You see things and people that you wont see anywhere else; and working in Soho, this is even more the case!

What’s this got to do with marketing? Well, there exists a small coffee establishment by the name of Brewed Boy, run by a gentleman named Rob Lockyear – this coffee establishment isn’t a building, it’s a small van, tailor made to spread coffee love through Rupert St and beyond, run by someone who ‘stands in the cold for the love of making coffee’ – Eat your heart out Starbucks.

So what makes Rob and his Van different? Well, seeing as I pass it every day on the way to work – it looked interesting so I Googled ‘Brewed Boy’ and found that not only is there a presence online in the form of their blog, but they are also on Twitter!

I hit the ‘Follow’ button and discovered to my sheer delight that I was Brewed Boy’s 200th Follower. Fantastic! Informing Rob Lockyear via Twitter that I held this royal position lead to many surprises.

I headed down to Rupert St and formally introduced myself, recognizing me from Twitter, Rob proceeded to offer me a free double Espresso for my acomplishment at being his 200th follower and apologized for forgetting my special 200th Follower Cup.

What?!

This was incredible, not only was i being offered a free double Espresso, he had also made me a special 200th Follower cup to mark this special occasion.

This morning i got into work, and swiftly proceeded to head back down to Rupert St to collect my trophy, I think the picture speaks for itself.

What have we learned from this? This is a perfectly crafted example of how an online presence can benefit even the most offline of brands. Brewed Boy now has one more regular loyal customer purely due to the fact that they spent the time and effort to connect via Twitter and make me feel valued as a customer. And here I am on the internet writing about him, publishing his reach even further into the web.

Quality over Quantity people.

‘Blame Sue’ (http://www.blamesue.com) is a website fully integrated into social media, encouraging visitors to share what they ‘blame Sue’ for. If you’re not sure who ‘Sue’ is, she is the woman who Gordon Brown blamed for putting the ‘bigoted woman’ infront of him – and from this, has spiralled a massive social media following.

From a more serious view, this is media generated which is purely anti-labour, purely because of one mistake. This media will be more popular than any type of pro-labour social media campaigns due to its nature, which is detrimental to Labour’s efforts.

So far, Sue has been blamed for such things as global warming, 9/11, 7/7, cheating girlfriends, bad food, failed exams and more!

We love it, and I’m sure that the 80,000+ strong following do too – so, what do you blame Sue for?

Why not check it out yourself and share!

However, this addition to the 100 Million strong micro blogging site has received both positive and negative feedback from industry professionals. The ISBA Chair & Marketing manager at the Post Office, Alex Tait expressed concern that the addition of adverts could interfere with brands social media campaigns.

Due to the unregulated & conversational nature of Twitter, the integration of adverts and social media campaigns within the same social sphere has the potential to create

contradicting messages as well as the detrimental chance that adverts appear next to negative tweets.

In opposition to this, several online marketing experts have commented expressing the powerful potential that this new advertising system can be for brands. Ciaran Norris, the head of social media at Mindshare said that ‘Brands will definitely want to try this. Twitter has a decent audience and brands will want to test how they can connect to people.’

The advertising model will be made available to agencies first, then opened up to everyone with a self service platform, similar to Facebook adverts.

Wrigged Media now have a brand new shiny Newsletter available to subscribe to! Within this newsletter you’ll receive updates of the tastiest news and promotions within the world of Media, Marketing, Social Media and Entertainment!

Delivered straight to your inbox, this newsletter of pure win is going to be crammed full of the stuff you’re interested in and who knows, you may discover some cool stuff too!

As we’re starting small with our database, we’re going to be giving away 2 free Spotify invites per fortnight to two random subscribers! If you don’t know what Spotify is, you won’t know how good these invites areso check out our recent article on Spotify Premium or our other article outlining Spotify and why it’s so good.

Basically, if you want free music without having to pay for it, Spotify is your answer as an alternative to downloading. Well, we’ve got 4 of them to give away – so if this sounds like something you’re after, all you need to do is to sign up to our Wrigged Media Newsletter – It’s simple, free and easy to do. In no time your inbox will be blessed with our humble words – what are you waiting for? There’s free stuff!

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Don’t say we don’t spoil you.

This is massive news within the online marketing industry, for a long time people have speculated the effect of social media such as Twitter and real time conversation for SEO and search engine utilization, but had no proof as to the precise benefits.

Some extra information is provided at the Google Blog:

‘“Given this new type of information and its value to search, we are very excited to announce that we have reached an agreement with Twitter to include their updates in our search results. We believe that our search results and user experience will greatly benefit from the inclusion of this up-to-the-minute data, and we look forward to having a product that showcases how tweets can make search better in the coming months. That way, the next time you search for something that can be aided by a real-time observation, say, snow conditions at your favorite ski resort, you’ll find tweets from other users who are there and sharing the latest and greatest information.”

Bing, Microsoft’s search engine in direct competition with Google was the first to announce their deal with Twitter, to list their live updates in their search results, however, Bing have also stated that they will be including Facebooks public updates, something that Google have not announced yet.

We shall see how this unfolds for companies online marketing – for me, it’s a great opportunity to see how I can further enhance the social media and SEO for Gaming Alerts.

What do you think? How will this will affect your marketing? Do you think this is the push that all companies need to get on board the social media train for their companies?

Let me elaborate.

At the moment, the one place in which you can log in and find out what the most current events occuring across the globe is Twitter. Through providing the top 10 trending topics, you can see exactly what is on everyones lips – currently a feature which is not possible through traditional search engines, except at Bingtweets, who give you the option to see what everyone is tweeting about with regards to your search keywords.

The implications of this are important. People turn to Twitter as a means of discovery, i know i certainly do. When i log into twitter, the first thing i do is check the trending topics for trends which i would find interesting – things that could be potentially breaking news – and it doesnt take long for breaking news to be at the top of the trending topics either.

For people like me, what this does is turns Twitter into a means to find news without a specific idea of what news you want to find. It drives traffic right back to the search engines, as people take the trending topics, and immediately ‘Google’ them to find out what is so important about that keyword.

However, this doesn’t necessarily ring true for everything. For example, as i type this, Mike Tyson and Oprah have become two of the trending topics on Twitter, and now I want to find out why.

I click the trending phrases and i can see in one tweet that Mike Tyson was on the Oprah show and broke down in an emotional interview. Done. I don’t need to take this any further than that if i only cared about that information, however there will be people out there who will want to read a transcript of the interview or watch the video, and will subsequently go and Google ‘Miket tyson Oprah interview’.

Bam – instant traffic to Google.

So what are the implications of this? Well – I think the ability to provide its users up to the second trends of what people are talking about is what makes Twitter a threat to search engines services however, it is not a replacement. The two actually work very well together. Twitter discovers and makes prominent the current trends and gives people reason to go and find it.

Perhaps Google will integrate some form of ‘trending searches’ feature to their homepage, displaying what people are currently searching for the most, live, and up to second. Not sure though. It’d probably consist of Porn and drugs.

Gaming Alerts are one of the biggest online portals providing the latest gambling news & promotions. Being a heavily journalistic company and having a profile of blogs already established, Social Media implementation meant that we could provide multiple new channels of distribution for the published media to a real time audience, suggesting micro blogging as the perfect social media solution to begin with.

This Social Media implementation is very direct response based, providing real time click back data, tracking and statistics showing the interest that the social media platforms audience showed to a particular story. Meanwhile, we use a designated social account as an agent to converse with influential figures and people with an interested in Gaming Alerts or it’s Micro environment.

As it was the first time we had integrated Gaming Alerts into social media, we embarked on running a special Twitter campaign with Ladbrokes Casino, in order to create ‘buzz’ and content for people to tweet / write about. This raised our social profile within our media platforms and creating a foothold to continue with as well as gaining extensive media coverage through the forms of press releases and retweets.

With the online gambling industry saturated with thousands of promotions, the signal to noise ratio for this project was inevitably going to be high, however through taking a two pronged approach to the social media for Gaming Alerts we were able to introduce both a promotional presence to Twitter and a conversational approach.

Each have their own benefits, and provide both the consumer and B2B players with different offerings.

Conversational: GA_Social

Promotional: Gaming_Alerts

Due to Gaming Alerts operating in such a competitive market, there were bound to be problems establishing the social media platforms. The main Issue in Twitter was the ability for our genuine promotional tweets leading back to quality published articles penetrating the spam tweets set by robot accounts to occur a certain amount of times per hour.

This made it hard for genuine users, interested in the latest ‘Gaming Alerts’ to find us and follow us.

From this it was necessary to accept that the noise in the public timeline shrouding our tweets from consumer searches was out of our control, and hence the Social twitter account was born. This twitter account is in operation to find conversations to direct people to appropriate material published on Gaming Alerts and works in conjunction with the promotional account.

With a personal touch and a degree of transparency & sincerity, this is successful in building authority to members on Twitter in regards to Gaming Alerts and their published content. It also directed users to us with a far greater conversion potential, through involving ourselves with appropriate conversations and interacting with influential tweeters in the industry.

With search engines placing more and more weighting to real time updates, such as those in Twitter – it’s important for us to keep the promotional account running, as for consumers searching engines such as BingTweets which feature live update listings, they will be able to find tweets from Gaming Alerts containing promotions and stories.

Meanwhile the conversational account will remain an agent, seeking to create and involve itself in the conversations with users of Gaming Alerts’ Micro and Macro environment.

In the future we hope to integrate Gaming Alerts into further social media platforms to reach different segmented audiences & aim to carryout a detailed analysis of their social mediascape in order to better target and communicate with the right people.

To find out more information about the Social Media being developed for Gaming Alerts, e-mail us at info@wriggedmedia.co.uk

A micro blog gives the user the opportunity to post small, real time updates which get submitted to a public timeline, which is fully searchable with the use of keywords and tags.

A micro blog still bears similarity to a regular blog, in the way that posts are made, and published. However, a regular blog is formed through less frequent, longer and well constructed posts, where as a microblog post can be a small update telling users what the ‘deal of the day’ is.

Twitter is the most popular micro blogging service, which has revolutionised the way in which people share information and converse through the internet, it can even be described as the voice of the internet. It’s the first place in which you can find out what the world is talking about, through analysing the trending topics.

This is where Twitter can be used as a very powerful tool from a marketing point of view, with the ability to find out what the world is talking about you can also find out what the world has to say about your brand.

By integrating yourself into this social media platform, you are able to actively involve yourself with the conversations that the world is having about your Organisation and influence the outcomes of these conversations, be that positive or negative.

The idea is to be completely transparent to your publics, a point of honesty and trust to which your publics are able to feel comfortable interacting with, sharing feedback, likes, dislikes, and a channel through which you can supply information to the people who matter on a real time basis through short, 140 character ‘tweets’.

Many different companies have embraced Twitter in many different ways, ranging from a pure customer service tool dealing directly with consumers, to a tool used to inform followers of promotions & press releases to crazy marketing stunts – whatever your company does, there are bound to be conversations occurring about your brand to which you can be involved with – and if there aren’t, i’ts the perfect opportunity to give them something to talk about!

Overall, Twitter gives you the opportunity to listen to what people are saying about your company, learn about why they’re saying it and involve yourself with social engagement in order to influence these conversations on a real time basis whilst being a live point of contact for your publics.

With the right people, it can be customised to your brand and utilised as a powerful tool of public relations with limitless integration into a marketing campaign.

Wrigged is designed to keep its finger on the pulse of Social Media & how its integration into marketing is both creative and incredibly effective with a substantial Return on Involvement.

Social Media isn’t just about constantly tweeting on Twitter, or inviting thousands of friends on Facebook – it’s about getting involved with your publics, in the conversations that matter the most, the ones about your brand.

Many marketeers expect to implement ‘Social Media’ into their company with visions of having substantial ROI within a week. Wrong. Social media implementation is a qualitative process and should not be rushed.

With patience & dedication, the channels you implement will start to form their own communities in which you’re involved with, actively shaping the conversations about your brand whilst being a transparent point of contact to which your publics can interact with, but first, you need to know exactly the social metrics which surround your brand.

We can listen to and interpret the current social activity surrounding your brand, turning what we hear into trackable and quantifiable information which can be then channeled into a campaign.

Whether you choose to implement Social Media Marketing to raise brand awareness, enhance your PR, provide better customer service or provide live updates (The list is endless…) – Social Media provides an unlimited source of customisable potential with the ability to really pull your brand into the 21st Century – and hand over the branding to the people who matter the most, your publics.