I delivered a presentation entitled ‘How to measure the “Engaged Web” to gain competitive business advantage,’ at last week’s Marketing Week Live event.  For those of you who were unable to attend, I thought I’d share this presentation with you via a series of posts on our blog. This is the first installment.

The Engaged Web is a term I coined back in April during a talk at Internet World.  I prefer to use it to describe today’s media landscape.  Why? Because I don’t like the term social media which I consider to already be a bit of an anachronism. I believe that organisations have to stop thinking about social media as something new and separate from their current web activities because everything is now social. It’s just what the web is.

So, what does the engaged web look like?

The engaged web looks much like the microscopic view of cells in the diagram below. Unlike the old world which was structured and block like with clearly defined media channels, the engaged web is organic and fluid.

The organisation sits at the centre of the engaged web, surrounded by a landscape of influencers which is constantly changing and interconnecting.  This fluid world consists of traditional old media (newspapers, magazines, tv etc) and the new giants Facebook, YouTube, Twitter et al.

Each of these channels has the ability to interconnect with each other i.e. a story can break on a blog, hit the news stands and then find itself on the evening TV news.

So what does this mean for businesses?

It means that our world has become both larger and smaller.  Larger, because the sheer volume of people able to influence our brand has increased exponentially. Smaller, because the speed and the reach of the internet removes geographical boundaries and constraints.

The engaged web also has the ability to touch all functions of a business; PR marketing, customer service and sales are the obvious choices but product development and HR can also be influenced.  Development teams have rapid exposure and market insight into the minds and expectations of their audiences.

Similarly, a company’s ability to recruit may be hampered by candidate’s exposure to negative postings about their working environment or practices.

Still think that the engaged web is something you don’t have to worry about?

Consider these three recent facts

1. A recent report from Morgan Stanley says that the time people spend on social media has now surpassed that spent on email
2. Facebook has over 400m users, each spending an average 55mins per day on the network
3. Recent research from Gigur has found that social media sites are driving more traffic to sites like ESPN and CNN than Google

People are empowered by online communities which give them a share of voice.  No business can afford not to know what’s being said about their brand.  It’s no coincidence that in 2009, the number of companies looking for “buzz monitoring” tools rose from 21% to 40%.

The engaged web demands complete transparency and visibility by removing barriers which some companies may have used previously to silence critics or hide mistakes.

2009 was, as they say, the year in which Twitter exploded.  Celebrities such as Stephen Fry and Ashton Kutcher became fervent Twitter users –  the former of which was accused of having a twitter wobble when he threatened to quit the micro-blogging site after some declared his tweets ‘boring’.

Searches for the site peaked in December 09 after “The Iranian Cyber Army” hacked the site, briefly taking control and redirecting users to their site.

My Twitter revolution began on 11th February 2009.  I had absolutely no idea what it was or why I needed to use it (and to some extent I still don’t). So why did I join? Because if you want to be an early adopter, you’ve got to keep with the times (even if you don’t quite know what the times are).

For the first few months I barely visited the site, with my early ‘tweets’ consisting of updates from my mapmyrun.com feed. Then July rolled around, I graduated and reality dawned “how am I going to find a job?”

What if I made use of all those targeting skills I learned at University and used Twitter to help me find a job? Although that didn’t actually lead me here to Glide, it did give me a valuable insight into how to ‘tweet’ effectively.

What tweet category are you?

A US based marketing research firm called Pear Analytics analysed 2,000 tweets and identified six categories:

1.    News
2.    Spam
3.    Self-Promotion
4.    Pointless babble
5.    Conversational
6.    Pass-along value

The study found that pointless babble (or social grooming as social networking researcher Danah Boyd referred to it) was by far the most popular type of tweet accounting for 40% of all tweets.  But as the category name suggests, it’s not ideal if you’re trying to engage with your audience.

What should you tweet about then?

People like sites like Twitter for real-time news updates.  Take the story of six year old Falcon Heene (the boy from the US who was alleged to have floated away in a homemade weather balloon) who was dubbed ‘balloon boy’ by the social media world.

They also like to promote issues they believe in and protest against those they don’t. For example, every Saturday night for the duration of the X Factor live shows the contestants and the show title were trending topics on Twitter as was the successful Rage Against the Machine campaign for Christmas number one.

People also love the spontaneity of Twitter – think impromptu gatherings like moon walking at Liverpool St station after MJ’s death.

People also like tweets that include interesting content such as music, websites, pictures and videos.

Engage with your audience in the right way and Twitter can be a great promotional tool.  Do it wrong and you risk being classed as a ‘spammer’.

So how can you use Twitter for PR (if you’re not already)?

Think carefully about your strategy.  Take time to understand what (if anything) is being said about you.  Listen to conversations and decide on the best strategy for engagement.

Here are some tips to get you started:

• Post interesting stories with “retweet value” to spread the word and get you noticed
• Tweet snippets of your releases that contain a link to the full release
• Interact with your customers and clients on a more personal level, listen to what they say and engage in a      meaningful way
• Target journalists, experts in your field and even consumers using the @username function
• Use the search and follow tools to monitor how consumers feel about your brand, your area and your competitors
• Use this great application by Edelman to measure how “important” you are on Twitter

Kate