In advance of the 2013 Grand National, we at Arena decided to see if Social Media could predict the winner or, more importantly, the punter interest in each runner — which may indicate the winner.
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You could fairly say our immune system is buggered. Whenever there’s a bug going round, we’ll catch it and sneeze it right back out, spreading the infection to colleagues, clients, friends, family and followers.
Unlike most offices, this has nothing to do with the air conditioning. I blame the recruitment process. Arena tends to hire people who are prone to trends, fads, earworms, buzzwords, memes and virals. Because knowing what it’s like to need to share something helps us do our jobs better.
We’ve recently had the Harlem Shakes and a severe case of Hadouken, and I wouldn’t be surprised if 247 Tottenham Court Road became be the backdrop for many more memes.
Handing your Twitter details to your colleagues seems like a rather unwise thing to do, but the fearless amongst us have done exactly that.
Over the past few weeks here at Arena, we have turned our keen social-media-monitoring eye upon ourselves, looking at Twitter activity across the agency and attempting to draw some conclusions from this data.
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There have been 2 pieces of news doing the rounds in the last week on how Twitter influences TV viewing. In the US, Nielsen has just released a study that shows that, on average, an 8.5% jump in Twitter conversation about a show generated a 1% increase in ratings. And closer to home, UKTV have said that they believe Twitter conversation has driven TV ratings for their shows.
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“To crack the glass ceiling you don’t need a sharp stick, you need a sharp suit”, says one of the tube ads. It got me thinking, what do women need to do to succeed in advertising? It used to be a Don Draper dominated industry, but it is not the case anymore. Our recent research showed that women are a 55% majority in Arena and we are better educated than men around us*.
Following that emancipated thinking, four of us went to The Young Women on Board meet up on Tuesday where successful women in media told us how they got there. The room, filled with 100 girls beginning in the industry, listened with anticipation and a lot of laughter – cheers for a brilliant stand-up comedian MC and free wine!
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There were times during The Guardian’s Changing Media Summit when it felt more appealing to stroll down to Kings Cross and feed myself to the pigeons. Rory Cellan-Jones, the Beeb’s technology correspondent, was charged with marshaling proceedings and, at times, I wondered whether it was indeed him or whether he had been replaced by a startled cabbie, as is the BBC’s want from time-to-time.
There was the odd blip in proceedings…
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Social Media Monitoring. It’s exactly what it sounds like, and only slightly different to what I used to spend hours doing at university. Perhaps it’s a little creepy to know that it is possible to gather the whole internet together and read every word from the Twitter and Facebook accounts of strangers, but really it’s just a more advanced form of Googling.
Like with Google, knowing what to search for seems to be half the battle. The sheer volume of useless information, spam and generally strange corners of the internet I find myself wading through boggles the mind. Who are these people who have the spare time to create these awkward bundles of html?
Or maybe retro ‘90s web design is a thing.
As part of the strategy team, I use this data to inform companies about the public reception of their products, their campaigns, their brand. It’s probably more honest data than the sort you would get from a pop-up survey. Sometimes too honest, if the rage vented on Twitter is anything to go by, but this can be an opportunity, and woe betide the brand which ignores it.
As someone who is just starting out, it was interesting to get involved with an internal project – looking at our own Twitter feeds in order to see what we can say about ourselves here at Arena. It’s definitely a little creepy to be reading everything your colleagues have on their minds, but the insights we gained were very interesting. Even though we tweet about work 20% of the time. Worth looking at in a future post I think!
With tablets and smartphones selling faster than ever before, the percentage of search they account for has inevitably skyrocketed. Google reports mobile traffic is now increasing 139% year on year. Next, we predict, mobile search will push 50% of all web traffic by 2014. Clearly, it’s a phenomenon worth your attention. How to approach it, however, is another matter entirely – though we’re already hot on the case here at Arena Media.
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David Brailsford, head coach of British Cycling and Team Sky Pro Cycling, was at Advertising Week Europe on Monday, where he addressed an audience of ad-landers on the topic of winning. This is the third blog post in a series on David Brailsford’s nuggets of wisdom.
David Brailsford and his British Cycling team are well known for their excellence in sport science (from nutrition, to conditioning and equipment) as well as their meticulous attention to detail, but I was equally interested to hear Dave’s take on people management.
He recognised early on as a coach that there are two ends of the coaching spectrum – the data-driven coach, whose brilliant technical analysis can give an athlete a competitive edge through the best training methods and tactics; at the other end of the scale is the ex-pro, they have been there themselves, they know what it’s like for the athlete, and they know how to relate to the athletes at a human level. They are, what we might say, ‘people’ people. The best coaches combine both the technical and the personal into their team management.
Given that we are talking about the field of sport, I was expecting Dave to say his people management style was a kind of tough love, cruel to be kind approach (you know like a personal trainer – “give me 5 more” when you’re in agony). I imagined him shouting at athletes that weren’t putting the hours in, who didn’t have the right attitude, who didn’t keep pedalling until they fell off the bike vomiting.
In fact Dave revealed a much softer approach to people management. Most, if not all of this you will have heard before in one place or another, but when Dave explained it you really got the feeling it was borne out of years of experience, and something he had figured out himself, not something he read in a manual somewhere. Here are his top tips.
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David Brailsford, the man behind the world dominance of British Cycling, was at Advertising Week on Monday, giving a talk on ‘winning’, with interview questions coming from Martin Sorrell.
One of the things he talked about was goal setting – how to do it right, how to make sure you are setting the right goals, and how to ensure you achieve your goals.
As a cycling fan (armchair only – no lycra), I was excited but sceptical when David Brailsford announced in 2010, shortly after the Sky Cycling team was put together, that they “would win the Tour de France with a British rider, within five years”. After all, the British had a very poor track record in the Tour de France, despite the success on the track in the noughties. What did the team know about the Tour? Did they have the riders to do it? The tactics? The know how?
Of course they actually achieved their goal within 2 years, with Bradley Wiggins’s famous victory in the 2012 Tour – and with Team Sky’s Chris Froome in second place. So it’s probably worth listening to what David Brailsford has to say about effective goal setting. I’ve distilled what he said into four handy tips.
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