Essential Buzz Monitoring – For Buzz Monitoring Companies

It’s funny – or rather quite appalling – when experts fail at their chosen discipline. You see, I am in search of a social media / buzz monitoring type of platform for Boden. I called a few of the names I’d heard before and read the relevant blogs and eConsultancy guides. But I thought the best place to find such a solution provider would naturally be Twitter. So last week I posted the message below.

And guess how many of the big solution providers replied to me? You’ve guessed it – zero. I may have only a few followers and not be the biggest name on Twitter (soon to change!), but in the age of Google Alerts and numerous Twitter search engines this is inexcusable. I did get replies – from bloggers and a small German start-up – but none of the big names have bothered to do what they preach and use their own tools effectively. Tsk tsk!

Search Jokes

Earlier in the year my fellow Bodenite Rob started a brilliant hashtag called #searchjokes, the principle aims of which are to aid the production and preservation of, yes, jokes about search marketing. A feat never attempted, possibly for a reason, the hashtag quickly went into obscurity amongst the general Twitter chatter. I’ll therefore collect the jokes in this post as Twitter is quick to forget them.

• Why couldn’t the Search Manager finish his book? Because he wanted to stay on page 1.
• A lemur walks into a search conference. The speaker asks, “Why the long tail?”
• Why did the Search Manager cross the road? To generate more traffic.
• What do you call a conversation that doesn’t influence your opinion in any way? A nofollow conversation.
• Why did the Search Manager join the Jehovah’s witnesses? To increase conversion.
• What do you call a search conference without a bar? An IT conference.

It’s Snowing On Twitter

It’s been snowing in London for about 5 minutes and Twitter’s gone crazy with excited reports from around town. Google is on the ball again and has picked up the trend already by showing a live feed on the SERPs. Simply search for “snow london” to check out the tweets galloping in (or see screenshot above.)

Notable tweets include ” As quickly as snow arrived, its stopped here. Snow in London is like BA Staff: wont be around much during Christmas” and the news story “London sacrifices virgins after centimetre of snow.”

Clever Social Media

When it comes to promoting brand awareness, reputation, customer engagement and other tough-to-crack areas of fluffy marketing, more and more often the weapon of choice is social media. Any excuse to spend more time on Facebook, right? Now, some marketeers are just tipping their toes in these uncharted waters while others are going for the big splash  - check out Ford’s Fiesta Movement for a properly large campaign. I’ve been interested in the middle ground to see what brands are doing on a budget yet using brains and creativity. Here are just a couple of campaigns that stood out for me recently and deserve a pat on the back.

Tweet The Parcel

Tweet The Parcel is a cunning little Twitter campaign by Comet. Visitors are urged to tweet about their most desired Christmas present and to include Comet’s hashtag. The twitterer’s avatar and tweet then appear on Comet’s page only to be replaced by the next entrant. At some random point in time every day “the music stops” and the lucky person whose tweet is live gets to win the daily prize. A very simple and eye-catching concept – hats down to Comet or whoever came up with it.

Facebook Showroom

Equally clever is a Facebook campaign for Ikea by Swedish agency Forsman & Bodenfors. You can watch their promo video showing off the idea on YouTube, but in short it makes a dozen or so showroom photographs available on Facebook and lets visitors tag a product on them for a chance to win  it. Again, a very simple bite-size campaign that gains additional exposure through propagating material on participants’ profile pages and newsfeeds.

Is This It For Twitter?

What a year it has been for Twitter and what stunning charts it has let us produce every step of the way! Growth was nothing short of explosive at the start of 2009, then boiling steadily throughout the year, but now it seems to have evaporated. Promptly, Hitwise produced some usage graphs and asked if it has twittered out? I wonder too, has it all gone twits up?

Well, there’s a debate. Some people say Hitwise graphs are misleading as going on Twitter.com itself is so January, now that we have TweetDecks and the like. Maybe, but the Google Insights graph above shows a decline in search volume that correlates strongly with Hitwise’s visitor stats. There is less interest in Twitter now, there’s no doubt about that.

I reckon it’s success that causes the failure. Twitter had so much buzz earlier in the year that most people that joined didn’t realise why. Now we’re at a stage when only users that genuinely see the platform as fun, cool or useful keep using it. The rest, not tempted by any new interesting developments, are leaving. And I imagine that this is the key for Twitter – if they produce something sexy with that $100m investment they have secured then they may take to the skies again. Whether that will happen we’re yet to see. Google Insights itself shows a pop up “Forecast is unavailable” and that is that.