Google yesterday announced its latest assault on the world of social and more specifically, Facebook. With Facebook’s massive user base and seemingly relentless desire to bring the entire internet inside Facebook, Google has for some time been looking for a way to address the threat to its bottom line.

The Google+ project, revealed yesterday with little fanfare via a blog post by Vic Gundotra, Senior Vice President, Engineering, is what Google hopes will be the answer to Facebook’s social dominance.

At the centre of Google’s premise is that “not all relationships are created equal” and therefore you might not want to share everything with everyone. As our online social networks have developed and we’ve become more switched on regarding what we’re sharing and with whom, we’ve increasingly become more selective about sharing. With Google+, Google is betting that we’d prefer to be selective within a single social platform rather than managing multiple social networks for different types of people e.g. LinkedIn for business, Facebook for friends and family.

Google is currently limiting who can access Google+ via a ‘closed beta’ so that it can quickly and easily react to user feedback. However, Google is hoping its range of new features will be too compelling to ignore:

+Circles – share different content with different social circles
+Sparks – find the content you (and others) love via an online sharing engine
+Hangouts – ‘hang out’ online, face-to-face with your friends (essentially an instant messaging/video calling application – watch out Skype!)
+Mobile – easily share pictures, experiences, your location etc wherever you are

As this is still day one and limited people have access to it, there’s no way of knowing if Google+ will be a success, let alone make even a small dent in Facebook’s dominant position. One of the key barriers to take up will be prising people away from Facebook and on to a new platform.

As for the impact on brands, well the jury is most certainly out. We’ll definitely be keeping a keen eye on developments though and advising clients as and when opportunities arise.

The service, known as Covoiturage.fr in France, has been a phenomenal success amongst drivers and passengers alike who are frustrated at disruptions to air and rail transport and hard hit by increasing petrol prices and rising public transport costs. The site, founded in 2006, now has over one million drivers and passengers and is growing by over 50,000 users every month.

For drivers, BlablaCar offers the opportunity to reduce the cost of travel on journeys they would make in any case, whilst for passengers this offers an extremely cost effective alternative to any other form of transport on their chosen route. Drivers post details of their trip and a suggested price (typically a proportionate contribution). Potential passengers searching for a specific trip then choose whether or not this fits with what they want to pay.

BlablaCar, like its French counterpart, will have the feel of a combination of a travel site and a community site, with drivers and passengers posting details about themselves and rating each other on a range of criteria, from performance and reliability to how chatty they are. In fact, the name BlablaCar comes from this as on the French site a driver rates how talkative he or she as bla (not very chatty), blabla (likes a natter) and blablabla (won’t shut up). The community aspect ensures transparency, safety and that the market effectively and efficiently sets the price.

Nicolas Brusson, Co-founder of BlablaCar said:

“We are looking to replicate the success we have had in France here in the UK as rising petrol costs, issues and prices associated with peak time public transport, as well as environmental concerns are very similar. BlablaCar is revolutionising carpooling from the preserve of students and those concerned with the environment to a mainstream answer to rising costs and tighter purse strings.”

Rhodri Harries Managing Director of Kaizo said:

“This is a massively exciting challenge to reproduce the phenomenal word of mouth that has taken place in France around this brand. Our programme will build as we attract drivers to posts their trips, initially focusing on a few key routes such London to Manchester.”

By way of example of the popularity of the service, posted trips from Paris to London have risen by between 100 and 200 per cent in the last year.

Additionally BlablaCar offers a service for events, festival and concert organisers called the Agenda, which provides branded carpooling pages for each event. This service is also due to be launched in early June.

In the past 10 minutes alone I’ve counted hundreds of (negative) comments posted to the magazine’s Facebook page (a page that only has 387 fans!). So what, I hear you ask, has Cooks Source Magazine done to warrant such attention?

It all boils down to the magazine publishing a writer’s article without her consent. “Big deal” I suppose some might say, “It happens all the time right?”. Perhaps, but what makes it worse is the response from the magazine’s editor. The writer contacted the magazine to find out how they had got hold of her article and ask for an apology/compensation. The editor’s response beggars belief:

“Yes Monica, I have been doing this for 3 decades, having been an editor at The Voice, Housitonic Home and Connecticut Woman Magazine. I do know about copyright laws. It was “my bad” indeed, and, as the magazine is put together in long sessions, tired eyes and minds somethings forget to do these things.
But honestly Monica, the web is considered “public domain” and you should be happy we just didn’t “lift” your whole article and put someone else’s name on it! It happens a lot, clearly more than you are aware of, especially on college campuses, and the workplace. If you took offence and are unhappy, I am sorry, but you as a professional should know that the article we used written by you was in very bad need of editing, and is much better now than was originally. Now it will work well for your portfolio. For that reason, I have a bit of a difficult time with your requests for monetary gain, albeit for such a fine (and very wealthy!) institution. We put some time into rewrites, you should compensate me! I never charge young writers for advice or rewriting poorly written pieces, and have many who write for me… ALWAYS for free!”

Yes you did read that correctly, the editor said the writer should PAY the magazine for editing the article! The writer has blogged about her experience on Live Journal. The story has since made it on to the front page of Reddit and as a result the Cooks Source Magazine is facing a bit of a social media storm.

Check out the magazine’s Facebook page if you don’t believe me… Be interesting to see how or if the magazine responds… Watch this space.

My advice would be to have the editor make an unreserved apology to the writer via the Facebook page and the comments section of the writer’s blog post. This needs to be nipped in the bud now before it spirals out of control.

Note: This author has handed thecopyright of this blog post over to his employer…

Is this ‘gaff’ no more than clever coverage generating and reverse crowdsourcing opportunity? I doubt very much that ‘GAP is launching an online consumer initiative to help redesign the logo’ would have had half as much coverage and debate as ‘Gap scraps new logo after online outcry’.

Whatever the case, Mark Hansen president of Gap Brand North America is the hero of the day, revealing that the company has been ‘listening’ and ‘watching’ and that the much loved original logo will indeed be reinstated as customers ‘always come first’. Hurrah!

Power to the consumer or brands getting clever about headline grabbing crowd sourcing? You decide…

Matt Warman reviewed the Labour leader candidates’ websites in today’s Daily Telegraph. While David Miliband had reportedly acquired the domain name for his campaign site only two days after Gordon Brown had resigned, it seems some of the other candidates have been slower on the up-take.

Diane Abbott does not seem to have set up a website for her campaign yet, while John McDonnell and Andy Burnham’s campaign sites could possibly do with a bit of work (I’m being generous here). Only the Miliband brothers link to their campaign sites from the Labour party website.

When advising clients on how to get the most from their online presence, we always emphasise the importance of showing that they are listening. Social media is valuable for companies because it gives them the power to hear what people are saying about their brand and then to engage with that conversation.

David Miliband, Ed Miliband and Ed Balls have all incorporated social media elements into their websites, but David Miliband is currently way ahead of his colleagues. Supported by his e-campaigns manager, Jessica Asato, Miliband has committed to holding regular blogger briefings, his campaign website includes a section dedicated to listening and responding to supporters’ ideas and all his social media channels are integrated within the website.

Whether David Miliband is the best man to lead the Labour party in the future, the comparisons to Barack Obama based on his online presence, certainly won’t hurt his campaign.

News spread on Tuesday that a bug similar to Y2K sunk its teeth into Sony’s older ‘fat’ (or if we’re being PC, ‘horizontally challenged’) Playstation 3. As owners prepared themselves for the prospect of losing their saved games and being unable to play online, I couldn’t help but snigger.

Many couldn’t even play in offline mode, leaving frustrated gamers wondering what was causing the baffling ‘8001050F’ error.

The bug, dubbed the ApocolyPS3, occurred when the PS3’s internal clock switched to February 29, evidently causing the system much confusion as that date doesn’t exist this year.

The latest fiasco will have left the powers that be at Sony with faces redder than the gamers who couldn’t get their fix and whose hours of hard work (OK, play) might have gone to waste.

In a statement, Sony said: “If you have a model other than the new slim PS3, we advise that you do not use your PS3 system, as doing so may result in errors in some functionality, such as recording obtained trophies, and not being able to restore certain data.”

Frustrated by the whole affair, gamers turned to social media to vent their anger. One comment on CVG said: “I cannot play any games, cannot log on to PSN. Your silence is doing nothing to help the situation. Looks like there is going to be millions of dead PS3′s all over the world with no fix in sight. Sony, you have just screwed up big time.” A video on YouTube called ‘How to fix PS3 error 8001050F’ showed an owner simply unplugging his PS3 and transferring the cables to an Xbox 360, whilst members of Facebook groups such as ‘I’m a victim of the PS3 Y2K bug’ offered more sensible advice.

Gamers were later left wondering why Sony failed to explain how they resolved the issue during an apology. It was later revealed that it fixed itself without any intervention from Sony. This sounds to me like a company that hasn’t got full control over and knowledge of its own hardware.

As the PS3 community flocked to forums for guidance in the wake of the crisis, it became apparent that saved games and ‘Trophies’ (an achievement tracking system) could be restored – no doubt accompanied by many sighs of relief.

Of course, the cynic in me wonders whether the whole episode was just an attempt by Sony to get everyone to upgrade to the newer, slimmer version of the PS3.

Many people have reacted with dismay to the closure of 6Music, including celebrities such as Phil Jupitus who has described the potential axing of 6 Music as “an act of cultural vandalism”.

Apparently one of the reasons for the closure (spokesperson on the radio) is that 6Music never attracted a big enough user base. Digital radios though still seem to be fairly few and far between. We don’t have one in the Kaizo office, relying on the good old internet to get our daily fix.

A weekly audience of 620,000 listeners may not match the heady heights of The Today Programme or Chris Moyles, but the BBC seems to be missing the point. The beauty of a digital station is that you can cater for a specific audience. We’ve already witnessed the speed in which the iPlayer has taken off and in the next couple of years the way in which we access digital content will evolve again. Before the BBC knows it, those 620,000 weekly listeners could have doubled due to the station becoming more accessible to a wider audience via mobile devices or set top boxes. And in any case, if the BBC can churn out turgid shows like ‘Cash in the Attic’, I expect my tastes to be catered for as well!

In recent years, the BBC has come under increasing fire to justify its license fee against commercial organisations. I for one have always defended it due to the leadership the BBC has demonstrated in cultural and media innovation. Today, that argument is all that much harder to defend. There are dozens of radio stations out there with chart driven play lists. 6Music provides a strong alternative that has personality. Will we see an improvement in Radio1 away from all of the chart music, with wider appeal that integrates new and alternative music? Unfortunately I fear not. I also don’t believe Radio2 will be able to diversify its range of music and ‘audience’ to fill the big, 6Music-shaped hole that will be left.

The hashtag #save6Music is currently the top trending topic on Twitter and 6Music has been the subject of an online campaign to save it, with the Facebook group attracting over 84,000 supporters. For the moment, this seems to have all been in vain. The one ray of light is that the station will remain open until the end of 2011 and the decision still needs to be upheld by the BBC Trust. Labour MP Tom Watson has also taken up the fight, tabling a motion in the House of Commons for “the Government to encourage the BBC to continue its support for the station for many years to come.”

So the fight isn’t over just yet. Save our 6Music!

(image source: http://www.bustedtees.com/keepthedreamalive)

With so much buzz about the rise of social media and how important it is for brands, it’s too easy to forget the importance of offline conversations. According to stats mentioned recently by WOMMA there is a 90% to 10% split between offline and online Word of Mouth. It also shares that three quarters of this offline brand chat takes place face-to face and 15% by phone.

When you add to these stats the fact that Nielsen research shows that personal recommendations are the most trusted form of marketing, with 90% of people trusting the recommendation made by a friend, then having a plan and an integrated PR programme to actively stimulate these offline conversations is a must.

One issue raised by marketers is that it is hard to measure or track the impact of offline WOM. But is that really true?

If you have a smart plan to create positive recommendations for people to engage with your organisation or buy your products or services, then it’s completely possible to identify the way to track the impact of your programme. The consumer engagement initiative we created for Simple is a good example. By involving brand advocates with a product ahead of launch we stimulated the desire for over 8000 more people to sign up as advocate advisers – in just 5 days. The only way these new recruits would have heard about the benefits of becoming an adviser was from their friends. When you consider that these 8000 recruits were stimulated by just 4000 existing advocates, you can see the cause and effect and the power of offline WOM. Is your organisation using the 90 to 10 ratio to your advantage?

Ok, so ‘strategy’ is perhaps pushing it a bit. But the popularity of Wikipedia means that it has quickly become one of the internet’s biggest and widest disseminators of information. Whatever your thoughts surrounding the use of Wikipedia for finding ‘factual’ information, it can’t be ignored as a communications tool.

With this in mind, last week we met with the UK chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation, the charity behind Wikipedia (and nine other projects!) and this got me thinking about how brands should be using Wikipedia.

Managing reputations
Perhaps this is the obvious one, i.e. making sure your article isn’t vandalised or inaccurate information posted. Given Wikipedia’s popularity (ranked 18th by Hitwise for global website traffic), and the challenge of controlling content, it’s not surprising that brands worry about how they are portrayed.

Google ranks Wikipedia highly in its search results so what your entry says can have a big impact on customer perceptions. Take Flip Video as an example (a Kaizo client). The daily traffic statistics (stats.grok.se) show that Flip_video was viewed 9,775 times in November 2009. That’s nearly 10,000 potential customers who could have been influenced by the Wikipedia entry alone.

The solution is to monitor your Wikipedia articles for potentially damaging changes. Simply set up an RSS feed from the ‘history’ tab of the article and whenever a change is made you will be automatically updated.

Correcting errors
So if something is factually incorrect on your brand page, what can you do? Wikimedia UK recommend info@wikimedia.org as your first port of call. This could result in the inaccuracies being removed, or the page being ‘protected’ in exceptional cases.

The second option is to edit the page yourself. However, a word of caution here, beware of ‘whitewashing’ (replacing harsh words with ‘softer’ ones) and also make sure you disclose any conflicts of interest on the ‘discussion page’. Better still; defer the changes to non-conflicted users.

Be proactive
It’s likely that you have a wealth of information and expertise within your organisation. It’s probably already in the public domain and may even have been covered elsewhere. So why not share it on Wikipedia? As long as the facts can be verified by multiple reliable sources (think ‘The Guardian’ rather than your personal blog), you have an opportunity to build a thought-leadership position on a major global website that dominates Google’s search results.

Above all Wikipedia is just one platform of course and your approach should be integrated within your wider communications plan, including a mix of the myriad other social media channels that are relevant to your business and communications objectives.

On Wednesday Kaizo ran a successful messaging session with 300 top executives from across Europe for a large multinational corporate. The team pulled off the challenging task of capturing all 300 on video as a way of helping them to develop key messages. The activity also demonstrated that new technologies (in this case, Flip Videos) make it easy for everyone to use video to present themselves and the brands/ companies they represent not just in campaigns but every day. And it’s crucial as this is what customers will expect very soon.

Take the example of my 2 year old. She has a weekly video call on Skype with my parents, both in their late seventies, sunning themselves in Cape Town, which far from being confusing for her (or them for that matter), is accepted as being the norm. And when her baby brother was born recently, it was a video of the two of them playing that the Grandparents were asking for.

Accessible technology has enabled brands to turn into everyday broadcasters, and the audience is ready, waiting, willing and able.