by Jesse Coombe, eModeration Community Manager.  You can follow Jesse on Twitter @emodjesse

Yesterday, something Tamara said got me thinking about the word
“user.”  Within this industry and others it has become the catch-all
term for people who visit a site, post on a forum, or play around in a
virtual world.

For a long time I’ve held the belief that we’re really using the wrong
term.  “User” implies exclusion and a one-way relationship.  It
suggests that they consume the services provided and give nothing
back.  Shouldn’t we all strive for a sharing culture in our
communities, where visitors see our content and are inspired to create
something for the next visitor to read or look at?  Perhaps if we were
to adopt a more inclusive term we’d be halfway there?

The other problem with the word “user” is that it’s very impersonal. 
“User” is a word made for marketing and corporate back-patting.  “Our
site has 1,000,000 registered users producing 100,000 ad impressions
per day!”  That may be all well and good for the board room but people
don’t want to feel like they’re a commodity.  Furthermore, when office
buzzwords leak out into official forum posts or newsletters it serves
only to fuel the reader’s belief that we’re entirely detached from
them, even to the extent of speaking a different language.

So what would be a better word to use?  You could try “member” –
indicating inclusion and belonging.  Perhaps “contributor” – reminding
them that they provide for the wider community, just as you do.  I feel
that either is an improvement on “user” but why not refer to John, or
Sue, or even xXsephirothgoku1337Xx?

The larger your community gets, the harder it is to genuinely know your
members.  Even so, the investment of time to establish a relationship
with at least your most active members can produce invaluable results. 
Read their posts, respond to them, start a dialogue.  They’ll
appreciate the effort and so will anyone else who comes across the
thread!  It shows that you, the community manager, are friendly and
accessible but by extension these positive attributes will also be
attached to the brand you represent.

Once upon a time I was the community manager for a massively
multiplayer online game.  I was fortunate enough to be involved with
the project from the very beginning so it was relatively easy to
introduce myself to new members as they registered and give them the
shock of their lives that a community manager on a gaming project was
actually willing to chat with the fans of the game!

By demonstrating that I was in fact human they were much more willing
to treat me as such.  I wasn’t just the shadowy supervillain, existing
purely to tell them what they could or couldn’t post and periodically
deliver bad news about release date slips through a maniacal grin. 
They acknowledged that these were unfortunately necessary aspects of my
job but they knew me and understood that I had their interests at
heart.  The game missed more deadlines than I’ve had hot dinners but we
never incurred even 10% of the nerd rage I’ve seen in other gaming
communities and I attribute that entirely to the time my colleague and
I spent hanging out with the members.  I ought to point out that I
hired that colleague from within our own community and he hit the
ground running as only community alumni can.  Having already fostered
relationships with his peers as a member, he was instantly accepted as
an authority figure.

As a community manager, as a moderator, and as a plain old “user”, I’ve
seen so many communities with a profound “us and them” divide and a
membership that actively rallies against the management, like teenagers
against their parents.  What I hope you’ll take from this article is
the knowledge that this doesn’t have to be the norm.  Treat the members
of your community not as users but as people and it won’t take long at
all to see the difference in how they respond.

Welcome
to eModeration’s round-up of all that is intriguing, alarming or odd in
the world of social media, compiled by Kate Williams. For more social
media snippets, follow her on @emodkate – or for general twittery,
@KateVWilliams.

This week: Revenge of the Zombie Slave Computers; human touchscreens; and robotic teachers.
 

THE HEADLINES …

In a considerable coup for cyber-law enforcement, Spanish investigators
have arrested the three alleged ringleaders of a massive botnet which
has, for at least a year, spread its monstrous tentacles across the
net, allowing criminals and hackers to penetrate up to 12.7m computers.
The botnet – known by the confusingly comely nickname ‘Mariposa’ – had
successfully invaded the ‘secure’ systems of more than half of the US
Fortune 100, and over 40 banks worldwide, harnessing them as slaves or
‘zombies’ through which to access numberless individual PCs.  The gang
– who appear to have relatively unsophisticated hacking skills – rented
out parts of the botnet to other cyber-gangsters, as well as selling
bank information harvested from infected computers. Following the
arrests, investigators were hit with a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack,
in apparent retaliation for the destruction of the hideous monster:
which final attack must henceforth be known as The Revenge of the
Zombie Slave Computers.

Still no sign, seven long weeks after Google’s Chinese flounce, that it
does actually plan on, like, leaving China. This Tuesday, the search
giant told a Senate hearing
that there is still no exit timetable, and indeed no official
resolution on withdrawal – though it insisted that it was ‘firm in its
decision’ no longer to allow censorship of its Chinese results.  Google
claims still to be investigating the ‘massive’ cyber-attack that
precipitated the breach – but intriguingly, Forbes reports
a claim by cybersecurity firm Damballa that, contrary to the picture
painted by Google, the attacks were unsophisticated assaults
orchestrated by out-of-date, ‘old school’ botnets, using ‘amateur’
techniques.

This week the Liberal Democrats in the House of Lords forced a last minute amendment
to the Digital Economy Bill – defeating the government, but leaving
critics anxious that they had done greater harm than good, according to
the Guardian.  Clause 17 – the hotly-disputed section of the bill which
threatened huge changes to British copyright law – now gives the High
Court the power to slam a takedown notice on sites accused of hosting
‘substantial’ amounts of copyrighted material.  So … that’ll be
YouTube, right?

Thus far, the Bill’s passage through the Lords is proving to be anything but stately: the government’s ‘three-strikes’ proposal, which could see Lord Mandelson
making decisions about how long offenders are to be barred from
broadband access – has come in for ferocious criticism in the second
chamber, with opponents citing an “extraordinary degree of lobbying”
from copyright-holding bodies.

Over in Europe, a German court
has decreed that an existing law which requires that telephone and
email traffic-data be stored for six months can’t stand. Lawmakers
ruled that data-storage systems were insufficiently secure – and that
it was still not yet clear what the law, which stems from a Europe-wide
directive, hoped to achieve.

Elsewhere, experts are predicting that Western cyber-security policies are catastrophically underpowered,
and might allow a future attack equivalent to “the next Pearl Harbour”.
 One former White House counter-terrorist warns in the Guardian that
“terabytes, petabytes of data have been stolen – and our firewalls
don’t stop it.”

Much chatter this week about Apple’s patent case against HTC, the first
manufacturer to use Google’s Android operating system in its phones –
with some commentators suggesting that the case could eventually impact many others, and others questioning whether software patents are worth the paper they’re written on.
Apple appears to be dishing out mobile patent-infringement suits like
sweeties presently – the one it launched against Nokia has just been
put on hold, while the International Trade Commission decides what’s what.

Several unanswered questions surround the HTC suite, the most pertinent
of which is “what do Apple want, precisely?” If you’ve missed the fun
and games thus far, then PCWorld is a good place to start.

Earlier in the week, Apple’s Patented, Astounding and Fantastical Rumour-Generator had been cranked up once again, with many (Mashable amongst them) prophesying a March 26th release of the iPad, as well as ‘predicted delivery shortfalls’ and a possible ‘short supply’ – news which will doubtless have generated a wedge of panicked pre-sales calls.

Turns out the pundits were out by a week: Apple today announced a US date of April 3rd – with us poor Brits forced to exercise patience until the end of that month. If you’ve not yet succumbed to the iPad’s siren call, this demo at Tech Digest may well have you joining the throng in late April.

And look, here comes Condé Nast
to boost Mac’s well-oiled PR-o-rama, with announcements that Wired, GQ,
Vanity Fair, The New Yorker and Glamour magazines will all be available
on the shiny new content-machine

Here’s a man who, it’s safe to say, will have a considerable interest
in how this iPad thing pans out: yes, it’s the particularly
paywall-positive Rupert Murdoch, who weighed in this week with the news
that the Wall Street Journal, his most successfully ring-fenced
property to date, is being tricked out as an iPad app for your
delectation and delight, even as we speak.
And speaking of News Corp, here comes the FT – another Murdoch jewel –
to tempt us with the news that we no longer have to commit to a monthly
subscription: henceforth a trifling micropayment of £2 will buy you a day’s worth of its charms.

Ah, content, content, content: it’s the issue that dominates the
digisphere, and it ain’t going away any time soon. It emerged this week
that Comedy Central was pulling both of its humungously popular Hulu
offerings – “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report”  - from the
popular video website. A bit of a worry for the many other blogging
sites which depended on Hulu’s embedded player to access Comedy
Central’s tip-top content – owners Viacom announced that it would be suing infringers – and almost certainly a taste of things to come for other content-grabbers.

Yikes. Respected online Brazilian newspaper Folha has carried out an
in-depth assessment of how well online-gaming companies organised their
Haiti donations – and, as Social Media Today
says -  it don’t look pretty. The report is particularly scathing about
Zynga’s ethics – specifically its insistence that donations not made
within a certain timeframe should revert to Zynga property Farmville.

THE LOWDOWN …

Yes, it’s come to this. Mobile phones are now so intrinsic to the
continuing success of humankind that researchers have decided to ditch
the human/phone distinction – so C20! – and just turn us all into
handsets. If you need to know how ‘skinput’ might transform my swarthy
forearm into a giant touchscreen, this video (via Mashable) will enlighten you.

On which mildly dystopian theme, a $44m Japanese-Korean project is well
on the way to removing humans from the education system, having
successfully tested out its alluring range of robot teachers
in schools. By 2013, robot educators are expected to be rolled out in
8,000 Korean kindergartens – but we predict that, without a serious
Taser upgrade, the teach-bots will flounder in British schools.

Britons are particularly guilty in the matter of buying tech which they then fail to master, reports the Telegraph
- and we waste a gargantuan £52 billion on gadgets which we don’t
actually use. The figures come from a recent survey by Sky HD, which
also reveals a tech-competency gender gap: only a quarter of men asking
for help when stumped, compared with nearly half the women.
Delightfully, the survey finds that ten per cent of IT experts have hit
a gadget in the hope of making it work – and while the figures don’t
reveal whether the hitters were male or female, I think we can hazard
an educated guess, don’t you?

It cannot truthfully be said I am of a sentimental bent – neither
kittens in cups, nor giggling YouTube babies have thus far succeeded in
penetrating my steely emotional carapace. But even my bitter,
unyielding heart momentarily softened at this viral video, which shows the moment that teen pop-sensation Justin Lieber made one small, sobbing girl’s dream come true.

And if this is a little saccharine for your taste, you might prefer the beefy goodness
of OK Go’s astonishing new video. Shot in one geeky take, using plenty
of repurposed junk, it contains all the ingredients you need for
instant virality.

IN OTHER NEWS …

Consumers are ‘grazing’
on online news, with few evincing loyalty to a specific news provider,
finds a new report from the Pew Research Centre. Only 1 in 5 claims to
stick to just one site – with the vast majority (a whopping 92%)
snacking on multiple sources, and nearly half visiting 4 to 6 platforms
a day.

A distinctly favourable reaction to the news that Twitter may well be
offering ads this summer – Lloyds and Virgin Media have already put
their hands up, and will take paid-for ads on the microblogging site if
Twitter goes ahead with its sponsored-listings plan, says Brand Republic.

The NSPCC has weighed in on the growing controversy over
the methods used to market products to children. The children’s charity
says companies must “give more thought” to how they sell to kids, and
contends that “the growing climate of sexualisation encourages a view
of girls as sex objects”.

WordPress has jumped into the real-time fray
- posts from any of its 10.5 million WordPress.com blogs will now have
a real-time presence in services like Google Reader, Bloglines and
Friendfeed.

Comscore reports a big old hike
in the numbers of us who access Twitter and Facebook via our mobiles. 
Facebook’s stats leapt a chunky 112% over the last year – while access
to Twitter went ballistic: a 347% rise on 2009.

And a separate survey by Neilsen makes the surprise find that teens account for a diminutive 7%
of mobile socnet use. Their parents are far more likely to be doing so,
at 36% – and there’s a gender split too:  55% of women beat the 45% of
men who use their phones to access social networks.

Microsoft appear to have struck oil
on the farm: after they ran an ad inside Farmville which offered
virtual currency in exchange for joining Bing’s Facebook Page, they
gained an astonishing 400,000 new fans in the space of just one day.

That’s all folks!

 Welcome
to eModeration’s round-up of all that is intriguing, alarming or odd in
the world of social media, compiled by Kate Williams. For more social
media snippets, follow her on @emodkate – or for general twittery,
@KateVWilliams.

This week: Apple’s sauce; Google’s woes; and Rickrollin’ the trollosphere.

THE HEADLINES …

Apple’s rotten week was neatly rounded off by the weekend’s revelation that at least eleven children
were found to be working in Apple-supplying factories last year. Though
the company was quick to announce that the fifteen-year-olds were no
longer employed (or were, at least, no longer underage), it was grim
news for the company: earlier in the week it had emerged that 62 Chinese factory-workers
had been contaminated (fatally, in one case) by the banned chemical
n-hexane, which can damage eyesight and cause muscular degeneration -
prompting the kind of ‘poison apple’ headlines which must long have
stalked its PR dept’s nightmares.

Meanwhile a commotion kicked off over the watering-down of Apple’s sauce:
last week many apps containing what the company described as ‘overtly
sexual content’ were axed without warning. Far less serious than
allegations of exploitative workforce practice of course – but
predictably contentious amongst those who cleave to a citizen’s right
to develop new ways to look at porn.  A rumour that the company was
reserving a special ‘explicit’ category for This Kind Of Thing brought them momentary comfort – but it was swiftly scotched, amidst much libertarian teeth-gnashing.

In fairness, many commentators were perplexed by the fact that the list
of banned apps included those of a swimsuit company (later re-instated)
but not those of Time Warner’s Sports Illustrated; Playboy’s
considerably racier apps were also retained. And while it’s hard to
overheat on behalf of porn–pedlars, Apple’s fumblings on this matter
highlighted its somewhat capricious stance towards developers in general, and to ‘adult’ content in particular.

The whole hoo-ha no doubt has much to do with Apple’s positioning of
the iPad as a ‘one-family, one iPad’ domestic entertainment platform –
though there was gloomy news for Apple on that front too: a survey by
AdMob revealed that only 1 in 6
iPhone owners had any thought of buying an iPad – plummeting to 1 in 17
Android phone fans.  Apple’s tart response would doubtless be a nod
towards this RBC/ChangeWave survey,
which according to All Things Digital shows that more of us are
planning to stump up for an iPad than were planning to buy the iPhone
before its launch. But neither that, nor the news that iTunes will soon
hit 10 billion downloads, will truly console all those Apple strategists who’ve been comfort-eating this week.

Apple’s wasn’t the only semanus horribilis; Team Google will have been
knocking back an extra-strength wheatgrass cocktail or three on Friday
night, following a grim week which began with the conviction in absentia
in Italy of three of their US execs, for the company’s failure to
remove a deeply-unpleasant video showing the taunting of an autistic
boy.  The New York Times points out
that the verdict may have much to do with a rolling assault on the
internet by Italy’s governing classes -  Italian president Silvio
Berlusconi controls a chunky wedge of its traditional media outlets,
and attempts to speed up the internet, for example, have met with
consistent administrative resistance. Nevertheless, the case has caused
ripples of alarm across the social web –  eModeration’s Tia Fisher has the moderation angle fully covered.

There was more bad news to come for Google.  The EU’s data protection mandarins ruled that Street View images should be junked
after six months – rather than twelve, as presently. Privacy tsars
further rebuked the search giant for failing to alert citizens of the
arrival of the Googlemobile in their ‘hood – and for not telling them
that they could officially opt out.

And for added wretchedness, it appears that the EU is pokin’ around Google’s crib, looking to smoke out evidence of anti-competitive practice.
Three complaints are being investigated – two, we note, from
Microsoft-associated organisations – pertaining to Google’s alleged
suppression of search results: Ciao, Foundem and French company
Ejustice.fr are the businesses in question. Google responded with
lightning-speed transparency, and the EU deny the search giant is under
formal investigation; but if one is an increasingly-omnipotent search
giant who seeks to reassure the world that a neutral and entirely
even-handed algorithm runs one’s business, any suggestion of human
partiality will be distinctly unwelcome.

YouTube footage which showed the daughter of a senior Russian apparatchik
mowing down two pedestrians – one of whom later died – has forced the
hand of the Russian judicial system. The CCTV footage further reveals
that Ms Shavenkova, whose mother is the head of the local electoral
commission, used her mobile immediately after the collision – but
failed to call an ambulance, and didn’t once glance at the horribly
injured pedestrians.  Now, months after the crime, Russian police have
moved to prosecute, reports the Telegraph.

A parliamentary committee has rubbished government plans
for a £6 tax to fund superfast broadband. The levy is, they say,
“regressive and poorly targeted” – and would result in the poor
supporting the internet access of the rich.

Meanwhile, Virgin Media proclaimed the rollout
of a super-speedy 100 mbs broadband service to 12.6 million homes – 24
times faster than the average UK speed of 4.1 mbs.  The Institute of
Practitioners in Advertising claimed this week that high-speed
broadband could pump a hefty £1.4bn into ecommerce revenues.

To the dismay of many, the American Psychiatric Association is considering the inclusion of ‘internet addiction’
in their bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental
Disorders. Critics worry that the classification will prove to be a
revenue-generating windfall to the unscrupulous  – but will achieve
little else.

The public, meanwhile, seem to be distinctly optimistic
about the possibilities that the internet offers humankind. According
to the Pew Research Centre, 76% feel that the internet will allow
people to become smarter and make better choices. And..

..as if by magic, here comes the social stats
for the campaign for a Robin Hood tax, whose Facebook page has now
garnered more 120,000 fans, with an average of 3,000 more joining
daily. According to Netimperative, that’s four times the number who’ve
fanned the three main UK political parties.

THE LOWDOWN …

Google’s week, which as we mention above has been a leetle bit tense, will not have been enhanced by reports that CEO Eric Schmidt has successfully silenced his ex-mistress
Kate Bohner, whose blog charted her ‘spiritual journey of recovery’
from addiction to sobriety.  Though the diary barely mentioned Mr
Schmidt, and did so only in complimentary terms, it seems that the
Google chief is only intermittently committed to the dictum that
‘information wants to be free’.

From the ridiculous, to the sublime:
Big Shout Goin’ Out to his His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, who joined
Twitter last week. Word to the rest of you: stop tweeting those kittay
photos and karma up – fast.

There will have been much biting of lips and blinking-back of tears in
adolescent bedrooms everywhere last week, as the news that YouTube had nixed the original “Rickrolling” video
swept through the trollosphere. Luckily the error, which centred on
uncertainty over copyright, was rectified within 24 hours – but for
Generation Hackboi, things will never be the same: they know, now, that
their world is one of chaotic and terrifying impermanence.

Finally, those Chatroulette stats in full: users are 71% male; 15% female; 14% ickiness. 


IN OTHER NEWS …

The Guardian reports
that global plans for a dedicated internet domain for pornography have
been revived, three years after they were abandoned amidst
international bickering. When the scheme – which is intended to help
users filter out adult material if they wish -  was first mooted, the
US opposed it on moral grounds; the International Centre for Dispute
Resolution has now ruled that the deal must be put back on the table.

Google added Facebook Pages
to its real-time search results this week, to complete a trifecta of
deals including those it has made with Twitter and MySpace. The news
coincides with Yahoo adding Twitter
to its results – the latter deal goes further than most, in that Yahoo
users will be able to send tweets directly from Yahoo’s various
properties.

The public is most likely to pay
for high-end online content –  in other words, the same stuff they pay
for offline:  films, music, games and some TV programmes. They’re least
likely to pay for user-generated content – and squished in the middle
and gasping for breath is newspaper content: expensive to produce, but
in the minds of many, readily available for nowt elsewhere.

A Muslim social network, where young Muslims can discuss and debate issues affecting them, was launched last week.
The site – developed by moderate Islamic organisation Radical Middle
Way – includes a multilingual facility which will let members from
around the world communicate with one another, and is supported by
government funding.

The AP reports
that a Wisconsin teenager has been sentenced to 15 years’ imprisonment
for blackmailing his classmates into sex. Posing as a girl, he tricked
boys into sending him explicit photos, then threatened to make the
pictures public unless they had sex with him.

ON FACEBOOK …

So. You’ve been staring balefully at the bottle of ‘virtual champagne’
(can you drink it? No. So, not champagne in any meaningful sense, then)
which a Facebook friend sent you last birthday. Well, now is the time
to pop the cork and shake it all around in joyful abandon: Facebook has decreed that henceforth, “application news” won’t come through your notifications. You are free, free of clutter at last!

Here’s a snippet
from Mashable which might have social networks reaching for the Rescue
Remedy: US patent #7,669,123 – unearthed this week by All Facebook –
appears to have claimed the newsfeed on behalf of Facebook founder Mark
Zuckerberg and seven others. It’s not yet clear what, precisely, is
included in the patent, but in theory it could be very bad news for MySpace, Twitter, Google et al, who might be forced to heavily adapt or even remove their feeds.

Facebook is unquestionably the world’s top social hub for content
– nearly 50% of all the content shared via Gigya  – links, photos,
videos and more – are broadcast to the world via Facebook, versus 29%
which get a Tweet.

P’raps in a panic to skitter up to speed with location-based services –
till now, it has studiously ignored them – The ‘Book has been doing due
diligence checks, normally only performed mid-acquisition, on
location-centric social network Loopt. More from TechCrunch here.

Talking of Facebook, which you’ll agree we were – here is some smart thinking from Mashable, which is guaranteed to refine your Fan Page chops.

ON TWITTER …

Tenterhooks: Twitter is testing a hashtag-based ad model.
The service will be “explicitly clear that a sponsor paid for the ad”,
and what’s more will be “relevant and useful”. Coming soon, apparently.


The micro-blogging service is now processing 50 million tweets a day,
per The Telegraph, of which 20% – that’s 83 messages per second –
mention a product or brand, says Twitter’s Communications VP Sean Garrett.

To contextualise this news, we must turn to The Pareto Principle,
which (in case you aren’t au fait) is a cousin of the gloriously-named
Law of the Vital Few. The principle decrees that 20% of users make 80%
of the activity – but in Twitter’s case the split is even more extreme.
It seems a frankly measly 7% of users are responsible for a gargantuan
79% of Tweets. #justsayin’.

Finally, in a body-blow to those whose stance is still furiously Anglo-centric, seems barely half of all tweets are posted in English. Qui l’aurait pensé ?

UNDER THE GAVEL …

Virtual worlds are, like, virtual – this appears to be the conclusion to draw from the dismissal of the suit brought by a visually-impaired gamer
against Sony. Alexander Stern had claimed that games like Everquest
violated the American Disabilities Act – but a US court ruled that for
the act to apply, there had to be a connection between the service and
“an actual physical place.”

The deeply creepy case of the US high school which used school-issued laptops to spy on its students
in their own homes was wrapped up last week. After a ‘friend of the
court’ submission by the American Civil Liberties Union, a judge ruled
that the school must immediately disable software which allowed them
remotely to activate the laptops’ webcams. The case was brought after
the school attempted to discipline a student for allegedly taking and
dealing drugs, which it had filmed without his knowledge.

Xerox is claiming that Google Maps, Google Video, YouTube and Yahoo Shoppping infringe patents
on their user-review-based method of updating pages, in place since
2001. They further maintain that another Xerox-held patent dating back
to 2004 is currently being infringed by Google’s Adsense and Adwords
software, amongst others.

A class action suit has been filed against user-generated customer-review service Yelp, alleging that the company has attempted to extort money
from companies in return for ‘burying’ poor reviews. The primary
plaintiff alleges that Yelp refused to take down a defamatory review
unless he signed a contract to advertise his business on the service.

VIRTUAL AND GAMES …

Social games companies will be blinking rapidly at the news that
virtual goods ain’t quite the be-all we’d been recently led to
believe.  Seems tens of thousands of real-life bunches of flowers were sold during the Valentine’s season in Pet Society – producing a fragrant half of the game’s revenues.

FarmVille, the Facebook social game whose acreage seems to expand
daily, announced this week that it had surpassed an astonishing 80 million monthly active users, bringing its users to some 400 million users in total.

More than a half of social game-players players are female,
according to PopCap, which finds that the average player in the UK and
the US is a 43 year old woman. And they’re not, it seems, particularly
keen on the idea of paying for their fun – according to a study by Q Interactive, only 11% would definitely pay for their favourite game –  a further 17% said ‘maybe.’

That’s all folks!

Media buying is an ever increasingly complex art – as channels and audiences have fragmented beyond anyone’s comprehension – apart from a few clever planners ; – )

What’s frankly ballsed it up for any lazy buyers out there is social media.  Print was simple.  Then came radio and TV; they were simple to buy too.  And after that came the internet; again this was again mostly simplified down to a basic CPM model.  But then came social media – not so simple, and the fly in the media buyers ointment.

What’s so annoyingly complicated about social media buying is that you’re not just buying the media, but you’ve also got to factor in buying the social bit too.  And when it comes to buying social things get a way bit complicated.  After all, buying friends just doesn’t work.

So how do you deal with planning and buying social media?  Well the main issue is the fact that the very nature of social media means it’s earned media – i.e. people share / advocate your ads – and not directly bought.  This therefore means that you don’t buy social media as such, rather you buy “social media potential”.

Social media potential is all about optimising the opportunity for your content to be shared and talked about.  The very nature of this means that the planning aspects of a social media campaign are more important than ever.  

To help, we’ve developed up a donut  – a social media planning and buying donut to help map out the key things to factor in when planning / buying a campaign:

• Conversation / community mapping: first up, map out the communities you want to start conversations in, and plot what those conversations might look like (i.e. who’s going to say what)

• Conversation catalyst creation: next stop is to create your “conversation catalyst” – i.e. make your viral film / game / idea that’s going to be the catalyst for all the social internet chatter.

• Small seed: small seed is all about seeding  to a small number of highly targeted, relevant and influential people to start sharing and talking.  Small seed optimises advocacy, and is typically based around blogger / twitter outreach.

• Big seed: big seed is all about seeding to a bigger number of lesser influential people – but still in a relevant and targeted way.  Big seed guarantees reach, and typically involves using an ad network like the Viral Ad Network.

So having done all this – how should you judge success?  Well ideally, your campaign would have spread from its initial seeds resulting in both advocacy and reach – in the perfect world that meaning a high number of relevant people talking about and sharing your campaign.

I’ve got a whole bunch more thoughts on the detail of planning social media campaigns + measurement – though I’ll save these for later ; – )

@Rubber_Republic