Launched in 2007, Tumblr has until now been one the many social media programmes which has attracted a cult following, but never reached the mainstream heights of Twitter, Facebook et al. However, industry insiders now believe that this multi-media platform may be about to reach a tipping point of popularity, with 15,000 new users every day and, like Twitter before it, will soon explode into the next big thing.

But what is it?

Tumblr is essentially a blogging platform that allows users to post text, images, audio, links, videos, and quotes to a short form blog, known as a Tumblelog. As on Twitter, these Tumblelogs attract followers who can subscribe to your feed and there are options to both like and re-blog information, ensuring that strong postings with informative or useful content are disseminated amongst the community.

Tumblr’s creator David Karp designed the forum with ease of use and access in mind and it has also been made the subject of an app, allowing it to be accessed and used from anywhere. Therefore it is a highly popular forum for those wishing to post various types of files quickly and easily.

If Tumblr does take off as predicted, there is a strong advantage to be had in beginning to develop a Tumblelog now. The forum is especially suited to companies wishing to run a multi-format social media campaign quickly and easily. The programme combines the ease and speed of Twitter with the multi-media aspects of Facebook to create a powerful social media tool that could begin to eclipse many others in the coming months.

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Social bookmarking is one of the less talked about areas of social media, but it’s growing all the time as sites like Digg, StumbleUpon and Reddit continue to develop their facilities and their audiences. So what is social bookmarking and how can it help your social media strategy?

Social bookmarking sites allow internet users to organise, archive and search for resource bookmarks online. These sites catalogue the bookmarks of resources which users find interesting, helpful or feel the desire to share, but not the files themselves, creating a highly efficient resource which can be accessed from any computer.

This makes social bookmarking an excellent tool for collating approved resources for market or business research, but the real value is in the way it can disperse information on your company, creating a wide audience base with built-in social recommendations.

The great thing about social bookmarking is that users add comments, or meta-tags. These can be anything from comments to a rating of the article’s quality. Consequently, good and informative pages can be high-ranked and well disseminated via user feedback, rather than overly focusing on SEO. As the site is socially based, articles that thrive are passed onto new audiences, complete with a personal recommendation which can lead to a higher uptake of readership and better conversion rates of readers into customers.

A strong social bookmarking strategy can ultimately lead to more hits for your website and an increasingly strong reputation as an online thought-leader.

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The targets of any in-house communications team tend to be three-fold: firstly, to protect their company’s reputation; secondly, to publicise their company’s achievements; and thirdly, to help attract and retain the best staff for the company. This last point may sound like a job for the HR department, but if the first two targets aren’t met, chances are you’ll never achieve the third. Previously on this blog we’ve discussed social media in relation to targets one and two, but how can social media help with recruitment?

When recruiting via social media, the main aims are the same as any other campaign: know your audience; develop a strong, long-term strategy; and look to engage with potential employees.

Once you’ve begun a campaign, keep it going regularly. Whether this means blogging, updating social networking sites or website content, up-to-date content shows a dynamic and contemporary company which will attract talent to match. Sluggish sites with few updates and outdated information have the opposite effect and can be detrimental to your recruitment drives.

The ongoing growth of social media is a fantastic opportunity for recruiters, opening up an amazing talent pool which stretches far beyond the usual boundaries of agencies, job pages and speculative applications; it just requires the right strategy and the correct platform to take off.

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Social media is so prevalent in people’s lives now, that many companies will be tempted to rely on the skills their staff have developed in their own time. While use of social media outside work does create a good basic skill set and understanding of the various technologies involved, it is not enough to implement and execute a full business strategy within the office. This is where social media training for business comes into play; but what are the main home / office differences?

Audience: Personal accounts on social media tend to be aimed at people you already know, work accounts are aimed at attracting attention, especially from your potential client base. Training can help employees adjust their social media mindset to accommodate this change of focus.

Accountability: What is appropriate to tweet as a personal opinion is not appropriate to say under the banner of a business. The lines can be easily blurred and social media training in the workplace is an excellent way to set and disseminate strong and easily followed guidelines.

Strategy: There is no real need for a strategy in personal use of social media as most people are not aiming to meet sales targets or establish reputations. Business use relies strongly on a far-sighted strategy to succeed, with all angles of social media use tied into this. Social media training can help your staff to understand this strategy and how to best work towards its goals.

Training can and should fit around your business needs, whether it’s an ongoing course in short bursts, or a condensed one – two day course. Regular refresher courses and an ongoing open dialogue within the office will also ensure that you, and your staff, get the most out of this powerful internet tool.

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Social media works best when it provides potential customers with something they’ve never seen before or the opportunity to jump into a conversation they wouldn’t otherwise be able to have.

The weakest social media campaigns are purely sales-oriented, every blog written and tweet published has a single aim – advertising. That generally means their content is very one-note, can be repetitive and has a clear agenda which puts off many readers.

That’s not to say social media should obscure your business’ involvement entirely; just that it should explore different avenues by which to raise awareness. For blogs – is there an industry issue or debate you want to become involved with? A key business question you’d like to discuss or some information on a key area you’d like to share? Addressing these sorts of topics via blogs not only positions you as a business of intelligence and free thought, but also encourages engagement with your brand through debate and conversation.

If you are more interested in social networking, then the word constraints obviously come into play. However, there are still plenty of characters to ask a question and open a debate, or, just as importantly, respond to someone else’s work. Conversation is a two-way corridor and the more you interact with others, the more you’ll find come back to you!

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NSDesign was delighted to hear the news that BBC 6 Music is to be saved, and even more excited to hear that the BBC Trust’s reprieve is largely thanks to the power of social media.

Since the BBC announced the closure of BBC 6 Music, its home for new and upcoming bands, in March the public outcry has been immense with celebrities and citizens going online to offer their support for the station, seen as one of the few bastions of independent music in the UK.

An internet campaign using various social media sites sprang up almost instantly. This was not a coordinated effort, but started by different individuals who wanted to show their support for the station and encourage others to do the same. The Facebook campaign gathered 180,000 followers, while Twitter’s #save6music hashtag appeared to be constantly trending as several million tweets featured it.

These campaigns led supporters to online petition sites, which formalised the support and created documents that could then be handed to the BBC trust, creating a definite record of the station’s popularity amongst the public. When these petitions closed in May, they held nearly 100,000 signatures between them.

Added to this was the inundation of 50,000 online responses and 25,000 emails the BBC Trust received in support, as opposed to 250 snail mail letters, and you can truly begin to appreciate just how much difference the internet made in this highly successful internet and social media campaign.

The perfect case study to demonstrate the effectiveness of social media marketing!

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A lot of social media tutorials focus on how to use the various tools these sites provide to open a dialogue and engage with consumers. While this is absolutely correct, the role of social media sites in providing cost-effective, and, some might say more traditional advertising methods is often overlooked.

Earlier this year, a report by Nielsen and Facebook found conclusive evidence that social media advertising led to a dramatic increase in advert recall, brand awareness, and purchase intent. This is not only down to the wording and placement of the advert, but also the effect of ‘personal recommendations’ as trusted friends become fans of the product.

The sample of 800,000 illustrated that the best social advertising campaigns followed a two-pronged approach that combined paid media (pay-per-click and banner adverts) and earned media (advert viewers driving their friends to become fans). This approach combines the best of traditional advertising while utilising all the benefits that social media has to offer to create an advertising campaign which is immediate, personalised and can have a long life, even once the initial adverts have stopped running.

This is a highly cost-effective way to drive business, as using pay-per-click adverts means that a company only pays to receive traffic with a confirmed interest in a product. Add to this the snowball effect of social media, whereby each paid for advert has the potential to enlist hundreds of ‘fans’ all spreading your brand awareness for free and the fiscal benefits become remarkably clear.

Combining social media advertising with a strong campaign can effectively push a company forward to quickly reach an entire new audience.

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As social media has become such a large and undefined group of applications, it can be difficult to identify which platforms will work best for your company. Social media is a fantastic way to experiment with marketing ideas, but unless you have clearly delineated, and auditable, targets, you’ll never know how truly successful any given campaign is – so, how do you set and track your social media targets?

Setting your targets is the same as for any other form of marketing – do you want to drive sales or increase engagement with your brand? Are you looking to create links back to your website or position yourself as a market thought-leader? Choosing just one or two clearly defined and focused aims will make selecting your platforms a lot easier; for example, a brand looking to engage will focus heavily on tools such as Twitter and Facebook, while one looking to share knowledge may prefer to utilise a social bookmark site, such as Digg.

Analysis should be undertaken monthly; this is a short enough time that you stay in control of your data, but long enough to hint at developing and emerging trends in your traffic. Many companies have their own form of analytical tool, but Google’s analytics is perfectly adequate if you don’t want to invest. Pick a handful of metrics to compare and focus on these figures month-to-month to see what effect any campaign is having. Possible metrics include bounce rate, source traffic and time on site.

Taking a focused approach will allow you to see where the strengths and weaknesses of your campaign lie, and adjust them accordingly, so that you are constantly improving your results.

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In the last couple of years social media has come to dominate digital marketing. It offers new and varied ways to share content, engage consumers and create dialogue. However, the sheer number of sites available and the scope for campaigns can leave even the most hardened marketer feeling overwhelmed.

So this week, NSDesign Social Media Training has a case study to help you pinpoint what makes a successful social media campaign. It’s from a surprising source – traditional brand Marmite, first established in 1902, and now leading the way in social media marketing.

Marmite has always revelled in its ‘controversial’ status and has run several traditional advertising campaigns around the love/ hate aspect of the product. To capitalise on the 2010 general election they conceived a social media equivalent, setting up ‘Love’ and ‘Hate’ Facebook groups. Within four weeks they had 350,000 fans across the two groups, the result of a massive multi-media marketing push.

Why were they so successful? Marmite created a debate, which required people to actively think and engage with their brand; this created an online discussion between consumers and the brand, which created an excellent source of rich and original content, helping to boost the product’s online footprint.

They also used various mediums to draw attention and focus it on their social media. The main social media thrust was supported by traditional mediums such as TV and newer avenues like online forums, all of which drove traffic to the Facebook hubs. They even offered hard copy ‘electioneering’ packs to the most energetic fans.

Marmite has a lot of resources behind it, but the lessons can be applied to companies of all sizes, so that your social media campaign becomes all about the ‘Love’.

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If you have a website that you update yourself, you need to be aware of how important it is to write for the web and not for print. Believe it or not, these two styles are very different, even though you may essentially be saying the same things.

One of the most important points is that people very rarely read a webpage word for word; most people simply scan and pick up the important points – after all, reading from a screen can be a strain on the eyes.

So, a good idea is to highlight any important information in bold so that it gets picked up by the eye. Aim for half the word count that you would use for printed material, always include eye-catching headings and only use one idea per paragraph.

•    Bullet points are also a good idea.

Credibility is very important for websites. You can make sure that your website is more credible by adding pictures, photos, hyperlinks to other web pages and something as simple as good writing. Trust and credibility should build as people go through your site. This could lead to them becoming long-term customers and referring other possible customers to your site.

Finally, false claims and over-the-top sales pitches are both ways of shooting yourself in the foot. Boasting and claiming to be ‘the best in the world’ will not do your credibility any good and will turn people off. Just write honestly about why people should buy from you.

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