Recently we created a Facebook Connect competition site for HomeAway, the UK’s number 1 holiday rentals site. The competition was to promote ‘Grantourismo’ - two globetrotting travel writers who inhabit HomeAway’s holiday rental homes on their travels, in order to experience culture, history and cuisine first hand.

The competition was in the form of a travel-based quiz, derived from some of the destinations of the Grantourismo tour. Not only do users test their knowledge, but they have the chance to win instant prizes and be entered into a star prize draw for £1,000 towards a holiday, in one of HomeAway’s 210,000+ holiday rental properties.

In order to enter the competition, the quiz is linked and connected directly with Facebook, which enables users to publish their results to their news feed which in turn creates a viral effect. Also the site has a ‘Like’ feature, which connects people further and turns them into a Facebook fan of the HomeAway page.

The competition has been a great success in terms of fans and users. In the first few weeks of the competition, the fan base increased by approximately 70%.

To see the Facebook Connect site visit http://www.homeawayquiz.co.uk. If you’re looking for something similar to this promotion, or would like to discuss it in more depth drop a tweet to @UnicornRW or @Brandmovers.

GetGlue is a creative social and semantic media platform for displaying your literary and musical tastes in movies, TV programmes, topics, books and music. It provides a unique recommendation stream and a similar 'like' function to Facebook, based on personal tastes, shared interests and what's currently popular.

The more you interact, the more 'stickers' you can unlock such as 'Foodie' and 'Critic' or even branded stickers for shows such as Dexter and movies such as Clash of the Titans. GetGlue also has a browser add-on, which brings recommendations around the web with you, to popular sites such as Wikipedia, Last.fm and Amazon.

Taking inspiration from the geosocial networking sites, GetGlue also allows you to check-in to whatever you’re thinking, watching, reading or drinking at that moment in time. Checking-in can be carried out on the website or using Get Glue’s iPhone application (and soon on the Android) for speedy commenting and interaction with others i.e. while the show is on air.

Get Glue is well set to be the next marketing tool, especially for the movie and entertainment sector. An applicable example is HBO who have partnered with GetGlue to offer secret, insidery stickers when you check-in whilst watching their shows. These stickers are not readily available or easy to unlock, rather die hard True Blood, Entourage and Hung fans need to also socialise, share and comment the most for the chance of unlocking the stickers.

GetGlue has a real future - not only have they partnered with the big players in the Entertainment industry such as Warner Bros and Universal Pictures, but they are taking advantage of the latest trend of checking into anything and everything for incentives.

GetGlue can reward brand ambassadors with stickers, guru status and free items in return for their online activity. As a result, businesses receive ratings and reviews to measure their impact, as well as reach their target market directly. Either way both businesses and customers benefit with this unification of entertainment and social media.

See our profile for an example of how we’ve utilised our recommendation stream based on movie, consumer good and entertainment projects that we have carried out over the years http://getglue.com/brandmovers. If you’d like to discuss this in more depth or are looking for a GetGlue promotion for your business drop a tweet to @UnicornRW or @Brandmovers.

One of the most significant but often disregarded aspects in the vast online spectrum is social media monitoring. It is imperative to measure the social media presence of your company and industry to produce content, create strategy and fix any disreputable PR catastrophes before they’ve had a chance to develop (think Coca Cola, Nestle and BP). Below are some steps to take when devising your social monitoring strategy:

What are my objectives?

The initial step in ensuring your monitoring will be worthwhile is to define your current business objectives. Examples of objectives could be identifying or measuring brand recognition, customer loyalty, new markets or social media buzz. For instance, do you want to measure the success of a social media campaign, or even your competitors? Or maybe you’ve recently launched a new product or advertising slogan and would like to observe the public’s response. Whether it’s marketing, public relations, social media, customer service or any other aspect you’d like to measure, it’s achievable.

What to measure?

Once objectives are acknowledged, the next step will be to identify various keywords to measure. The first and most obvious is the company brand name, to determine whether you’re being talked about and to identify any dissatisfied customers or common misspellings/nicknames associated with your brand. Other measurable keywords include competitors, common SEO keywords, slogans, Directors, business partners, events, industry topics, news and products.

What tools to use?

- Google Alerts, Analytics & Trends: Simple mix of updates of keywords, insights into web traffic and monitoring of topic trends.
- Social Networking Sites: Twitter, Facebook, TweetDeck and HootSuite allow you to search, filter and interact with large volumes of real-time conversation.
- Social Networking Tools: Ice Rocket, It’s Trending, Ellerdale and Twitterfall for tracking and searching specified content on social networking sites,
- Blog tools: Blog Pulse and Technorati to monitor daily activity
- Free Social Media Monitoring: Social Media Mention and HowSociable?
- Premium Social Media Monitoring: Radian 6, Alterian, Scout Labs or Visible Technologies for more bespoke and expert monitoring.

How to Analyse?

When examining results on various monitoring platforms, human monitoring is essential to structure and define data and to filter out any unnecessary, irrelevant or inaccurate results. It is essential to identify recurring trends and phases, identify new markets, compare volume of conversations and the main online sources, monitor brand sentiment or feedback and identify domains with the most conversations.

Recommendations

To gain a realistic overview of your brand it is advisable to use a mixture of paid and free monitoring tools for full variety and understanding. Once you’ve reported what’s effective and what isn’t, it’s crucial to alter your strategy or approach accordingly i.e. customer service and products. For this to be achieved a brand needs to use monitoring to learn rather than merely listen to opinions or criticism. Rather than using technology to impose on discussions, customer trust can be maintained by using social media portals to invite feedback whether negative or positive. As a result, measuring and initiating online conversation is priceless and the key to continuous improvement.

If you'd like to discuss this in more depth, please drop a tweet to @UnicornRW or @Brandmovers.

As I pride myself on being a real fashion and social media fanatic, over the past year or so I’ve been following and observing fashion retailers and the channels they’ve been using to represent their brands ‘voice’.

Digital has undoubtedly taken over the traditional fashion spectrum. Gone are the days where individuals who are eager to know about fashion trends, merely pick up the latest fashion magazine for their latest style fix. In a society where technology is ever changing and instant - fashionistas log into various social networking portals to connect with brands and fellow fans.

According to the Internet Measurement Research Group (IMRG) sales of clothes online rose considerably in May 2010, with a 32% increase compared to last year. Even better, Facebook and Twitter users spend 1.5x more online than the average user - which is why fashion retailers need to be aware of the fast paced digital revolution drawing upon them.

Successful conversations and connections with customers take immense planning and preparation. So, the first step in developing a comprehensive social media marketing plan is to define objectives and expected outcomes. Below are some suggestions of the benefits of certain social media platforms to fashion retailers.

Facebook is great for visual stimulation and forming a creative context for consumers i.e. uploading pictures of behind the scenes photo shoots and celebrities spotted in their attire. In the office, we’ve been creating customised tabs for brands, as it’s a great way to organise content. Facebook boxes also not only look appealing and incentivise but increase usability for fans (i.e. signup to emails and quick links).

User generated content is also an important mechanism that Facebook makes possible. Savvy online shoppers are becoming more challenging and like to express themselves and exchange their opinions on goods and services. An example of this is Lipsy who encourages women to upload and tag photos of themselves wearing their dresses. Lipsy then selects winners on a monthly basis and publishes them on their wall of fame http://bit.ly/deeDjG.

Twitter, the contemporary buzz outlet for fashion, is great for general updates and initiating conversation. Competitions or contests are also particularly popular. Fashion retailers such as River Island (“Don't forget to tweet #riverislandgfw before 5pm for your chance to win this dress from the GFW Boutique http://bit.ly/c40E20”) have been running free clothing/accessory give-aways recently, and interaction and ‘re-tweets’ are huge and most importantly viral.

Broadcasting fashion events or a première, with pictures is another technique for promoting clothing on Twitter. An example of this was when our Creative Director (@johnnieego) was the official Twitter photographer of the première of ‘The Disappearance of Alice Creed’ and provided pictures to outline key events. It’s fair to say that many were only interested in where the star of the film, Gemma Arterton’s outfit was from, rather than focussing on the updates!

Geo-marketing is also another approach, which is carried out on a wide range of location based social networks such as Foursquare, Loopt and Gowalla. I’ve recently created proposals for fashion chains that want to dip their toes into location-based marketing.

A recent social media strategy I enjoyed observing was Jimmy Choo’s Foursquare based treasure hunt called ‘CatchAChoo’ to promote their new trainer range whilst offering winners the chance to win a free pair. To generate deep levels of engagement, pictures of a Jimmy Choo bag (containing the shoes) in potential locations were posted over Twitter, Foursquare and Facebook. According to New Media Age 3,500 people took part and 400 bloggers covered the initiative

Social media needn’t be just a marketing strategy. It can also focus on researching and foreseeing fashion movements and trends. There are some great tools out there, such as Social Media Mention and Radian 6 – to monitor your company’s online presence on a wide range of platforms, whether positive or negative, big or small.

If you want to find out more about social media strategy for fashion retailers or have any questions drop a tweet to Rebecca Williams @UnicornRW or the company account @Brandmovers.

I recently read a fascinating article by Judy Shapiro (@judyshapiro) titled “Question: What’s a Facebook Fan Really Worth to Marketers?” (See: http://adage.com/digitalnext/article?article_id=144437) which took research from two companies and looked at formulas for how you might value a Facebook fan. Let’s start by stating that the approach of both companies is very different.

Syncapse look primarily at the additional spending power of a Fan, which it estimates at $71.84 over a two year period with a total value to the brand of $136 per fan when taking other performance factors into account. (See: http://www.syncapse.com/media/syncapse-value-of-a-facebook-fan.pdf)

Vitrue on the other hand look at the comparison between the brand value of a Fan and the equivalent advertising spend, and conclude that each Fan generates $3.60 of awareness when considered along with a $5 per thousand impressions banner ad campaign. (See: http://vitrue.com/blog/2010/04/14/360-facebook-fan-valuation-is-just-the-tip-of-the-iceberg/). (Please Note: Currently the link is down, this should be available again soon.)

Ok, so far so interesting, but what does this mean in practical terms? Well, let’s consider some real world scenarios:

A banner ad campaign with a $5000 budget and with a 6% click-through rate (that’s our average, rather than the industry standard 2%) generates 60,000 clicks†. Now for a standard campaign that’s where it ends, but what if the destination is a Fan page, or has a prominent and purposeful “Like” option?

Being conservative, let’s assume that only 15% of our active clicking visitors become Fans. That translates to 9,000 fans, and if each of those is generating the equivalent of $3.60 worth of advertising then that equates to a staggering $32,400 of follow-on market infiltration. So your $5k campaign is now punching as hard as a straightforward $37k campaign!

Let’s take that one stage further. Let’s give the Fan something to engage with –a loyalty platform, instant win or prize draw say? Maybe even just a cute app to tease their friends with, or virtual gifts.

Our own statistics show that a well-constructed Facebook application or dynamic tab which promotes and incentivises users to share, invite and post to newsfeeds can directly generates an average of 300% uptake in new users (we’ve achieved as high as 2000%, but let’s keep this manageable! (See: http://brandmovers.co.uk/portfolio/my_boys.html). So our 9,000 fans beget 27,000 fans. Using the same formula as before, that now gives us the equivalent of $97,200 of marketing punch.

Let’s assume the application costs $25k to develop, and add to the $5k we started out with. Your $30k investment has generated as much awareness as a campaign you’d otherwise have to spend over $97,000 to achieve!

Finally, the Syncapse formula suggests that those 27,000 new fans could bring a sales increase of $242,460 over a typical promotion period of 3 months.

Drop a tweet to @Brandmovers or @johnnieego for more information on Facebook as a potential monetisation model.

† $5000 at $5 per thousand = 1000,000 impressions. 6% of that = 60,000 clicks.