My first session of the day and it promises to be a really exciting one. Social Media is always a good crowd-puller, but in the hugely competitive affiliate space, Social Media participation has it’s pitfalls.

Here we go…

Andrew is a self-proclaimed geek and former affiliate. Currently working with a big agency and experienced in managing legal social/gaming issues, (particularly the celebrity death odds.)

Participation is underpinned by a required understanding of the law.

We’re starting off in 2000 when Lawrence Godfrey goes after Demon Internet and sets a 15k precedent for content host responsibility. Blame him…

Andrew himself had a client video removed from YouTube, due to a trademark referenced. Less than 100 views before it was pulled.

The Electronic Commerce Directive “ISPs should not have to monitor everything.” However in France Louis Vuitton and eBay are at constant war over fake goods. eBay does offer some policy (the VeRo program) to try to protect IP.

How does this affect You?

Blogs

Post moderation and pre-moderation. Post comment goes live, approved after the fact.) Pre – moderation approving by consideration, actually puts you i a difficult position, as you have complicity approved something.

Spartacus Order – anonymous comment trolls need to watch their backs. This order means the person responsible for comments must identify themselves.

John Doe: 18thc law. A court can still proceed without knowing the identity of a perpetrator.

In the UK, the  Consumer Protection Act. A financial interest must be disclosed e.g. if I chat on social media “Betfair is great”, then I need to disclose my financial relationship, or am technically breaking the law.

Yahoo! Answers example – comment in Car Insurance from a guy who gets a lot of thumbs up, however ‘always’ recommends the same insurance co. Naughty.

Gambling in Europe

EU free trade is fuzzy when it comes to gambling and proceedings take a very long time to change. One law is that there is coming EU tracking law. Opt out of tracking must be clear.

Other Effects – Google

The algorithm knows gambling content.

That’s the cautionary tale, now for the advantages.

Affiliates are not stupid

Affiliates don’t have a brand committee (nimble and flexible structure)

On average affiliates are 3525% quicker than brands to make site changes

Merchant Disadvantage

One client took two years to put a link on their homepage

One bank took one year to add an RSS feed to a page for a 10k bill from their design agency.

Another took 7 months to decide to use Google Local and 1 year to actually get on there.

Lesson: affiliate organisations are the perfect size, scale and mindset to successfully participate in social media.

Virtual Networking

Nimble affiliates can easily participate in Twitter.

TRAPS

Blogging

Blogger, Mixx, Friendfeed, Twitter, Twhirl – one blog can grow into so many means of promotion it is an easy trap to end up exceeding time spent “being social”. Do monitor your time against benefit.

Dumb Merchants

Andrew himself was previously an affiliate of New Line Cinema – When Lord of The Rings launched, they offered an affiliate scheme on a golden ring for £200 which got a lot of traction in some social media, (incredulity of price for a replica ring) which lead to a lot of impressions, high-interest. Social/viral effect can lead merchants to suspect some form of click incentive. Andrew got kicked off this particular program.

Biggest Tip

NEVER offer legal, financial or medical advice in any way, shape or form.

Also – careful when providing content related to celebs. If it is true = copyright, if it’s private = Intellectual Property.

Moving onto Gamer Networks and the Prime Candidates for Affiliate Social Activities.

Raptr is a perfect hunting ground for casual gamers.

Real-time in Twitter, links text ad links related to trending topics.

Outbrain’s Outcloud A great way to collate blog content into a social content form including thumbnail image content. Costs $10 a month, but huge potential for impressions and clicks. Highly recommended.

Also – don’t forget good old Yahoo! pipes.

In summary – Social Media is a world of opportunity for affiliates, but just be aware of the rules of play, and how social viral campaigns may not convert in the way that is expected by the merchant.

QUESTIONS

What about duplicate content?

Don’t duplicate your own content. Don’t push the same post to multiple distribution points. Check Google from a content dupe perspective. Make sure your post is live on your own site first. Establish authority of source.

PR are the sites good distribution sources?

Yes. Particularly if you can get something into Google News. NYT picked up a press release about how US prisoners are forbidden to play Dungeons and Dragons. Great story, which was picked up by the blogs already for two days before NYT picked it up.

On the bonus side, nobody can tell that you haven’t pressed your dress suit!

If you really want to rock the party, it pays to have a clear idea of why you are there in the first place. If it’s primarily a customer growth objective or a credibility objective, this will effect your follow strategy.

Here’s a few tried and tested, but imaginitive ways of finding people to follow…

1. Use a Directory

A number of directories exist just for people on Twitter. You can search for Twitter users by their interests or categories and/or geo-location. www.wefollow.com is one of the largest, and allows for both interest and location based searches. Other directories include www.twellow.com, www.justtweetit.com, www.twitterdirectory.com and www.geofollow.com .

Make sure you add yourself to these directories too; so that you can be found by people who are interested in your chosen categories and physical location.

2. Speaker ‘Circuits’

If you want to follow and establish a presence with the leaders of your industry, it’s a good idea to familiarise yourself with the ’speaker circuit’. Industry leaders and conference speakers tend to have a highly visible media presence and you will find many on Twitter. Check your industry conference and exhibition websites for a list of speakers. Most websites will feature a detailed speaker profile with Twitter ID included. If not, take your list of names and do a “Find People” search on Twitter.

3. Competitor Websites

Following your competitors is always a great idea. If your industry is super cut-throat, be warned that they may not follow you back, or may even block you from seeing their Tweets. This is a bit extreme and most competitors will have nothing to hide from you, and many may welcome a bit of banter and exchange with an industry peer.If any of your competitors are on Twitter, most will have a link to their profile on their website.

4. Follower-Drilling

Once you have identified a good person or competitor to follow, check who is following them and use the profile information in the followers list to see who could also be of interest to you. In most cases with a well managed Twitter account, you will find followers of a like-mind.

5. Keyword Searching/Hashtags (#)

Use the Twitter search functionality to search for keywords or hashtags that are relevent to your brand and your product. A hashtag is slightly different to a keyword in that adding a hashtag to a Tweet, collates all Tweets that use the hashtag, regardless of content. As an example #LAC is the hashtag for the London Affiliate Conference next week. I may well see Tweets like this…

“Where is everyone staying then? #LAC”

or…

“Going to the closing party?” #LAC

So a hashtag, when used correctly, can help you identify people that are involved or interested in something, even if their Tweet content does not specifically call this out.

Search results for keywords will show Tweets from Twitter users that have referenced the keyword in their Tweet. In many cases this may be because they have a specific interest in your product. It may be a good idea to directly introduce yourself to them by sending a Tweet (@mention) solely to them. Be aware that someone you follow will be quite likely to click your profile to assess if it is worth following you, so please don’t do this!

I want To Be Special!

Tip: If you use a third party application such as Tweetdeck you can create a column for your keyword search or hashtag and all public tweets containing your keyword or hashtag will appear in this column in realtime.

6. Other Social Media

Many other social media sites allow users to add their Twitter ID to their existing profile. If you already have an established community elsewhere, such as your Linkedin network, then check the profiles of your contacts and those that are also on Twitter will be easy to find!

Of course, the standard way to find people on Twitter is to use the “Find People” search within Twitter, however this is a little long-winded and relies on you knowing who you are looking for by name.

We hope these resources and tips give you a bit more of boost to your follow strategy, so that you can easily find people to learn from, connect with, market to and create a relationship with. Do you have any questions about Twitter in general that you would like to see answered in this blog? And do let me know if you have any cool ideas for identifying people to follow!

This year however I’m speaking, reporting, live blogging and all sorts.

I’m really excited having been off the scene for a while. Also I’m a little nervous about seeing and meeting all those people I have spent the past year stalking, befriending, admiring and engaging with on Twitter. I have a bad habit of seeing celebrities in London and thinking we’re old friends, so I’m not confident in my avatar recognition skills. Please don’t be offended if I walk past you. Grab me and explain who you are and we’ll get on like a house on fire I’m sure. Or you may get dragged into a room at SES and interviewed for SEO-Chicks. (If you’re really, really lucky )

First up is #LAC, or London Affiliate Conference (Gaming). I’m speaking on a panel about advanced social media strategies; lead by social media expert @JudithLewis. Judith has been online, since there’s been an ‘online’ and truly knows her onions when it comes to social media, search engine optimisation, paid search, quality chocolate and indeed most other things. I’m excited to meet my fellow panellists, who are Sarah Goodwin of Bloom Media; Matt Nash of OOSOCIAL and Zoe Sands from Cisco.

We have a tough gig though as we’re on Saturday (30th January) last session of the day, on the last day, on the session before the partayyyy! BUT. We’re giving away free stuff including wine and chocolate and I may even have something pretty speshup my sleeve.

So please come and heckle/learn/laugh/eat/drink/snooze/whatever: just come! You will certainly pick up some gems of information, that could help increase your audience and brand rapport; even if you’re an experienced social media communicator.

If on the other hand, if you have no idea what ‘#LAC’ (hashtag) means, or why I’ve prefixed a name with an “@” – then you have to come!

John Prescott on Twitter

I think that this is a great thing. The product capabilities of social media platforms, such as Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and YouTube have opened more than just a new functionality-driven approach to customer communication. Over time, such media have shown us that customers have longed for that personal route and that feeling of belonging, so it’s actually a shift in mind-set we’re seeing.

I’m a member of Virgin Wines, and every time I receive an order I throw the cardboard box in the recycling pile out back. Last time (which was just before Christmas) I happened to notice on the side of the box, the following message; “Did your driver do a good job today?”

Virgin Wines Social Feedback on Delivery Boxes

Isn’t that great? I think this is a bit of a mind-shift from the punative tone of similar messages seen on the back of professional vehicles. What struck me here is that, this is a personal request for feedback on an individual, that is motivated seemingly by desire to reward and encourage good performance.

I’d like to think that brands like Virgin Wines are seeing how well received is the social element in their interaction with customers and are thus embracing this mindset; this friendly and human tone of voice, throughout all of their communications.

A Cardboard Box Can Be A Social Medium!

My point then… customers really want to interact with you. Customers are human beings just like your employees. Customers might not have cared so much about who you are, until you showed them they could.

With the Virgin Wines example, I was immediately warmed to the thought that they care about my experience, they value my feedback, and they also value their staff by rewarding good performance. I want to continue to be a customer of a business like that. I’ll admit that I intended to send an email, but got distracted by what awaited me in my inbox. If they’d given me the option to tweet @virginwines then I definitely would have; and would have said something like “the man brought fine wines to my house. I am in love with him”.

Instances of brands embracing the social mindset are occurring more often in Europe, but it’s been happening for a while in the U.S. Coca Cola famously offered two of their biggest fans a job, after (said fans) Dusty and Michael created a kick-ass facebook fan page some time in 2008. Rather than contact Facebook and demand these guys handover the page to them (which Facebook will allow you to do), Coca-Cola obviously thought who better to run their fan page, than such die-hard, genuine fans? If you haven’t come across this story before; its a great social media case study, and you can find a thorough review on Econsultancy.com by Patricio Robles.

Now 'Offical' Fan Page

Brands aren’t just becomming more social-minded in the way that they involve consumers though. We’re also seeing brands communicate a human approach by telling us about the people that work for them. I’m thinking in particular of the charming and amusing “Intel Star” TV ads.

I took this video from their official “channelintel” on Youtube, where they state “Rather than focusing on a new product, the 2009 “Sponsors of Tomorrow” ad campaign celebrates what makes Intel different; culture, personality, heroes…”

That Intel are taking the trouble to endear to us the people that make the things that other companies stick into the machines we use to connect online, is a great testement to the brands embracing a social mindset. Even the less consumer facing brands!

What Does This Mean To Me?

I’m aware that all of the examples above reference brands that are hugely well known and have the sort of marketing budgets the rest of us dream of. Because of this, I think we can have more faith in the benefit of adopting a social mindset in approaching your customer communications. Huge brands like Virgin, Intel and Coca-Cola do not do things lightly. When your revenue is into millions and billions of dollars, you do not invest in a campaign direction without research and analysis. If these brands recognise a customer desire to connect and act on it; we won’t go far wrong to follow their example.

What Practical Lessons Can We Put Into Practise Here?

1. Be Consistent: Decide your social media brand identity and register it in as many places as you can. Use the same brand name, brand icon and profile precis throughout. You will probably benefit from having one detailed profile and a brief profile version, depending on the media tone of voice and character space available.

2. Be Everywhere: Register your social media profile in as many places as possible, starting with the most suitable for your audience and focusing your time in the same way. Even if you never intend to communicate via e.g. Bebo, you can at least protect your brand and make yourself available in the event a potential customer wants to interact with you there.

3. Be One Brand With One Voice: Instead of referencing “our Twitter account”, or “Our Linkedin account” think of your brand as everywhere online, and the social media platform is just the lens through which a customer may prefer to see you. Instead think “come find us on Linkedin”, “come join our fans on Facebook”.

4. Listen And Learn: Save the one-way “me, me, me” messaging for the spammers. Use the functionalities of social media that faciliate two-way communication. Monitor post interactions on Facebook, check your @mentions on Twitter; and most importantly try to respond and acknowledge those who participate.

5. Let Go Of Your Brand: I’m not saying you have to ‘do a Coca-Cola’, however it’s important to know that the people that buy your product have every right to mention your product and feed back about your product. It’s how you handle that feedback and what you can learn from it that is invaluable.

So there we are. None of this is remotely unfamiliar is it? In fact you may have been reminded in the anecdotes here about your favourite local caf, or the corner shop from your childhood. I think it is human nature that we crave recognition and we want to be valued as an individual customer and not a sales statistic. Social media websites have the functionality to enable brands that would other wise be very distant, to feel more local and approachable. From this; we’ve been reminded of what we already knew.

A social mindset is nothing new. What’s (fairly) new is that online technology faciliates a local and social approach not previously possible for national and international business. And your customers will love it!

To illustrate; imagine I’m a small business in the 1960’s seeking to make the public aware of its existence. I’d have to think about physical, visible signage for my premises and advertise in the classifieds. All of that costs money and would involve hiring specialist professionals to create such signage and ad copy. Fast-forward to today, and a small business director has everything they need to make their business brand known; strong and discoverable, just a few keystrokes away.

Of course this works both ways! So, just as a brand owner has some great tools and resources to reach a wider audience more quickly, so does a brand consumer have numerous outlets to transmit their dissatisfaction or voice their opinion. And rightly so; as it’s a good thing this so-called democratisation of the web allows all of us consumers to voice our opinions in an open and public forum. It can be a headache for brands however, as this unregulated, unofficial content on the web vies for attention with your own material. Now; we’re not about to advocate attempting to bury all negative publicity, it is still publicity. What we are advocating is that you seek to ‘own’ your brand message at least on page 1 of the search engines.

Why Own Page 1 for Your Brand Results?

•    Consistency of message
•    Brand recognition and reinforcement
•    Increase traffic to your owned and operated websites
•    Look like a big deal

How to Own Page 1! (It’s easier than you think).

Get Your Domain Name: Make sure you own your brand domain name. www.whatever.com and the local TLD for each market in which you operate; that is if you don’t already! Your own company website is the easiest way to own your first result.
Join Professional Directories: Add yourself to professional and local directories for your sector, thus controlling profile information and having the knock-on benefit of association.
Write and Distribute Press Releases: Writing specific and tailored news about your company is a great way to inform often, and in an official way. Distributing this news as a press release to your online press and having this covered is absolutely invaluable. Trade press publishers naturally tend to rank well due to the authority of their content.
Create a Social Media Presence: Social media is a fantastic, wide-reaching and cost-effective way of essentially, advertising your brand. Facebook pages, Linkedin profiles and CrunchBase profiles are all good ways to extend your brand message. We looked at a couple of good practise tips to be aware of, when expanding your social media brand in a previous post.
Blog and Comment: Nobody knows your business like you do. So get out there and blog, guest blog, comment on related blogs. Establish your internet credentials by showing exactly how much you do know about integrated circuits, or bridal gown design or whatever it is that you do.

Although we can’t control (nor should we want to control) what is said about our brand, but we can control what we say about our brand; so there’s really no excuse not to.

1. Be discoverable
From Facebook to YouNoodle, many social media/networking websites offer you the chance to have your content surfaced to the search engines. DO take advantage of this opportunity. Firstly this is valuable from an SEO perspective as these sites and your presence on these sites can be spidered by search bots. Such reference to your brand and links back to your site from high-volume high-credibility sites, helps improve your own PageRank. Second reason to tick that box, is that if anyone searches for your brand, they will be able to see not only your own website, but also your presence on the social media websites you have chosen. Provided you are consistent in referencing your brand (more on this in a second) this helps add validity to your organisation and faith in your brand as the user is confronted with a back-up reference to your brand from additional trusted sites. Incidentally, if your own website appears below your Facebook/Linkedin/Crunchbase profile – come see us and we’ll sort that out for you!

2. Be consistent
Your brand is your intellectual property and should be treated as such. Larger organisations tend to have entire rulebooks dedicated to their various brand identities, corporate fonts, logos and other marks. Every brand, (no matter what size) should have some basic rules in place regarding company name, logo(s) and profile. As an example – our company name is theMediaFlow (all one word, with the emphasis on Media and Flow by the use of a capital ‘M’ and ‘F’) if you search for “themediaflow” using Google, you will find a number of results on page one, including our own site, our Linkedin profile, our CrunchBase profile and various news stories about us. In nearly every case the result references “theMediaFlow”. If a result references “themediaflow” this appears to be an inconsistency, and it would be natural for a reader to place less trust in such a listing. Your social media profile is your chance to reinforce your exact brand identity, image and message in a consistent, professional and controlled way.

3. Be your own biggest fan
Unless you’re McDonalds or CocaCola (in which case, “Hi, we’d love to manage your SEM. Skype me!”) you probably can’t afford to advertise on every billboard in town and in the Corry Street ad breaks. Until that time, social media is your space to promote your business and talk about how wonderful you are, what you do and who you do it for. Do not be ashamed to big yourselves up. Never feel silly writing in the third person; and DO remember to be consistent. We find it helps to use the same profile précis as a starting point for each of our professional network profiles.

4. Be yourself
You can’t win every single deal and you can’t please every single customer 100% of the time. Each organisation has its own cultural ethos and identity. It’s what makes an organisation most distinct from competitors. Ask anyone who has just chosen a supplier what clinched the deal for them, and oftentimes they will state that “the organisation was a good fit”;” the people really understood our business,” “we got a really positive vibe from the team” etc. It is therefore important to allow some sense of your organisational values and culture to permeate your social media communications.

You will find that the technical/functional differences between networks contribute to a certain tone of voice, i.e. Twitter’s 140 character limit promotes familiarity and less formality than say a Linkedin profile; therefore trying to have the same rigid tone of voice across all your social media may seem insincere.

Please note: I’m not advocating that every brand should do their own social media communications, but a good third party social media professional should be able to communicate with your audience as an extended member of your team. They should be able to speak of “we” and “our” goals and missions; and be able to understand your business objectives, core customers and values.

We hope you found this post interesting and useful. Please do add any other pertinent points that you think we have missed that are important for growing your social media brand.

As the TechCrunch team are putting the finishing touches to the the Europas, the TechCrunch Europe Awards 2009 Park Lane Champagne have been busy showcasing their services providing personalised Champagne. Even in single bottles they can print, label and dispatch unique, customised bottles of the finest French Champagne.

In their understandable enthusiasm to salute the best of European technology and start-ups they have accidentally printed too many labels and therefore have 3 bottles of Limited Edition Winners Champagne to give away, now everyone can celebrate like a winner, enter to win:

Rules

* Anyone can play
* Follow Park Lane Champagne @nonvintage on twitter…
* Tweet @nonvintage [and then add the 3 words that describe your favourite Champagne]
* Park Lane Champagne decide who wins based on the best (funny, outrageous, sad, boring… you get the idea)
* All over on 29th July (so be around 31st for delivery!)

To find out more about personalised champagne for a special gift, party or corporate event, visit www.parklanechampagne.co.uk

I got to thinking that this could mean a lot of consumer brands and websites are adding content and functionality that is actually counter-productive to their brand, due to available resource and stage of development. It seems there is a lot of pressure and evangelical promotion of social communications that can lead a business to feel that they are not professional, ‘2.0’ or approachable if they’re not engaging in such activities. I decided therefore to examine the circumstances when it’s best not to blog.

1. If you do not have the time or the resource

A blog should allow a consumer brand to give a less formal perspective and an inside view on activities and happenings within that organisation. If your organisation does not have the time or available resource to commit to regular and open communication, then schedule blogging for a later date in your brand development. Nothing smacks more of insincerity than a half-arsed blog.

2. If you cannot/will not disclose

If for whatever business reason you are not able to share more than you do in a press release, then don’t blog it. A blog is not media communication tool (though media professionals can of course get a great level of organisational insight from company blogs) so do not feel tempted to re-hash or replicate your press releases in blog form. Your customers and fans will not be hugely interested in formal announcements or whoever has just won your accounting software contract.

3. If you can’t take the heat (i.e. accept feedback)

Okay, so a blog technically by definition; (and as an abbreviation of weblog) is essentially a record of activities, happenings, thoughts opinions and sometimes feelings. A blog is still a blog without the facility to allow user interaction in the form of comments and feedback, but really why bother unless your brand is ready to engage with readers? Again we come back to the point of what are you really offering that is distinct to your press releases? A blog really is a valuable platform to spark conversation, debate, allow insight and open up your business or brand to the people that actually buy it. Why the hell not allow the most important people connected to your organisation (your customers) have their say too? If you are blogging well and if you are sharing real insight and excitement then allowing comment and community input can be the most valuable (and free) insight you can get!

These are just some of the reasons and situations I could think of when blogging is not the best idea for a consumer brand. Don’t misunderstand me, I am usually a great advocate of blogging and all social media in general; however I thought it important to get the point across. Don’t succumb to the pressure and blog for blogs’ sake.

Please help me expand on the list above and add other reasons you can think of when a consumer brand would be best not to blog!

theMediaFlow blog is written by Nichola Stott. You can follow me on Twitter: www.nicholastott.com

1.  Set an objective

Set an objective for your social media strategy to help you focus your efforts efficiently. You can go the ‘whole mnemonic hog’ with a detailed SMART objective. (Your objective should be Specific, Measurable, Achievable and Realistic in a given Time,) or keep things a little more relaxed. As long as you have a specific, realistic goal and an awareness of the tracking tools and measurements of success that are out there, you have the right framework. An example social media objective could be… “promote customer awareness and engagement with my brand by attracting a couple of hundred fans to my Facebook page in a month.”

2. Work the 80/20 rule

You know the 80/20 rule? You get 80% of your revenue from 20% of your clients? Well it’s true for audience as well. It’s extremely important with the huge volume of social media sites, products, tools and applications; that you focus the majority of your efforts where you have the biggest potential return on your (time) investment. Unless social media marketing is your full time job, you need to go where the greatest audience is. Facebook reached 22.7 million visitors in the UK in February (Comscore), which is over two thirds of the UK online population. Twitter grew 1689% year on year in the UK to almost 2 million users in March (NNR). It goes without saying that you do need to consider your audience demographic when compiling the short-list of sites for your social media campaign.

3. Create a consistent social media brand

Use and abuse all the customisation features and profile fields that you possibly can, to customise the look and feel of your profile page and deliver your message. It’s important to make sure that you use the same photograph (or logo), same strap-line and profile data, and the same company name and format conventions to represent your brand. If you don’t make and keep your profiles consistent, professional and recognisable you run the risk of being taken for an imposter profile (sometimes great for a laugh,) however users will be less likely to tune into and take notice of your message if they’re not 100% convinced as to your authenticity.

4. Integrate your social media

So you’re Digging and Tweeting and cultivating yourself an entourage big enough to push Paris out of the VIP area. Great. What about your company website? If you are generating awareness and interest in your brand and leading traffic back to your website, are users offered the same message and tone of voice as your social media? If your company website content is a little dry and lacking in social features this may put people off. Such mismatch in content positioning and tone of voice may come off as a little insincere. Additionally, for potential customers coming to your company website from search engines or type-ins, you may miss the opportunity to connect and interact if you fail to reference and promote your social media outlets. There are plenty of well designed, social media icons available freely on the web that you can use to easily drop onto the relevant space on your site, such as this lovely set from web design agency FHOKE. http://www.fhoke.com/blog/2009/05/07/a-set-of-14-free-social-icons/

Right... that’s the easy bit. Now comes the most important part, which is all up to you! Make sure that you have some great content, advice, giveaways and information to share with your friends, followers and fans or they may not stick around for too long.

theMediaFlow blog is written by Nichola Stott, who you can follow on Twitter @NicholaStott.