The Brindleyplace-based consultancy has been commissioned to conduct research and devise a social media strategy for the University Hospitals Birmingham. The aim is to engage with users of the newly opened Queen Elizabeth super hospital in Selly Oak, and to keep Birmingham citizens informed as services, such as A&E, are migrated to the new building.

Alcester-based Helping Hands Home Care, which provides live-in carers for the elderly and disabled around the UK, has also turned to Friend to help it promote its services. Those responsible for making the decisions on care for their relatives are increasingly looking to social networks for help and advice on looking after their loved ones.

Chris Tomlinson, director and co-founder of Friend, said: “Over the last year Friend has gained a great deal of experience in finding relevant online communities and helping organisations engage with their key influencers to turn them into advocates on social networks.

“The continued growth of our client list is proof that social media is now an established marketing channel and, increasingly, a first choice marketing tool.”

Considering it is the largest media owner in the world, Google is very bad at communicating with its users – which, lets face it, is most of us.

Back in December Google slipped Personalised Search into our lives, but few peopled noticed.

Google is always fiddling, or ‘refining’ as it calls it, with its algorithm, the one that determined which sites we see at the top of our search results pages.

Usually you need to be a search engine optimisation (SEO) expert or a real geek to spot the changes, or follow Google’s official blog.

But now even normal people are noticing that their search engine results are becoming very different to those of other people – even when they search with the same words!

Basically, Personalised Search means that once you have visited a website, via its results pages, Google is now more likely to offer you the site again, in future search results.

Now, if you’re an advocate of personal privacy, an international terrorist, or part of an organised crime syndicate you already know that Google records you’re every move and you’ve worked out a way of turning its tracking off.

However, those of us who don’t fit into the above categories have not really been that bothered. But now that Google is using this information to choose websites for us, perhaps we should be bothered.

Fundamentally, I use a search engine to find websites I don’t already know about. I have other mechanisms for recalling websites from previous interest; bookmarks and news feeds (RSS) for instance.

And whether my own previous misjudgment in site selection is a good way of determining what sites I see in the future is highly debatable too!

You can of course turn off personalised search, but it is now on by default and few users will be aware of this or work out how to turn it off. Previously you had to be logged into iGoogle to get this ‘useful feature’ but now everyone is unwittingly lumbered with it.

This makes it very difficult to prove money spent on SEO is justified. If everyone is getting different results, how can you know your SEO is working?

Alternatively, the unsuspecting client, who visits their own website on a regular basis, might think their SEO consultant is doing an amazing job, as their site seems to turn up on every relevant search they do.

So if you’re site has suddenly become number one in Google, for your targeted keywords, but this hasn’t turned into an avalanche of website visitors – and of course you’ve read this, you will now know why.

Who are you going to call?

Well, if you can’t get hold of Ghostbusters, there is always Wragge & Co!

The leading Birmingham law firm has setup a Cyber Tracing team to bring those heinous bloggers, who are hiding behind the anonymity of electronic communication, to justice.

Using their special powers, sorry, I mean UK legislation, to force ISPs to handover the real names behind the anonymous blogging accounts.

Well, if that sounds too expensive, you can always take the PR approach to online reputation management.

Most sensible people will always take a ranting blogger with a pinch of salt and if they are posting anonymously their credibility will be especially low.

Of course some bloggers are incredibly influential and cannot be ignored.

We can assess the influence of a blogger in many ways. The number of readers he/she has. Our the number of comments and contributors to their blog and perhaps most importantly the number of people linking to it.

If the latter is high, their blog might start to appear at the top of Google when people are searching for you – then it’s time to act.

Now let’s assume defamation has occurred. If they are telling the truth, better apologise and promise to do better in the future. However, unlike traditional media, inaccuracies can be corrected.

Leave a comment on the blog, pointing out the mistakes or offering a rebuttal wont require a visit to court.  Many bloggers will edit or update their post in the light of new information.

If you regard a blog as the start of a discussion or the beginning of a conversation, rather than a published work, suing under defamation laws seems less appropriate.

However, if a blogger refuses to publish your side of the conversation, perhaps it is time to call the team at Wragges!

Be warned, though, true online anonymity isn’t that hard to achieve, unless Wragges know something the serious crime squad and the anti-terrorism people at MI5 don’t.

And let’s not forget that, despite its many misuses, online anonymity is usually regarded as a good thing – ask anyone who lives in Iran for instance.

You may not have any desire to inhabit the digital world but are starting to worry that, if you ignore social media any longer, you’re likely to be put on the endangered species list.

You’ve listened to the ‘kids’ in your marketing department rabbit on about consumer-to-consumer engagement and you’re wondering if they also speak English.

But strip out the technical jargon and the marketing double-speak and you’ll probably find it’s a more familiar world than you thought.

Firstly, you’ve been doing social networking all your professional life, just offline.

As every SME knows, in the absence of a large marketing budget, the best way to get new business is to “network”. By that I mean going to events where people you know introduce you to people they know, business cards are swapped and food is eaten on sticks.

You’ve spent a lot of time making friends and influencing people in your local business community. Recommending your business partners in the hope they will return the favor or at least buy you lunch sometime. It takes years to build an effective network and you’ll probably turn into an alcoholic by the time it’s complete.

Thanks to sites like Linkedin, this can be achieved in less time, with less geographical limitations and significantly less liver damage.

Secondly, you didn’t get were you are today, without taking every opportunity to be in the press.   You know editorial is far more powerful than advertorial.  The problem is fewer people are reading newspapers these days, especially local press but choose to get their news and insight online.

The press release is replaced by the blog post, mailing list by the Twitter feed and success is measured by the number of readers rather than by column inched, is about all you need to know about online PR.

Finally, personal recommendation has always been your goal. It’s customers that get you more customers if you treat them right. Now ,thanks to social media, this word-of-mouth has turned into word-of-mouse.

friend

“If you’ve no desire to go on Facebook, think Twitter is full of twaddle, haven’t got the slightest inclination to write a blog and ignore all invites from Linkedin, you’re probably a director of a successful company!”

Read more: The Reluctant MD’s Guide to Social Media

In this age of social media and online PR, fully understanding the marketing environment your business operates within is not just vital but now much more possible to do – and less forgivable if you still cut corners.

In the past, research for many clients was almost a dirty word. “Why should I pay to find out what I already know?”

Well it’s different now. The digital landscape is complex but it provides a mine of invaluable information, sometimes (at a basic level) at the touch of a button. The web offers us a vast ‘universe’ (in research speak) and therefore much larger sample sizes – this is good!

It also enables us to go down to levels of detail that often we couldn’t before. Through a defined approach we can fully research brand(s), audiences, products, competitors, channels, conversations, sentiments and so on.

This insight is crucial in order to create a social media or online PR strategy (or any marketing strategy for that matter) that is going to achieve your business objectives.

And it’s not just about upfront research and insight either. We are able to monitor and measure campaign results much more intricately than we could before. This means we can react quickly to market changes or under-performing marketing campaigns (both offline and online). Keeping the focus on Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), we can fine tune ROI as we go.

Over the past few years, and in the past 12 months in particular, I’ve noticed an explosion in the number of web-based social media analysis tools that help us do this. I could write a book about all of them but for now there’s a great comprehensive list courtesy of Business Week.

I’ve used many of these – both free and paid for – and have my favourites but am always flexible, combining and switching between tools depending on which client I’m working with.

The important point is that one solution on its own is far too limited. Using Google alone to search the web is not enough from a social media and online PR perspective. And simply paying lots of money for the likes of Techigy or Social Radar is a good start but needs to be part of a toolbox – not the toolbox itself. Searching the social web demands a different approach.

And beware – you’ve also got to apply sound marketing and market research expertise to the process too – the information/data is one thing, how it’s organised, interpreted and presented is a whole other ball game.

The good thing is that smart businesses can more and more see the value of sophisticated online research and insight. So I’m still banging the same old drum but it’s a lot more satisfying these days.

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Image courtesy of Wordle.net

The European Road Initiative (ERI) is a Europe-wide project, led by oil giant Nynas and backed by two of the biggest road industry multinationals based in Europe. Their collective aim is to launch and develop awareness of a new brand for ‘roads’.

The ERI is determined to positively reinforce the perception of roads among the general public, an audience never targeted by the European road industry before. Its ultimate aim is to improve roads across Europe.

More specifically, the ERI approached friend to ask us how they could motivate and mobilise the general public to campaign for better roads in Europe – on local, national and continental levels – via social media and online PR.

Objective

The overall objective for the ERI was to answer the following questions:

• Do the general public talk about roads and road improvement online?
• Who are they? Who are they most influenced by?
• Can we reach them via social media?
• How do we reach them?
• What are they saying and how are they saying it?
• How can the ERI join existing conversations – and create new ones?

Solution

friend undertook a pan-European social media research project to research the markets in the UK, France and Germany.

Our highly experienced team, including native language speakers, discovered and analysed a vast amount of information and data for all countries. We then collated and organised our findings to directly answer our clients’ brief.

By developing this research further we created a targeted European social media and online PR strategy for the ERI, to be implemented over the next five years.

Results

We can’t talk about the specific findings at the moment, as they are confidential, but we can say that we have created a wealth of insight and new knowledge for the ERI. Our work has highlighted some major opportunities for them – both online AND offline.

friend presented the work to senior directors in Brussels in October 2009. As a result, the work has been unanimously praised and now forms the basis of the brand development project. friend continues to work with the ERI over the next year, and beyond, to implement the strategy.