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Let’s connect campaign 08 – look at the results

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Following what was previously announced on the old blog and the mail you may have seen in your inbox, I’ve received a lot of links from all over Text 100 – impressive contributions I had to share. Just to remind you – the purpose of the campaign is to allow the peer media team to connect more tightly through all the social media we use so far, and why not, discover new ones.

Disclaimer: I’ve probably forgotten people. If so, do not hesitate to update this article on the comments.
Or if you want to update your info, do not hesitate to mention it on thecomments of the posts.

And do not hesitate to connect between each other !

Continue reading Let’s connect campaign 08 – look at the results →

Reading

How Mozilla track PR metrics

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A good article I recommend you to read about tracking and measuring PR metrics. Interesting to observe their point of view on this question 🙂

PR is notoriously difficult to quantify. Part of the challenge is
developing PR metrics that will be meaningful over time. If PR
objectives are constantly shifting, certain programs will undoubtedly
get more attention than others. Setting PR metrics is a
semi-existential undertaking. Will things that matter today still
matter a year from now? Two years? Ten? Fifty?

To read the rest of the article : http://icouldntfindanypaper.blogspot.com/2008/09/mozilla-pr-metrics.html
The article is written by Melissa Shapiro, the PR manager for Mozilla.

Reading

Radian6 & language – “not for everybody yet”

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We are currently several country to have a closer look at Radian6 over here in europe. The good point for Radian6 is that they exist in several languages – currently :

  • English
  • French
  • Spanish
  • German
  • Italian
  • Japanese
  • Korean
  • Chinese

The bad point now … our friends from the Netherland, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, etc cannot use it, as their language is not supported yet.

Jordan from the London office asked Andy McCann from Radian6 if something was going to change. His answer :

Ahhhhhhhh the great question.  The answer to that Jordan is not right
now,  we are putting together Russian and Portuguese.

The Scandinavian countries are on our map as being an emerging market.
However with developing languages we do it now with guaranteed revenue.
If someone is willing to commit a certain amount of clients we fast
track the language.

With those country’s we haven’t really had anyone step up.

Hope this makes sense.

Just to keep in mind for future discussion with Radian6 🙂

search, Social Media, Social networking

Connection time 08

2 Comments

Hello everybody

Sorry, but due to a bad manipulation, the original post has been deleted, as well as the comment from James. I restored as much as I could 🙂

You’ll find hereunder an idea we would like to set up for early september. If you want to comment, do not hesitate.

Jordan asked me how many people from Text100 I know on Delicious. I realized that I had some account in mind for France but really not that much, especially with our US / APAC / EMEA colleagues from the peer media team.

The same for twitter – I found some text100 contact on twitter, but it’ not all the time easy.

So, here is the idea : launching a mail chain with the topic “Peer media team connect campaign” (or something like that) to encourage people to share their social media presence during a limited time period (2 weeks).
Blog, twitter, delicious, digg, website, linkedin, friendfeed, facebook, flickr, youtube, vimeo, dailymotion, google reader, etc, etc – any social media thing that people would be willing to share and that could link us with each other …
All the information could then be gathered somewhere on sharepoint at the end.

And I even rapidely drafted a banner for that to include to the email 🙂

Suzanne Smith recommended to wait people to come back from holidays before launching it, but I would like first to get your opinion.

Pierre from Paris

Reading

Problem with the big firewall ?

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It seems Ava has some issues accessing the plateform in china

Hi guys,

I cannot access this site. However, if it can be accessed by others than this limitation may be due to the “Great China Firewall” as it has blocked my wordpress blog previously. If it is due to this reason, than I am not sure what we can do and we may need to look at another option because we should have a solution that can involve China.

Sure it is a major problem … and I cannot access anymore http://www.greatfirewallofchina.org/ to see where the problem is coming from …

Once the test period with WP will be over, will the blogs still be hosted by wordpress.com ? I’m afraid that the plateform might be blocked in china. Do you know if it will be planned to host the blog plateform on our Text 100 servers ?

Thomas Crampton previously had the same issue : http://www.thomascrampton.com/dalian/wordpresscom-and-the-great-firewall-of-china/

Reading

Peer media Newsletter experience – feedback from France

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Hello all,

Let me update you today about a local marketing initiative: the French newsletter dedicated to Peer Media!

We came up with this idea because it was for us the most cost-effective solution to meet the following objectives on the long run : demonstrate our expertise in the peer media industry, and raise our brand awareness.

Format

Of course, the question of using a newsletter (push tool) rather than a blog (pull tool) was raised, but we thought in final that most of our clients an prospects were not educated yet to the usage of RSS feeds. So we are being pushy, indeed, but with information and not adverstising, which is not that intrusive. So far, only one person required to be taken out of our mailing list – because she couldn’t read French !

So, it may sound like a paradox to use a newsletter for peer media matters… but this is probably the best way to evangelize our contacts about Web 2.0.

Targets

This newsletter was sent to a total of 250 contacts, including clients and prospects : the current ones + the ones we had already identified when organizing our Peer media roundtable, + all the ones we had identified by ourselves, based on our Top 20 and Top 100 targets.

Results

We received some nice comments from PR Managers from TomTom, Orange, Adobe, Intel, Creative Labs and Yahoo, who all said that the contents were very interesting (happy happy!)

Contents

Of course, it is in French…

But just to give you an overview of the contents, we chose to talk about:

– the Social Media Release (thanks to Disruption blog’s contributors who gave us this idea 🙂
– traffic figures of the online media
– RSS feeds : how does it work ? (with video)
– The “buzz” video of the month : Electronic Arts made it!
– A blog review – theme : marketing & communications oriented blogs
– A stat : “38% of investors are sick of green PR”
– And a mention about the Peer media theory and “bible”, the Cluetrain Manifesto

If you read French and want to have a glimpse at the articles, you have 2 options: we can send it over to you by email, or you can go to: http://text100.typepad.com/lemeilleurdupeer/

People / time spent

Our first newsletter was a bit long to prepare because we had to set up the team and prepare contents + format at the same time, but we are now 5 people working on it, and we expect to keep their participation down to 3 or 4 hours per month.

Machinery

We leveraged the text100.typepad platform as an article repository. Indeed, having a newsletter is nice, but having a footprint somewhere on Google is all the more important. Obviously, all the articles of the newsletter can also be found on the text100.typepad.com platform.

Next steps

improve the overall design, and mostly keep our readers captive 🙂

Any comment or suggestion on one of the points mentioned above?

Cheers!

Hélène Delannet
Text100 Paris

Virtual Worlds

Second Life – definitely “out” ?

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Not a big news : Facebook and other Social Networks is the buzzword of 07 while the previous year was the year of Virtual Worlds, especially Second Life.
Since the beginning of last year, the first critics about SL was appearing. Since september 07, the situation was clear – Second Life was not the hot topic anymore.
And now, when I look at some figures, I wonder if Second Life is turning to be the completely "out" topic.

Hereunder, you’ll find Second Life’s alexa traffic – for those who are not familiar with this tool, alexa tracks the traffic of the major website of the web. Not 100% reliable, but it gives you a good idea of the trends.

Graph_2

The full graph

(just a funny fact – just add on the graphic the keywords "worldofwarcraft.com" or "facebook.com". Crazy, isn’t it ?). Clubpenguin.com is the famous virtual universe dedicated to kid acquired by Disney discussed in this previous article.

You can also check the google trends graphic for the same keywords which confirm the trend.

We’ve alredy discussed the topic in july 07. But I wanted to come back on this a few months after, and give 5 pro / 5 con ideas regarding SL, just in case to discuss with clients 🙂

5 reasons why second life is still an interesting plateform to visit / to investigate for you and your client

Now, my opinon : it’s not new, the trends is just going on – Second life is definitely not the hot topic anymore. But it’s not because people don’t talk about it that there is nothing interesting inside. Reasons why Second Life is still a universe to investigate :

1/ it is the most advanced social technology plateform of the moment (3D, voice, social capabilities, etc)
2/ Second Life has a strong community which remains dynamic : http://secondlife.com/whatis/economy-graphs.php
3/ Second Life is the most advanced community in term of Metaverse (a universe created and animated by its users)
4/ Second Life remains the best place to experiment Virtual Universes, 3D technology, etc
5/ Second Life is the most advanced virtual Universe while young generation are getting more and more used to interact with this new universes (see the previous article discussing the NYT article)

5 reasons why people don’t visit Second Life anymore

But despite the fact that I’m a Second Life enthusiast, I have to admit that people are not interesting anymore in that universe. And here are the main reasons I’ve identified.

1/ "Second Life sucks". The plateform in itself is unstable, require huge computer to work decently and … compared to actual 3D games, it’s just ugly. Welcome back to 90’s graphics.
2/ "Second Life is boring". Second Life for newbie is a very disturbing experience. People are so disappointed when discovering a virtual universe : rules are changed. How many avatars die after a few minutes lost in the newbie island ?
3/ "I’ve got Facebook, looser". Second Life completely missed the social network game. Making more bridges between identities and avatars would have been a good way to increase retention, and attract new people. Of course, facebook is not the same, but the social aspect of Second Life has been neglected.
4/ "It’s unsafe, it’s crowded with sexual pervert and it emits ton of carbons". Blablababla. At least, that’s what media says (the same media that never visited SL to write articles about it).
5/ "It is for Nerds". Or at least, you need to have a certain familiarity with a computer and a LOT of time.

My diagnostic would be : all these critics are true. But it also confirms that Second Life remains a fantastic place to experiment what Social web could be in the coming year – Second Life is a universe of Science fiction, a visionnary place built by technology pioneers.
A lot of people made the mistake to think it was mainstream.
Not yet. It requires to be open minded and aware of what it implies.

Let’s hope that the next plateforms will learn from Second Life present critics. But for the moment, the advice for our client remains the same :
"Go to second life to experiment and interact with your community"

Have you also the feeling the Second Life is going to be out ?
Have you identified reason why people may think that ?
Would you recommend it for a client ?
Have a different feeling about it ?

Pierre from Paris