Produced, directed and edited by our in-house Exo Team, working with Lexis Sport & Entertainment.

Watch episode 1 here: http://bit.ly/DTH_1
Watch episode 2 here: http://bit.ly/DTH_2

SOCIAL MEDIA DOWNLOAD

• Is Facebook setting its sights on becoming a paid for service? The social media giant has started testing a system that allows users pay to highlight or promote posts. Aiming at the social climber within all of us, this service (for a small fee) ensures information a user posts becomes more visible to friends and colleagues
• Forget Ibiza, now you can bring Pacha to your living room! DJs Sebastian Ingrosso from Swedish House Mafia and Alesso are set to throw the first Spotify house party by setting up a special room in the Soundrop app – find out how you can get involved here
• Following its much talked about recent sale, all eyes are on Instagram, how it will evolve and how brands can get involved. This is a fantastic overview on how brands are using the tool with case studies from the likes of Red Bull and Marc Jacobs

TOOLBOX

• New tool VenueSeen helps brands to identify and interact with customers discussing them on social media. The tool works by pulling in location-specific content from Facebook, Instagram, Foodspotting and Foursquare

CAMPAIGN/VIRAL OF THE WEEK

• We love this new campaign to support the Wounded Warrior Project (WWP). Application HashtagsforHeroes auto-populates the unused characters in a tweet with messages to raise awareness for WWP. To get involved and donate your unused twitter characters, read more here
• The first ‘invisible ad’ from Lynx Anarchy (Australia) is going from strength to strength with over 70,000 views in the last month. Simple yet effective technology and a fun twist makes this content extremely shareable while the house itself has become one of Sydney’s must-see destinations. Click the image below for the full video

INFOGRAPHIC

This smart infographic from Campalyst shows the top 250 internet retailers and which retail industries are leading on each platform. Did you know Nike is the brand with the most YouTube subscribers at an impressive 200,000? Well now you do.

SOCIAL MEDIA DOWNLOAD

• The days of fashion fanatics relying on their best friend’s opinion whilst out shopping may be numbered – you can now harness recommendations from Facebook.  C&A in Brazil  has embedded real-time Facebook ‘likes’ on the coat hangers of your potential purchases. The project, called ‘Fashion Like’ hopes to reassure shoppers by the power of recommendation and encourage them to part with that all important cash.
• Getting a job these days has become quite the gauntlet – especially if you want to demonstrate your expertise in the myriad ways of communicating in the digital age. One Harvard Business School graduate who hoped to snag a job at the successful start up Pinterest, used the site to create a Pinterest CV. In her message to Pinterest she exclaimed ‘This aint your mama’s resume!”. Well quite.

TOOLBOX

Photos, messages, articles, posts… what would we do if our digital lives were wiped out? Make sure it doesn’t happen with Social Safe: Back up your Facebook Timeline, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ & Instagram to create a searchable digital journal.

If you don’t have the Photoshop skills to create fun memes of you and your friends: Memekit has arrived. It allows you to pull photos and statuses from your Facebook to easily create pictures. Here’s one Mashable made earlier:

CAMPAIGN/VIRAL OF THE WEEK

When four homeless men were given phones and twitter accounts in New York City, they went from being invisible and voiceless to award winning communicators. The “Underheard in New York” campaign by BBH New York and New York Rescue Mission shone a social media light on the plight of the homeless and encouraged people to act. The campaign has been accoladed with Gold awards for Social Media, Content and Contact at the 2012 Clio Awards. Watch the case study video here:

INFOGRAPHIC

Instagram has become the ‘smartphone photographer’s app of choice’ and gains one new user every second. Check out the infographic below for some more mind-boggling facts about the hit photo app.

Produced and directed by Exo, Lexis’s in house video production experts, for client William Hill, keep an eye out for episode 3 next week.

SOCIAL MEDIA DOWNLOAD

• Klout, the tool we all use to measure influence on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn and Foursquare, has launched ‘Brand Squads’, its version of brand pages, into beta with Red Bull as its sole launch partner. The site will gradually roll out more Brand Squads in the coming weeks, and each of the pages will feature the brand’s logo, a list of the top 10 and top 100 influencers about the brand, an activity stream and any brand-specific deals offered through Klout’s Perks platform.

• Just when you thought there was nothing else Facebook could do to change the world, the brand has unveiled a new tool for ‘saving lives’. The social network has added the possibility to share your organ donor status onto timeline. Users can also share their story about when, where or why they decided to become a donor as well as signing up to their national registry.
• We’re sure you’ve noticed the recent changes to your Google+ profile, so here’s a run down of the new features and how they might affect your brand pages.

THE TOOLBOX

Tweet Charts launched this week, allowing you to pull together data on any any keyword, phrase, username, hashtag or URL in the simplest way possible. The tool gives you a list of the most mentioned users, top hashtags and most popular media and is really handy for pulling together quick stats on brand pages.

CAMPAIGN/VIRAL OF THE WEEK 

Communications agency Duval Guillaume Modern created this hard hitting film in support of the Stop the Traffik campaign to highlight exploitation in the sex trafficking industry. The cleverly titled film has over 1,200,000m views so far.

Microsoft took a more social media friendly approach to it’s recent Office 365 launch, targeting female bloggers with the announcement rather than using traditional advertising or PR. But instead of directing promotional messages toward the bloggers, Microsoft involved them in the process from start to finish. Take a look at the case study, here.

BIG DATA: INFOGRAPHIC OF THE WEEK

Produced and directed by Exo, Lexis’s in house video production experts. Episode 2 coming very soon…

SOCIAL MEDIA DOWNLOAD

• Google launched Google Drive yesterday, after weeks of speculation. The new service will allow you to store documents in ‘the cloud’ and log in from anywhere in the world to access them. A key selling point for the new service is that it will incorporate Google Docs, which means you will be able to work collaboratively on documents in real time. Another interesting element of the service is that you will be able to open documents in the browser in 30 different formats – even if you don’t have the software installed! The service will also impact on your search results – so if you’ve stored a picture of Tower Bridge, next time you google that term your photos will show up in the image results. At the moment you can download Drive to your mobile, tablet, PC or Laptop.
• Pinterest has really blown up recently, so how can your business take advantage of the network’s new found popularity? This article from Social Media Examiner provides five tips on how to make your site sharable to Pinterest users.
• We’ve all seen the queues at the Apple store for the new iPads and at Game when Modern Warfare launches but did you know that in the US Nike stores suffer the same fate when new trainers are launched? In response Nike has instigated an interesting new method of managing the crowd for their product launches. The company has created a Twitter RSVP service that alerts users to a time and location where they will be able to get hold of new products. The stores tweet out a shoe specific hashtag, which users must then DM back to their specific store, with identification details and shoe size. They are then told when to turn up to the store to collect their shoes!

THE TOOLBOX

SeeClickFix is a web application, also available for iPhone, Android and Blackberry, that empowers active citizens with a simple and easy avenue to reach their government about non-essential issues they see within their communities. The tool is effectively crowd sourcing the identification of civic issues.

SeeClickFix lets people highlight issues in their neighborhood to local administrators.

Another tool that has been all over the web this week is SocialCam. Described as ‘Instagram for video’ this app has seen huge growth and is sure to be an acquisition target for one of the major tech companies in the coming months. The app allows you to capture video content, edit it, apply filters to it and then share it anywhere and everywhere.

SocialCam is like Instagram for Facebook and encourages the sharing of video on social sites.

CAMPAIGN/VIRAL OF THE WEEK 

Universal Studios celebrates it’s 100th anniversary this year and to celebrate they are bringing some legends of the silverscreen to your smatphone/tablet. The company have create and app, devised by Aurasma, that will react to 15 different blu-ray and DVD covers to bring scenes from the specific films to life on your screen.

The app also works with three locations in central London. If you visit Big Ben you can see the DeLorean from Back To The Future appear and you can also find King Kong clambering up Nelson’s Column. The Queen may also need additional security for the Diamond Jubilee as a T-Rex from Jurassic Park will appear at Buckingham Palace if you have the app.

Universal's app incorporates AR technology with real world locations to bring some of the silver screen's biggest names to life.

The PRCA disagreed. However, the industry does agree that it is not simply ‘generating editorial media coverage for a brand’. That is called Publicity. It is a part of the process but not the true skill. PR skill is about creating 3^rd party endorsement. In other words, an unbiased recommendation from a trusted source. This could be a journalist endorsing a product to their readers. It could be a blogger to their fans. It could be customer to customer, friend to friend, fan to fan etc. But how does it actually work and how has that evolved?

For many years the industry either hired ex-journalists to sell stories to former colleagues or wined and dined the media in order to build relationships they could leverage (and a lot of that still goes on of course). Account Directors had to try to think like a journalist and develop either a ‘nose’ or a ‘gut’ for a story. However, as PR channels have expanded to include individuals that staff have no relationship with, how has the industry trained its ‘strategic people’ in the science of 3^rd party endorsement?

At the heart of this is one simple question. Why do people recommend a brand, product, service or person? This is very different to why people share content (potentially signalling their status) or why people talk about content (conversation is a catch all). That has a parallel with getting some coverage (probably a survey with a tenuous link) with a brand mention. Is that really an endorsement? Will it change behaviour? The answer to the critical question is not simple but it is one that Lexis is researching with behavioural psychologists and MBA students to try to put into our planning wheel process that all staff use so that they don’t have to rely upon a belly and a beak.

Here is a starter for ten: Consider expectation management for every brand touch point. Apply a score card on exceeding and failing to meet those expectations. Benchmark current achievement. Create newsworthy and memetic experiences at every touch point that exceed the norm. The further away from the norm, the greater the propensity to recommend. So, easy peasy then!

Of course, you still need the creative magic to produce ideas that inspire and there will never be a science for that! (even if our Wonderwall helps). We will have a definitive White Paper by September but in the meantime, any thoughts would be welcome!

Jason Gallucci, Lexis CEO