bloggers in key ways. So when they launch a specific type of Marmite, they think about
people to attend, special events, bloggers and people on Facebook in the same way that
perhaps we think of engaging journalists.

The Eurostar Twitter Feed at Little Break, actually proactively Tweets, it uses something
like Tweet Deck or another engine like that and seeks out people that are Tweeting about
Eurostar and its destination as well, so Paris, Brussels, etc and invites them to join in the
conversation, offering up helpful advice where possible. It’s got a high level of consumer
interaction and peer to peer recommendation through encouraging reviews and ideas from
their users as well, within the Twitter and the website as well.
What else can we do to add value?
Essentially it’s about deeds rather than words, it’s about reaching out to our communities,
our fans and our friends and the influence that they have. Tate ran a competition last year
when they had the Pop Live exhibition – and this is linking up to Threadless, the T-shirt
company in America who are often cited as being very good at social media engagements,
and they linked up so that the people could design their own Pop Live T-shirts, which then
went on the website, people get to vote for which T-shirt they think is best and then it gets
sold in the online Pop Live pop-up boutique. Essentially it’s about creating a type of tone
and content to the audience, which is matching what the exhibition is about.
Examples of new technology using augmentative reality include Layer for Smart phones,
so when you want to go to a particular location, you would hold it up and you would be
able to see undiscovered pieces of information, so that could be essentially for the early
adopter or the user who is always trying to seek out more. You go to a museum or a
gallery, hold it up and you’d be able to see hidden bits of artwork that would be on the
outside of the buildings.
In Rotterdam, when they were building the market hall, you held up your iPhone and you
could see the market hall as it was when it was going to be built.
There are many levels of things that people can interact with and Pepsi, who, instead of
spending 33 million pounds on a Super Bowl ad, they spent 20 million pounds on a year
long social media campaign. The Pepsi Refresh website allows people to submit their
suggestions for community projects and vote on which should receive grants. The
research they did on this is that the ROI, just around the PR buzz that it generated alone
was worth more than actually the money that they’d spent to do all the grants and all the
giveaways here. I think they had coverage all over America.
Something else to think about is being available – are we there in real time or at the
location or even both, if possible. Google Caffeine is a new way that Google searches are
being set up, so at the moment you might think that when you do a Google search you’re
getting instant information, but it’s not actually. In the future we’re going to be getting much
more real-time information, there’s a certain real-time search that comes up now through
Twitter, but that’s going to be progressing even more in the future and this is important
because people talking about you’ll be much more visible, you’ll be able to look at them,
see what they’re saying and respond to them in real time as well. It also means that that
fast aggregation of information gives a more rounded view of what people are saying
about you, which could be positive or negative, but at least you know about it, it’s being
said anyway.

Orange Glastonav is an application, a mobile application, where you went to the festival
and it kept you up to date with the latest line-up and navigated you around the site which is
a good example of people augmenting the experience – so people going somewhere and
getting something extra.
The Guggenheim did a Twitter tour, so you got sent a certain Tweet, meeting at a certain
location at a certain time and when you did, the Tweets would come out and you would be
taken on a real-time tour around the museum. If you didn't want to be there, actually in
person, you could follow it on Twitter and match it up to the photos that were on Flicker. I
spoke to Francesca who did this and she said logistically it was a bit of a nightmare, but it
definitely opens up the possibilities of what you can do and maybe it becomes more crowd
source, maybe you’re asking other people to do their own tours and you’re looking at what
they’re saying and then pushing that out to more people.
Night True City is another iPhone app that uses geo-tagged content for people to get
insider information about specific locations, so when you’re at a certain location, the
information will come up on your phone. They used various different ambassadors who
gave their opinions on certain places to go or events to go and you could go into this via
Facebook Connect as well, so it was all integrated by the same log-in. There were also QR
codes, which are like barcodes that you could scan if you wanted to get extra information.
How do we know this is working?
There’s definitely hard and soft metrics that we can look at to see if social media is
working. I think it’s still in early days, that said, but there are various tools that we can use.
Hard metrics are similar to what we might use around Google Analytics, so the number of
visits and referrals that we’re getting, the search volume, number of followers, friends,
fans, all those sorts of things, the share of voice, how many people are talking about you
and where they’re talking about you.
Softer metrics are also really important, because they show the quality of interaction,
rather than numbers and that’s around contents admission, so are people engaging with a
number of posts, is it audio, is it video and also there are tools that you can use to look at
the sentiment around that, paid for and free tools. So, normally we would use something
like Tweet Deck or suites which would link in your Twitter or your Facebook and your
LinkedIn, which are really good for tracking search terms and also auto shortening URLs,
so you can to work out how many people are clicking through on a certain link.
To take it a step further there are various free tools such as Social Mention which is good
for doing a general search of all social media. Google Updates is quite hard to find – when
you go into Google, it’s down on the left hand bar and there are updates put in there and
that gives you a real time search pooled from social media networks like Twitter, Google
Buzz and Friend Feed. It can search back further than you could through normal Twitter
searches.
When you have got the search in Twitter, Google Blog search is an easy way to find out
different people and if they’re blogging.
I’m working with a web developer and Yahoo Pipes and Net Vibes on creating a new
dashboard for the Science Museum using free tools like the ones I mentioned earlier but
pulling them all into one place. So instead of paying thousands of pounds we’re doing it on
a much lower budget. But, we are at the whim of some of these free tools. We’re trying to
pull out an idea of sentiment around visits, people visiting the different exhibitions and the
museum and what they’re saying about it on blogs on Twitter. Facebook is the hardest
one, as it is a bit of a walled garden and you can’t really get much information from it. We
have found a way to find out what peoples’ status updates are but there isn’t much more
we can do than that. In Twitter Analyser you can find a basic chart showing the Twitter followers over time. You can click on any of the dots over time and see which Tweets were being sent out, perhaps which caused a peak in your followings, if there are certain types of content, which is working really well, certain types of content that’s been re-Tweeted a lot and then causing a surge in followers. You can look at the followers and when they’re online, which I think is quite useful and showing us most effective times for us to be Tweeting, rather than when it’s most convenient for us or which is it in the schedule. When are most of our followers online? Because it is real time you need to be there when people are online. When you can see the certain peaks in time would be good to schedule it in your Twitter activity. You can also find analysis of the followers and the different jobs they have – shows an example for Tate – showing artists, designers and similar. It can be a useful tool just to consider your audience. It’s pooled from the buyers on Twitter, so it’s not entirely accurate, but good to get an overview. Backing up is important and tools like Backupify or Back Up My Tweets give you an archive of what’s going on. Tweets slide off and disappear and if there’s something that you want to be looking back to a year or so ago it might not be there anymore. [Delegates then took part in a group exercise] Some final points: • It's very important to ensure that your social media activities are in-keeping with • There isn’t a ‘one size fits all’ social media campaign – every one is different • There is lots of great free stuff online to try, so play about and see what fits you and

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