I spoke at ad:tech Sydney last week, the session Don’t Sell Me … Tell Me – The Attribution Of Digital Monetisation. In it, I put forward that marketers really need to learn to love measurement, because its the only way you can work out where your sales are coming from. How are your consumers going through your digital sales funnel in the way you’re expecting them to? Or are they jumping in from social channels? Which channels can you influence or buy your way into?

A big issue for retailers both online and offline is digital comparison shopping. Consumers can be walking around the store and checking out the price of those wineglasses on amazon.com. It’s consumers revenge because if we want to find the best price or don’t get good service, we can search & find or be vocal about what we want – on the go. Or as an online retailer, you could be winning the mobile race by having a mobile optimised product site, making it really easy for consumers to buy off their smartphone.

My top points for working out where those sales are coming from:

1. Look at search trends to see what the category looks like and then compare your brand to competitors and see how you’re doing.
2. Make sure you’re measuring all your own channels. Google Analytics is free. See where your customers are arriving from. Is it Facebook, Twitter or Stumbleupon? Search what the conversation looks like, where ever the customer has come from
3. Have a mobile optimised website. Always look at how many visits are coming from mobile devices. One client I’m doing SEO for, I’ve seen their ecommerce site go from 6% mobile visits to 17% mobile visits in less than a year, while revenue from mobile devices is now more than 10%.
4. How do your social consumers shape up? Do you know what your customers are saying about you on Twitter? Or forums? This is where social media monitoring tools are invaluable. Sentiment analysis, gauging your share of voice, identifying issues are all possible with a social monitoring tools such as SM2 and Radian6.
5. Make your customer relationship database more social. At the point of sale, identify where customers heard about the brand (or offer) from, rather than asking for their postcode.
6. Learn how much your social outreach is contributing. Track from a baseline to see the impact of your activity. (See the calculating return on investment graph in the Slideshare below)

Are their any other ways you attribute your return from digital channels?

Created by: MBA Online

Moby gets behind Vinnies Signed Finds

Signed Finds is a new social media marketing initiative for Vinnies, a.k.a St Vincent de Paul. The premise is simple: get Australian and international musicians and bands to sign and donate their t-shirts, with a photo of said musician holding up the signed tee. Then the t-shirts get hidden in a Vinnies retail store, the fans and followers of Signed Finds get issued clues as to where to find the t-shirts and then the race is on.

The intent is to drive people into Vinnies stores, to find the top selling musicians t-shirts, but also to look around and discover the other hidden gems hiding in the clothing racks. It’s reinventing the Op Shop (Opportunity Shop) to a new generation who have grown up  selling their unwanted goods on eBay, rather than donating to the local Vinnies. These are also a generation who are more likely to be into new clothes and accessories, rather than the “pre-loved” and vintage finds. Either way, it’s putting Vinnies onto the map as a retail destination for unique items, and what better way of doing it, than through money-can’t-buy autographed musicians t-shirts.

The campaign launches on Monday 5th December 2011 in New South Wales, the suburbs of Sydney and then also towns around the state. I’ll report back on how its going, as its a labour of love from the GPY&R Sydney creative team & the brainchild of one of my colleagues Luke Simkins, who has put in so much time and love into the project chasing the musicians and managers to get the t-shirts – he’s managed to get some of the best up and coming as well as supremely established artists, including Moby, Missy Higgins, The Living End, Sneaky Sound System and recent ARIA award winners Gotye and Boy & Bear

The artists themselves have been helping drive the organic growth of the Signed Finds community in Facebook, by tweeting and mentioning Signed Finds, many of their individual fans have jumped on board. Hope you do too!

Fans are being driven by the musicians taking part

Missy Higgins tweets about Signed Finds

I went to a new type of media briefing a couple of days ago. “New” because it was the old media world reaching out to engage with the new media world. The old media in this case was News Limited’s masthead The Australian – shortly launching their digital subscription/ freemium business model, a.k.a paywall. And as uneasy as it would have made the old guard feel, the proof was that we, the new media world of bloggers and social influencers, were there to chat, ask questions and perhaps offer insights, in our analysis of where the future of journalism was heading. The old guard is listening.

The death knell of print media, particularly newspapers, has probably been more drawn out than many expected. The rise of news being published online was only one part of the process killing print. The other, far more significant impact has been the rise and rise of social media and its importance in breaking and disseminating news. Facebook might be the monolith in social sharing, but Twitter has the unofficial crown for wider information sharing, and is the one to watch for breaking news and trending topics.

If I (or indeed any of us who live online for the majority of our days and nights) get my news via social channels (particularly Twitter), then clearly a premium masthead looking to monetize its content on digital platforms has a big task on its hands. Competing with breaking news that’s free content on Twitter is not where the bucks are going to be made. To be on the front foot of breaking news is an expensive process, and The Australian management assured us the majority of the new digital strategy investment has been in journalists. So those journos need to be offering deeper value in terms of insight and analysis. Luckily, The Australian has already built its value proposition around quality Australian journalistic commentary: led by Paul Kelly, the analysis offered on The Australian could be the central reason for subscribers and readers to move into the digital subscription model.

Pros (what The Australian digital subscription model has considered already)

1. Digital content is more than words on a screen. The Australian digital team spoke about journalists taking video crews to the interviews to create subscriber premium content. Here’s hoping they understand great digital is also more than video. The New York Times does superlative infographics and knows its strengths: its meta title is breaking news, world news and multimedia.
2. Curation. The 5 and 10 minute “Editors’ Choice” is ideal for the time poor and the decision fatigued. Here, subscribers will find a short list of the day’s “need to knows” as curated by The Australian editors.
3. A porous paywall. Commentary and in depth analysis are the main carrot for the paid subscriptions, but in the freemium model, editors have discretionary power to move content in and out of the paywall to serve other needs (I imagine getting unique browsers up on key days or for critical content will be part of this strategy)
4. The masthead as an offline content delivery platform. The Australian (and other mastheads) as a content platform – extending into events for example is a natural progression, particularly for the lifestyle sub-brands, which have the most mainstream appeal.
5. Mobile as a key consumption medium. We saw the preview of the mobile optimised The Australian site aimed at smartphones, steering away from phone app development, which is probably wise considering costs associated and the fragmentation of the Android platform. The Australian was first to market when the iPad 1 launched in Australia in 2010 and the iPad app is being reworked. We can only hope they will consider trends such as Nielsen’s recent report that shows 40% of tablet and smartphone owners use them whilst watching tv.
6. Try new things. The Australian delivery team seemed to be willing to try new things. Which counts for a lot. Best to use tech startups as your guiding principle – always be in beta, fail fast and learn from your mistakes quickly.
7. Invest for the long term. The Australian and News Digital team seem to be prepared for a long haul. They cited Foxtel subscription model. It took many years to become profitable, but now its more profitable than other tv networks.

Now here’s the rub. Where the future of journalism lies, is in the intersection of technology, content and the subscriber desires. Here’s where media companies need to start thinking like technology companies, to start to anticipate what their readers and subscribers want, and deliver it to them while enabling them to become part of the news gathering and feedback process.
Here’s my list of considerations on the future of journalism The Australian digital subscription hasn’t tackled yet, the cons:

1. Appealing to new/younger/digital savvy audiences. The Australian digital subscription platform is for the migrated and migrating – people who were already readers or subscribers of the print edition. Many of the other bloggers/commentators asked about plans for attracting younger audiences – how quickly that needs to happen is probably dependent on how quickly the existing subscriber base “die off” whether literally or whether to other titles, platforms or content. How to attract the younger, digital natives to the content The Australian is offering is a bigger picture strategy, and a long term one at that.
2. Mining data to deliver user centric content. The Australian’s Digital delivery could focus as a reader or subscriber-centric model. It’s likely to be (in the short term at least) an editor driven model. By its very nature, digital publishing is a technical medium. But not just tech for tech’s sake. What makes technology relevant to people is its ability to change people’s lives, habits and ultimately the businesses like media publishing that now rely on technology for delivery. What technology offers publishers such as The Australian is data – precision in a deeper understanding their readers and subscribers habits than media publishers have ever had before. While I’m certain that the new digital subscription will have basic analytics around the platform’s content consumption, there’s very deep analytics that could be used to develop smarter content delivery that’s genuinely user centric rather than driven by the journalists, editors, or publisher’s agenda.
3. Personalising the news. The idea of “destination” news versus the “personalisation” of news is at the heart of the shift to social platforms. With personalised/social news, I can subscribe to the topics, journalists or subject matters that interest me rather than have to sift through headlines, and filter out that which doesn’t. The popularity of news curation applications such as Flipboard is a key trend. Flipboard brings me news feeds based on my personalized interests. I can add in my trusted sources of news, and it serves me an integrated user experience in terms of topics, sharability and reposting to my social channels.
4. Frictionless sharing. Yes I know it’s the buzzword of the moment. In terms of competitors, the real competition in the space of digital news platforms are aggregators and third party RSS feeder news applications (see previous point). While the SMH iPad app might have a decent “consumption” user experience, it has an appalling “interaction” and “sharing” user experience. The Australian needs to look at Flipboard (iPad app), Rockmelt (social browser built on Chrome) and the deep social API platform integration used by The Huffington Post which serves me up the stories my Facebook friends have been reading. The Guardian have developed a deeply integrated Facebook app which does the same thing in Facebook – tells me what Guardian stories my Facebook friends are reading in my Facebook feed
5. Reader input on what makes news. The next progression? Leveraging social measurement and trends and crowdsourcing the news, and the opinion driving. The Guardian is also experimenting with opening up newslists, and using their readership to help decide what’s news. Real time trending topics on Twitter and heavyweight social sharing on Facebook can be analysed to give insights to inform editors decisions on what should and shouldn’t be behind the paywall
6. Making sure the journalists have personal digital brands. Curated news, sought after content and paid for commentary relies on personal as well as professional credibility, and while the Australian’s journalists and editors have oodles of “print” cred, their journalists are not very social. In 2009, when the majority of global journalists and broadcasters were jumping on Twitter to build communities of contacts and fans, The Australian editor was busy discouraging and frowning on their own people doing anything as modern as tweeting. This lag can be translated into a social disadvantage: while Twitter is busy promoting top US journalists and broadcasters in their Twitter for Newsrooms guide, The Australian is lacking any high profile “social savvy” journalists.
7. Sophisticated syndication to help build thought leadership. Syndicating content was an area touched on in our briefing. While UKs The Guardian was held up as a great example of application development, The Guardian has a very sophisticated digital platform, serving syndicated content via a content API to aggregation and curation sites such as PSFK.

It may be baby steps for The Australian with the launch of the digital subscription, but at least by intention, it seems like they are willing to take risks and try new things. By delivering content that’s relevant to their audience, in the places and times they want to consume it, The Australian can build a thriving digital media business.

Whether The Australian can work across the multiple fronts necessary and embrace technology more fully to transform their business in time, we’ll just have to wait and see.

Read more opinions at The Future of Journalism, Servant of Chaos, Mediahunter, Ross Dawson & Mumbrella

photo credit: HeavyWeightGeek

This post originally appeared on the ADMA blog, its modified here with new implications regarding Twitter’s own URL shortener, t.co.

When I was speaking on a panel at ad:tech with Mark Higginson, Director, Digital Insights, Nielsen, he mentioned something about Twitter’s decline, citing Nielsen statistics for twitter.com. The panel was in the process of wrapping up, so I couldn’t jump on the inaccuracy, but now more than ever, is the time to address the broken digital measurement model.

Nielsen, comScore, Hitwise, Google AdPlanner et al, look at website traffic, and while this would have been gospel 10 years ago, and still relevant 5 years ago, “web” measurement just doesn’t capture what’s really going on in the online space anymore. This is particularly true for social platforms whose content, links or engagement take place within a mobile application.

Two interlinked trends are behind this: the rise of smartphones and tablets, and the resulting shift mobile app usage eclipsing web browsing.

In 2011, smartphones and tablets shipments now exceed desktop and laptop computer shipments. 79% of all new phones shipped into Australia are smartphones. iPhone represents 31.4% of the entire phone market in Australia–that includes dumbphones (no internet access) and featurephones (internet access but no apps or computer-like features) – up from 18.8% at the end of 2010.  iPhone’s market share of the smartphone market increased 10% in a single quarter to hit 40% in Q1 2011. Android is a close second in smartphone market share in Australia with 30%.

In June 2011, the traffic from the “internet of apps”, trending upward for a year, for the first time ever, eclipsed “web browsing” in the US. The mobile analytics firm Flurry says that daily time spent in mobile apps has now surpassed web consumption. The average user now spends 9% more time using mobile apps than the Internet. In June users spent an average of 81 minutes daily on mobile apps, compared to 74 minutes on the web. Flurry says that the growth in mobile app usage is a result of more sessions during the day per user, as opposed to an increase in session length. Even though Flurry can only access approximately one third of mobile application activity from the US, it does point to the rise of mobile apps in our lives.

comScore is adjusting its measurement of sites by segmenting into non-computer device traffic and looking at the various operating systems in its “Device Essentials” report.

But apart from the platforms themselves reporting what the traffic from the app itself is, we have no way of accurately measuring the traffic going from the mobile device and the platform.

Going back to the Twitter example at the beginning of the post, rather than being in decline, Twitter is undergoing continued exponential growth. Twitter users are sending 200 million tweets a day, up from 65 million tweets a year ago. There are now more than one million registered Twitter applications, covering analytics, curation and publisher tools. In 2010, when Twitter endorsed its mobile apps (through purchase or build), it’s mobile users has jumped 62 percent since mid-April 2010, and, remarkably, 16 percent of all new users to Twitter start through mobile, as opposed to the five percent before Twitter launched its first Twitter-branded mobile client.

Since August 17 2011, Twitter has implemented the t.co shortener, all links (longer than 20 characters) posted on Twitter.com or any Twitter client have been wrapped with a t.co URL. This means all analytics tools are picking up ‘t.co’ as the referrer as opposed to a particular twitter client (Twitterrific, Tweetdeck etc.) or just twitter.com.

The public story is that Twitter users are being protected from phishing sites and scams, the side effect has a big impact on measurement, particularly being able to identify traffic being sent to a site from a Twitter source. So now, web analytics will be able to see referral traffic as coming from t.co regardless whether it came from an app like Tweetdeck, or Twitter for iPhone, or  Twitter.com. This goes a long way to giving Twitter the recognition it deserves, and as Zee from The Next Web puts it, the fight  is now on with Facebook and StumbleUpon, long seen as the kings of social referral.

An amplified app story is even more evident Foursquare, where “website traffic” is a pointless metric: all engagement and interaction takes place in the app on the smartphone device. The only “website traffic” on Foursquare would be Superusers fixing broken or repeated links for venues. Likewise Instagram, one of the social networks success stories of 2010 and 2011, made a strategic decision to exist as an iPhone only app accessible, photo sharing social channel.

There is now more activity in the “internet of apps” than on the “traditional” web. Most of this is invisible to marketers. Isn’t it about time we rethought how we measure digital activity?

Metropolitan Police in London use Flickr to help identify rioters & looters

Author and sociologist, Malcolm Gladwell wrote a seminal article for the New Yorker in May 2010 on “Why the revolution won’t be tweeted” on social activism expressing via social networks. His argument was that social networks are all about week ties, whereas heavy-duty social revolutions like the black civil rights movement in the US, required strong, real world ties to succeed, as they involved matters of life & death.

Gladwell’s article was prescient for a real “life & death” revolution ignited by social media – by only 8 months. It completely refuted Gladwell’s postion, partly through the extreme action from the Egyptian government, which did the unthinkable and shutdown the Egyptian Internet on 27 January 2011, blacking out 80 million Egyptian users. It took 5 days for the internet to be restored and 18 days for the regime to fall. This was partly due to the efforts by the international media, and the international social media community including platform owners such as Twitter and Google who came out in support. Twitter with a freedom of expression, “tweets must flow” manifesto, and Google with a voice to Twitter service http://twitter.com/#!/speak2tweet launched on January 31 to help users deal with the Internet blackout. People could leave a voicemail to express what was going on, and it was be tweeted out with relevant #egypt hashtag.

Fast forward to August 2011 and the London riots, we’re witness to the same effect as in Egypt: mass mobilisation of a grass-roots socio-political movement via social channels. Only this time, it was for both evil and good. The rioters themselves using Blackberry’s proprietary social messaging network and Twitter, to do “bad”; and those using social channels to do “good”: the affected citizens to see where trouble was brewing to get out of the way, the guy on bike tweeting out verified reports on rioting in Bristol, to the London police on Flickr calling for help to identify the rioters, and community minded citizens to rally helpers to clean up the mess.

I was horrified to read UK’s Prime Minister David Cameron was considering blocking social media networks because of their role in the UK riots. Blaming social networks for the speed and ease of communications, and blocking them, is the digital equivalent of shooting the messenger.

Twitter’s position of “tweets must flow” is the central tenet of its network. Twitter doesn’t censor individual tweeter’s content, and that’s its power as a public social channel. Meanwhile, Blackberry’s PR crisis continues to build with hackers blackmailing RIM to keep the riot messaging logs out of police hands.

For British politicians to block or attempt to censor social channels, they are exhibiting the same traits as Egyptian’s totalitarian regime. I feel it would do better allocating funding for more police and using social channels to get their own messages out. Or better still, look to the reasons and causes of such an outpouring from an underclass with nothing except their Blackberry’s with cheap messaging deals.

What do you think? Are governments out of line trying to block or censor social channels?

1. The fabrication of a “sex scandal”. (Which should be the real scandal here.)
2. Deliberate misinformation and libelous claims, by referring to a selection of my Tumblr blog posts, taken totally out of context.

You’re about to see the posts IN context, and withOUT the misinformation, so that you can see I have nothing to hide – unlike the press, who intentionally omitted the images and commentary that accompanied the blog posts in question.
At the risk of teaching digital grandmothers to suck eggs, may I remind you that Tumblr’s conventions are blogging, “hearting” (liking) and reblogging posts, whether links, images, videos, text, audio etc. These types of content are often internet memes – which are blogged, hearted or reblogged for their humour value, or magazine materal, for its aesthetic merit.

And needless to say (but contrary to what the article may imply) none of the content was created by me originally.
OK, so let’s have a look at some of the posts referred to in the press:

The alleged “guide to acceptable stalking”

As you can clearly see, the so-called ‘guide’ is actually a cartoon poking fun at online stalking behaviour, and commenting on the oddity of stalking being accepted by society when it’s done on Facebook. To which I then added an ironic and humorous comment summarising the cartoon: “Stalking.. you’re doing it right if you’re doing it on Facebook”. Both the image and the comment are ommitted, in a clear attempt to misinform the reader and create the impression of some sort of step-by-step ‘guide’ on stalking that I supposedly endorse, or even allegedly wrote.

The alleged “guide to making one’s own sex toys”

Once again, the word ‘guide’ is used to imply that I am personally showing people how to make their own sex toys – whereas the actual post depicts the cover of a book still sold publicly on amazon.com and amazon.co.uk.
The book cover from the original imprint was the one on Tumblr which I reblogged.  And again, my commentary was left out, namely that I thought it was amusingly frightening: “Be afraid! A DIY book on how to make your own sex toys”.

The slogans such as “put a condom on your ear and f..k what you heard” and “drunk texting is the new foreplay”

These were reblogged Tumblr slogans, one from the Wordboner blog and the reblog referred to the ability of readers to get it on a T-shirt. Taken out of its context, it’s missing any of its intended humour or irony – where in reality it’s just a funny T-shirt slogan – no more harmful that universally worn slogans like ‘Shit Happens’, or even ‘FCUK’.

The alleged “lewd picture of two elephants”.

This is part of another internet meme called Demotivate Us. The characteristics are a black framed photographic image with an all-caps headline and a second line of captions. A simple Google Image search for this meme yields about 51,000 results while meme sites such as memebase exist solely to create, re-caption, and rate memes like this. Note again that my comment in which I expressed my opinion about the image was left out, as was the fact that it’s tagged as a meme and not a photo taken or created by me.

The post for “dyes for pubic hair assuming you have any”

For once, my commentary has been included, but the entire context was removed. The image was of an actual American drug store product. Not a call-to-arms for pubic hair dyeing, not a how-to. The reference to having any pubic hair, is a comment on the current mainstream fashion for Brazillian bikini waxing.

As for the alleged “women in compromising positions” and “pornographic photos”, they are all either fashion and celebrity images from online magazines, or ads and covers from modern and vintage glossy magazines – and nothing more than you would see in any major newsagency. Here are some examples:
Dita Von Teese for Vogue

Sacha Grey advertisment for Peta (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) to promote animal birth control

A hilarious fashion shot – Daria Werbowsky for Vogue as described by New York Magazine in their monthly fashion magazine review as the best WTF fashion moment for the month.

Also in the same vein, the cover of a 1970s car magazine, with commentary “from the days when there were naked girls on car ads”

Another vintage photo, from the 1950s – a bikini clad Model: Asya Arteyeva in a 1950s Cheverolet.

A couple of Lindsay Lohan shots – one relating to a “car crash couture” fashion shoot for The Sunday Times Magazine as chronicled on a number of blogs

and one other fashion magazine shoot where she wears a sheer mesh shirt – commentary line is “Lohan – a pinup for bad girls”

Kate Moss as photographed by Mary McCartney part of a New York exhibition: Kate Moss Portfolio and Other Stories exhibit at Danziger Projects.

An apt summary of the impact that Kate Moss has had on high fashion photography:

“Unlike any model in the history of fashion photography, Kate Moss has proved to be a unique subject blurring the boundaries between fashion photography and contemporary art. In a career that has lasted 23 years to date, it can be said that Moss’s particular beauty and singular figure have made her more of a muse than a supermodel. No matter what she is wearing (or not wearing) Moss invariably becomes the subject of the photograph, supercharging the image and inspiring photographers to create some of their most imaginative work. Unselfconscious and unapologetic, Moss’s persona and sensuality have not only changed our notions of beauty but also influenced the culture at large.”

As you can see for yourself, none of these images are linked to any form of restricted material or “pornography” – as defined by Australian Internet Law.

In summary, my blog posts were taken out of context described innacurately, with deliberate intent to mislead the public, defaming me in the process.
Whether I should have self-censored or de-linked my personal curation site away from any online work profiles, is a moot point. If they were sitting in isolation, the same “scandal” fabrication and bending of the truth would have taken place, given what happened.

So now that you’ve seen my posts IN context, with their accompanying images and comments, I’d like you to consider one more thing:
Why did the article leave them out?

Here’s Dae Levine from Greenpeace Australia presentation at Social Media Club Sydney, where she outlines how Greenpeace took 10 weeks to achieve the kind of result they took 10 years to do using offline channels.

A summary of the key learnings:

1. Greenpeace campaign succeeded in taking down the sentiment of KitKat to an extremely low level
2. Nestlé gave fuel to the campaign by having the YouTube video banned initially, causing international news services to pick it up, and giving the campaign oxygen (it went viral soon after)
3. Nestlé did not pro-actively respond using any social media, instead deleted Facebook comments and posted angry status updates around the use of the Nestlé logo by people within Facebook who wanted to bring awareness to the Greenpeace campaign, which caused even more uproar
4. Nestlé failure in social and its lack of social crisis management contributed significantly in Greenpeace success in the social campaigning
5. Two Australian specific tactical campaigns for KitKat – Desk Jockey and Take Back Time were launched early June to combat the negative impact of Greenpeace on the brand, but did not get enough traction to offset the overall decrease in brand sentiment until well after the capitulation of Nestlé

So the moral of the story? Old school PR methods of bunkering down will not help you in social media. Third party influence can drag your brand sentiment down, and unless you pro-actively crisis manage, you could be left well behind those who are active and understand social media strategy.