Apple tops the Social Media Brand Charts

..which begs the question, should we just give up on all this social media malarkey and do something a bit more useful instead?

Along with reviews of the year and predictions for the one to come, January is also a cracking time for lots of Top 10/20/50/100/infinity-1 charts of stuff from the previous year. Unsurprisingly there have been a couple of of top social media brands for 2009 charts make an appearance this week and equally unsurprisingly Apple has done very well in both.

In the Virtue Top Social Brands of 2009 the iPhone comes in at number one, iTunes at six, Apple itself at eight, followed by the slightly laggard iPod and Mac at 34 and 35 respectively. Then we have the Social Radar Top 50 Social Brands of 2009, which Twitter in the top slot, then Google and FaceBook with iPhone coming in fourth. Mac, Apple and iPod however all do much better at seven, eight and nine and poor old iTunes is no where in sight.

Both companies behind their respective charts claim similar methodologies. Infegy describing the Social Radar methodology as:

To create the Top 50 list, we used Social Radar to analyze millions of blog posts, news feeds, forums, social networks and Twitter posts to aggregate a list of the words and brands mentioned most frequently on the Web during all of 2008 and 2009. The list measures the number of unique individuals or sources that posted content about each brand during 2009 rather than the overall number of mentions, which would be more heavily influenced by big fans who post frequently about a specific brand.

With Virtue describing its thusly:

The Vitrue 100 is the result of Vitrue’s daily analysis of over 2,000 popular brands on the social web.

On July 1, 2009, we refined the SMI’s algorithm in our continual efforts to reflect the the social web.  See more details here> http://vitrue.com/smi/

The Vitrue SMI report is an easy to understand measurement of a brand’s online conversations. Based on our patent-pending technology, index scores are comprised of various online conversations from status updates to multi-dimensional video sites. The Vitrue SMI score provides a snapshot in time to help make sense of the overwhelming amount of measurable data.

We derive the Vitrue SMI by reviewing popular social media sites. We update the Vitrue SMI once daily. Our sample set represents different dimensions of social interactivity:

Both of which when combined say to me, there are several ways to skin a rabbit and the rabbit is most likely going to look a tad, or even radically, different depending on you chosen method. However this is not a post about the need for standardised metrics, this is a post about how if Apple is the Social Media Brand that all brands should all aspire to be then perhaps we’re barking up the wrong tree when we talk about the need for online engagement and for brands to become more social. For as so beautifully described in this late 2009 post, ‘Why Santa shouldn’t use Social Media’.

Apple has a web presence that if it was any more old-school would be in black and white and suggesting Netscape Navigator as the browser of choice. It has a website and a store, thank you very much. iTunes at heart is just a store. A lot of it is free, but it’s still a store.

Which is true, Apple doesn’t own its name on Twitter. Going by the single Tweet from @Apple in March 2009, I’m not convinced they are even an Apple fan. Unlike @iPhone, who at least links to the Apple home page but as he claims to be ‘just a dude with an iphone and 16 gigs worth of attitude’, I’m not sure he’s an official channel either. A search on the Apple site for blog reveals results for blogging apps and how-to’s for iweb. In short, Apple doesn’t do social media. Yet why would it need to? It has thousands of evangelists talking about it all over the place already because they love its products.

So perhaps what we should do is quit working on engagement strategies, how to achieve cut through, growing the number of FaceBook Fans and concentrate on making amazing products that do something that people actually want, which they will then buy and then rave about with monotonous regularity.

Simples.

Social Media Prediction for 2010

Since my last post assessing how my hopes for social media in 2009 panned out in which I promised a second post on my wishes for this year I’ve been procrastinating like a good ‘un. This is mainly because I thought I’d actually do predictions instead but there have been so many other excellent posts from wiser heads than mine on what 2010 will hold and predictions are tricksie, too exact and they are unlikely to come to pass, too vague and well, there’s not much point. Then I thought I’d do an uber-round up of everyone else’s predictions to see if there was a trend but I’m working to a time constraint, though the initial research indicates increases in more mobile web users,  an imminent app war, yet more blog storms but this time in relation to the FTC guidelines or political candidates So I’ve decided to stick with the wishes, which are three fold for this year.

1) The media stops  regarding Twitter as being newsworthy in its own right. We can’t deny that 2009 was the year of the microblogging platform and while many people still disparage its worth, others can’t live with out it. I wouldn’t quite put myself in the latter category but I do find it damned useful. However the BBC covering @stevenfry’s decision to leave Twitter seems a tad OTT. It would also be nice to see an end to stories that would not get coverage apart from the fact that it happened on Twitter, or that

2) That social media is a necessity. Most of the hype around social media has thankfully died down, we’re starting to work out what it can and can’t do but it still seems that a lot of companies think that they have to do it, and not just do it, but do the really tricky bit of generating content and building a community. I think every company will benefit from listening to what’s being said online, though some need to understand that they are not being talked about, but I’m yet to be convinced that every brand will benefit from online engagement.

3) That we really work out ROI for both social media and PR. Yes, it’s a repeat from last year’s wish list but who doesn’t want to be able to prove what they are doing is actually making some kind of difference? And while being able to throw some numbers around, like we’ve got you 45,000 twitter followers or 50 billion facebook fans, it would be even nicer if we could know what it actually meant in terms of the client/campaign objective.

2009 Resolutions Revisited

So about this time last year I created a list of five social media wishes for Social Media over the coming 12 months, as the year now draws to a close I thought I should review them and make some new ones.

The 2009 ones were mainly:

1) That I never have to sit through a presentation on digital that uses Kryptonite, Dell Hell or Wal-Mart as a proof point on how iccky the web can be, surely we dig up examples that are slightly newer?*

2) That I never have to see a blog post entitled PR/Blogging/Advertising is dead again meme. Really ppl find something better to link bait with in ‘09.

3) To see some case studies with actual ROI attached to them. Thus far I think I’ve seen two – Dell claiming a $1 million in sales via Twitter and HP’s month of the Dragon blogger outreach.  I know that digital engagement is more valuable than attributing figures to it might suggest but as the credit crunches, clients are increasingly to demand that we show them the money

4) That we stop over hyping what social media actually is, as John Jantsch says “Social media is a tool, not a religion‘

5) To see digital become an integrated part of what a PR person does, not an activity that is punted out to a separate silo of experts. Making everyone tick off the list of 51 things every PR person should know would be a bloody good start.

I did fairly well on number one, but then again I didn’t attend that many presentations but I know people that did and despaired that the same old clichés were still being trotted out. I even create an eponymous law about it.

The meme involved in two moved on, people stopped declaring things dead and instead started fighting about which discipline should own social media, there was a nice debate held by NMK in April about online versus traditional PR which came out of a twitter discussion, Drew has a very nice summary of it over here.

On to three, there is a still a lack of hard numbers attached to social media case studies. I know it’s a hangover from PR being difficult to measure but we really do need to address this if social media is ever to gain credibility. Personally I’ve been pushing this slide deck to everyone who mentions ROI as I think it’s a damn good starting point.

I do think that we have stopped over hyping what social media can achieve, and we’re also coming to a realisation about just how incredibly useful it can in certain situations, the recent Eurostar snafu being a good example of what a can be achieved on the fly. How much improved the outcome might have been if there was already decent monitoring and a response policy in place can only be guessed at.

Finally, integration of digital into the remit of the normal PR person’s bag of tricks. From a personal perspective it’s happening at PN Towers but this year has seen other agencies spin out dedicated digital shops so perhaps there is still some way to go on this front.

As for my Social Media wishes for 2010, that will be another post in the next couple of weeks.

If any one is interested in my  personal resolutions they mainly involve this , more of this and this , hopefully doing this in the summer and this  in the autumn, and the odd bit of this on grass as well as on sand. Oh and blogging more, mebbe. And world domination.Natch.

Have a happy Christmas people!

2009 Resolutions

As most commentators look forward to 2009, predicting what will be our major obsessions, I thought I’d make some resolutions instead. Not on my own behalf but rather for the wider world of digital and social media. although if you would prefer to know what I’ve resolved to do in 2009 feel free to drop me an email requesting the very mundane details.

Obviously it would be rather egocentric of me to make resolutions solely on the behalf of the wider community, so I’m tagging Brendan, Chris, Damien, Darika and Gary to share their five hopes and dreams for 2009, in a strictly digi sense, too.

My particular wishes are as follows.

1) That I never have to sit through a presentation on digital that uses Kryptonite, Dell Hell or Wal-Mart as a proof point on how iccky the web can be, surely we dig up examples that are slightly newer?*

2) That I never have to see a blog post entitled PR/Blogging/Advertising is dead again meme. Really ppl find something better to link bait with in ’09.

3) To see some case studies with actual ROI attached to them. Thus far I think I’ve seen two – Dell claiming a $1 million in sales via Twitter and HP’s month of the Dragon blogger outreach.  I know that digital engagement is more valuable than attributing figures to it might suggest but as the credit crunches, clients are increasingly to demand that we show them the money

4) That we stop over hyping what social media actually is, as John Jantsch says “Social media is a tool, not a religion‘

5) To see digital become an integrated part of what a PR person does, not an activity that is punted out to a separate silo of experts. Making everyone tick off the list of 51 things every PR person should know would be a bloody good start.

*I reserve the right to make this resolution next year but naming Motrin Moms