Twitter have finally launched the long awaited ‘Tweet Button’ for sharing articles on websites and counting how many times they have been shared. This button is apparently the most comprehensive counter of retweets and shares across Twitters’ network, a crown which Tweetmeme have held until now. It is also very simple to embed with a single line of code (similar to that of the Facebook share button).The other great thing about this button is you can customise it to tweet a line of text, a URL and also recommend two accounts to follow after you have used it. Great stuff.

For more info watch the video below or visit Twitter.

If you’re wandering along Oxford Street on a Friday feeling in need of a caffeine injection head on over to Debenhams, check in with Foursquare and collect your free coffee.

Debenhams is one of the latest national retailers to get on board with the emerging location-based social network Foursquare. If you’re not familiar with this new phenomenon, the basic idea is that you ‘check in’ to real-world places from your GPS-enabled mobile device and earn points for doing so. And what do points mean? Well, free coffee in Debenhams’ case but the possibilities are endless for retailers to utilise this service to retain their customer base and gain new customers.

When you check in, your foursquare friends are notified of your whereabouts (hmmm… a bit Big Brother) and you can automatically Tweet and update your Facebook status too. There are other features of the service like ‘tips’ (if the place you’re in does the most awesome hangover bacon butties) to help you spread the word about what’s great … and what’s not so great about where you are.

Of course, the potential for bricks & mortar retailers to capitalise on this are significant. Offer discounts, freebies, new services to loyal customers who check-in with foursquare and they’ll spread the word for you. And hopefully a good word at that.

Foursquare in the UK is in its infancy. But it looks set to become big in 2010. Who knows, with national retailers like Debenhams coming on board, it might even see growth like Twitter saw last year. Watch this space.

Poor old @VodafoneUK have fallen victim to the dangers of social media - and boy have they done it in style(!!)  On Friday afternoon, someone posted this homophobic remark on their @VodafoneUK twitter feed to their 8500+ followers.

Ouch.

Disgruntled employee perhaps? Or ‘innocent’ mistake posting to the wrong account? After all the apologising that they did, it seems it was a “A severe breach of rules by staff in our building“. Either way, despite their swift attempts to delete the tweet, it had been re-tweeted and captured for posterity for all to see. A quick Google now shows over 1,200 results for the exact offending phrase.

Interestingly, the blunder gave them a bit of a boost in followers. People wanting to witness in person their next public fail? Hmmm…

Just goes to show that measuring social media success by number of followers alone isn’t appropriate! I guess Friday’s incident just highlights the power and speed of social media. And the inability to retract our digital utterances, thanks to it’s real-time and re-publishable nature. Social media can be quickly damaging to a brand if care isn’t taken.

In this increasingly socially digital world of ours, brands are being forced to be more open, more honest and more able to engage in real-time conversations. All power to the consumer! Not since the birth of the internet itself has something had such a levelling effect on the way we all communicate.

Of course, social media is here to stay and it will reap significant benefits to those who use it well. And for those who don’t?  Well, they’ll probably be left out on the street - presumably like that Vodafone employee.

I’ve recently had two personal experiences of customer service delivered through Twitter - twice in one week.

The detail is below, but in summary:
I now expect brands to respond to me when I tweet about them. Those that do, I like. Those that don’t… they don’t think I’m important enough…so they go down in my estimation.

Experience 1 - Gist

I recently signed up to Gist – a service which aggregates information about all your contacts from different sources (outlook, facebook, twitter, etc) and puts it in one place. Sounds great. After setup, however, I couldn’t log in.

So (not expecting a reply) I tweeted…

They got back to me… 3 times… Initial contact was only 2.5 hours later (read bottom up)

So I @replied, again on Twitter.  And they got back to me again.

I spoke. And they listened. Not only did they listen, they actively engaged me in conversation. They made me feel special. That’s a good thing. I like them. I’ll recommend them. That’s great for them.

Experience 2 - Xmarks

Xmarks is a bookmark synchronising service which syncs your bookmarks between PCs (and Macs) and allows you to share them online too. It’s great.

But I recently had to re-install it (new laptop…old one died)… and it caused a problem.

So I tweeted…(again not expecting a reply)…(and note, didn’t do @xmarks, just a simple xmarks)

3 days later…they got back to me.

OK, so it took 3 days.  But at least they bothered. I’m about to email them.
Both brands above are clearly actively monitoring the social space in order to pro-actively engage with their consumers. And benefiting from my improved perception of them by so doing.

Many brands could learn from these experiences and grow their advocates through social media-enabled customer service.

(Inspired by a tweet from @socialmedia2day…)

Marketing teams spend millions of pounds in manangement time and agency fees developing briefs, tone of voice guidelines, and executions for every single broadcast message they put out. Every comma becomes a trauma, is that wardobe choice dynamic enough, does that font project our innovativeness? And once they’ve fine-tuned these messages and filmed them in glorious technicolour, they seem to sit back, their labours complete, and rest.

We like to think of marketing in human terms (see our previous post on this). I’d like to suggest this behaviour by brands and their owners is the equivalent of me seeing someone across a crowded room, falling in love with them from afar,  going home and crafting a perfect declaration of my love and why I am the ideal person for them, dispatching this missive, then sitting at my open bedroom window, gazing at the stars, sighing wistfully.

The time and resources devoted to enabling relationships between brands and their consumers can still be achingly inadequate. People who make an effort to find a brand and try to engage in conversation often go unrewarded, faced with impersonal automated email systems or glossy brochure websites.

But this can be easy: it certainly doesn’t need to be hard, or even expensive. But it does require a change of mindset, it does require brands to think of their customer relationships more like, well, real relationships; which need to be 2-way, they need maintaining, they need work. Otherwise, they’re not really relationships.

The current social media phenomenon is Twitter, before that it was Facebook, MySpace and Friends Reunited. And while your brand wants exposure in the most popular digital environments you shouldn’t forget there are some communities that are probably here to stay.

What am I talking about? Well it can only be Facebook can’t it?

In the UK only Google gets more traffic than Facebook and in terms of social networking websites Facebook is a country mile ahead of the field.

I’m certainly not saying forget everything else but given that Facebook traffic is more than everything else in the top 10 added together you’d be crazy not to even consider it. Add to the fact that it has 200 million active users and more than 4 billion minutes are spent on Facebook each day then the reasons not to become harder to justify.

So, what options are available?

For brands the obvious place to start is by creating a fan page. They are quick to set-up, easily tailored to your needs and can become extremely viral if done properly. The key benefit though is that it gives your brand the opportunity to listen and talk to your consumers in an environment they are already very comfortable in.

Redbull on Facebook

Adding fancy gadgets and links to your corporate site is fine but the chances of your page being successful will be pretty slim. At the launch of Creston’s strategic approach to social media Kieron Matthews of the IAB stressed the importance of “respecting your environment”. If you are going to enter into your consumer’s community then make sure you follow their rules. If you don’t then you could quite easily end up following Habitat’s recent Twitter debacle.

A few fan page must do’s are:

• Conversation is key. If your fans ask a question, give you feedback or make a complaint then don’t ignore it: respond. Being open and honest will create trust.
• Keep your fans engaged with regular updates but don’t over do it so it becomes spam.
• Plan ahead and create a content plan. That way you always have something to say.
• Make your fans feel special. Treat them to Facebook only discounts or leak them news before it’s officially released.
• Remember it’s a two way conversation. Treat your fan’s as individuals and try to add a human face to your brand.

Facebook fan pages aren’t right for every brand but if you do venture down this route then make sure you invest the time in listening and responding to your customers.

And one final thought: more than 6 million users are becoming fans of Pages each day.

While we’re always keen to explore new ways of connecting brands with their audiences, it’s doesn’t always have to be complicated. Evoking an emotional response with a simple idea will always resonate strongly. Traditional media carry ideas just as well, often better.

Occasionally I read about a campaign or idea that prickles the hairs on my neck, makes me wish I’d been involved. Or in recent weeks, two campaigns. Their aims of these campaigns are noble, and the executions are genuinely exciting and moving.

The first is an Australian campaign for the UN from 2008 using interactive posters to alert people to the stories of minorities and other marginalised groups. It adheres (almost) to the age-old rule of posters of ‘5 words and a pack shot’, a simple, arresting headline “Listen to me” and striking full-face image, commanding the viewer’s attention. While waiting for your bus, simply snap a picture on your m0bile of the poster, which ‘rewards’ your engagement with a phonecall, putting a voice and a story to the face. It’s a clever use of traditional media with interactive technology (the cynic within wonders whether there wasn’t enough money for TV!). But if there wasn’t, good. This is way better than any preachy, very-worthy-but-most-likely-very-dull TV campaign could have been.

The other campaign is an even simpler, more striking use of posters, where the medium for once really is the message. The Zimbabwean ran billboards of worthless Zimbabwean bank notes to raise awareness and promote readership of the newspaper, and recently won the Cannes Lions Grand Prix award for outdoor advertising.

The ads outline how the regime of Robert Mugabe had introduced a 55 per cent import ‘luxury’ duty on The Zimbabwean, making it unaffordable for the average Zimbabwean. The campaign went further, distributing trillions of dollars worth of Zimbabwean money stamped with provocative messages and a call for support for The Zimbabwean.

There are further images on The Zimbabwean’s Flickr photostream.

Social media is all around us and brands are increasingly attempting to leverage its power in influencing consumers. There’s a lot of nervousness in jumping in though, since engagement in social media can easily back-fire, as Belkin recently discovered when it attempted to influence online shoppers to buy its products.

As e-consultancy recently reported…

Belkin’s CEO responded saying they didn’t know it was happening. Hmmm….

One of the lessons we can take out from this is that openness and honesty are key! Without it, you risk causing damage to your brand. In our ever-connected, ever-online world it’s all too easy to be caught out.

It’s also important to develop clear rules of engagement which govern how the brand engages within social media spaces - this ensures the risks are minimised and gives content authors guidelines on how they should behave in different circumstances.

As part of the Creston Digital Forum, we’re running a seminar on social media where we’re inviting clients to come & listen to our view on how to engage. More details will follow…

Google has teamed up with major social networking sites to fight the Facebook juggernaut. They are working on an initiative to provide an open, standards-based approach to social networking … OpenSocial.

TechCrunch reports…

OpenSocial is a set of three common APIs, defined by Google with input from partners, that allow developers to access core functions and information at social networks:

• Profile Information (user data)
• Friends Information (social graph)
• Activities (things that happen, News Feed type stuff)

Hosts agree to accept the API calls and return appropriate data. Google won’t try to provide universal API coverage for special use cases, instead focusing on the most common uses. Specialized functions/data can be accessed from the hosts directly via their own APIs.

Unlike Facebook, OpenSocial does not have its own markup language (Facebook requires use of FBML for security reasons, but it also makes code unusable outside of Facebook). Instead, developers use normal javascript and html (and can embed Flash elements). The benefit of the Google approach is that developers can use much of their existing front end code and simply tailor it slightly for OpenSocial, so creating applications is even easier than on Facebook.

We are about to build a couple of Facebook applications for a new client, so may well need to investigate OpenSocial as it becomes available. Watch this space.