Sarah Atkinson, Vice President Communications Europe at CA Technologies, said : “Kaizo had the most thorough approach to running a social media campaign. They will work with our team to establish a strong online presence in all our target areas. They really understand what it takes to create and sustain online conversations.”

Crispin Manners, who leads the CA Technologies team at Kaizo, said: “Unlike a number of brands out there who see social media as a new channel for broadcast communications, CA Technologies wants to stimulate direct online conversations to build relationships with customers, partners and online influencers. We are looking forward to helping establish CA Technologies as the best practice approach to B2B social media communications.”

About CA Technologies
CA Technologies (NASDAQ: CA) is an IT management software and solutions company with expertise across all IT environments – from mainframe and distributed, to virtual and cloud. CA Technologies manages and secures IT environments and enables customers to deliver more flexible IT services. CA Technologies innovative products and services provide the insight and control essential for IT organizations to power business agility. The majority of the Global Fortune 500 relies on CA Technologies to manage evolving IT ecosystems. For additional information, visit CA Technologies at www.ca.com

The event challenged communicators and press officers from the research funding organisations of 17 European countries to investigate new ways to engage their stakeholders in the research they fund.

The “science and social media” session involved the use of case studies and introduced a “social media toolkit” to raise awareness of the opportunities posed by social media to enable ESF member organisations to increase public engagement and develop their relationship with the researchers.

Emma Potter, Consultant at Kaizo, said: “With so many stakeholders to please and considering the current pressure on research budgets, it is no wonder that funding organisations have anxieties about using social media. This session was designed to put some anxieties to rest and demonstrating the opportunities posed by social media to this audience.”

——- ENDS ——-

For more information please contact:

Emma Potter
Kaizo
020 3043 4191
Emma.potter@kaizo.net

But, will the parties learn from the Obama campaign, moreover will they learn from what forward-thinking brands and communicators have been doing?

How many candidates are ‘web savvy’, other than “I’m on twitter” and “I’ve got a blog”…

How many will have the resource, nous and inclination at a local level to engage in conversations with those whose vote they don’t yet have, but could have? And, how many will simply churn out the usual news to their already enthusiastic followers?

The Obama campaign used social media to mobilise a national team of passionate followers who phoned, texted, emailed and facebooked their own contacts with the message to vote Barack.  Ironically, in a sense this was traditional electioneering using a new medium, but will any of the UK parties or candidates create this level of desire amongst their followers?

Will twitter mean that private gaffes and non-party opinions become the big talking points such as this? Will ‘set piece’ online activity like ‘Dave and Sam Cams Web Cam’ have any real impact in influencing the undecided? And, will Gordon Brown make a return on YouTube?

In truth, nobody quite knows where social media will be most effective in this election, cue for many established and new media commentators to dust off their best suit, or t-shirt, for 24hr news opportunities.  One thing is for sure; mistakes will be made, lessons learnt and facebook groups set up aplenty (could this be the new equivalent of kissing babies?).

For brands, the election can be a distraction, less news space and head space will be available in the weeks leading up to 6 May, meaning that consumer product launches may well get lost.

However, it can also be an opportunity to coat-tail campaigns and media relations activity around a subject that will be covered by all media. Creativity, innovation and not a little perspiration is required here to rise above competitors.

So it’s all to play for, for brands and the parties, let’s hope the country is the eventual winner.

John was full of anecdotes and witticisms as he recalled being the BBC’s Foreign Correspondent at a time when everything was shot on film and loaded onto an aeroplane in the hope that the news got back into Britain the next day! Other insightful commentaries included how he

broke the news of Nixon’s impending resignation via the first ever BBC satellite feed from the Whitehouse.

Amongst the usual candidates responsible for the changes in media (24 hour news, the internet, social media), John mentioned the death of deference. He argued that this has had a profound effect on the way journalism is approached.

John made some interesting points about the effect of 24 hour news on the media. Although it used to take a while to get the news, this gave reporters a chance to think about what they would write. Nowadays there are vast numbers of people covering every single story that breaks, with the audience expecting that they will know about it immediately. With the advent of interactive media, more and more people can keep abreast of news events as and when they happen and talk and share opinions about that news.

Although John remains concerned at the prospect of completely unmediated news, I think it’s the result of the fast paced and driven world in which we now live. Technology has changed the goal posts and so we must adapt too. Even though content is pouring into places like the BBC, we should have enough confidence in the ability of those employed there to review it as rigorously as they can in the time they have. Even if the news is slightly vague, at least we’re now privy to the story as it happens. Often this can prove advantageous, for example, if we hadn’t immediately found out about events like the earthquake in Haiti, far more people would have perished. Treated with caution and (albeit a slightly lower standard of due process) rolling news is a step forward in the right direction.

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.

Kevin Anderson, The Guardian blogs editor, touched on this at a Meet the Media event this week. A strong advocate of social media, he believes the traditional print newspaper is dying.

It is no secret that the newspapers are struggling at the moment and these days people expect the news to come to them. Coupled with the credit crunch, people are opting for free online versions – why buy a newspaper when you have all the information at the click of a button for free? And does this mean the death of the humble newspaper?

I hope not. For me, the beauty of the newspaper lies with the experience. It’s not just printed paper, it represents so much more. Whether it’s the lazy Sunday morning, the daily fight over the sports section or just doing the cross word, these are things you simply don’t get with the online versions. The death of the newspaper would be a tragedy. Maybe we are living in a digital world, but I’m still a material girl.