Let’s be clear. Facebook isn’t ‘over’ any more than Google is. Facebook dominates our online world and is here to stay. What IS over I hope are attempts to force Facebook into an ‘old media’ model by agencies and ad men who don’t really get it (and even Facebook execs are guilty of this).

Facebook still offers unparalleled opportunities for brands, but not in the buying of banner ads and sponsored statuses. Here are 5 reasons brands don’t need to PAY to advertise on Facebook:

1. Advertising on Facebook is free if your marketing content is interesting enough.

Mark Zuckerberg created an online world where any brand, regardless of ad budget, has an equal chance to be heard. If you have authentic, interesting great marketing content you don’t need to pay to disseminate it. Set-up a brand page and start telling your story.

2. If you create compelling content that can go viral you don’t need any paid ad spend behind it.

Sure you can pay to ‘boost’ your content with paid ads. But if your content is compelling enough you don’t need to. Look at YouTube – the most viral and highest rated videos aren’t created by the worlds top TV or ad directors, they’re very often low budget, frequently low quality and created by an individual. But they tell a story and they grip imagination and attention. If you can do that for your brand you don’t need deep pockets or big bucks.

3. Your best advertisers are not ad men and copywriters but enthused passionate, authentic, advocates of your brand. Find them and amplify their voices, not yours.

How long do you think brands take briefing new ad teams on their brands? Getting them under the ‘skin’ of their consumers and telling them what their customers think, through focus groups, research and extensive briefings ? All so their ad messaging is ‘authentic’ and ‘speaks the language’ of the consumer. On social networks you don’t need to talk TO the consumer, you need to let the consumer TALK. Find your biggest fans and let them be your ad team – they’re a lot cheaper.

4. Social media can NOT be treated the same way as ‘old media’, entirely different rules apply. Anyone who tells you differently doesn’t ‘get’ social media.

This is not just about Facebook. It’s about all social media. Brands have got to stop trying to fit social into a TV or print, broadcast, mould. It’s not the same medium and they can’t use the same message. Cut the banner ads and the featured tweets and use each platform’s strengths. Encourage your brand advocates to campaign FOR you.

5. The world has changed, broadcast marketing, controlled by brands’ heavy ad spends and ‘one-way’ messaging, has hugely decreased in effectiveness. Facebook offers a never-before-seen opportunity to get directly to consumers & find out what they’re thinking/saying/doing.

Tear up the advertising bibles and your ad spend schedule and spend your time listening instead of talking online. It’s harder work, it takes different skills and it’s not as nice and simple as handing over a media budget to a 3rd party but it WORKS.

All this begs the question, how will Facebook make money if agencies like mine are encouraging brands away from paid ad spend and focusing them on creating compelling content and empowering brand advocates?

I’m glad to say that’s not my problem. All I do know is that Facebook and the myriad other social platforms aren’t ‘dead’ because big brands have found out paid advertising on them just isn’t effective. They’re here to stay and they undoubtedly WILL crack the thorny ‘monetisation’ issue and unlock a revenue stream. Paid advertising just isn’t ‘it’.

5 reasons brands don’t need to advertise on Facebook is a post from: Tamar

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We’re very keen as an agency to support our national team and we hope the infographics series will help spread information about the team in an exciting visual way that will encourage the whole nation to get behind them.

The first in the series “Behind TeamGB”, published today, concentrates on the history of the team, the support behind them and where GB currently stands in the all-time Olympics medals table.

The second “Meet the Team” will be published when the last of the 550 athletes is selected in July and will introduce you to the men and women who will represent us at London 2012.

The third and last infographic will be published after the closing ceremony of the Games and will showcase our national team’s medal success.

I hope everyone will enjoy and share the infographic series and will get behind TeamGB!

Tamar help TeamGB with launch of infographic series is a post from: Tamar

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At Tamar our mission is to create digital brand legends, amplifying the power of consumers who don’t merely ‘like’ brands, but truly ‘love’ them. With Facebook’s implementation of the engagement-driven open graph, it’s important for brands to be loved, now more than ever before. It’s no longer good enough, if it ever was, to simply build thousands of ‘likes – high levels of engagement are key for visibility and influence across social media platforms. Furthermore, with digital comes international and those who make their presences known globally and engage with worldwide audiences in their local markets will reap the rewards – not to mention the profits.

With so many brands, platforms and media competing for consumer attention these days, being merely ‘liked’ most certainly means being “out of sight, out of mind”. It’s essential to begin cultivating interactive social communities that love your brand and serve as brand ambassadors, facilitating engagement levels and bringing even more fans into the community, valuable fans – the kind that money can’t buy.

We weren’t surprised that ASOS tops the BrandLove25 forthe 2nd year running but it has been interesting to see several new brands appearing on the table this year. This time around we’ve kept a keen eye on growth and how social media has played a part in the year-on-year performance of the British digital brands that are out-performing this tough economy at a time when familiar high street chains are closing their doors on what seems like a daily basis.

Out of the 25 brands on the BrandLove25 league table this year, Missguided had the highest YOY growth of an impressive 380% and the majority of them grew more than 20% in the past year. After a closer look at some of the fastest growing brands on the BrandLove league table including Missguided, Wiggle, Boohoo and Secret Sales, we found that most of these fast growing brands, unlike the others on the table, are using YouTube and several of them are ‘early adopters’ of the popular emerging platforms Pinterest and Instagram.

In contrast, we were very interested to find that the brand on our league table with the smallest social community achieved the smallest amount of year-on-year growth. With the wide acceptance and acknowledgement of the importance of social media conversions to generate online sales, those brands who have not adapted their marketing plans are clearly beginning to suffer and may eventually render themselves irrelevant to consumers. Without the benefit of brand advocates in the social media space, there’s no way to compete for the patronage of potential customers who are influenced most through social media.

Though many brands on this table have higher revenue figures than the four mentioned above, their future survival will ultimately depend on maintaining high year-on-year revenue growth. Judging by what we’ve seen in our analysis, fast-growing brands like Missguided are gaining on them – and they’re using social media to do it.

Download the Infographic…

Britain’s pure-play digital brands use social media to turn in 27% YOY revenue growth is a post from: Tamar

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Yesterday afternoon in New York, Facebook held the first ever Facebook marketing conference fMC, which aims to do for marketers and brands what f8 does for developers.

The majority of the announcements were focused around changes to the Facebook ad platform; brand “stories” (aka ads) appearing in news feeds; a new “premium” service to feature ads on mobile; and a Back To The Future-inspired  “Reach Generator” to ‘boost’ brand-page updates out to a wider audience.

However, one ‘free’ development has some interesting implications for social media brand strategy. The new ‘Timeline’-style Facebook page layouts, that have been available to individuals since late 2011, are now being extended to brands. And hidden in this seemingly innocuous announcement is a potential bombshell for brands who have been focusing their brand strategy entirely on growing their ‘likes’ numbers.

The new ‘Timeline’ layout means that while ‘tabs’ will still exist on brand  pages, the ability to push or force non-fans to a specific tab (i.e. a splash or landing  page) will no longer exist after the full roll-out on March 30th.

Writing on The Next Web, Nancy Messieh notes that eliminating these landing tabs takes away a core feature that many companies have heavily relied on to make a first impression with potential Facebook fans – and to aggressively grow their community sizes.

These companies have been focusing their strategy entirely around using a landing tab to promote a variety of contests and giveaways to grow their ‘likes’. This will no longer be an option which means companies will now have a tough time *forcing* people to like their page, and will instead have to focus much more on engagement tactics to *persuade* them.

I’m all in favour of this and many in the online world agree with me. Giancarlo Massaro, founder of AnyLuckyDay, agrees that ultimately, the new-style brand pages will now force companies to focus much more on user engagement as they develop their Facebook strategy rather than shameless likes getting. “You could have 50,000 likes or 5,000 likes, what matters is the amount of engagement,” Massaro says, and I agree.  We’ve seen average ‘fan value’ (revenue per fan) for brands just plummet when community sizes are being aggressively grown by these artificial tactics.

Existing brand customers are also hugely turned-off by an aggressive focus on luring new ‘likes’ to a brand page at the expense of time and money spent on improving customer service through social media and growing customer satisfaction through engagement.

Facebook appears to be forcing a massive and much-needed focus shift in 2012, with all companies now needing to be focusing much less on growing their ‘Likes’ and focusing much more on engaging with the fans and customers that they already have. And those customers will of course then generate new ‘likes’ organically for them via their enthusiastic recommendations.  As far as I am concerned that can only be good news for all of us as both marketers and consumers.

Facebook fMC drops a bombshell on shameless ‘likes getting’ by brands is a post from: Tamar

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Trend spotting firm trendwatching.com have coined a neat buzz word for this, ‘flawsome’. In a nutshell, brands who want to be truly awesome online have got to be prepared to reveal their faults and flaws – and be more flawsome.

Why does this work? Well human nature being what it is, people appear to have a hard time feeling close to, or really trusting, other people who seem or pretend to have no weaknesses or flaws – or who just don’t seem to ever make any mistakes.

We instinctively distrust ‘perfection’. And we feel the same way about brands. We just can’t feel connected with them if they claim to be perfect. On the other hand, we actively appreciate and respond to any disclosure of problems or flaws. After all, we’re now disclosing more and more of ourselves through social media channels so we expect our brands to do the same.

This is nowhere seen more clearly than in the area of onsite product or service reviews: 68% of consumers trust reviews MORE when they see both good AND bad scores, while 30% suspect censorship or faked reviews if there aren’t ANY negative comments or reviews (Source: Reevoo.com, January 2012).

Even more inteteresting, shoppers who go out of their way to read bad reviews convert 67% more than the ‘average’ consumer (Source: Reevoo.com, January 2012).

And when things go wrong in the brand-consumer experience being ‘human’ in the way you respond turns out to be even more important.

Thanks to social media consumers now have even more opportunities available to them than ever before to be able to complain vociferously and publicly about poor service or disappointment. But if handled well those exposed flaws can actually be made to work for a brand and it can be made flawsome.

76% of people who complained on Twitter received no response from the brand. But among those who WERE contacted, 83% liked or loved that the brand responded, and 85% were satisfied with the response (Source: Maritz Research, September 2011).

So, bear in mind when planning your social media strategy, consumers don’t expect brands to be flawless. In fact, consumers will embrace brands more that are flawsome. Brands that are flawsome show their empathy, humility, flexibility, humour and, above all their humanity. And they reap the rewards.

Brands, be flawsome to be awesome. is a post from: Tamar

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We spend at lot of time at Tamar thinking about how consumers show they ‘love’ a brand, and what that means. What makes a brand well loved? Is it possible to track how customers demonstrate their love for a brand through their online interactions? And, in these tricky times, how successful are those brands at translating ‘love’ into profit?

When we started the Brand Love series in 2011 we decided to measure ‘love’ by the degree of social interactions with the brand online. There are lots of different measures and our table deliberately lays itself wide open to challenges of metrics that haven’t been considered. But as a very transparent, easily trackable measure it’s still effective. This year we’ve been able to add some of the newer social platforms to our metric (like Pinterest and Instagram) as more brands have adopted them.

Our thinking is that if you’re following a brand on Twitter (or Instagram or Pinterest) and engaging with it on Facebook, that suggests your feeling about it is somewhat stronger than mere ‘awareness’. You’re interested in what that brand has to say and you want to get news and updates about its activity. Following a brand shows you’re actively involved with it, not just a passive appreciator of its charms. That kind of active involvement is what every brand in the social media age is seeking. Engaged fans will buy your brand time and time again over any competitor because they feel ownership and involvement.

It’s Social Media Week in London this week and London Fashion Week kicks off on Friday, so this Brand Love infographic looks at how well-loved British fashion brands are in 2012. And how British high-end fashion brands like Burberry and Victoria Beckham stack up against the British ‘high street’ represented by brands such as ASOS and Topshop.

No surprise that Burberry are way out ahead of the pack with a combined social media community of 11mill+. They’re simply off the scale compared to other fashion brands, both British and global. Burberry COO Christopher Bailey says that “digital innovation is an integral part of the culture at Burberry” and the brand has led the fashion pack in investing in digital and particularly in social media. Burberry has consistently innovated, being one of the first to launch a mobile-commerce site, offering buying off-the-runway of certain items and it held the first ever ‘Tweet Walk’ in 2011 (“Burberry works with Twitter to create social media history“) where each look was tweeted backstage before hitting the ramp – the show was also streamed live on Facebook.

Over on the high street, Topshop and Asos have also capitalised on the social media revolution by using social media to show celebrities (like Alexa Chung) and well-known fashion bloggers (like Suzie Bubble) wearing their clothes. They promote celebrity designer collections (currently Mary Katrantzou for Topshop) heavily via social media platforms and tweet from the catwalk at fashion weeks, both brands are currently at New York Fashion Week tweeting runway shots.

In looking at the differences between the high-end and high street brands we saw that the social media interactions of the high-end brands are much more focused on strengthening brand image rather than driving direct sales. The high street brands, on the other hand, hardly ever tweet or post a status update without including a direct link to buy that product. They’re very much using social as a sales tool.

However, even though brand building may be the focus for a high-end brand like Burberry it has very definitely had a huge impact on sales. At the end of last year the brand credited its revenue growth (£830m in the six months to 30 September 2011, which pushed pre-tax profit up 26% to £162m) directly to the decision to switch the majority of its marketing spend to digital. It’s said to spend over 60% of its marketing budget on digital channels, about three times the average investment by most brands in most sectors.

The next stage in our Brand Love journey has always been about examining the propensity of each brand to translate ‘love’ not just into sales, but into profit. Burberry have come right out and admitted that their investment in digital and social has boosted profit. We’d love to hear from other fashion brands on how they’re feeling the love today! Happy Valentine’s Day.

Tamar’s Brand Love on Valentine’s Day: British high-end vs high street fashion brands is a post from: Tamar

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Toyota wins the prize for the most inept attempt to leverage Super Bowl buzz with a series of spammy tweets about what it called the “Camry Effect a Friend’ Giveaway!”. The carmaker described its Camry Effect campaign as one of the “most ambitious social media campaigns we’ve ever implemented.” But it beggars belief that setting up a load of verified twitter accounts simply to send spam @ messages to random individuals (based on nothing more than a tweet mentioning the Super Bowl), was the work of any half-competent social media team. We’d love to know if there was an agency involved (we hope not) or if, as we suspect, this was an in-house job by a marketing team who clearly believe social media is simply just a new broadcast medium on a massive scale.

The Toyota episode also reflects badly on Twitter itself, so it’s a double social media #FAIL. They verified all the spam accounts, they should have known better.

But Toyota hasn’t been the only 2012 car industry social media #FAIL . Another manufacturer , Volkswagen, also came under fire earlier in the year after apparently deleting comments critical of the company’s environmental credentials on its Facebook page

The firm had asked users to to list New Year’s resolutions and make suggestions about what people would like to see the company achieve in 2012… but then clearly didn’t like what they heard.

Greenpeace, which is critical of Volkswagen’s environmental track record, claims the car maker ignored thousands of unfavourable comments about their green credentials and then began deleting them. Earlier screen grabs of the page showed comments such as “Stop threatening our planet by lobbying against climate laws. You should be ashamed of yourselves.” and “YES YES YES stop lobbying against green resolutions.” all of which seem to have been subsequently deleted.

There’s a common thread running through these car industry #FAILs. Both brands are obviously keen to embrace social media but both are trying to adapt their tactics to fit the ‘old’ broadcast-style or ‘control the message’ approach. Social media is an entirely new marketing medium and NEW tactics are needed. But, before brands panic, we want to reassure them – they’re simply the tried and tested old tactics of good customer service; don’t shout at or ignore your customers, listen to them – and then, let them know you’ve heard. Couldn’t be simpler.

Tamar’s Friday #FailureToLaunch #16 – “Spam, spam, spam and the Super Bowl” is a post from: Tamar

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Proponents of the bill say it will bring in much needed legislation to stop Internet piracy and that Google, among others, should play a key role in that enforcement.

Opposers say that this bill amounts to nothing less than internet censorship and effectively the prevention of freedom of speech, since it gives the US attorney general the power to completely censor access by its citizens to foreign sites that the US government doesn’t have jurisdiction to take down directly.

WikiLeaks is the most frequently given example by opposers of the bill. Under SOPA, American citizens” ISPs could be forced to block their individual access to Wikileaks. The concerns are that once the technical means to do this are in place, then it becomes very easy for this power to be extended.

All the ‘big’ internet names have joined together in a protest move against SOPA, Google are registering opposition with a ‘censored’ logo and a link on their homepage to more information, but that falls short of Reddit and Wikipedia, both of whom have gone ‘dark’ today. The SOPA issue has found the opposition very divided with how best to show their protest. Twitter’s CEO Dick Costolo tweeted this week about the ‘go dark’ movement, “closing a global business in reaction to single-issue national politics is foolish.”.

As someone who sat in a hotel room in Shanghai not so very long ago trying to access the BBC website with a slowly dawning realisation that access was blocked to me in China (nothing like appreciating the impact of censorship by experiencing it yourself), I find myself firmly in the anti-SOPA camp.

I want my children to still enjoy a free and open Internet where information can be shared without censorship. I may not always like, or agree with, what they can access and read but I don’t want the decision taken on their, or my, behalf on what falls into the definition of ‘acceptable’. I believe SOPA would set a very frightening precedent for other similar legislation worldwide. If I wanted to live like my friends and colleagues in China I would move there, I place a high value on the freedoms I enjoy in the western world.

For that reason Tamar is supporting the anti-SOPA protests today and we encourage you to do so.

SOPA? So what? is a post from: Tamar

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To round off the year, here is Tamar’s Top 10 blogs of 2011, compiled by choosing a combination of our personal favourites and weaving in the blogs that generated the most comments, views and shares:

10. The Social Media Voice and THAT Footballer
We looked at the effect of Twitter on this year’s “Super Injunction” scandal, and how the courts failed to silence the new media and the Twitter gossip mill…

9. Burberry making social media history
This year’s London Fashion Week saw designer brand Burberry streaming their catwalk show live via their Twitter channel – a move which attracted almost as much coverage as it did new followers…

8. 5 Ways to Optimize for Google Places
We’ve all seen Google Place results coming up in search results – but how do you ensure your locations come up higher than your competitors? We investigated…

7. London 2012: Best Games Plan
With less than a year to go until the biggest show in the world hits London, I took a look at the ways in which brands can capitalise on the buzz around the Olympics in 2012…

6. YouTube Scores a Win, But What Are You Watching
This year saw YouTube break all sorts of personal records for traffic, as well as showing a massive uplift in mobile movie views – but what are people actually watching?

5. Digital Santa Infographic
The most recent post on the list, our Digital Santa infographic takes a festive look at all the different ways Father Christmas is utilising social media to spread Christmas cheer…

4. Steve Jobs and Me
I took a personal look at the life of recently-deceased visionary Steve Jobs, a man who had a big impact in my own life as well as millions of others.

3. A Twitter Experiment – The Dangers of Blind Retweeting
If you’re Twitter feed is ever filled with B-list celebrities retweeting charity requests or birthday messages from their followers, you’ll definitely want to read this post…

2. Digital Predictions for 2012 / Predictions Infographic
Every year we produce our predictions for the coming 12 months – this year, as well as looking forward, we also took a light-hearted look back, producing a review looking at our success rates in previous years…

1. Brand Love 25 / Britain’s Best Loved Digital Brands
This year saw the launch of our bi-annual “Best Digital Brands” report, which caused more than a little conversations when we released them in February and September…

Tamar’s Top 10 Blogs of 2011 is a post from: Tamar

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And who better to include in our Winter infographic than the big man himself – Santa Claus, aka Father Christmas. Hopefully giving him this much publicity will definitely get us on to his “Good” list this year…

Amongst the things we looked at for the research were: Who are the most popular Santas on Facebook and Twitter? Which country searches for Santa the most, and what name do they use when they’re searching? How popular is Santa on YouTube? We’ve also taken a look at one of our favourite Christmas digital events – the NORAD Santa tracker.

All in all, it’s a great way to get in the mood for the start of the holiday season. So sit back, relax, pour yourself a glass of Eggnog and enjoy the Tamar Christmas Infographic. Happy Christmas!

[Click image for a larger, shareable version!]

Santa goes digital for Tamar’s festive infographic! is a post from: Tamar

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