As a former professional services marketing professional now working in the digital media industry I have been intending to post a blog about professional services marketing in the digital age for some time now. The reason why it has taken me so long to get around to is probably partially due to the fact that the professional services industry is hardly at the forefront of digital marketing. In fact, when compared to other industries, professional services is probably about 10 years behind everyone else - something that most professional services marketers are acutely aware of.

So what is the reason for this? A major factor is that in most large professional services firms the people making the decisions about marketing are not actually marketers, they are senior partners, often forming committees of partners with no marketing experience to make the most important marketing decisions. The majority of senior partners are not themselves involved in the digital space so they automatically assume that their clients aren't there either. This belief that the clients are not heavily involved in the digital space and to communicate effectively with your clients in the digital space they need to actually be listening and participating online. Whilst this may be true to a certain extent, the reality is, to compete in today's market, you need to be leveraging digital. Whether it's for the purposes of online collaboration, research, networking or project management, it cannot be denied that digital is the way of the future. If your clients aren't already there, they will be soon. If you're not already there, you risk missing out on important ways to compete for the future of your client base.

Another factor is that because social media is still in its infancy when compared to traditional marketing mediums, there is still a lot of experimentation going on. Whilst most digital marketing channels are by far easier to measure than traditional marketing channels, we are still learning how to get the most out of social media. This is an exciting prospect for many marketers who are seeking to push the boundaries to find out new ways of getting the most bang for their marketing buck and to stay ahead of the curve. However, as I just mentioned, in the professional services industry, more often than not, it's the partners who have the final say and experimenting with the unknown means taking risks. Partners in professional services firms spend their lives trying to avoid risk, it's their job and they are very good at it, that's why they've made partner.

However, social media is all about making it easier to bring people together to build and strengthen relationships, transfer and share information and communicate in more efficient and effective ways. For an industry that centres around sharing knowledge and information and forging strong relationships, it seems non-sensical that professional services firms have not grabbed on to social media with both hands!

Of course, there are some of the big professional services firms are finally 'getting it' and experimenting more...

To me, the obvious front-runner in Australia is Deloitte with Deloitte Digital who are leading the way in the delivery of professional services online. This digital arm of Deloitte offering a range of online tools including financial tools, online training, compliance and HR solutions, clearly positions them as leaders and innovators in the tax, audit and advisory industry. Deloitte also incorporates social media as an important part of their communication strategy, both for internal and external communications. Read more about how Deloitte is using social media.

In the legal industry, most of the big players are starting to dabble in social media in one way or another - mostly through Twitter and with a few starting to use blogs which is good to see. Whilst the wheels do appear to be in motion, most are still a long way behind in terms of their approach and understanding of how to best use the social media tools they have chosen, particularly with regard to a lack of integration. For example, in most cases, their blogs are not integrated with other elements of their online presence like their website and Twitter account to allow users to easily find the blog and reTweet posts that they feel are valuable meaning that the blog is most likely to miss out on the potential to be more widely circulated beyond the firm's immediate contacts, to contacts of contacts and so on.

There is an upside to the slow uptake of social media by the big firms however in that some of the biggest opportunities exist for smaller firms trying to get their name out there and establish themselves as 'thought leaders'. These smaller firms currently don't have the same amount of noise to cut through as currently exists with other communication channels where the big firms are focusing their energy. Also, social media doesn't require the big budgets that other marketing channels require meaning that this is a perfect medium for the smaller firms.

My top tips for professional services firms using social media would be:

1. Don't write the same old style articles and bulletins and post them online and call them blogs - they shouldn't be a straight copy and paste. These traditional articles are generally sent out via eMarketing and are one-way communication tools used to update and inform readers. Blogs on the other hand should be about two-way communication and should encourage readers to comment and engage with the blogger. This is much easier said than done but there are several techniques you can use to encourage this two-way interaction. The main way of doing this is obviously to write about topics that are likely to evoke strong opinions. If you want people to express their thoughts and opinions you should make it very clear which position you are taking to encourage others to agree or disagree. You should also ask questions in your blog, for example - "I think XY&Z. I'm really interested to hear what others think - let me know if you agree or disagree". This two-way engagement will also help to set you apart from your competitors who are delivering similar information but do not offer the benefits of the opportunity to respond and interact with others who are interested in those issues.

2. Choose a few social media tools you want to focus on and use them regularly. The most valuable sources of information are those that regularly deliver quality content. For example, set goals to write a certain number of blog posts per week or per fortnight. It is far too easy to let social media fall by the wayside without setting targets.

3. Integrate your chosen social media tools with your other online and offline marketing tools - that might include things like:
Linking to your blog from your website.
Including the social media icons (Twitter, Facebook etc) on the website.
Making sure that blogs have functionality to be reTweeted to increase the likelihood that those readers with a Twitter account will pass on the link to their network of contacts, thus increasing your reach.

4. Start talking about how you're going to use social media more in your firm - as we know, it often takes a long time to get partners on-board and make decisions so get things moving sooner rather than later to avoid being left even further behind.

5. Encourage younger staff members to start blogging, even if it's just for an internal blog, or if it's going to be reviewed by a senior staff member before being published. Blogging is an excellent professional development tool - it encourages you to research and build your knowledge around a given issue for you to try to position yourself as a thought leader. This is important for all industries but particularly for professional services where thought leadership is such a key factor to establishing your reputation.

So... l would be keen to know what you think... :)

If this guy isn't the next internet sensation, I don't know who is. Not only is he amazingly talented, he's hilarious and funnily enough, sounds a lot like Ben Folds.

For those of you who aren't familiar with chat roulette, it's a web application that connects random web cams from around the world. Most often used by people with nothing better to do than view random strangers in the comfort of their own home. I mean, who needs to go outside anymore right?! Once you've had enough of staring at someone you can 'next' them and you're instantly disconnected from your current 'partner' and connected with another live web cam.

The risks? Well, it's not censored so the person on the other end can be doing "anything" - some of course, like "Merton" are brilliant, others, like "man with chin strap" aren't; from what we understand there's a fair bit of nudity... imagine that!

If you're game, give chat roulette a go. You'll need a web cam and it works better with a microphone but we here at surfacemedia take no responsibility for what you see/hear haha. We certainly aren't there.. during work hours anyway.

You'd have to be living under a rock or in regional Australia with Telstra as your ISP not to have heard about the tragic loss of a child's life in Bundaberg Qld earlier this week. As seems to be the trend in Australia and indeed worldwide, a facebook 'grievance' page was set up to honor the life of the little one who lost hers so early. But shortly after the page was made public it was 'vandalised' with, to be polite, insincere messages and illegal video footage. There is of course (and rightly so) shared outrage from the people close to the incident as well as governmental departments over the posting of this type of material on what is essentially a place intended to somehow ease the suffering of the Bundaberg community.

Following this incident, Anna Bligh, the Queensland Premier has apparently written a letter to Facebook CEO asking for the company to show some 'corporate responsibilty' in allowing these messages to be aired without moderation; they should not have been allowed to post it in the first place?  

This got me thinking about the recent stabbing of an Indian student in a Footscray park not long ago. This incident, kindled by the media attention given to earlier attacks on Indians across Melbourne, sparked international media coverage and debate, questioning Australian society's attitudes towards race-related discrimination. If we were to take Anna Bligh's approach to this stabbing, does this mean the councils are somewhat responsible for responding to or preventing stabbings (or any negative behaviour for that matter) in their parks all across Melbourne?

The way I see it, Facebook is the global public park. It's successful because people can communicate instantaneously with their 'friends'. Just like people meet for picnics, play frisbee or have a bbq in their local park. To add a layer of moderation to any content posting on Facebook would not only be infeasible from Facebook's business point of view, but would also spell the end for it's popularity as a social networking tool. People want to be able to communicate with each other without any delay at all - otherwise they'd just use email. The parallel I would draw between moderation of Facebook and public park would be like having 1 security guard at a park for everyone 1 group of people that decide to have a bbq that day or 1 person who chose a park bench to sit on whilst reading. What about automated moderation of content publishing you ask? Well, there's currently no technology that can look at an image or video and determine whether it complies with Facebook's terms of use. Just like there's no security camera you can put in a Footscray park to automatically determine whether two people are embracing happily or one has the other in a headlock trying to strangle him to death.

It's unclear to me whether government departments and the general public understand the limits of technology as it stands today because we've progressed so rapidly that it almost sometimes feels that anything is possible. Why can't technology determine the content of a post before it's made live to the world, it bloody well should shouldn't it? Well, we're simply not there yet.  What we are capable of doing though is connecting each and every person on the globe, if they choose, via online social networking tools like Facebook. The above incident on the little girl's grievance page is simply a one-off, it happens occasionally because one immature, non-sensical individual decides that it's humour. 

But what can one do? Kill what some would call the most popular, useful and world-changing internet application of our time because of a few bad eggs by enforcing moderation or simply shutting it all down? Well, if we're following that logic then it's time to kill all public spaces in the real world - parks, clubs, playgrounds, sporting venues, city streets, anywhere where anyone was ever bullied, punched, kicked or sworn at. That sounds like a very depressing world to me and I'm sure to anyone who enjoys leaving their house to walk down the street to the shops or go for a run with their dog around the block.

I can't pretend to have the answer to how these sorts of incidents should be handled. In the real-world, security cameras would be installed but even though we've had security cameras for many years in public spaces it hasn’t brought an end to all criminal activity. Although, they have helped solve many-a-crime that may have otherwise gone unsolved; but the beauty of the internet is everything (unless you’re very very computer savvy) is trackable. I believe Facebook as an organisation did respond appropriately by removing the questionable content as soon as they were made aware of it, and until the technology is there, it seems to be a trade-off between global connectivity and every once in a while, agreeing to deal with these issues of immaturity and vulgarity as a community - ignoring it so the bully doesn't get spurred on by all the other children in the playground. One could also argue that public grievance pages, because of the high emotional charge they carry are simply not a good idea but then you can't stop someone stealing a bunch of flowers laid at a telegraph pole on a highway where a loved one was once killed either. You see, there's just no simple solution. 

People need to grieve the loss of a loved one, it's a basic, emotional need and the internet is allowing communities to band together to show their support to one another - but perhaps there are other more private, idiot-proof solutions than holding a vigil in a global park where anyone and everyone can stumble on in and upset the sincerity of the occasion.

So far I've blogged about measuring the success of blogs and  Twitter, now I'm going to turn my attention to facebook.

In my last post I wrote about measuring social media, with a particular focus on blogs. For this post I would like to focus on measuring the effectiveness of your Twitter efforts.

When it comes to measuring social media, Twitter probably has the biggest range of statistics tools and metrics available. Here are some of the best (in my opinion anyway):

• Twitalyzer - Loads of interesting statistics for your Twitter account and some basic stats for any Twitter user. You can also get some basic statistics for other accounts ie your competitors.
• Twitterholic - Essentially lists those people with the most followers but also allows you to search for other Twitter users and check out the number of followers, friends and updates.
• Google Analytics - Good for tracking how many people are coming to your website from Twitter.
• Social Mention - Provides a search filter where you can select microblogs to see what keywords are being Twittered. You can also set up Social Mention Alerts to receive daily/weekly/monthly updates on selected keywords.
• bit.ly - URL shortener that allows you to track the statistics relating to your bit.ly shortened URL. Most URL shorteners will offer a similar service.
• Hootsuite - Browser-based Twitter client (meaning you can log in and access it over the internet from any computer) and is also a URL shortener. Hootsuite allows you to aggregate a number of social media feeds in one. You can view twitter/facebook/LinkedIn/Wordpress feeds and related info such as retweets and mentions and you can also set up keyword and hashtag searches. It also allows you to tweet to multiple twitter accounts directly from Hootsuite and has a statistics function that allows you to track things like referral statistics, most popular messages within the selected date range.
• Tweetdeck - Similar to Hootsuite but is a desktop application that you download and run from your computer. Tweetdeck lacks a statistics function but does allow you to filter your feeds which is handy.
• GraphEdge - Costs around $5 a month but provides Twitter reports that include very useful statistics such as 'legitimate' followers - ie those who are actually likely to receive your Tweets (people with more than 2000 followers are not considered legitimate as it is unlikely they will be monitoring your feed), 'churn' rate (based on the proportion of people who unfollow you), measure of loyalty and more.

Now, I'm willing to admit that I think statistics are awesome. I could literally spend all day sifting through different data sources to identify trends and patterns. However, whilst it's great to have the raw numbers pumped out and given to you in a tidy package, it's always extremely important to put the statistics in context by analysing the qualitative data as well because, whilst quantitative statistics are good at measuring change and providing a picture of the current situation, in most cases, the qualitative data will provide reasons for changes and reveal ways to improve.

For example, a large number of retweets or mentions doesn't tell you if the sentiment is positive or negative. If you use the 'sentiment' metric in tools like Twitalyzer you might get an indication of the proportion of positive and negative but you won't know why. The only way to increase your effectiveness is to actually read the comments that people are making. A statistic that indicates X number of people are saying good things and Y number of people are saying bad things is very interesting but it can never be 100% accurate. A positive or negative comment does not have a constant value and positivity and negativity can depend on interpretation, content and tone.

Company A for example might have received 5% highly negative, damaging comments and 95% only very mildly positive comments while the company B might have received 10% mild 'borderline' negative comments and 90% overwhelmingly positive comments. On the surface company A seems to be performing better, but only after actually reading the comments would you be able to tell that sentiment overall is better for company B. Without analyzing the comments, neither company will know what factors are responsible for these positive and negative sentiments and they will miss the opportunity to use that information to address negative comments and leverage positive feedback.

For these reasons it is important to take the time to read mentions and retweets in conjunction with studying the quantitative data because no, bigger numbers are not necessarily better.

Ok, so you've been dabbling in social media for a while now and you're starting to get the hang of it. You've got some useful content in your blog and some eye catching tweets going on, now it's time to promote your web-presence to maximise the value you're getting from your social media activities. The only way you're going to know how successful your pursuits have been is to start measuring and testing. For a lot of people, the meaning of success lies in big numbers - subscribers, followers, pageviews, comments etc... BUT... with social media in particular, it's not always about the big numbers...

So what should you measure?

Because each social media tool has it's own set of goals and achieves slightly different results it is not possible to have a one-size-fits all approach to social media tracking. The tools available for measuring social media vary from one application to the next (although there are some tools that will measure metrics for several applications at once but that is a topic for another post). On top of that, measurement of social media activities needs to consider both qualitative and quantitative data in order to get a complete picture.

In light of this I'm going to dedicate this blog article to what I consider to be the Grand-Daddy of social media family... The Blog.

Blogs can be tracked in a number of ways. Most blog applications have some kind of statistics functionality built in. The level of detail and sophistication of these statistics vary from one application to the next and most free blog applications will offer basic quantitative statistics such as the number of posts, views, re-tweets and comments. The best way to interpret what this data really means is to combine it with a more powerful statistics tool such as Google Analytics. By integrating your blog with Google Analytics you can measure things like:

• Basic dashboard statistics: Average time on the blog site and each blog page, bounce rates, new versus returning visitors (loyalty). These statistics are useful in identifying how relevant and compelling content is and which headlines attract the most attention and comments.
• Traffic sources: Proportion of users coming directly to the blog, via a search engine or from another site, blog or social media application (referring sites). Referral data is particularly useful in identifying the level of integration between your organisation's online tools and identifying influential third party referees.
• Keywords: Most popular keywords used in search engines to get to your blog. You can use this data to determine what keywords are generating the most interest.
• Goal conversion: How often users complete a particular task (such as clicking a link to the website). Good for aligning measurement and strategic objectives.

These quantitative statistics are great but to get a full picture, more often than not, you will need to combine this quantitative data with qualitative analysis. For example, if your objective is to create higher levels of customer retention and loyalty by creating a more engaging customer experience and providing thought leadership as a value-add then your quantitative statistics such as new vs returning users will need to be measured in conjunction with an analysis of the 'quality' of comments being posted by customers. Things like loyalty, engagement and value cannot be measured through quantitative statistics alone.

On the other hand, if your objective is purely awareness-based then quantitative data such as the number of re-tweets and views might be enough (ideally you would want to conduct a more sophisticated analysis of demographic information but with a blog the amount of user information can be limited as commenters do not need to sign-in to participate).

The most important thing is to measure regularly (not just after a promotion) and test different things based on your findings. This is the only way to develop and maintain a successful blog that achieves your online objectives. If you find that your statistics are sluggish, try inviting a guest blogger to write for you to generate more interest. If you want to encourage more thought leaders to comment on your posts, comment regularly on their posts. If you identify a topic that appears to receive a high number of views and comments, next month write a few more related articles and measure again. (Tools such as Social Mention are great for identifying trending topics and interesting stats relating to those topics... check it out and have a play!)

It is also important to measure the time you spend writing and maintaining your blog. The benefits of increased customer loyalty, greater awareness, thought leadership, building your own knowledge and expertise etc need to out-weigh the cost of your time and resources. As these goals are more long-term goals that are generally not directly linked to more immediate results like sales they are more difficult to quantify in terms of dollar figures. This is why it is important to measure regularly over time to enable comparison with other business statistics, such as number of repeat customers and sales on a long-term basis. It's more about monitoring statistics closely to identify patterns and relationships between metrics over time. For example, after 12 months of measuring and testing, your statistics might indicate that on average a 10% increase in the number of regular commenters (loyalty) in a month leads to a 5% increase in sales in the following month. If a 5% increase in sales leads to a $5,000 increase in profits and you spent 10 hours maintaining your blog at a cost of $1,500 in that month, then you know you're not wasting your time.

A blog is a long-term investment... keep measuring and keep testing!

Do you need forums? Project Management Software? Things to help you tweet? blog? Share absolutely anything? This is the place to be. It seems gone are the days where you built something from scratch...