Steve Richards

About Steve Richards

Five lessons for effective blogger outreach

Earned media is becoming an ever important aspect of the modern marketing mix with recent research showing blogs as one of the most trusted digital sources guiding consumer decisions.

Given that 92% of global consumers value word of mouth recommendations over all forms of advertising, it’s clear that marketers and advertisers have a lot to learn before they can reliably win consumer trust. 

Social media audiences: the purest judge and jury?

This weekend sees the first ever YouTube Video Music Awards streamed online. In many ways, it’s like a lot of other music awards: there’s glitz, there’s glamour, and there’s Lady Gaga, One Direction and Rihanna (though Cher’s invite is presumably still in the post…).

However, the YouTube awards are different in one major way. Any videos shared across Facebook, Twitter or Google+ since September 2012 contribute to deciding the winner, alongside user votes.

Just over a year ago, in August 2012, Nielsen revealed some research that revealed YouTube as the number one music discovery source for under 18s – a figure that can only have grown in the past 12 months. Arguably, this makes these awards the most relevant of all.

Has social media grown up?

In the years since the emergence of social as a separate entity for marketing purposes (roughly from around the birth of Twitter in 2006) we’ve figured out a lot about what social is, how it works, and what it means for marketers.

Now you could talk directly to a brand, and have them listen to you.

For consumers, this was great. For brands, it presented opportunities and challenges. It also entailed a pretty major shift in thinking.

So as memories of Social Media Week fade, has social now grown up?

Has social changed corporate culture forever?

“It’ll be easier if I just Dropbox you” is now a relatively familiar phrase to anyone in an office.

It used to be called ‘shadow IT’ but the prevalence of a BYOD culture in work environments means that with every employee working on their own device of preference; sharing documents and working socially, has become the norm.

Pitches are created in Google Docs, updated by all parties concurrently and the age of positive collaboration is upon us, right?

Do brands need to care about Vine?

It launched, like no other social network before it, with instructions on how to create the perfect steak tartare and very quickly, became all about spam, pornography and regulation. 

Vine is one of the raft of new launches from Twitter. It’s novel, it’s got some spammy teething problems and it’s already had its first #fail. 

But, assuming that all of this can be fixed (and this is social behemoth Twitter we’re talking about, so that’s a fair assumption) what does Vine mean for brands?