Since its invention towards the end of the 20th century, the Internet has changed a great many things. And one of the things that is has done time after time is dismantle business models that had seemed, until its arrival, absolutely rock solid. From music to publishing to TV, the Internet has swept away seeming certainties and replaced them with doubt and uncertainty.

Whilst this fact can not be argued with, the common perception that the reason these media models have been so badly damaged is due to the rise of UGC is, like so many ‘commonly held facts’, actually untrue. The reason these businesses face ruin is that their old models simply can’t be upheld in the face of a fragmenting consumer base and advertising dollars that are increasingly being asked to pay for everything.

The reason I say this, is that if you actually look at the content people are consuming, it’s still overwhelmingly content that has been professionally produced; it’s just that there isn’t enough money to pay for this production anymore.

Earlier this year, the video tracking firm Visible Measures released a chart of the videos that had managed to amass more than 100 million views apiece. In the commentary, they claimed that the list included:

older and newer campaigns, and includes music videos, movie trailers, user-generated spots, and clips from TV shows.

Now this is true, up to a point. Of the top 20, only 2 were actually user-generated content: “Charlie Bit My Finger Again” & “Numa Numa”. Visible Measures claimed that 2 others were also UGC, but “Achmed The Terrorist” is a consumer’s video of a professional comedian performing on stage, whilst Rick Astley was originally a professional musician. Users may have made them popular, but they didn’t make the content.

This is an interesting trend for brands, for whilst ‘traditional’ media companies now struggle to finance the sort of content that they did in the last century (hence, NBC’s recent decision to put the relatively cheap Jay Leno show up against big budget dramas), brands can start to step into the breach.

As the rise of social media appears to make it harder than ever for brands to find ways to gain consumer’s attention, being able to fund content that can then start conversations means that they suddenly have a reason to be part of their customers’ lives. To paraphrase the old mantra of search:

Conversation is king; content is just something to talk about

This means that brands can start to capitalize on sponsorship opportunities by using the web, and particularly social media, to give fans a look behind the scenes, whether by organizing Facebook chats with football stars or inviting bloggers to cover big events. They can mobilize music fans and find a way to talk to them, as mobile company Orange has done in the UK. They can look to generate their very own water-cooler moments that chime with their brand’s essence, in the way that Unilever did in the US with In The Motherhood, a series of online shows that started on MSN before moving to ABC, or they can give time-poor mothers fairy-tale podcasts to play to their kids, as Kleenex did in the UK*.

Interestingly, the reason In The Motherhood didn’t fare as well on TV as it did online is that the Writer’s Guild Of America were unwilling to allow viewers to suggest their own stories – really there’s no need for UGC to try to kill traditional media when it is doing such a good job of it on its own.

So next time someone tells you that UGC is about to take over the world, or that their brand has no way of talking to consumers, why not tell them a story about the stories their brand could tell that people really want to hear.

*Disclosure: In The Motherhood was produced by Mindshare whilst the Kleenex podcasts were produced by Mindshare & Altogether, my current & previous employers.

BedTime stories image by Playingwithbrushes on flickr

One of the greatest marketing success stories of the last couple of years has been Cadbury, the British chocolate maker – which, at nearly 200 years old, could be forgiven for failing to grasp modern technologies to promote its brands.

However, helped by some great creative work by London shop Fallon, they’ve had huge success by creating ads that people love to share. First there was The Gorilla, which racked up millions of views and countless Facebook groups on its way to driving up sales by 9%, as well as a number of interesting spoofs, including a memorable one for Wonderbra which you might not want to watch at work.

More recently there was Eyebrows – which, despite its very bizarre subject matter, has managed to acquire over 4 million views and was a fixture on most viral video charts for months, both in the UK & the rest of the world (particularly the US). Meanwhile, the accompanying Facebook page has over quarter of a million fans and is still generating user interaction, months after the ad was released.

And now, the latest Cadbury ad shows a giant head zooming round a town in Ghana, whilst the locals dance to a track being performed by local rapper Tinny (who appears out of a magic cocoa bean, obviously). The ad is to promote Cadbury’s use of fair-trade cocoa beans and the song that soundtracks it is to be released on iTunes, with all proceeds going to charity. It will undoubtedly prove to be a social smash, just as its predecessors were.

So does this mean that Cadbury is the perfect example of a social media marketer, no longer beholden to old, interruptive forms of advertising? Well, not exactly.

Whilst Gorilla may have become a viral sensation, it was first aired during the finale of the eight series of Big Brother, at a time when the show could still command approximately 14% of the UK population. So much for long-tail seeding. A specially adapted version was also shown before the 2007 Rugby World Cup final between England & France – another program with a pretty sizable audience. Unfortunately, it wasn’t enough to spur England on to a second World Cup victory.

Like Gorilla, the Eyebrow ad was also backed by high-impact TV slots, as well as a major digital campaign, including prominent campaigns with MSN & Photobox. And Zingolo, the new dancing cocoa bean video, is being advertised on everything from YouTube to bus-shelters in Dublin.

This isn’t to suggest that Cadbury’s success should in any way be lessened, or that they haven’t set out to create fantastic ads that act as entertainment content, perfect for social sharing. In fact, it shows that rather than a naive reliance on consumers spreading a message, Cadbury and their marketing partners, understand that in these days of earned media, paid media still has an important role to play.

Last month, Google was forced by a New York judge to hand over the personal details of a user of its Blogger service to someone who wished to sue the blogger in question for defamation. In a series of posts, fashion model Liskula Cohen was described by fashion student Rosemary Port as a “psychotic, lying, whoring … skank”. Whilst Google at first refused to hand over her identity, it agreed to give Cohen’s lawyers her email address after being ordered to do so by the Manhattan Supreme Court. Port is now suing Google for $15m claiming it failed in its duty to protect her privacy.

While it’s interesting that the original lawsuit was launched because the offending blog post turned up in a search for Cohen’s name (it doesn’t anymore, the blog’s been deleted), a more interesting issue is the one it raises in regard to who owns what in the social media space, or indeed on the wider Web. Port felt that Google had a responsibility to refuse to hand over her details to the courts but, as has been seen time and time again, search engines will not break local laws if pushed to do so. By signing up to Blogger, Port had essentially given Google ownership of her personal information.

So what does any of this have to do with social media, and why should anyone who manages to get through the day without calling anyone else a skank care? Because just as Google ‘owned’ Port’s data, and handed it over when pushed, it proves most social media profiles aren’t really yours, whether you’re an individual or a brand. This means that if you’re planning to use a social media platform, whether it be a blog or a social network, to promote yourself or your brand, you need to consider a few things.

Image by KhayaL on flickr

Whilst I advise most clients to ‘fish where the fish are’ when it comes to social media, sometimes it makes more sense to try to replicate or even recreate a social network than to invest too heavily in building up an audience on a 3rd party network. If, for instance, your business is based on advertising, why on earth would you want to spend any time creating content that puts dollars in another business’ bank? Of course some companies do, and for very good reasons, but it’s certainly something that ought to be considered.

And even if you’re not relying on advertising dollars, and are using social media to drive value to your brand in other ways, there might be an argument that you could still be risking a loss.

Imagine that you spend hundreds of man hours building up an audience on a social network, as well as thousands of dollars creating content for the profile, as well as on marketing to drive awareness of it. Now imagine that an entirely new social network comes along, everyone gets bored of the one you’ve invested so much time in, and your audience more or less disappears overnight. It might sound extreme, but it’s happened (to a certain extent) before and is almost certain to happen again, because the cost to consumers of switching social networks is nil so the only thing stopping them is fashion and friends.

A rumour recently swept the digital village that is London, suggesting that one of the major social networks was about to close the profiles of any brand not spending sufficient money on its advertising options. The rumour proved to be false, but as more and more networks continue to struggle to monetize their traffic, it may well come to pass. After all, whereas a search engine without major brands in its results might seem strange to a user expecting to be able to find them there, on social networks, where consumers aren’t looking to be sold to, that’s unlikely to be the case.

And what about if you don’t even use social media profiles, but just have similar tastes in back-end operations? If your business lives in the clouds, then it’s entirely at the mercy of people over whom you have no control. So if your provider goes off-line, or loses all your data? Tough luck.

And finally, as the recent Orwellian example of Amazon deleting copies of novels by, errr, George Orwell from its Kindle devices show, you don’t even have to be on the Web in order to be prone to the issues of digital ownership. The fact that Amazon was probably right in doing what it did (if incredibly naive not to publicise and explain its actions more) doesn’t really matter.

Nor does the fact that Rosemary Port sounds like a rather nasty individual (if I hadn’t been raised better, I might even describe her as as sounding like a [blank], but would never do such a thing for fear of a defamation lawsuit) and that the Web could probably do with a little less anonymous agression, as frequently as Paul Carr argues.

All that matters is that anyone investing time and resources in building a digital brand (or literary collection) understands that these days possession counts for approximately nine tenths of nothing.

With the recent spate of companies such as United Airways, Domino’s  Pizza and Habitat UK, being hit by negative publicity online, one could be forgiven for thinking that social media can be used as a cure-all for such issues. But in fact, social media will only ever be a band-aid for such problems, unless it’s tied into fundamental changes in the way such companies operate.

By now the story of how disgruntled United Airways customer, and aspiring country singer, Dave Carroll turned his anger at seeing his guitar smashed by ground staff into a song and, subsequently, a YouTube viral sensation, will be familiar to you all. It’s even made the leap across the pond and into mainstream media, with BBC’s Breakfast programme featuring the story on a recent edition. Following a brief interview with Carroll and a clip of the song, they then featured a number of ‘marketing experts’ commenting on the case, and what it means for brands.

Unsurprisingly, the experts all agreed that this was a ‘terrible thing’ for United and that, in failing to respond quickly and thoroughly enough, they had seriously slipped up. As evidence of how widespread this type of problem is, the ‘experts’ cited Domino’s Pizza and Habitat UK as examples of other brands that had been seriously damaged by social media led consumer rebellion: “Dell Hell” for 2009, if you like.

Ignoring the fact that Domino’s Pizza actually responded pretty quickly and thoroughly to the videos of employees tampering with food, and has received widespread praise for their actions; or that Habitat’s balls-up on Twitter, horrific though it undoubtedly was, hasn’t actually garnered that much attention outside of the echo-chamber of social media types on Twitter. These experts were making the mistake of thinking that United could have fixed this problem by being ‘more social’.

They seemed to be suggesting that if United had quickly produced its own YouTube song, apologising to Carroll and offering him lots of compensation, then everything would have been fine. But this misses the point – that social media can only ever act as a band-aid for bad customer perceptions, not a cure.

Image by MatthewWilkes on flickr

If we look at the two companies most commonly referenced with regards to customer service and positive brand perceptions engendered by social media marketing, Dell and Zappos, we see something much deeper than simply responding to tweets, Facebook updates and YouTube videos.

Both companies have put customer service at the very heart of everything that they do; in Dell’s case this is a massive change in the way that they had been operating prior to the Dell Hell instigated by Jeff Jarvis’ infamous blog post. With Zappos, it’s always been fundamental to the brand and is one of the main reasons they’ve grown to be a $1 billion brand in just a few years (it will be interesting whether its recent purchase by Amazon will impact on this customer service culture).

In the case of Dell, they don’t just monitor what people are saying about their brand, they actually act on these things. IdeaStorm has led to new product developments which were inspired by customer interaction. Zappos’ success has been built on hours of telephone based customer service, and continually exceeding customer expectations. Their actions on Twitter and the like is just an expression of this.

What so many social media experts make the mistake of doing, is thinking that it’s the stuff round the edges that makes the difference and that simply responding to negative customer experiences with a speedy Tweet, or jolly little video, is enough. But unless you’re prepared to perform root and branch surgery on the way that your company works, and put the customer at the heart of everything that you do, it won’t make a difference as you’ll always be fighting fires (admittedly whilst winning plaudits from social media experts in the process).

If we take this back to United and Mr. Carroll, even if they’d responded quickly, sincerely and in a knowing, ‘social’ manner, it wouldn’t change the fact that their customer service was terrible, and probably still is. It might have stopped this particular sh*tstorm blowing up in the way it did, but it wouldn’t have done anything to prevent the (inevitable) next one to come along.

Of course what social media could allow United to do, is gain a deep understanding of what customers think about their service and what they would like to see changed, and then to explain exactly how they do intend to change. But that insight is useless unless it provokes and powers real change.

Because as the authors of The Cluetrain Manifesto so succinctly put it all those years ago:

Markets are conversations

And smiling and saying sorry will never beat not having to say sorry at all.

Until Andy Murray recently gave hope for a British man winning Wimbledon for the first time since his clothing’s namesake Fred Perry, the news here in the UK had been almost entirely full of stories about politicians, their inventive expenses and the political careers that had come to a premature end (or overdue end, depending on your point of view) as a result of the claims.

And yet the news that  one of the most senior members of Gordon Brown’s government was resigning doesn’t seem to have caused much stir at all. Just last week, David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary (equivalent to the Secretary of State in the US), used his Twitter profile to anounce his resignation:

You would imagine that news such as this would be on the front pages of every major news story, especially as so many of them had reported his tweet on Michael Jackson’s death (”Never has one soared so high and yet dived so low. RIP Michael”). But the reason that so few did report it was because of course it wasn’t actually David Miliband posting tweets: it was a couple of graduates who wanted to parody politicians, but ended up showing how gullible, or lazy, many journalists are.

But before all us bloggers start proclaiming how this shows that ‘old media’ simply can’t keep up these days, it’s not just journalists that fall for this sort of thing. Last year, the blogosphere was united in its praise of Exxon Mobil and its use of Twitter to connect with consumers. Except, of course, for the fact that once again, it was a fake account.

This has now become such a common occurrence that any number of celebrities now call their profiles the ‘real’ one. But despite this, it’s often difficult to tell reality from parody, and if you’re a multi-million dollar brand, that could be a problem.

In his (typically biting) post on the Exxon example, Drama 2.0 (a now retired web 2.0 satirist) argued that companies shouldn’t worry unduly about this sort of thing. When a profile only has 500 foloowers (as the Exxon one did) on a very niche site (as Twitter still was at the time), then it’s unlikely to cause much damage. But now that tweets make the front pages of national newspapers, and the news broadcasts on major TV stations, things have changed.

The two pranksters responsible for the Miliband account said that it demonstrated the need for verification on the web. And minutes after reading about their hoax I noticed that the official 10 Downing Street profile now has a verified badge, to promote the fact that Twitter has certified the fact that it’s actually being run by those Gordon Brown’s communications team.

Unfortunately for brands though, Twitter has said that it’s not currently running the verification programme for businesses, though it is inviting companies to express an interest in the service. One would think that installing something similar to the system Google uses to verify business listings would do very nicely.

And in the meantime, brands will just have to keep listening for people talking about them in the hope that they can spot these hoaxes before they gain too much traction. And all of us who write about the web, whether blogger or journalist, will have to start doing some of that pesky fact-checking before we pronounce on the latest celeb or brand to say something scandalous on Twitter.

Anyone reading this post is likely to be someone who spends some, if not all, of his or her time at work trying to make use of social media to market products & brands. We spend hours trying to maximize the benefit for our employers or clients from sites such as Facebook, YouTube & Twitter as well as the millions of blogs that litter the web. And yet I’ve started to wonder whether these very activities might not result in exactly the opposite result to the one we’re hoping for.

A recent article about viral video showed that, contrary to what those who promote the game changing nature of user generated content would have us believe, the most popular content is still that made by professionals. Of the 18 videos that Visible Measures suggest have received more than 100 million views, 14 (or 17 depending on your point of view) were professionally produced. This shouldn’t necessarily surprise us, but it is worth noting as we look at what people are actually using social media for, and what it means for marketers.

So why should it matter if the videos that people are watching on YouTube and the like aren’t actually user generated? Well, with analysts suggesting that YouTube loses Google half a billion, yes, half a billion dollars a year (though others have their doubts), it means that the people marketing those videos (as professional content tends to be marketed by professionals) are responsible for Google burning $500 million a year so that people can watch TV clips, pop videos & movie trailers. And some think that this might mean that Google will have to stop allowing the user generated content that made YouTube what it is today.

What is certain is that all the major social network sites are struggling to find serious business models and will have to do something about this at some point. And until they do they’ll need to hang-on to the users that they have, even if some think they can’t afford to take on any more. And that’s why it will be so important for them not to allow their current users to be alienated by bad marketing & spam.

I’m guessing that Rupert Murdoch certainly wishes that he could turn back the clock to the days before people started abandoning MySpace in droves: yes the rise of Facebook has had something to do with this but so did, I’d suggest, the rise of spam on the original major social network (Friendster doesn’t count). In the recent figures for his News Corp company, the internet division’s results were just as disappointing as most of the others. In fact, so bad were the figures, that Murdoch has suggested that he will soon start charging for content on all of his web properties.

So what does all of this mean for other social media sites, or for us as marketers? It means that anyone looking to buy Twitter might want to organize lunch with Google CEO Eric Schmidt & News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch before they do, and that we need to make sure that we take as much care as possible not to alienate the consumers we’re trying to talk to lest we kill the golden goose 2.0.

The recent launch of the UK edition of Wired, the magazine for people who keep saying that magazines have no future, has seemed incredibly apposite when considered alongside many of the stories in the news every night. Whether it’s celebrities Twittering, the Queen getting all 2.0, or  news of magazines killing their print editions and going totally digital (I’m guessing those stories weren’t quite such music to the ears of Wired’s owners), it’s often felt like everyone is now online, and there’s really nothing left for the likes of us to say.

However there have been three events involving politicians and figures of authority that provide fascinating insights into how the web works, how many people still don’t understand this and which can act as illuminating lessons for any brands looking to make the most of digital, especially if they intend to become involved in the world of social media.

First there was the case of Daniel Hannan, a Conservative MP at the European Parliament. He made a speech in which he attacked Gordon Brown, who was visiting the parliament, for his handling of the ongoing financial crisis: Hannan then put the footage of his speech onto his YouTube profile and after furiously promoting it, found it had become a viral monster (it currently stands at just over 2 million views—incredible for a British political speech). There’s no need to go into the validity of his claims right now, as that’s not what this post is about, but what is interesting is what it tells us about how one can make something go viral.

While the speech was made by a British MP, in the European parliament and, presumably, was aimed at an English constituency, the reason that it became as successful as it did was because it was picked up by The Drudge Report, the infamous American site. This highlights how, despite the fact that the web is now very much a global medium, it is still often necessary to build popularity in the US in order to ensure that your story starts circulating the email inboxes of the UK. When promoting a video aimed at raising awareness of road safety amongst cyclists & drivers in London, we undertook a strategy based on this fact and purposefully targeted digg and other sites with large US audiences. 12 million views and counting later and we think we made the right decision. I’m guessing that Hannan does too.

Second, there was the Rodney King-like incident in which a man who died at the recent G20 demonstrations in London was seen, on video shot by a passer-by, being assaulted by the police. Up until that point the police had issued misleading statements about their involvement in the incident—some have even suggested that they lied. However, as further pieces of film and still images emerged casting the police in an ever darker light, so it became apparent that the story was not likely to go away. And, ignoring the potentially terrifying implications of the actual incident itself, this once again provides us with some salutary lessons.

Because no matter how well you may think you can manage your brand’s image online, if you’re getting involved with the general public you have to be prepared for the fact that they might disagree with you, and might back up this disagreement with user-generated-content which can, if put in the right place, destroy a brand: when camera-phones, Flips & services like Twitter turn citizens into journalists, all brands need to be wary . What’s also interesting here of course is the fact that the content was passed to a mainstream media organization, The Guardian, rather than distributed at a lower level, which suggests that those foreseeing the death of ‘big media’ may still have some time to wait.

Finally, the last few days has seen the ruling Labour party involved in a rather demeaning incident in which a number of people with connections to Gordon Brown have been implicated in an attempt to set-up a new blog called The Red Rag, the sole aim of which was to publish gossip about opposition Conservative MPs. Whilst the site never went live (it still said Hello World as I wrote this) the mere suggestion that people officially connected to Labour considered such actions has lead, unsurprisingly, to a huge scandal. Again, I won’t go into the rights and wrongs of what did or didn’t happen (though it’s pretty obvious that they were mostly wrongs), except to say that the lesson here is that just because a competitor is doing something, that doesn’t mean that you should (and that you should never trust email).

For whilst the revelation of the planned site came from a right-wing blogger called Guido Fawkes, what’s most interesting about this whole sorry episode is that the Labour officials implicated were, in many ways, trying to beat the right-wing blogs at their own game: Fawkes’ strap-line is “plots, rumors & conspiracy,” while the US blogs that all the British ones aspire to be like, such as Drudge, have long made a buck by promoting stories that may or may not have a close relationship with the truth. (Interestingly, Fawkes’ dedication to the truth was such that he “only” wanted £20,000 from the Daily Telegraph to give them the emails.) And so, by totally misunderstanding their own audience and underestimating their opponents, they have managed to smear no-one but themselves.

Taken individually these three stories may not seem to have any wider relevance to digital businesses, or those of us who spend much of our time online. But, taken together, they suggest some seismic shifts in the way that people now accumulate & pass-on information which can probably best be explained by paraphrasing Clay Shirky, the digital futurologist & evangelist for crowdsourcing:

So forget about blogs and bloggers and blogging and focus on this — the cost and difficulty of publishing absolutely anything, by anyone, into a global medium, just got a whole lot lower. And the effects of that increased pool of potential producers is going to be vast.

Gothamist: April 9, 2004

And whilst all of these points may seem obvious, and it may seem apparent to us that the web is changing the way that people & politicians, subjects & police and consumers & brands are interacting, then the fact that so many powerful people can still totally misunderstand these new relationships suggests that there is still a lot of work to be done.

Blogging image by antigone78, red rag by k.ivoutin, both on flickr.

Every so often a site comes along that, in the amount of hype it generates, blows away everything that has come before it. Not so long ago it was Second Life, then Facebook came along and now Twitter is scattering all before it in a blizzard of press-coverage that many of its start-ups peers would give their trendy offices & table-football sets for.

Here in the UK it seems like the BBC & The Guardian would cover the opening of a paper bag if it somehow included Twitter, whilst in the US it has caused enough of a stir to earn a dressing down from Jon Stewart. Meanwhile here on Search Engine Land the top three stories are all about Twitter at the time of me writing this, while Sphinn’s homepage also appears to have been hit with a Twitter bomb. And it’s not as if I’m not guilty of hyping Twitter myself. However I am slightly worried that in recent weeks things might have gone slightly out of control.

This fear was prompted by the tidal wave of coverage generated by Skittle’s recent decision to give over its homepage to the micro-blogging service (a decision which was soon revoked when, in an entirely predictable fashion, many people took the opportunity to fill the candy brand’s homepage with swear words and worse). Now, I’m not going to take this opportunity to explain why I think that this move was such a bad one. But I do want to use it to highlight the fact that Twitter is still very much a niche interest. And while this isn’t necessarily a problem in and of itself, it can be when people are making decisions on whether or not to invest in marketing on Twitter based on the hype rather than the facts.

Thus the the headline of this post. While I was thinking about what to write today I decided to find out what Twitter’s audience is and ended up on Quantcast. It gives the audience in the US as 6 million which, considering the fact that this is unlikely to include all those using third party services to interact with Twitter, is a pretty healthy number. However what really grabbed my attention was the small bit of commentary next to Twitter’s rank (165 in the US):

Twitter.com is a top 250 site that reaches over 6.1 million U.S. monthly people.The typical visitor reads Techcrunch.

That second sentence is so true it hurts and you only need to go back to Skittles to prove this. Even now, weeks after the move, a large proportion of the chatter taken from Twitter is about how Skittles used Twitter, rather than ‘real’ consumers ‘discussing’ Skittles: as social media experts use social media to discuss a social media marketing campaign, it’s like there’s an echo of a reflection. And that’s simply because not that many real consumers are using it yet.

To give some proportion to the audience figure of 6 million, Quantcast gives Facebook a monthly US audience of 79 million. Now that’s what I call mainstream and, for many brands, if something isn’t mainstream then it simply isn’t worth getting involved in, no matter what all of us social media experts may say. Unless something has a certain level of cut-through the investment necessary just won’t be worth it.

None of this is to say that Twitter can’t be used or indeed shouldn’t be used as a great marketing tool. It can, is and will continue to be. But as Sky News announces that it now has a ‘Twitter correspondent’ we should remember that Reuters’ Second Life bureau is now closed and be careful that, when marketing on Twitter, we don’t end up just talking to ourselves.

Cartoon by gapingvoid

The start of this month saw the UK hit by the worst snowfall it had seen for nearly 20 years. Whilst the amount of snow involved (about 1 foot at its worst) would barely count as a sprinkling in parts of North America or Scandinavia, it brought the UK’s (mostly 100 year old plus) infrastructure grinding to a halt. This meant that, along with millions of others, I was trapped at home on the Sunday the 1st and Monday the 2nd of February and that, like millions of others, I turned to the Web to entertain me and keep me informed.

As it had been predicted well in advance of the snow actually starting to fall, by the time the streets of southern England did start to turn white, a suitable hashtag had already been settled upon for the millions of Britons using Twitter who wished to catalogue events. And so, as Americans started to gather round their TV sets to watch a load of ads, interspersed with some ’sport’, the phrase #uksnow became the most used on Twitter, beating even the Superbowl (for a time at least).

By the time that Monday morning rolled around, and large swathes of the country realised that they essentially had a day off, the web really started to show what a wonderful thing it can be. A chap called Ben Marsh created a neat little mash-up which tracked people’s Tweets of the snow onto a map, providing real-time UGC data on the severity of the weather. Showing that useful tools weren’t confined to Twitter, one fine soul decided to build a tool that checked geo-tagged photos on Flickr to allow you to find the nearest snowman.

And over on flickr, whole groups of photos had been created of the snow and the magical effect it was having on the British landscape. One of these groups even used my attempt to create a real-life hashtag (above) as its icon. Finally, as if to disprove all of those who say that the Web and most of the stuff on it is a waste of time, Twitter and Facebook were used to organise a flashmob snowball fight. Of course there were some who didn’t understand the real relevance of the Web, and insisted on using it to provide updates on travel news, advice on how to get to work, and other useless bits of trivia.

Throughout all of this I sat at home and marveled at the way in which people were using Twitter, Flickr and a whole host of other sites to communicate, share information, create and generally have a good time. And it made me realise that those of us who work in social media, or the web in general, can often forget that for most people, the web is a tool and something to be enjoyed.

And whilst this may seem like an obvious point to make, I think it highlights the problems that many brands face when trying to decide what to do online. As Ethan Jarlewski, a character in Douglas Coupland’s novel JPod, says:

Why do companies like Toblerone or Pepperidge Farm bother having websites? As if people are going to say to themselves, “Gee, I wish I knew more about Milano cookies. I know! I’ll go to their site!

And just as it highlights the difficulty brands face, it also makes clear exactly how much of a problem many of these social media sites have in building a robust revenue model: because when people are having fun, they often don’t want to be sold to. But, for now at least, I’ll let others worry about that (or not worry about it in the case of Twitter) and just remember how lucky I am to be able to do this stuff for a living.

As the campaign progressed many pundits were taken aback by the way in which the candidate had managed to use the net to mobilise supporters in a way never seen before. By allowing supporters to take his core values and messages, tweak them and broadcast them in whatever way they saw fit (such as the video below which was submitted to a YouTube competition), he had made this the first UGC campaign.  By taking citizen journalists seriously, he had ensured that the bloggers were on his side. And by utilising social networks, he had made sure that his supporters were organised in such a way as to maximise his vote.

Who am I talking about? Obama, surely? Well, actually, no. Howard Dean. As these articles from The Guardian & Wired detail, Howard Dean was in many ways the test bed for many of the tactics that Obama’s team used to make the most of the web as a campaigning tool. And Dean was building on the learnings from the original, innovative Presidential campaign to use the web – that of a certain John McCain, back in 1999.

So what does this tell us? That Obama is all flash and that his much vaunted utilisation of the web to amass unheard of funds and to mobilise thousands of volunteers, was all hype? Absolutely not. It tells us that just because something has been done before, that doesn’t mean it can’t be done again, and better. On inauguration day, let’s look at some of the things that Obama did, how he built on the successes of others, and what brands could learn from one of the greatest marketing campaigns of the 21st Century.

• Let go: If you’re going to try to harness social media, you also need to be prepared to release control of your brand. The, now iconic, Obama Hope posters were not official products of the campaign but created by street artist Shephard Fairey (better known as Obey Giant). But the Obama campaign encouraged this pirating of its brand, a meme was born & Fairey has now produced the official inauguration poster.
• Listen & respond: One of the things Republicans had done very successfully in past campaigns was to use the internet to promote stories which adversely effected the perceptions of their Democratic opponents*. Like a reputation management professional, Obama used the web to quickly counter such stories, showing that you should always be thinking about what people are saying about you.
• Embrace the conversation: Obama’s campaign didn’t just pay lip service to citizen journalism, it actively embraced it. Inviting hundreds of bloggers to the convention was a masterstroke and just showed that it’s not the medium that matters, it’s the readers you reach, and influence, through it.
• Make it easy to share: As well as generating PR for the novelty of the method of delivering the news, announcing the choice of Vice-Presidential candidate by email & text also meant that Obama’s supporters were able to quickly forward the news on, maintaining the buzz. Creating ‘viral’ content is, in many ways, the Holy Grail of modern marketing, but ensuring the content has sharing built into its DNA is a good start.

There are of course many more lessons to be learned from the Obama campaign, as well as those of his opponents. Because what all this also proves is that if the message doesn’t match the brand and isn’t right for the audience, then noone will buy it. For what really differentiates Obama from those who went before him, such as Howard, McCain (in ‘99) and even Ron Paul, is that he got elected and they didn’t.

*This is not a political post so I make no comment on the validity of the stories circulated by the Republicans or the Democrats. I’m just interested in how they used the web to do this.

Obama Obey Giant poster by Daquella Manera on flickr