Then I wrote this

I write in different places and for different people. Not all of it can be shared here but I hope you enjoy what you read.

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26 Weeks: In conversation with Ben Rafiqi

An extraordinary project, for extraordinary times.

The coronavirus pandemic placed us in a unique scenario – one that requires us to change how we do things at an unprecedented pace and scale.

At 26, we wanted to capture these changes as a snapshot in time – to observe and listen to people’s responses and create an authentic record for the future, with writing at the core of our response.

I’ve been interviewing Let’s Feed Brum co-founder Ben Rafiqi as part of 26 Weeks. Read the evolution of our conversations here. 

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What I learned when I ran away to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival

I don’t recall being invited. When one of my oldest friends told me she and her partners had been offered a slot at the Fringe — a street performance piece that tells an interactive story using audio, antique boxes and miniature objects — I told her I was coming to help out. And she even let me. I knew I’d have fun, I knew it would be a lot of work, but I didn’t realise how much the experience would make me reflect on my work in marketing. And no, I’m not saying that I’m surrounded by a bunch of clowns (boom, boom).

The Fringe is massive and it is a tough marketplace. Visitors, all 400,000 or so of them, have high expectations. Yes, everyone who was there was primed, but you don’t walk more than five steps in the centre of Edinburgh in August without being approached by eager and determined entertainers coaxing you to attend their performances instead of the one you’re battling to get to. If someone’s giving up 5–10 minutes of their time, it had better be worth it. Here’s what we learned.

Not everyone is going to like you.

We were blanked. We were side-eyed. We were laughed at. We were told straight up and forcefully, ‘no’. But we stayed strong and kept finessing our elevator pitch to catch the eye of the kindred spirits among the torrent of people hurtling past. They were in there, we just had to find the right way to capture their attention and not worry about the rest.

Some people will like you.

Our audience was made up of all kinds — from affluent world travellers, to broke students, families, theatre professionals, and the savvy locals who’d been to every Fringe. But there was always that moment — when people would smile and lean in and forget the distractions of the Royal Mile. It was usually when the first drawer was opened up to reveal a previously unseen tiny magical world. And in return, people were so generous with cash donations and referrals — many groups came to us because a friend sent them (good old word of mouth).

Everything hasn’t been done already.

From my friends and their interactive tiny box stories, to the joyful Lederhosen-clad Sasha and his wind-up disco across the square, to the living statue beside us, who spent her days covered in gold, silently sprinkling fairy dust on dazzled children, there are fresh ideas all around us. I am as guilty as the next person of getting a little jaded sometimes, feeling like it’s all been done before. But it hasn’t. We just need to get out of our bubbles and do something else for a change.

I’m glad I did, even if it got a bit soggy at times.

Thanks to Joy Tomasko, Sarah Murphy and Justin Steeve at Tiny Box Theater for letting me join its first trip to the Fringe.

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Writing to stand still: Opinions in the age of influence

My online opinions have become increasingly muted over the last few years. I used to post about all kinds of topics. The writing wasn’t always earth-shattering but I enjoyed participating in a bigger conversation and learning in the process. That was before collective outrage became the norm. 

This doesn’t sit right; I’ve never met a debate I don’t want to throw myself into (just ask the people I know offline). But in the online world, it’s felt like all I’m doing is contributing to the noise and setting myself up for a takedown. 

There’s never enough research to be done, there are never enough angles to be considered. Opinions I process and deliver in a matter of seconds around a table and happily (and fiercely) debate, I will think myself into a corner over when I write. 

I’m a words person but over time I’ve retreated into the relative safety of retweets, images and hashtags. This happened because of a nagging worry that I may appear like I’m trying to position myself as a ‘thought leader’, ‘influencer’, or (say it ain’t so) ‘guru’. Then today I watched Denice Frohman say, “I heard a woman becomes herself the first time she speaks without permission...” (performed in Twitter’s very inspiring #SheInspiresMe). 

I speak without permission all the time in real life. And here’s the thing - I love my job, I love design, I love advertising, I love the sometimes uncomfortable space where art, commerce and technology meet. I love the potential to do great things because of the sheer volume of creative minds at work. And I love reading other people’s opinions, particularly those of people who don’t pretend to have the answers but are enjoying the ride. 

So here I go, sharing the view from my window. Without permission.

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26 Pairs of Eyes

Aiming to tell a different story, The Foundling Museum selected 26 objects from its archive that reflected the many different elements of its collection. 26 writers were randomly assigned one, I got the uniform. 

The buttons caught my eye almost immediately. I inspected the uniforms minutely once I was assigned them as my object for this project, but there seemed to be so little to them. The clothes are of simple and practical design, as one would expect. They’re not particularly comfortable looking but seem well made and warm. According to the Museum, the children’s uniforms were designed to resemble their adult stations in life, so the girls’ resembled domestic servants and the boys’ sailor uniforms. There was this one, single detail visible on the boys’ uniforms – bright buttons embossed with lambs, the symbol of the Foundling Hospital. 

Read the rest of this essay and my poem on the 26 website. 

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Black Friday is perceived as a frantic one-day sale, when shoppers lose control in the fight for bargains and retailers move mountains of stock to get a good chunk of Christmas sales in the bag. This study on Black Friday in Britain shows that the reality is somewhat different. While there will always be a small proportion of shoppers willing to fight for a bargain, the majority are sensible human beings happily buying online, at home. The losers are the retailers. Black Friday discounts drive shoppers to open their wallets earlier, but not necessarily deeper, so the idea that they are a major boost to UK Christmas spending is flawed. In November 2015, we published a report of FITCH predictions for the future of Black Friday in Britain, and our recommendations for what retailers should really be focusing on. I oversaw the project with ECD Alasdair Lennox and edited the report.

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Inside Dubai Lynx 2015: Part two

Arabic Day puts language  and its impact on culture on the agenda

I learned an Arabic word yesterday: ‘yatafakkaroun’. It translates in English to ‘thinking and questioning’ or critical thinking. Language and its impact on culture and communication was a recurring topic at the series of sessions presented in Arabic at Dubai Lynx. The sessions aimed to explore creative themes and challenges for the region – a good complement to the subjects covered on the main stage.

This is the first time Arabic-language sessions have been included in the programme, which was a surprise to learn, given how well established Dubai Lynx is. Better late than never, though – you really had to move fast to get a seat in between talks and the room was packed all day with people spilling out into the hallway. I attended a session with the help of a translation headset and my Arabic-speaking colleague Shaghig Anserlian attended a few others. We’ve compared notes for this post.

The top-billed celebrity in the Arabic programme was without doubt Egyptian YouTube star Abla (Aunt) Fahita – she’s a widowed mother of two and a puppet. She has over 2 million fans on Facebook alone and gained international attention in early 2014 when she was accused of sharing encoded terrorist messages in a Vodafone online video.

There was such buzz around her talk – Abla Fahita’s presence and star status underlined how critically important it is for brands to be thinking about video and social media in this region, particularly on mobile. According to Resolution Media, in Saudi Arabia alone, 65 per cent of users access YouTube by mobile. UTURN Entertainment explains this phenomenon in part because there are currently no movie theatres in Saudi Arabia (with the exception of a single IMAX screen), making web one of the few ways to access video.

Later, on the main stage, Twitter shared that 79 per cent of people in the Middle East use mobile to access the platform – a figure higher than the global average. McCann Worldgroup’s reasoning for part of social media’s popularity in the region is because it ‘allows forms of candid self-expression that state-run media shy away from’.

All of this social and mobile activity would seem a great opportunity for brands, however this is where we get back to language, and here’s where I hope I don’t get myself into linguistic hot water. There’s an ‘official’ form of Arabic often used in printed publications, however spoken Arabic varies quite dramatically from region to region in the Middle East. Shaghig explained that the Arabic she speaks in Beirut is quite different from the Arabic someone in Doha might speak – and these differences are far greater than the tomayto/tomahto debate that divides English speakers on either side of the Atlantic.

According to Resolution Media, although there is evidence aplenty that people in Saudi Arabia are searching online and using social media in their local Arabic dialects, brands often insist on communicating using official Arabic.This dramatically reduces the potential for engagement with consumers, but I’m guessing makes life a lot easier when working on a MENA marketing campaign.

And then there’s the challenge of translating international English-language campaigns for local markets. According to JWT Levant, while English language is made up of a mere 600,000 words, Arab writers have more than 12,000,000 to choose from (NB: I’ve been trying to verify those numbers but not been able to. Some estimate that English has up to 1,000,000 words, so, pinch of salt, everyone…).

Whatever the numbers, there is a wide selection of Arabic words to choose from but because of cultural and linguistic differences, it can be a struggle to find the right ones to use when making a direct translation. Because – and this doesn’t just apply to Arabic – language is about so much more than words. And the moment we forget that, we turn our backs on a world of possibility and shared experience.

No surprise, there’s very interesting creative work coming out of the Middle East but what was inspiring about yesterday’s Arabic language sessions was the deeper conversation around identity and communication. In the meantime, we can take heart in the knowledge that British kebabs have finally arrived in the region. Lucky them!

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Dubai Lynx 2015 – part one

Shingy, David Carson and why context matters

Context Matters: that was just one of the many big messages fired at the audience by AOL ‘digital prophet’ David Shing on the first day of the Dubai Lynx Festival of Creativity.

For me, never have those words rung more true than on this, my first trip to Dubai. Of course I had a preconceptions about UAE; I was expecting blistering heat, sand everywhere, glittering skyscrapers packed together and super cars driving down the streets.

Well, on Saturday temperatures were firmly in the ‘where’s my sweater?’ range, the sand was exactly where you’d expect it to be – on the beach – the skyscrapers I saw were separated by wide stretches of low-rise residential developments and while the super cars are roaringly present, they’ve got to share the road with saloon cars and taxis. The Dubai of my imagination isn’t wrong but it definitely lacked context.

The Dubai Lynx programme is packed with some impressive international names, exploring the festival’s theme ‘Create Tomorrow’. From Shingy’s blast of the future that’s happening to us right now to Dentsu’s Nadya Kirillova sharing the ‘Sounds of Honda’ story, it certainly feels like some of the world’s top talent and the best of the local creative scene have gathered. According to some local creatives we spoke to, this festival is an important part of the industry calendar, as there aren’t that many regional platforms to share the best work and thinking.

Sitting in a packed room as the day went on, it was clear that the MENA region is wrestling with the same old questions we all are, in whatever part of the world we may sit: how can brands stay relevant and connected to consumers in today’s world? We all know by now that the prize doesn’t lie in just one tool or platform, it lies in dramatically changing the approach we take. For me, Shing put it beautifully and powerfully, urging us to "Dream digitally with the 'primary colours' of technology, content and distribution".

I keep referring to his talk as it seemed to encapsulate most of themes from many of the speakers – that we have the tools at our disposal to engage with consumers like never before, but we can’t leave the human experience behind. I’m here because Fitch's associate design director, Shaghig Anserlian, is on the programme talking about the Importance of Play. She reinforced that point in her presentation, demonstrating how brands can create rich experiences with consumers that drive loyalty and commercial value.

All of these messages hit home to us when we visited a development called The Beach later that evening. We encountered six towers, each with a digital screen. They contained cameras that allowed us to take a picture on the promenade and then email or post the photo to social accounts. How great is that? I don’t even have to search for my phone to capture a moment. We played with it for a little while, and the other stands had small clusters of people gathered round too. What a simple, generous thing for The Beach to do and it kept us lingering in the area rather than walking on through.

Unfortunately, the resulting email was disappointing – it contained the image along with a thank you message for using ‘Hills Media Pole’. It’s not a pole, to start with (I’m a pedant) – but what is Hills Media? Google tells me it’s an agency…what about The Beach? Where did you go? It feels like a missed opportunity for the brand when I’m feeling so warm towards the experience made possible by the brand and the memories connected to it. Context matters.

So here I am, living the point that Dubai Lynx speakers were making just a few hours earlier; here was the right use of technology, in the right location, providing the right experience. It’s a real shame the follow through was so lacking.

I’ll finish with a few words from graphic design icon David Carson, who rounded out the day with a look at his career. One of his slides will stay with me for a long time: ‘Don’t mistake legibility for communication’. Today’s over-riding message could paraphrase this: Don’t think because you use the right tools that you’re truly engaging with your audience. Make it meaningful.

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Was #StormSWT the making of rail operator’s social customer care?

Something amazing happened on Monday. Yes, we were visited by the worst storm to hit these shores since 1987. But even more remarkable, the @SW_Trains Twitter feed was filled with happy tweets. Praise and support for the train operator when trains were at a standstill. As a regular commuter on this train line, I know that this is an unusual state of affairs.

South West Trains was late to the Twitter table, with an official account only established a couple of years ago. The community management team has always been quick to respond to tweets, but appears to lack either the breadth of information or the empowerment to handle the wide range of problems passengers face. These limitations combined with an often flat, quite corporate tone of voice often results in the team behind @SW_Trains being the target of anger from unhappy commuters who feel unheard and primed to see the negative in everything. 

It felt like the South West Trains team decided to take a whole new approach to handle essential communications around the storm. Over the weekend, @SW_Trains introduced the hashtag #StormSWT for conversations related to the storm. Tweets were very specific about the delays that should be expected on 28 October. What’s interesting to note is that initially, these tweets elicited quite a negative response from the community, who at that point perceived these communications as ‘excuses’. Conversation as usual, then. 

Fast (or scroll) forward by one day and things change. Tweets came in thick and fast from @SW_Trains with regular updates and…here we go, this is different…pictures! Pictures of trees fallen across lines, trees smashed through signal boxes, more trees fallen across lines. The community (including me) shared those pictures and not only were we sharing the photos, we were tweeting support for the team – tweets that were responded to with a friendly ‘thank you’ from the team.

Like many reading this blog, I have the kind of job that can be done remotely, so I worked at home and checked the stream for updates regularly. I understood my chances of getting into London that day were zero and I could also see for my own eyes what problems the clean up crews were facing, so I felt sympathy and support, not frustration. 

So pictures made a huge difference, but the tone of voice did too. For what felt like the first time, I could hear the human in @SW_Trains tweets – I’m sure I even spotted one that included “*performs cartwheels*” In response to a passenger tweeting that she’d successfully managed to make her train with their help.

#StormSWT was a good example of social customer care in action and the South West Trains community team deserves credit for the way they handled themselves on Monday. I hope it’s the beginning of a new kind of relationship with their community on Twitter.

Image source: @SW_Trains

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Brands are becoming social to adapt to people’s new attitudes and behaviour. This means developing meaningful relationships, listening and behaving appropriately.

This presentation looks in particular at what high perfroming brands on Facebook are doing right. A case study from Social Brands 100 joint number 1 brand for Facebook performance, Appliances Online is included along with Apple Group, an auto dealer doing a good job building a Facebook community.

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Buying engagement: fake likes and dodgy endorsements

It’s important to shine a light on this kind of behaviour, but it isn’t new. There have always been those willing to bend the rules to achieve short-term (and shortsighted) goals and celebs snapped carrying the latest “it bag” have been a feature of gossip rags for years. What is new is the reach these actions can have, thanks to social media. What used to be a picture in a few magazines has transformed into a personal endorsement that can be sent directly to that person’s hundreds, sometimes thousands, or even millions, of fans.*

If that’s not bad enough, for a few pounds these days, it’s possible to buy thousands of views and likes from ‘click farms’. This is news that will leave consumers feeling understandably betrayed and mistrustful. For many, the number of followers or fans a brand has acts as a form of reassurance. If those numbers aren’t to be trusted, what’s a person to do?  Why should brands bother to do the right thing if their competitor is racking up views in underhanded way?

The answer to both those questions lies with the Marketing, Brand and Communications Directors representing brands making the choice to stick to social brand principles, engaging with their communities in a transparent, authentic manner, and ensuring the agencies they work with are equally committed to a strategic, sustainable plan, not a quick win. As Dispatches shows, underhand approaches will be found out, and with tools like the Socialbakers Fake Follower Check now in existence, how long will it be before it will be possible for us to vet brands’ social accounts for authenticity before we decide whether or not to provide our endorsement? Twitter’s verified accounts will take on a whole new meaning. In the meantime, our advice is to avoid the shortcuts and build a community of real advocates.

*The IAB published guidelines to paid promotions in social media in 2012.

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At your service: the importance of social media in customer service

Commenting on social media and customer service in The Drum: 

“Brands that have ignored the potential of social media for customer service may have already been left behind. Customers are no longer willing to navigate endless ‘press one for...’ telephone systems or to wait several days for an email. They often want to tweet questions and post complaints on Facebook and they want to be treated in a respectful, transparent, authentic manner.” She suggests that the good news is that scores were generally higher for customer support metrics in Social Brands 100 2013, suggesting that companies do understand the benefits of using social media for customer service. “Getting this aspect of social media right is important for any business but an overly customer service-oriented approach isn’t necessarily going to build a loyal community. For that, a brand needs content – a word that may now be an essential part of ‘buzzword bingo’, but its importance can’t be underestimated. “If a brand can keep customers happy when they’ve got a problem and overlay that with a compelling content strategy rooted in company values, it’ll win fans in the short term but will ultimately build a loyal and engaged community of advocates,” she adds.

Read more at http://www.thedrum.com/news/2013/08/06/your-service-importance-social-media-customer-service#ZO1HOq50K0BFzdHS.99

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Step off the street(view) and come on in

Looking for ideas to drive footfall or create a better sense of a place online?

Inspired after attending one of Google’s Creative Lab Days, our developer team has been playing with some Google technologies. By linking a real Google Streetview panorama into a custom streetview, now anyone can step off Grosvenor Square and ‘visit’ our head office in Southampton. 

Virtual tours already exist online, of course, but they don’t tend to work on mobile devices and this technology does. Apart from Google, we haven’t seen anyone produce something like this with custom markers, so let us know if you spot something similar elsewhere.

Any content that can be embedded on a normal website, including video and e-commerce functionality, can be used here and it can be shareable, making content an integral part of an intuitive interactive experience in a virtual ‘world’.

Before you try, keep in mind that it’s experimental and a very simplified (dare we say ‘beta’?) version of what could be done: http://labs.fivebyfiveuk.com/wheres-vally/.

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Social Brands 100 case study: Kiss FM

What is it about cats? According to Kiss FM Web Editor Karen Campbell, pictures of cats along with other funny pictures, competitions and funny games and tasks requiring listener response are the most engaging forms of content for its social media community.

Part of the Bauer Media Group, Kiss FM is one of the top ten Publishing & Media brands in this year’s Social Brands 100. Social media plays a big role for the radio station, generating on-air content for shows and acting as a vital tool for communicating with its youth audience. “We need to engage them in the spaces they choose to be in, not just expect them to come to us,” says Campbell.

Listeners and presenters interact daily on Twitter and Facebook as part of live radio shows. “Where once radio presenters asked listeners to respond to talking points via texts, emails, or phone calls, Twitter and Facebook seem to have replaced this method as listeners prefer to communicate with us in this way,” says Campbell. She goes on to explain that during shows, most posts are made by the DJs themselves, which helps to provide additional content. Ideally, Campbell would love to see presenters engaging in conversation online as well as on-air, but as many shows don’t have producers, this level of engagement has understandably fallen down the priority list.

Kiss FM came 12th on Social Brands 100 for its performance on YouTube in particular. The platform plays an important role in providing ‘added value’ for listeners, says Campbell. “We use it mainly as a way to give fans the ability to see what happens at the station. Young listeners are no longer satisfied with ‘the mystery of radio’. They often want to actually seewhat is happening via photos and videos,” she says.

Follower numbers, likes, and YouTube views are important to KISS FM as a way to attract advertisers, “almost in the same way as with RAJAR listening figures,” adds Campbell. With the launch of two new digital stations in May, Campbell expects Kisstory and Kiss Fresh to have an impact on the social strategy once they get off the ground. In the meantime, for Campbell the focus remains on community growth and finding ways to make radio more open, instant and accessible. “This has meant experimenting with live video streaming and producing extra or exclusive online-only content such as music performances,DJ mixes, longer edits of celebrity interviews and behind-the-scenes photos,” she says. Campbell has plans for some new projects afoot which she can’t reveal the details of yet, but in the meantime, Kiss FM plans to increase video streaming and production of short-form online content.

We started with cats, so we’ll end with them. Campbell shared one of Kiss FM’s most popularInstagram pictures with us. Enjoy.

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Social Brands 100 benchmarks brand performance in social spaces. I project managed the research this year and wrote the majority of the report (with essential insights from data analyst extraordinaire Nick Owen). 

Sue Evans edited the report and contributed the case studies and Tom Chapman contributed the essay 'What's next?'.

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Social Brands 100 presentation

My presentation from the Social Brands 100 launch.

Social Brands 100 2013 Launch from Headstream

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News: Electronic Arts’ game title No. 1 in Social Brands 100 2013

The research has found that brands are starting to make the most of social for their customer care with scores slightly higher for those metrics. Scores were on average lower for engagement metrics, suggesting more could be done to better connect with people and create long-term loyalty.The Social Brands 100 report launches this morning (23 May) at an event in London, which will be livestreamed from 0900 – 1230 GMT at www.socialbrands100.com. The conversation can be found on Twitter by following the hashtag #sb100.

Social Brands 100 was created in 2011 by Headstream, who partnered with social media analytics provider Socialbakers to conduct this year’s research. The report benchmarks brand performance in social media, identifying industry leaders and providing an annual snapshot of social media’s evolution. This year’s review included over 700 brands, making it the most comprehensive yet.

Steve Sponder, Headstream Managing Director says, “With Social Brands 100 research showing an average of 10% of marketing budgets assigned to social media activity, it’s firmly part of the mix now. It also feels like more brands are getting to grips with engagement in social spaces than a year ago. The challenge is not only getting customer service right in social spaces, but creating content which creates a loyal community of advocates in the long term.”

Socialbakers measured brand engagement on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube over a six-week period using a set of key performance indicators to create a Data Score. Headstream additionally surveyed a cross-section of brands involved in the research to identify trends in social media

Jan Rezab, CEO of Socialbakers says, “When social media is used to its full potential by companies, it’s the perfect platform for, amongst other things, engaging with customers, providing customer service and raising brand awareness. Measurement is key to ensuring that your brand performs properly and we’re glad to see that Socialbakers Analytics PRO was selected to help identify winners for Social Brands 100. We hope other brands will continue to follow these great examples

Social Brands 100 is sponsored this year by user management platform Janrain. Russell Loarridge, Managing Director Europe at Janrain says, “This year’s Social Brands 100 results highlight just how important identity is to social engagement.  Ultimately, this breaks down to one-to-one interactions, and they can only truly be authentic if there is a sense of identity on both sides.”

He continues, “Without identity, trust can’t occur; neither between people nor between brands/corporations and consumers. The more brands can learn about their customers and provide genuine, authentic, personalised interactions, the more they can succeed on the social web.  And this starts with identity.”

Follow the discussion @socialbrands100 and using #sb100. The report can be downloaded from www.socialbrands100.com.

The Wall and Brand Republic are exclusive media partners to the Social Brands 100.

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News: From ASOS to Waitrose: Retail brands dominate Social Brands 100 shortlist

Retail brands make up a quarter of this year’s Social Brands 100 shortlist. Brands from sixteen industries appear on the list with Charity, Travel, FMCG and Publishing & Media the most represented after Retail – the same five industries that led the shortlist last year. Over 700 brands from 23 industries were included in Social Brands 100 this year, more than twice that of 2012.

The final ranking and report will be published on Thursday, 23 May at an event in London and you can read more about our methodology on Slideshare. Now, here’s the shortlist

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