When it comes to engaging on Twitter, Coca Cola has a huge organic opportunity that they seem to be ignoring. So instead of resorting to automated campaigns that result in embarrassment, they should get back to basics.
Last week wasn’t great for Coca Cola. On Wednesday the brand pulled its automated #MakeItHappy social campaign. The campaign auto tweeted ASCII images based on negative tweets. In response, Gawker created a bot that submitted passages from Mein Kampf. Sure enough, the campaign tweeted them.
And that got me wondering….just how well is Coca Cola utilising Twitter?
The findings aren’t great.
Accounts
The @CocaCola account is far and away the most important to the brand.
@CocaCola has 2.85 million followers, follows 67,815 and has tweeted 125,000 times. According to Status People 57 per cent of these followers are “Good”. That’s a potential audience of 1.6 million.
It has six times more followers than the next most popular Coca Cola account.
The rest of the analysis therefore focuses on this account.
Top 10 Coca Cola brand accounts by followers excluding @Coca Cola
Screen Name
Followers
CocaColaMx
458,254
CocaColaCo
321,159
DietCoke
300,586
CokeZero
226,594
Sprite
221,604
CocaColafr
167,734
vitaminwater
127,701
docpemberton
125,069
WorldofCocaCola
116,334
CocaColaRacing
108,676
Tweet activity
CocaCola will have appeared to be silent to its followers for most of the last six months.
Almost all the activity on the @CocaCola account in the last six months has been @replies. This includes those #MakeItHappy tweets.
@replies are only seen by people who follow both accounts involved in the conversation. This means a tiny fraction of @CocaCola’s followers will have seen these tweets.
Apart from replies, they have only tweeted four times and retweeted three times. The last occasion was in November last year.
Who they follow
Coca Cola are ignoring high profile “fan” accounts that have massive organic reach potential, both within and outside of Twitter.
@CocaCola follows 67,815 accounts. A lot less than their follower count, but still a big number.
But it’s not the number they follow that’s the most surprising thing, it’s the apparent lack of logic or strategy.
For instance they do follow this account:
And yet all of these accounts follow @CocaCola, but they don’t follow them back:
The 8 accounts pictured have a gross follower count of over 38 million. I also spotted other similar high profile “fan accounts”, the top 25 of which totaled 70 million followers. That’s a huge potential audience to tap into, even allowing for duplication or fakes.
Plus, high profile people and organisations like these have a reach that goes way beyond Twitter.
Report Card
Grade D – Huge missed opportunity
Coca Cola has a significant organic reach of its own on Twitter.
It replies to individual fans, but it isn’t saying anything to the wider community.
It follows accounts that don’t even tweet.
Meanwhile it has high profile followers with even greater reach than their own that it doesn’t follow back.
Instead of investing in an automated campaign, a better strategy would be to get back to basics.
To carry out the analysis I used Lissted’s database of 1.8 million of the most influential accounts on Twitter.
A survey by Cision has found that time spent using social media for work by the UK journalists who responded has fallen. The focus this finding has received is unfortunate as this reduction may simply be due to increased productivity. Meanwhile, for the first time the same survey found that a majority of UK journalists now think social media use for work is both necessary and beneficial.
Cision have produced their annual survey of how journalists are using social media. The top finding is a fall in the proportion of UK journalists using social media for work for four hours or more per day. The level has reduced from 24 per cent in 2012 to 13 per cent in 2014. The inference drawn is that we’ve reached a point of “saturation”, or even decline, in the use of social media by UK journalists.
The thing is, time spent is only relevant if you can relate it to a set objective. In this case the reduction in time seems most likely to me to be due to improved productivity in the use of social media by journalists.
Here are a few potential reasons for this:
– According to the survey, Twitter is the No.1 tool used by UK journalists (75 per cent). Our analysis of when UK journalists joined Twitter suggests they have had between three and six years to become proficient at it.
– Productivity tools are likely to be widely used by now, particularly by those who use social media the most. An example of this is in the survey where it highlights 25% of respondents saying they use Hootsuite.
– Knowledge from earlier adopters will have been shared with colleagues who joined later. Journalism.co.uk’s excellent newsrewired conferences are an example (the latest of which was yesterday).
Meanwhile the same survey also tells us:
– 54% of journalists who responded couldn’t carry out their work without social media (up from 43% in 2013 and 28% in 2012).
– 58% say social media has improved their productivity (up from 54% in 2013 and 39% in 2012).
If the survey is representative, this means a majority of UK journalists now think that the use of social media for work is both necessary and beneficial.
26/1/15 Post has been updated to include some entries that were missed off the original post and to take account of feedback in comments and on Twitter.
I thought I’d investigate PR related blogs in particular. To do this I analysed the tweets from over 500 of the most influential members of the UK PR community over the last 60 days (c. 140,000 tweets all told).
Within these there were a little under 2,000 domains represented that were shared by two or more members of the community during the period. Of these I spotted 73 sites that are PR related, or carry PR content, and are UK based.
6 media outlets – The Drum, Econsultancy, PRWeek, Holmes Report, PR Moment and Communicate.
35 corporate sites – almost all agencies with a few service providers included. Some, or all, of these could be in the list due to posts on their corporate blogs being shared, though it could also be content like news announcements or job opportunities.*
The data suggests there’s a relatively small cohort of UK PR bloggers that are garnering attention with personal blogs.
Meanwhile a large proportion of content being shared would appear to consist of corporate blogs or people contributing to media outlets and shared platforms.
—————————–
A few points to note:
1. The timeframe of this analysis (over the Christmas period) may mean that some blogs haven’t appeared because they didn’t post much, if at all, during the 60 days. I will re run the analysis in March to see if the picture is similar.
2. Posts will almost certainly be being shared through other means than Twitter, LinkedIn for example, but I would still find it surprising if interesting posts weren’t being shared to some extent on Twitter.
3. It’s possible there are blogs that are attracting significant attention from the UK PR community, just not from the group of influencers our data looks at. This seems unlikely as I’d be surprised if at least some of this group wouldn’t have picked up on such content.
4. The option to now publish within LinkedIn may be a substitute for personal blogs, as could Medium. Both of these sites appear high in the list so it could be worth looking at these in more detail.
5. I could have just missed someone relevant on the results. If anyone wants to look at the full list let me know.
* Corporate sites
I haven’t included sites that relate to agencies with global operations e.g. edelman.com, blog.ketchum.com where it’s likely that content is being created by UK based staff. The exception being where a dedicated .co.uk domain appeared in the list.
In the week before Christmas, Brandwatch, the social media monitoring company, acquired influencer platform (and Lissted* competitor) Peer Index for a reported figure of £10m in cash and shares.
“As we (Giles and Azeem, Peer Index’s CEO) talked, I became acutely aware that PeerIndex were years ahead of us in their understanding and technology for influencer analytics and mapping.”
But why the need for a social media monitoring company to invest so heavily** to address influencer analytics and community mapping?
The answer lies in the exponential rate at which online activity has been growing, and the challenge this has created to find the people, content and conversations that really matter to PR and Marketing objectives.
*I’m the founder and architect of Lissted for anyone who doesn’t already know me.
**£10m looks to represent around 10-15% of Brandwatch’s value based on filings relating to its most recent finance raising in May 2014.
A world of ‘pretty noise’
The key social media monitoring platforms (including Brandwatch) were conceived and designed in the mid-to-late Noughties when we had a fraction of the online conversations we have today. Even by the summer of 2008, Facebook had only reached 100 million users (versus 1.35bn now), Twitter had a measly 10 million (versus 284 million now) and Instagram didn’t even exist.
In this relatively quiet online world the platforms didn’t need to do much to address what I think of as the ‘laws of social listening‘. A few simple metrics – like number of Twitter followers – and keywords were often enough to find who, and what, mattered most.
As the scale of online conversation has grown in the last few years these platforms have invested in an arms race of engineering to try and keep pace with the demands of multiple sources, processing and storage. Meanwhile at their heart they mostly still treat ‘listening’ as a purely data driven exercise, continuing to use similar metrics of now questionable worth, combined with increasingly complex Boolean keyword strings, to desperately try and filter it.
This has resulted in what I call “pretty noise”. Beautifully designed front end applications with graphs, charts and word clouds that look wonderful, but often tell you very little of real value, or worse can be genuinely misleading.
Because real listening, and the insight that comes with it, requires an understanding of people and communities, not simply data mining.
Noise doesn’t equal influence
At the same time as social listening platforms have been struggling in a Canute-like fashion with this vast wave of conversation, we’ve also seen the rise of the ‘influencer’ – someone who is judged to have the potential to exert higher levels of influence over others.
Such people have always existed of course, but social media and the wider online world has increased the ways in which this potential can be earned, observed and utilised.
Again, a plethora of tools and platforms have been created to try and help users identify these influencers in relation to their brand, product or industry. The majority of them start with who produces online content around your chosen keywords, and then look at the reaction they generate before deciding who ranks highest.
Unfortunately, these tools generally suffer from the same weakness as the social listening platforms. The scale of conversation and online activity is so great that they often equate noise to influence.
And even when these tools are successful in identifying truly influential and relevant content creators, they’re still of limited use, as creating content isn’t the only way to be influential.
They may help me identify candidates for outreach purposes, but it certainly doesn’t follow that their answers will be relevant to other key Marketing and PR activities such as:
ranking higher in search;
organising an event with industry leading figures;
understanding how my competitors are behaving online;
reaching more relevant people with my own content; or
identifying who I should target with my advertising.
True, there may be some active content creators in a particular field who will indeed be relevant no matter what your objective. For instance – if you’re looking at a list of UK PR influencers that doesn’t have Stephen Waddington near (or at) the top (as I was the other day) then I would seriously question whatever approach they’re using.
But mostly, this combination of noise driven methodologies and varying objectives has created a situation where users are asking questions of these tools, and it’s often just dumb luck if they get back the answer they really need.
It’s all about Community
So how do we address these two problems?
Effectively listen to social media sources to find true insight in a real time world.
Identify the right people and organisations depending on our objective.
The solution lies with understanding communities and the contextual relevance they provide.
It’s about identifying, observing and listening to enough of the key members of a community, particularly the ones who are authoritative and knowledgeable.
Lissted approaches this challenge in a very different way to Peer Index, but we do agree that if you can understand the makeup of communities relevant to you, everything else starts to fall into place. This is because the very people, content and conversations they are paying attention to are the ones that are likely to matter most.
We call this “Superhuman” social listening. A host of people who really know their stuff helping you to filter the online world and discover who, and what, really matters to your PR and Marketing objectives:
Reputation management: they’ll highlight important stories and conversations about your brand before most people get to hear about them.
Outreach: they’ll tell you who the content creators are that drive influential conversations, not just noisy ones.
Amplifying your content: they’ll tell you who the curators are that identify and share influential conversations.
Improving your search ranking: they’ll tell you the domains that they trust, which are therefore likely to be the very ones that Google will trust too.
Targeting your advertising: they’ll help you identify the people most like them and who share their interests.
Event organising: they’ll tell you who are the most recognised people in their field.
Real time marketing: they’ll help you identify what’s really getting relevant people engaged.
And so on……
The future
The critical element is the ability to identify these communities accurately. To find the right people to listen to. This is why we’ve spent the last two years developing Lissted’s real world approach to identifying relevant communities and why I believe Brandwatch have invested heavily with this acquisition to try and achieve this too.
I expect we’ll see a lot more activity around this challenge in 2015 and beyond as others in the social listening industry recognise the need to address the elephant of noise in the room.
Beta invites
We’re currently running a private beta of Lissted’s latest community analysis tool. If you’d like to get involved then drop me an email, adam@lissted.com.
Physics can teach us a thing or two about what matters in Content Marketing
Source: Moviepilot.com
Genesis
Two things collided to create this post.
First, I’m a huge ‘The Big Bang Theory’ fan. For anyone who doesn’t watch the show its central characters are two roommates – Sheldon Cooper and Leonard Hofstadter – both physicists at CalTech, and Penny, an aspiring actress and “temporary” waitress who moves in across the hall from them.
Penny lacks the guys intellect, often struggling to understand (or care) what they’re talking about, but she knows a lot more about life and relating to people than the two geeky scientists.
Second, I showed a very clever real life physicist, Stephen Baldwin* a graph of retweet activity over time for one of the tweets identified by our Tweets Distilled experiment. Tweets Distilled seeks to identify interesting tweets early in their lifecycle.
Stephen suggested there could be parallels between what makes content successful and the physical properties of heat capacity and phase transition.
*Stephen specialises in acoustics and sound processing and is currently looking for a new challenge.
Our Theory
Here’s a summary of what we produced:
Content heat capacity
Content phase transition
Sheldon Cooper will explain the physics behind these properties later in the post. First here’s the story of the tweet that got me and Stephen talking….
Giving it 110 per cent
On the day of the Scottish Independence Referendum, CNN’s graphic department had clearly been listening to too many footballers’ post match analysis as they put this graphic up on screen.
A Twitter user called Brady, who goes by the screenname of @BurningGoats picked up on the error and tweeted:
This was just after 8pm. The graph below shows the average retweets per minute in the 8 hours after the tweet was posted. You can see that in the first hour and a half there was a limited amount of activity. and by 21:31 the tweet had been retweeted 62 times. This is exceptional for Brady as none of his tweets in the subsequent 2 months have had more than 2 retweets, but it’s nothing compared to what happens in the next few minutes. At 21:31 the tweet is retweeted by @BefairSports, an account that doesn’t follow @BurningGoats. @BetFairSports has over 80,000 followers, one of whom is the ex Liverpool and Germany footballer Dietmar Hamann who has over 600,000 followers. He also retweets the story at 21:33 and immediately following this combination we see a massive spike in retweet activity. From then on the tweet never looks back maintaining a rate of 40-80 retweets per minute for the next couple of hours.
Finally at 02.26 the story is picked up by the mainstream media and appears on the Daily Mail, whose article generates nearly 1,500 comments on Facebook. The Science
So how can physics help to explain what happened? Over to the awesome Sheldon Cooper to explain.
Source: bigbangtheory.wikia.com/
Sheldon: Two physical properties are relevant here. Heat capacity and phase transition.
Heat capacity
Heat capacity is the amount of energy that is required to increase the temperature of a material. It can be expressed as an equation, thus: So the higher the heat capacity, the more energy it’s going to need to get hot. Different materials have different heat capacities.
Leonard explanation for Penny: It’s why they don’t make hair straightener plates out of rubber!
Phase transition
Sheldon: As the temperature of a material rises it will change state. These changes are called phase transitions and the most well-known are from solid to liquid and liquid to gas. There is also a fourth state that matter can take. When a gas is heated sufficiently it will ionise and form plasma (the most abundant material in the universe). Different materials go through phase changes at different temperatures.
Applying physics theory to Content Marketing
Content heat capacity
Sheldon: If we relate:
– heat capacity as a measure of the quality and likely potential interest a piece of content possesses within an online community (where high quality content is equivalent to material with a low heat capacity);
– energy as the tweets, retweets, favorites, likes, shares and other forms of engagement with the content it receives; and
– temperature as the level of interest it’s achieving within the relevant online community;
we get: This predicts that low quality content will need high engagement to raise the level of interest being shown in it.
Leonard to Penny: “You might read an article on toilet brushes, but only if Gerard Butler tweeted it!”
Content phase transition
Sheldon: If we see the different states content can exist in as: Solid phase = low quality content that even your followers find uninteresting or decent content that receives very little engagement.
Liquid phase = great content that’s got some engagement and started reaching followers of your followers, or not so great content that’s lucky enough to get engagement from some influential sources.
Gas phase = content that’s reached the wider community, either because a) it’s awesome and quickly got the attention of people dotted throughout that community, b) it’s pretty great content that’s getting lots of engagement generally or c) decent content that’s had the full star power treatment to force it out into the wider community.
Ionised = Amazing content that’s so “hot” you’d actually talk to someone about it in the real world and/or it’s appearing in media outside of the online community concerned.
The key is that the more widespread the appeal of the content among the community the lower the temperature (interest level) it will have to reach to change its state.
So awesome content will take a lot less energy to go through these phases and start reaching the wider community .
Leonard to Penny: “It’s why the biggest secrets make the best gossip.”
Source: fanpop.com
How the theory fits the CNN Story
Sheldon: The CNN graphic is great material. It’s funny, has immediate visual impact and it’s got numbers, and everyone loves numbers. It therefore has an inherently low heat capacity i.e. very high content quality rating.
The tweet by @burninggoats improves on this by bringing in the “giving it 110 per cent” phrase that is often used by sports people. This meant the tweet itself had an even lower heat capacity and so raised its inherent quality further.
Implication: The tweet only needed a relatively small amount of energy (engagement) to raise its temperature (interest level).
At the same time the content also had the potential for widespread appeal. Whether you were interested in the Scots referendum, appreciated the sporting reference or simply wanted to have a laugh at CNN’s expense, many people were likely to find this content interesting.
Implication: The tweet only needed a relatively low increase in temperature to change state and reach the wider Twitter community.
Combine these two and you had content that only needed a relatively small amount of energy (engagement) and it was going to reach far and wide. This is what happened when it received the retweets from @BetfairSports and @DidiHamann. And the content subsequently “ionised” when it was published by the Daily Mail.
Practical application of the Theory
To be successful you need to recognise three key implications:
1. Content creation and design is crucial
If your content isn’t all the things you know it should be – well designed, eye catching, exciting, thought-provoking, surprising, timely, appropriate format etc – then its going to need a lot of energy from the community to raise the interest level.
If you don’t possess this yourself e.g. a brand with a huge organic following like Apple, or you can’t buy it (celebrity endorsement for example), then content like this is going to really struggle to reach beyond a small proportion of those who are closest to you.
2. Listen to understand what will have widespread appeal
If you want to reach the parts of a community you don’t already know then you need to understand what is likely to engage those people, as well as those close to you, and design your content accordingly.
This will mean that your content has the potential to “change state” at much lower levels of interest. Again this means the energy (engagement) requirements to achieve this are lower.
3. Influencer engagement (and potentially paid promotion) will often still be necessary for success
In almost every case the quality and appeal of the content will only get you so far. They will reduce the energy requirements, but they won’t eliminate them.
As we saw with the CNN example, the innate quality and widespread appeal of the tweet meant it turned into a liquid (reached the followers of Brady’s followers) quite quickly. Even still it took the input of energy from Betfair and Didi Hamann’s engagement to make it change state to a gas and start reaching the wider community.
This demonstrates one of the potential benefits of an influencer strategy. Though be wary. It’s important that the influencers, really do possess the potential for influence. Don’t get fooled by simple reach numbers. Make sure they are highly relevant so that the wider community they help you reach is the one you were looking to target.
Finally in a corporate situation the use of paid promotion should be considered as an alternative to provide this additional energy when it doesn’t appear organically.
At 21:31 the tweet is retweeted by @BefairSports, an account that doesn’t follow @BurningGoats. 
He also retweets the story at 21:33 and immediately following this combination we see a massive spike in retweet activity. 
There is also a fourth state that matter can take. When a gas is heated sufficiently it will ionise and form plasma (the most abundant material in the universe). Different materials go through phase changes at different temperatures.
