UK’s Top Female Social Media Guru & Speaker 2009

Lisa Devany contacted me through the P2P Community I admin on Ning and asked if I could suggest some top notch female speakers in social media for an upcoming conference being planned on behalf of Brand Republic here in the UK. 

Well I didn’t know too many. In fact I am ashamed to say none. Having just put on a social media event of my own with what was later pointed out as an all male cast I felt  like some girl power. I reached out to my network across Twitter etc only to be inundated with recommendations within minutes. I’ve listed them below but if I’m honest the only reason why I can be sure they are any good is because in most cases they have come through people I trust some of whom are gurus and great speakers in their own right.

@suw (Suw Charman-Anderson)

@aleksk (Aleks Krotoski)

@lauraoliver (Laura Oliver) of Journalism.co.uk

Emily Dent from St Lukes @emilydent

@mseaons Melanie Seasons

@katyhowell Katy Howell of Immediate Future

@Laurajohnson from Pegasus PR

Addtions:

Helen Aspell @hel_razor

Fleur Hicks of Pass it on Media @PassItOnMedia 

Amanda Rose @amanda 

@vikkichowney

Laura Whitehead @littlelaura

 Amy Sample Ward of NpTech Comm@amyrsward 

Joanna Shields from Bebo

Katie Lee of Shiny Media @shinykatie

Helen Nowicka from Shiny Red @helennow

Judith Lewis @judithlewis

Alex Goldstein @dogstrust

Helen Keegan @technokitten

The shame of not knowing any of these women has led me to take this one step further and offer up a quest to find the…

 

 

 

UK’S TOP FEMALE SOCIAL MEDIA GURU & SPEAKER!

So 1st phase is taking recommendations for entrants (this can be self nominated if you’re that shameless) over the next 2 weeks starting from today 27.02.09. Simply post the full name, twitter / blog URL and link to a profile. 

Then at the end of the two weeks 12.03.09 we can start voting over who folk think should go through to the final round.

The final round will see 5 women selected to each provide a 20min presentation (Additon: at an event to raise money for Macmillans) whihc is recorded and uploaded to Vimeo to a set social media theme. You the community get to decide those themes.

In the mean time we are looing for brands to sponsor the day and a prize. Oh yeh and you get to say you’re the…

UK’S TOP FEMALE SOCIAL MEDIA GURU & SPEAKER 2009

FINALISTS ANNOUNCED @ www.femalesocialmediaguru.com

You must be Joaquin & the Socialization of Entertainment

Getting the public involved in the creation or marketing-of entertainment is nothing new from Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds to Blair Witch. Recent speculation around Joaquin Phoenix’s headline making bloopers has pundits Parez Hilton, Huffington Post and even the UK’s mainstream Guardian debating if this is the latest the-jokes-on-you. I think the fact his brother in law Cassey Affleck is currently following him around making an undisclosed documentary about his ‘transition’ suggests all is not as it seems. So I won’t focus on the validity of it all as I think we all know the answer. What does interest me however is the role the public can now play in this kind of process through the use of social media now it’s firmly mainstream.

Previously War of the Worlds duped the public, the passive observer, into believing their world was being invaded. I don’t think the end result was expected, I may be wrong, but rather it was a rather nice and unexpected turn of events due to the pioneering quality of work achieved by Mr. Welles. Once media execs saw the value to this kind of outcome the format was continued and honed in the emerging TV medium where the joke saw the unsuspecting public as the cast / victim.  Japan took the format to another level with sometimes quite sick but hilarious Crowd Man pranks. But it was all just for laughs and not really making a cultural impact or statement.

Enter daring Chris Morris who lampooned the UK Media’s changing obsessions that had focused its glare on pedophilia through a tong-in-cheek social commentary and mockumentary Brass Eye. Agree with it or not it got the public and every hack debating what it said about our society today and the media. But what if the general public could play a bigger part and unwittingly construct the story?

Recently a client who represents fighting the stigma of mental illness in the UK wanted a ‘viral’ to help combat and highlight the issue. You only have to look at how the media treats those on the edge Kerry Katona / Britney to see the media don’t exactly help the average Joe perceive mental illness in a particularly sensitive way. My idea, that I don’t think ever got to the client was; lets get a celebrity (of the cult student variety) to go along to a fresher’s event and lose the plot. Have an emotional breakdown right there. Let the students with all their camera / video phones capture and then distribute the content across social media until the newspapers, celeb mags pick up it. Sit back and watch the media / public fill in the blanks and create the story for you. You can just imagine the gossip mags YouTube comments… ‘Celeb losses the plot’ Celeb X is a nutter!

Whilst I don’t think Joaquin has done this subtly or well as he has created too much of the media himself and given too much too soon the concept is there. Rumor has it he is making a mock-u-mentory about Hollywood fame and the media circus that surrounds it. 

I think the explosion of social media usage, which now dwarfs all other media for consumption, and the complexity of RPG gaming culture has created a generation that want to get much more involved other than just decide what the character should do next. Brands have tried to get into this space with their own misinformed brand versions of things like Kate Modern EG Nokia and Annasphone but failed. To be honest I’m not sure how much a brand can bring to the table beyond this attempt but would be open to suggestions.

My thinking is it’s the production companies that should be really pushing this area now that the golden reality show format is old-hat and failing them. I think social media allows social entertainment to be more than personal medias, a prank or advertising campaign but rather an opportunity to let society collectively create the story, provide the characters, then look at itself for what it really is.

 

User generated ads aren’t the same as consumer generated ads

I am all for companies inviting consumers into the creative process to help define and communicate their brand. There is nothing worse than 30 something advertising execs trying to be street and think like an 18 boy from Peckham. Even with focus groups they just give you a framework to be creative within. The point is let; the consumer market the product for you in the way they see fit for their peers. But does asking creative folk to come up with your latest ad fulfil the same ambition of peer-2-peer or is it just a way to get a cheap advert when money is tight.

The reason I ask is every week there seems to be a new campaign where brands are asking people to make an animation, song or shoot a video for their next advert. You Make It We Play by Doritos Is just one example but there are many more. Don’t get me wrong these are all nice baby steps towards where we want to be but the problem is who does this appeal to? Is it actually your consumer or just a very small community of art students? If it’s not your consumer and its just all the people who haven’t progressed to the position within your agency creative team isn’t this crowd-sourcing a grad hire to come and work for free.

If the one that wins is because they have made the most entertaining ad, others voted for them, but they weren’t your consumers does that mean it has more relevance or just likely to be more seen. What are the impacts of that on sales or brand equity? If the idea is supplied by a non-professional creative and approved by your 30 something marketing director hasn’t it missed the value-give of your actual consumers participation. It would be interesting to know if any of the winners of these competitions actually ever bought the products they made the ad for BEFORE winning. If not we are back at square one; the Marketing Director and ad agency guessing what the 18-year-old boy from Peckham wants from a pool of UGC.

There is also a new take on just totally replacing the retained agency and ‘crowd souring’ solutions to briefs as seen here at Idea Bounty. However this leaves even more power in the hands of the 30 something marketing director who now has no one fighting back, and trust me the best relationships between client and agency require that dynamic to achieve anything close to brilliance, at least brilliance in the old broadcast model. And guess what they get it for a fraction of the price.

No matter how you look at any of these models you end up with one ad to meet the requirements of many. Even though its been crowd-sourced it is still broadcast and even if you get the million views viral video yes its still broadcast. The clue is in what happens after your broadcast version gets millions of hits the mash-up (Dove Real Beauty time-scape) but not necessarily the mash-up that gets the next million hits but something more meaningful than eyeballs.

Solution (A):

Do you like our product? Here are some tools to tell your friends and us why. For every sale / signup your creative achieves you get prizes or plain old dirty MONEY (straight old fashioned affiliate deal). The one with the most sales / actions becomes the official campaign.

If that’s just too scary hows about this..

Solution (B): AKA Social Brief Creation

Find a handful of people who are out there talking about your product / company and another handful talking about your competitors. Pick a couple from those groups that have the widest social graph and invite them to your HQ to join the creative process beyond a one-night stand focus group. Ask all the obvious questions and empower them to even ask their peers the same ones. Ask them for their ideas and sit them down with your creative team (should be social media team but I know many haven’t made that step yet) and collaboratively come up with ideas (again get them to pitch these to their peers leveraging their social graph) and see which work. Guess what by the time you nail the creative invite all those who participated to watch it be made and you won’t have to do any seeding as you already have your advocates (that which we create we embrace to quote David Cushman’s ramblings).