ZN

My name is Gary and I have a MySpace account. There, I’ve said it.

In my defence, I haven’t used it for five years and I now forget the password.

However, for dozens of our esteemed Members of the European Parliament (MEPs), wandering alone in the social media wilderness we call MySpace is a regular pursuit.

According to the EU Digital Pulse 2012 report, 3% of the 102 MEPs surveyed byComRes say that they frequently – that’s ‘daily or weekly’, ladies and gentlemen – log on to MySpace. And they say politicians are losing touch with youth vote… Read more

How do you manage and monitor your all up social presence on the web? Are you struggling to keep up with real time conversations and content flow across platforms?

At ZN we’ve been working with Campaign Commander (formally known as Objective Marketer). It’s a content management and statistics gathering tool. We use it on a daily basis to manage the delivery of online communication strategies for various clients. It helps us not only be effective with time management but churns out some great statistics. As with any new web technology, it keeps evolving with new features being added every few months.

Read more

And they are just starting. Social media giants Facebook & Twitter, together with “newcomer” Google Plus, are rolling out new and improved features to attract more usage and to dominate the web’s social sphere. If you’ve missed out on social media news this week, here are a few of the new features that came out of your social networks: Read more

ZN is right in the middle of a ‘talent quest,’ and has been recruiting new members to its continuously growing team for the past year. We continue this effort in order to continue to improve our client service and to strengthen our team with new capabilities. The best way to find the right people is to give them an idea of who we are, how we think and what we are looking for. We put this video together to give you an idea about this – check it out and share with anyone you think might fit the bill.

If you don’t see the video try these other options: 

For more information on the job positions we are looking for, click here

This week ZN’s Facebook page has seen some upgrades! Dealing with the coding challenges from apps like FBML (the Facebook coding language) as well as new restrictions from Facebook in regards to content and settings were the primary challenges. Taking some hints from other Facebook fan pages like those of Starbucks, Emailvision, Scribd and plenty of others, we began our challenge! We added several new tabs, like About ZN (which non-fans will see upon landing), Resources and Brussels Sprouts. The About ZN page was created using an app from Involver, which allows the user to place regular HTML into a Facebook page. On the resources page we used the Static FBML app and searched the web for the codes to embed the Prezi presentation. We also used Scribd.com to upload our PDF documents, store and view them online within their platform, then found the proper FBML embed code to house them on our page. The Brussels Sprouts tab was done in a similar way, but with the videos directly from our YouTube channels.

It was an exciting and interesting challenge, and introduced us to many new applications and platforms. Take a look at our improved Facebook page to see the changes. Also, if you have suggestions or tips, we would love to hear them!

The latest video in our Brussels Sprouts series is now online – please do pass these on to your friends and colleagues and help us spread the word.

This time round, we’re talking about Facebook. As if it wasn’t popular enough, the site has gained even more column inches in the last few months thanks to the success of The Social Network by David Fincher – so, of course, we had to go and see it. We won’t give too much away – suffice to say it’s split opinions here.

Aside from the intrigue and skullduggery that make up the plot of the film, there’s plenty of fun stuff to say about Facebook, particularly now that commentators and businesses are recognizing that it marks a great shift away from traditional media – a huge, interactive, innovative platform which means something different to everyone who uses it and which has been met with staggering success. Find out more about where we think things are going…

I am currently stranded in Bangkok – experiencing along with millions of other passengers the joys of our new found Icelandic volcano.  It is, and has been, a fascinating story and there will be a great deal of learning to be dealt with  about how people, organizations and groups communicate in times of crisis. Just to give a few examples, some organizations such as Eurocontrol, have been doing an impressive job at keeping everyone informed by Twitter.  As someone who is in real need of up to date information, I must admit that we can really appreciate the effort made:. My understanding is that Aurelie (member of the IABC group) is involved / behind this effort so it would be great to connect with her after this is over.

On the other hand, it seems that most airlines are doing a disastrous job at keeping their passengers informed about the situation. I am myself flying with Austrian Airlines and they have been slow and unresponsive in communicating.  So in the spirit of engaged online communication, I have formed a passenger group in the hotel where I am staying in Bangkok and they started to post information about developments on a facebook group we created for the occasion: Facebook: Austrian Passengers in Bangkok

Although we only have 22 people from the flight on the group it is the main place to get the latest news from the airline and the manager of Austrian airlines is relying on us to disseminate information to passengers in an effective way.  What makes this even more ironic is that Austrian Airlines has a facebook ‘fan page’ which is, in the spirit of the Nestlé ‘social media suicide’ turning into a forum for people with complaints against them.

What makes this worse is that the local manager told us that they are not allowed to go on Facebook as part of their company policy so neither he nor anyone else is able to respond to a group of frustrated passengers.

More on this when (?) I return.

Greenpeace's Nestle Killer campaign logo

From time to time, we come across a story that demonstrates that a worst case scenario can come to life. Nestle is currently going through just that ( http://www.mycustomer.com/topic/social-crm/nestle-debacle-demonstrates-common-social-media-misunderstandings/105610).

The story is that they launched a facebook group which is a general ‘corporate’ one – if you read the information page, it talks about Nestlé, and its Mission is ‘Good Life, Good Food’.

The group has over 93 000 members, so clearly has attracted many people.

As the communication team was getting excited about the success of this open engagement strategy something went badly wrong.

Greenpeace decided to launch a campaign against Nestle called Nestlè Killer – Give the Orang-utan a break, driven from the main UK site: http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/. The greenpeace campaign has all the marks of a social media campaign (including a truly gross video – do not watch this before eating!).

But here comes the twist. The greenpeace campaign gradually started to take over the Nestlé facebook group, putting comments, pictures and activating the campaign using the very platform Nestlè had build to show it’s customers how it was delivering ‘Good Life, Good Food’. The result is that currently the site is dominated by posts by anti-Nestlé campaigners. The company is struggling to find the appropriate response – first by deleting comments, then confronting the campaigners and finally apologies and letting all the comments stand. The spirit is one of open and and learning – but it feels a lot like a catastrophic situation out of which there is no easy way out. As this is still unfolding it will be fascinating to observe how this plays out.

Nestle Facebook Fan Page: What should Nestlé do now?

The question is: what should Nestlé do now? Delete? Engage? Change country? Flee the country? They have already said that they had stopped giving business to one the companies that was responsible for the deforestation that is leading to the Orang-utan being threatened.

A video worthwhile watching: Ikea’s viral facebook campaign that was solely based on existing facebook applications:

I just read a post from Gitte Gorzelak called You mean..having 57 blogs is not a good idea? and as I found myself commenting on the post it made me think about when is having too many platforms, blogs and social networks running at the same time is a waste of time.  I tried to answer in my comments, but I feel that this question deserves a more thorough examination.

To take ZN as an example we have quite a few ‘digital assets’ running.

First we have the ZN site (www.zn.be).  It has a hyperlink on the homepage to our blog (Hyperthinker.com).  So far, so good.  However we have a page called ‘The Lab’ which links to another initiative which is our NIng platform.  The later platform has links to the blog as it feeds it through an rss feed.  We also are able to import videos from our youtube channel which means that actually there is a lot linked to the ning platform.  We also have two other ’groups’ on Xing.com (actually two: one called hyperthinker and another on emarketing).  Interestingly  the latter has continued to survive despite being neglected (I had some difficulties with lack of applications and the lack of integration with the outside world).  But they both have over 400 members and as I checked earlier, both had posts dated December. 

We also created several facebook groups (some private, some public – but to be honest this generated little impact from a business point of view but it was great to connect with old friends).

Finally we created a platform on linkedin.  This one is very interesting as it well designed, and has a great facility to share articles (automatically creating a clean title and summary from a url).

All these experiments are very useful in approaching clients (we have replicated a ning platform for client recently around a packaging competition) and we have also started many blogs and facebook communications programmes which have met with some success. 

The Xing group actually generated a few leads and some positive referrals and so did some of the other initiatives.

The main puropose of these online ‘assets’ is that they serve as a place of learning.  I am also finding that a good blog serves to focus the mind on key questions (like this one) and helps to share your thoughts and feelings, especially with your own team and clients (and perhaps prospects but I feel this is not the main aim of this).

So I guess so far we are making slow and steady progress up the learning curve.  I would like to see as much hyperlinking as possible between those different platforms so people can choose how they want to consumer their information, which profile they want to use and what ways they want to choose to express themselves.

The simple blog seems to be the most ‘mature’ of the lot, but it takes hard work and discipline (something that was a missing a little in the past).  However I have seen the various communities serve very effectively the purpose of client if the fit with the campaign was right.   We will continue into 2009, with more experimentation and look forward to meeting you there…