Communications today is about relevance say Brodeur

A great blog from Andy Colville and our friends at Brodeur on the changing world of communications and how ‘relevance‘ now sits at the core of their agency’s mission. Brodeur is committed to helping clients become—and remain—relevant in an increasingly noisy and turbulent environment. Relevance moves people from passive to involved and actually gets them to act. As we know, simply shouting louder does not make you relevant. For communications to succeed in today’s rapidly changing communications world – campaigns have to be ‘relevant’. Here in Europe, onechocolate is doing something similar – listening to each client’s particular communications challenges and then delivering campaigns that have them joining the important conversations and getting them talked about in all the right places. Like the blog Andy and good luck with the new vision, it’s very exciting.

Social networks? Watch out for friends’ posts while you are searching for information online

Last week Google announced that it was planning to implement changes to its Google Social Search platform to include posts from people’s online friends into its standard search results. The social search results, which previously appeared at the bottom of the page, will now be mixed throughout the list of results based on their relevance. Another interesting change in the search engine functionality is that users will be prompted to connect their social networking accounts any time Google’s algorithms find a public account that might belong to the same user.

As social networking profiles become more interconnected, people will be able to see publicly shared links posted by online ‘friends’ and connect their Twitter, YouTube, Flickr or Quora accounts. However, the upgraded social search engine will not include posts from the social networking giant Facebook. This does not come as a surprise as the two companies have a long history of trying to ‘steal’ each other’s market share with Google tapping into social media and Facebook developing its own email platform.

Despite excluding Facebook, Google’s Social Search platform will offer access to much more information about users than it was previously available. Some people will question whether this is entirely a good idea. Google seems sensitive to the privacy issues and allows users to opt out of the social sharing service by not connecting their online accounts to the search platform. However, if any of your online friends is ‘connected’ and shares or retweets your posts, they will become publicly available in the search results. Moreover, it remains uncertain how you would be able to control who sees to your online posts once you have connected your social networking profiles to Google.

Overall these changes highlight a number of trends which will potentially impact social media PR and marketing. As social networks are increasingly woven into online search engines and online profiles can be easily linked, businesses will be able to reach wider audiences and niche customer segments. SEO practices will be adjusted to take into account the rising importance of social networks for placing content in the top ranking of people’s search results. This will result in more intricate and subtle integration of social media tools into PR and marketing campaigns and will place higher importance on online networks.

Embracing social media – different paces abound

We have all embraced social media in a big way – particularly in PR where it is such a natural fit for us – it’s pretty much second nature after all, we are so used to having dialogues with journalists, sharing stories and having on-going conversations with all types of people.

So it’s easy to forget, perhaps, that social media is still evolving at a rapid rate and that businesses aren’t all embracing it at the same pace.

Just in the past few days, I’ve heard of two global brands who are way behind the curve. One has flatly refused to have anything to do with social media and the other, is ‘way behind’ in their social media conversations according to an inhouse marketeer.   For those kind of brands struggling to persuade directors to embrace social media  – here’s a useful post from an interesting US online publication, ‘the social media examiner’, ‘9 ways to sell social media to your boss’.

And then of course, there’s the other problem that businesses are online but don’t know what the guidelines are.  The rules are still evolving and changing, again at a pretty rapid rate.  Twitter is still largely unregulated and businesses are still learning and experimenting with it.  Here’s some latest guidelines that have come out of oatmeal.com.  They are not necessarily right, in fact I would question many on the list, but it’s interesting to see guidelines attempted to be set.

And then of course, there’s the fact that Facebook is only just starting to be used as a valuable marketing tool  for businesses. The largest social media tool on the planet provides a huge opportunity to businesses – the social media examiner has lots of ideas on how to maximise your Facebook profile to generate interest among customers and prospects as well as some great recent campaigns that have really worked for brands.

So as we all move at different paces, and standards and guidelines continue to evolve as time passes, once the revolution is over, it’ll be great to see what transpires.

David and Goliath: plus cela change?