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Visu­alised ¹. past par­tici­ple, past tense of vis·u·al·ize (Verb)

1. Form a men­tal image of; imagine.
2. Make (some­thing) vis­i­ble to the eye

¹ Google Search Dic­tio­nary www.google.com

This week we look at ideas that take large chunks of infor­ma­tion and trans­form them into some­thing visu­ally appeal­ing, socially engag­ing or, in some cases, anti-establishment.

Social in 60 Seconds

Stuff that hap­pens while you boil your ket­tle

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We held another suc­cess­ful Hud­dle over at the Ban­ner offices yes­ter­day. The sub­ject was all things mobile. And, over the course of the next few blog posts, I’ll be tak­ing you through some of the insights from the var­i­ous speak­ers who gen­er­ously gave their time to make the after­noon such a suc­cess:

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• Simon Sil­vester – EVP Head of Plan­ning, Y&R EMEA
• Christina Carstensen – Direc­tor of Mobile Strat­egy, IDG
• Matt Findel-Hawkins – Sales Direc­tor, Nikkei BP Europe
• Mark Challi­nor – Direc­tor of Mobile, Tele­graph Media Group

I’m no scrooge, but there is some­thing insid­i­ous about cer­tain Christ­mas campaigns.

Now ‘get­ting into the spirit of things’ is great — I think it is a bril­liant idea — but to have the word Christ­mas in every sec­ond sen­tence to con­vince cus­tomers that “with­out X it just won’t be the same”, seems to prey on con­sumer fears rather than embrace a sense of cama­raderie and fun.

As such, the cam­paigns I’ve cho­sen this week get peo­ple excited and cre­ate a mem­o­rable experience.

Grab your eggnog and read on!

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Dur­ing a meal with a client the other day, she men­tioned that a divi­sion in her com­pany was deploy­ing a task force to develop a social media strat­egy. Whilst I under­stood the sen­ti­ment, I explained that this seemed like the wrong thing to do. I was obvi­ously accused of heresy and ignor­ing the most impor­tant trans­for­ma­tion in mar­ket­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tions since Johannes Guten­burg devel­oped the print­ing press in 15th Cen­tury. After all, which self-respecting com­pany doesn’t have a fully defined social media strat­egy?

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The final pre­sen­ta­tion at last week’s Social Media Hud­dle was from Xabier Ormaz­a­bal. He’s Senior Man­ager, Prod­uct Mar­ket­ing over at Salesforce.com. His 25 minute slot was filled with a huge amount of insight and action­able advice. Here’s a quick sum­mary of the points I took from it.

Salesforce.com build their social media strat­egy around three pil­lars of online com­mu­nity. Seems like a pretty straight for­ward model:

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• First ensure that your cor­po­rate site and other owned web prop­er­ties are work­ing hard for you. Focus on build­ing engage­ment through knowl­edge shar­ing, user groups, blogs and ideas sharing.

This post con­cen­trates on Ioanna Stagia’s pre­sen­ta­tion at our Social Media Hud­dle. She’s Research Direc­tor over at CNN International.

CNN have cer­tainly pushed the bound­aries when it comes to explor­ing the power of rec­om­men­da­tion and the value of shared con­tent. Their global research ini­tia­tive Pow­nar, illus­trates why peo­ple share con­tent, how they share it and the type of con­tent they pre­fer to share. In the US and Europe, peo­ple tend to share con­tent for altru­is­tic rea­sons, whereas in Asia, shar­ing con­tent is more about broad­cast­ing your sta­tus. As you might sus­pect, arti­cles with embed­ded video and images are most likely to be shared. And, Face­book is the pri­mary plat­form used for shar­ing.

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LinkedIn is an unde­ni­able force when it comes to B2B social net­works. Henry Clifford-Jones showed us some fas­ci­nat­ing sta­tis­tics – over 80 mil­lion pro­fes­sion­als view­ing 1.5billion pages per month across 600,000 pro­fes­sional groups.

When you want to build a group on LinkedIn, it’s only going to be a suc­cess if you build it around a com­mon inter­est and pur­pose. An empty LinkedIn group can be a very lonely place…

So, the more focused and well-defined the group is, the higher the level of par­tic­i­pa­tion and engage­ment. Also, don’t get too dis­ap­pointed if most peo­ple aren’t con­tribut­ing. LinkedIn reckon that for every per­son that con­tributes on the site, nine will com­ment and inter­act, whilst 90 will just sit back and con­sume the con­tent.

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The impend­ing Tube Strike didn’t deter a record num­ber of tech­nol­ogy mar­keters com­ing to the Ban­ner offices to take part in this year’s Social Media Hud­dle. And, look­ing at the feed­back, the con­tent of the day was rated at 4.2 out of 5.

So first of all, a big thank you to our speak­ers and work­shop mod­er­a­tor for mak­ing the hud­dle such a suc­cess and pre­sent­ing such com­pelling con­tent — Ioanna Sta­gia (CNN Inter­na­tional), Henry Clifford-Jones (LinkedIn Europe), Jackie Hewitt (Autodesk), Xabier Ormaz­a­bal (Salesforce.com) and Zoe Sands (Juniper).

There were a num­ber of com­mon strands to the day:

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Recently, whilst look­ing through a LinkedIn group on Face­book and Twit­ter for busi­ness, I came across a ques­tion that asked: Is it ok to have mul­ti­ple Face­book and Twit­ter accounts for your business?

It depends…

The answer (at least it seems this way to me) is self-evident: it depends. What I said, was this:

I think it all comes down to defin­ing exactly what you want to achieve and exe­cut­ing the pro­gramme in a way that’s con­sis­tent with the brand.

There are sit­u­a­tions (espe­cially with smaller organ­i­sa­tions) where a sin­gle account would be suf­fi­cient; you need a cer­tain ‘crit­i­cal mass’ to gain enough inter­est­ing con­tent and wouldn’t nec­es­sar­ily want to dilute this.

 In medium and large enter­prises, though, I can see it being ben­e­fi­cial to have mul­ti­ple accounts for var­i­ous rea­sons:

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A year is a long time in social media. We held our first Social Media Hud­dle in Autumn 2009. Dur­ing the ses­sion, atten­dees learnt how Dell, IBM, Juniper and Salesforce.com were all using social media to drive mar­ket­ing success.

To see how social media has moved on, this year we’re host­ing a new hud­dle at the Ban­ner offices. In this information-packed after­noon, mar­keters will hear from senior tech­nol­ogy mar­keters and ven­dors about how they’re using social media to drive prov­able suc­cess for their brands in 2010 and beyond.

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At the Hud­dle you’ll discover:

• How to get the most from the avail­able media options