Former OgilvyOne Creative Director, Simon Bloomfield, has been appointed Creative Director at Hyro. He will take over Hyro’s Creative and Visual Design departments.

Bloomfield joins Hyro after being Creative Director at Singleton OgilvyOne/Interactive, Clemenger Proximity and Euro RSCG. Most recently, he’s been consulting to Three Drunk Monkeys and GPY&R Sydney.

Hyro’s Digital Director, Mac Walker, said “Simon is a highly respected creative leader and brings to us a depth of creativity that complements our existing strengths in strategy, customer experience and technical development. Simon joins us at a time when Hyro is expanding on many fronts, and his appointment ensures our digital services will be as desirable to customers as they have always been useful and usable.”

According to Bloomfield, “Digital has become such an important channel for all marketing tasks over the past decade. I felt the time was right for me to bring together my skills in building strong customer relationships with Hyro’s undoubted leadership in the Customer Experience space.”

Hyro’s creative gains last year included Spirit of Tasmania, Buzz Insurance, REST and South Australian Tourism.

The previous post in this series [Rule 1 – Don’t’ Believe The Hype], made the case that Online Social Media represents ‘effect’ more than ‘cause’. In social media opinions are aired, shared and confirmed, but not originated. Social media is the water cooler conversation of the digital age, and even though brands and celebrities are allowed to overhear, and even join the conversation, the reputations of these brands and celebrities come largely pre-formed.

Social media does not represent the uniquely powerful new means of manipulating opinion promised by some*.

However, Social Media is a great place to simply listen.

There are many ways to ‘listen’. You can measure aggregate sentiment, gauge the success or failure of targeted marketing and communications activities,  gather feedback from individual customers on products and features, find out what your competitors are doing right and wrong.

 The good news: the data is rich, high volume, real-time and 100% free.

 The even better news: the opinions of social media users seem to be a very accurate measure of the opinions of the general population. Previously, I poked fun at those drawing a very long [and very wrong] bow based on research data. But in doing so, I found that the same research data showed the responses of active social media users did not materially vary from the responses of the general population, including infrequent users. In other words – what active social media users think and say is very close to what everyone is thinking and saying.

Brands can use social media as a real-time, unprompted focus group, tracking actual, intimate, and detailed conversations about their products, price and service.

Brands can measure sentiment, and derive Net Promoter Scores, across large populations, and track how these measures change over time.

Brands can collect immediate feedback on a product launch or marketing activity, and react rapidly.

These possibilities, and the appetite for analytics tools they will create, have not gone un-noticed by the global technology giants. I have seen a few sneak previews of Social Media Monitoring software to be released in 2010 – including Microsoft’s LookingGlass.

Access to these tools will result in an increasing sophistication and subtlety in the way that marketers address social media.

In the next post, I’ll consider whether the best way respond to social media is by using social media, and discuss the pros and cons of active participation.

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*Nor is any new medium likely to deliver on this promise. Ever again. The 20^th century, one-to-many model of media is in decline, and will continue to decline as long as large numbers of individuals can easily produce content of good-enough presentation quality and access distribution networks like the internet.

Much of the social media hype emanating from agencies and consultants is based on an astonishing confusion between cause and effect.

To use the analogy of social media as the ‘water cooler conversation’ of the digital age - People don’t formulate the opinion that Bank A has great service, Politician B can be trusted, or Kyle Sandilands is a goose, purely through the mechanism of a debate around the water cooler. These opinions are formed elsewhere, and brought to the water cooler.

The following assertion, published by a leading agency, epitomizes the confusion between cause and effect.  

“It’s important to note that we found no variations in the responses among the people who identified  themselves as active users of social networks and those who use social media less frequently. In other words, as you study the survey responses, note that social influencers and social media have an impact on the general consumer population – not just a small elite of social media enthusiasts.” Shiv Singh Vice President & Global Social Media Lead, Razorfish Social Media Labs. Fluent: The Razorfish Social Influence Marketing Report, 13 July 2009, p 9

Using the fact that research shows no variations in response between those who are active social media users, and those who aren’t, to conclude that social media has a uniform effect on those who use it and (somehow) on those who don’t (by some kind of spooky osmosis?) is wonky logic and wonky science.

Possible explanations for the research observations include -

1. The opinions of those who actively use social media are influenced by their use of social media, and these opinions in turn (by a mechanism unknown) uniformly influence those who don’t actively use social media
2. There is an influencing mechanism, outside of social media, to which both groups are uniformly exposed, and by which both groups are uniformly affected

In the absence of a proven hypothesis explaining the mechanism by which the opinions of social media users influence non-users, the first explanation should be rejected. (Why? Read Wikipedia entries on The Scientific Method and Occam’s Razor).

There we go again - cause and effect.

Social media use is not the mechanism that causes users’ responses. The cause originates in the media in general. What is observed amongst social media users is the effect. The real good news from Razorfish’s research is that the opinions of social media users seem to be a very accurate measure of the opinions of the general population. But more on this in the next post: “Rule 2 – listen”

Before I sign off, one more hype-puncturing factoid.

Dell is one of the poster children for Social Media strategy, especially when it comes to Twitter. Dell have invested properly in their Twitter strategy, and do a very good job at it.

In June Dell announced that Twitter had contributed to $3 million in sales revenue over a 2 year period.

Dell’s turnover for the same period was $122.2 Billion – so that’s 0.00002% of sales.