Because of the success that IT Bloke has seen over the past twelve months, we expanding our team to enable this continued growth.  The continued expansion and ever increasing presence and consumer relevance of Word of Mouth Marketing has drawn many new faces interested in the concept of our philosophies.

Our team has had many interesting discussions with new people, and I am pleased to announce that IT Bloke had now agreed a change in structure bringing new faces on-board to prepare us for the challenges and opportunities that the coming year will bring within our new virgining industry.

Our new freshly expanded team brings brings much greater commercial and general business experience to IT Bloke, as well as the ability to interact with our reader/customers on a more regular and relevant basis.

Whilst we will continue to introduce you to new faces and new ideas over the coming months, in order for us to continue our success within the new highly commercial environment, of Word of Mouth Marketing, our first is the introduction of our new Senior Partner, Alex Hamilton.  Although I have now handed over the day to day management of IT Bloke to Alex, I remain a fully committed Partner and IT Bloke and look forward to continuing all the conversations I have instigated over the past year, Regards….. Ashe, IT Bloke

We all have needs wants and desires that are formed by what we see in the world around us and how we view our place within it. The Philosophy of IT Bloke is based upon the idea that our level of contentment with our lot and or desire to change and achieve is measured by our interaction with others.  IT Bloke seeks to encourage and facilitate social interaction and through the medium of Word of Mouth Marketing, to provide understanding of how such interactions express our needs and how such understanding can help our clients better fulfill the needs of their customers.

Word of mouth Marketing is a concept, which like many others people, is relatively new to me. The IT Bloke team have provided me with an opportunity both to understand the concept and to see the undoubted commercial benefits that Word of Mouth affords.  Over the last 12 months IT Bloke has not only shown that the benefits are real, but also that the world of commerce has a real desire to utilize these benefits to better understand customers and ultimately to achieve growth by fulfilling their requirements.

I join the IT Bloke team at a time of commercial uncertainty, where with the recent and ongoing financial turmoil, businesses are looking to find new and more cost effective ways to understand both their markets and their customers.  There is no doubt that Word of Mouth Marketing is not only a new way, but is probably the most innovative and effective way for businesses  to reach and understand its customers.  I am massively excited to be joining the IT Bloke team and with my background as a commercial lawyer both in private practice and in the world of commerce, I have no doubt that with the dedication and drive of the IT Bloke team and the willingness and desire of our clients to explore new ideas, we will be able to help our clients utilize Word of Mouth Marketing and achieve sustainable and cost effective growth.  I look forward to working with you all.

Kindest regards……Alex, IT Bloke

This year on Valentine’s Day, people are taking full advantage of all that social media has to offer to build on their special relationships.

What does Valentine’s Day have to do with social media? What they have in common is relationships. Social media is about building relationships.

Valentine’s Day is about paying attention to relationships and strengthening relationship bonds. There are several important aspects of social media relationships that apply to all relationships: listening (knowing what people are saying about you), empathizing (connecting with people and trying to understand why they feel the way that they do), being transparent (honesty builds trust and without trust, your business will not succeed), showing appreciation (express how much you value your clients), and being passionate (long-lasting and valuable relationships are filled with passion, dedication, and hard work).

People use social networks to connect with people with whom they have existing relationships. In the process, they also form new relationships. Social networks allow you to share media and to customize your look and feel online. People can form online groups that consist of people who all share common interests. Special occasions, such as Valentine’s Day, create a whirlwind of activity on social networks. People are looking for the perfect gift for that special person or for themselves.

Searching online for Valentine’s Day ideas produces a huge volume of new articles, social networking suggestions, commercial offerings, and live twitter feeds. Before social media was available, the standard flowers and chocolates were gratefully accepted. Now, social media is ensuring that everyone tries to get more creative and exciting gifts to show how much they care. In today’s difficult economy, people are trying to be generous within there financial restrictions.

Here are some fun gifts and gift ideas for your sweetheart using social media:

• Create a personalized Facebook ad—You can create an ad that will only be seen by one user. You can make it as special as you want without any fear that you are sharing it with the whole world.
• Upload a karaoke cover of your song on YouTube—It will be considered very romantic if you sing a song for your sweetheart in a room full of people. In fact, in this case, you will be singing in front of the entire World Wide Web. Share your recording on social media channels so that it is perfectly clear who your sweetheart is.
• Schedule new @replies by the hour through HootSuite—Send a new reason for loving him or her every hour for 24 hours. You can set it all up in advance and HootSuite will automatically work its magic.
• Buy a generous Facebook gift (for charity)—Facebook’s online gift shop has an entire collection of gifts for charity. Whatever you spend will go to the charitable organization of your choice.
• Use the Sweethearts iPhone app to share personalized Sweethearts candies via Twitter—You can create, order and share Sweethearts with creative and special messages.

Of course, Valentine’s Day gifts are not the only things that are dominating the social media world. Ideas for celebrating Valentine’s Day cards, dates, surprises, proposals and other inventive ways to light a fire in a relationship or add something different and sweet to a friendship are all around us. In addition to gifts and ideas on how to celebrate, people are making plans to do something special within their budget.

Many popular sites, including Amazon and Oprah, have released lists of affordable gift ideas. Most websites offer a filter where items can be sorted by price. If you don’t want to guess what your sweetheart would like, Amazon also offers a wish list option where people can choose what they want, which avoids the recipient being disappointed as well as the giver not having to stress over whether he or she has bought the perfect gift.

For those people who find Valentine’s Day annoying, there are humorous gift online, such as fun things to do if you are single and broken-heart cookies. There is also a list online of the top worst Valentine’s Day gift ideas along with a list of the most unoriginal ideas and the worst Valentine’s Day dates.

With social media continuing to be a networking and economic giant, nobody will be left with a bad Valentine’s Day gift this year. Whether you love or hate it,  there is something that will please everyone. You should definitely take advantage of social media this Valentine’s Day, whether the result is a feeling of softness and sentimentality or amusement. In any case, a whole world full of possible gift ideas is open to you, and you can bet your bottom dollar that all the staff here at IT Bloke will be taking  full advantage of these new social media Opportunities, Regards….. Ashe, IT Bloke.

Writing this at the end of 2009,  with the Music industry now finally unable, to ignore the power of Social Media Networking or Word of Mouth Marketing and the substantial influence they now wield with their once compliant target audiences, it is easy to see that we are in fact witnessing  the final demise of the industry lead  first wave of the digital music revolution, and that with the dawning of this new decade we will bravely enter  into the obtusely different but totally consumer lead second wave, but what does that actually mean for us?

To make sense of this we need to  consider what we have already seen; Napster die, streaming services on ad-supported revenue become suffocated by unsustainable high licensing fees {although Spotify is now showing signs of emerging as a competitor}, and subscription services splutter along, never quite capturing the imaginations of music fans, only P2P lives on and continues to flourish although still in its cosy black market/twilight zone but still seems to be unstoppable unless the record labels start to think differently.

We  have also seen 2009 ending in a flurry of acquisitions (LaLa, iLike), launches (Vevo) and shutdowns (iMeem), which dramatically rearranged the digital music landscape. When the dust finally settles, expect digital music and especially the way it is now marketed through social media to begin anew in 2010.

After taking all this into consideration, I thought I would take a moment to reflect upon and discuss some of  my predictions for the music industry for the coming year.

Labels Will Become Consumer Complient:

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It’s been coming for more than a decade, but major labels are now being forced to grasp the digital opportunity.  They’re licensing music on more sustainable terms, diversifying their business model, investing in new technology and, most critically, understanding more than ever what it means to be truly consumer-led and totally open.

As market leaders, major labels have the resources and the networks to profit most from the changes currently taking place.  The move from physical to digital hasn’t been as fast as many people might have wished, but that’s because digital still doesn’t pay like physical does.

CDs, when they sell well, still mean good profits,  but now according globally to demographics are mainly purchased by a more mature market place.  Digital isn’t like that.  But that’s changing, and as major labels have shrunk, their capacity for change has increased.

Expect 2010 to be the year that the bad press on the major labels starts becoming more favourable,  but only if they themselves and especially their artists embrace social medias demand for long term transparency and ethicalness in all matters.  An artists ethical stall must now be laid out and validated long in advance of any release, or now  it will defiantly come back to sting them later.

The promises of the digital age — deeper understanding of the music consumer, integrated ticketing and merchandise, direct-to-consumer sales, and fans as marketing teams — are all about to become a reality, and it won’t just be major labels leading the charge.

Physical CD Sales Will Continue to Decline:

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Indulge me here playing on the safe side here, even after all my predictive successes of 2009, but to make sure that at least one of my predictions comes true, so I’m going to forecast that globally, sales of physical CDs will decline at an even greater exponential rate in 2010.  That’s one I think we can all bank on this year.

Release Strategies Will Evolve:

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The traditional model of building buzz through radio singles followed by a carefully timed album launch will no longer continue to be the norm even  for commercial pop music.  At the edges, we’re going to see the birth and exponential growth of a new model for releasing music that’s totally attuned to the diverse community of music consumers and that is forced to listen and conform to there demands or fall by the wayside.

The new model, already being pioneered and tested by many in the music industry, will be a long term targeted multi-tiered, staggered release. Artists will now have to offer  totally free, full streams and downloads early to the curious and the devoted, building their fanbase as they grow.  Traditional release schedules will follow, in tandem but with more innovative targeted products, at more diverse prices, to more accurately segmented groups of fans.

Rather than just a plastic CD, we’ll start seeing multiple tiers of music product: free streams and low quality mp3s, simple digital and physical packages, enhanced audio and packaging on digital and physical releases, and then levels of premium products including vinyl, merchandise, and increased access to the artist.

This year our concept of music in its physical form as a CD on the shelf will come to an end, we’re going to finally realise that now  in reality it is a suite of music products — T-Shirts, mugs, books, framed art, signed lyric sheets, USBs, and once-in-a-lifetime music experiences and fully embrace it as such.

Music Will Live Legitimately in the Cloud:

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It’s been talked about for a number of years, but 2010 will be the year we start thinking of music less as a finite tangible product and more as an infinite, on-demand reservoir to be accessed at any time for a fee.

This process will still roll out in tandem with the evolution of music “storage and playback products.” Even if music is universally accessible, it’s still key to people’s idenity.  We still need something to put on a coffee table, something to pass to friends, something to put under the Christmas tree and something to signal to the world that “this music is part of me and I want you to know it.”

iTunes, is as ever, aiming to be in the driver’s seat to make the most of this change. Its acquisition of LaLa could see them making their first forays into the streaming market, however it is now a little way behind with companies like Spotify starting to create quite a  buzz and it is now the best-placed streaming service to take advantage of the cloud’s potential, so Apple now need to pick up the gauntlet or they may miss out on this hugely popular although slightly less profitable market.

Grooveshark’s growth, if it continues, is going to make it a serious player in the streaming game.

MySpace, with iMeem and iLike in its back pocket may also consolidate its place in the land of the streaming.

And finally, Google–- who owns the bridge over the moat, digitally speaking –- could pull the rug from everyone and facilitate properly integrated music streaming into its search platform.

Whoever emerges at the front of this pack will be in new territory, providing access to the world’s music, anytime, anywhere on any device for nothing.

Who Knows?

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There’s some as-yet untested consumer models building momentum.

Guvera is promising the world, not just to the music industry, but to advertisers as well. Whether consumers buy into its advertisement for content exchange remains to be seen.

Rdio, with serious pedigree and some big money backing it, hasn’t poked its head up completely yet, but you can be assured that whatever it offers isn’t going to be lightweight.

Lost in all the buzz is the fact that some legacy digital music companies — Last.FM, Pandora and MySpace to name a few — still have the established brands, the existing customer base, and the revenue streams that preserve their lives beyond the froth of the tech/music blogosphere.

And of course, there’s Facebook. The biggest country in the world (or soon to be), Facebook and music have always been awkward bedfellows. If Zuckerberg and Co. can figure a way to integrate music with the Facebook platform, the existing user base would guarantee a big chunk of the market overnight.

It all adds up to create a big void of uncertainty, one that will be filled in the way the web knows best — by its end-users. What those end-users decide they love will ultimately determine the winners and losers in the digital music economy.  As a passionate music fan and Social Media Marketeer, I can’t wait for the competition to heat up.  For those on the digital frontier, music really is better than it’s ever been, although the Record Companies now need to pick up the gauntlet or really lose out in 2010.  Regards….. Ashe, IT Bloke – London.

This piece was inspired by a marketing plan that was sent to me over the weekend, which I was mean’t to assess, however to be fair it was little more than a work of fiction, it was what the writer actually wanted to happen in his head not what would happen in reality, marketing is about knowing your market and understanding the deep level intelligence and conduits that run through it, not just hoping something will happen because you include it as an objective within your plan.

So after seeing Stacey Solomon’s misuse of Social Media destroy any chances she had of her qualifying on Saturdays X Factor and what felt like the hundredth conversation on social media marketing which started with “so I’ve created a Twitter ID, Facebook fan page and LinkedIn group”, I started to despair.  Why is it so difficult for people to identify their objectives before they launch in with the tools?

And let’s face it, setting up the tools is the time consuming but easy bit! .  The hardest – and  truly time consuming part, is identifying why the hell you’re creating them in the first place, and how you’re going to measure your success.

So I thought I’d jot down some potential objectives that might assist you in planning your campaigns:

1. Research/Market Intelligence:

Generally the listening phase of a social media project is to establish what’s being said about your company/product/service on the web, who’s saying it, where are people congregating, how are they talking about you, how are they talking about you in relation to your competition, what’s the tone being used online, do people know you exist… etc.

This information can provide valuable insights that can shape your messages, tone of voice, product development, customer service strategies, etc.

And something to remember when agencies tout listening services, the real insights come when you can apply them to your organisation’s strategies and MI.  Otherwise you will receive reports with some pretty graphics, but little actionable insight.

2. Engaging in Conversations:

To demonstrate thought leadership, build relationships with customers/partners/employees, to share knowledge, to obtain feedback, to facilitate customer service, to promote upcoming events/offers/white papers/etc.

3. Empowering Consumer Advocacy:

Enabling your brand advocates to spread your message, thus reducing your need to constantly promote your brand usual traditional methods such as advertising, PR, events, etc.  Ensure that your content is easily accessible and shareable.

Remember to think about your audience and what’s of interest/value to them – whether it be insights, discounts, special sneak peaks, games, competitions, training, etc.  Create special offers/content to target influencers.

Include internal as well as external audiences – extend the reach of your marketing activities by enabling ALL employees to spread your messages to their networks.

4. Enable your customers to support each other:

e.g. via communities, forums, social networking groups, etc.  Act as a facilitator of the conversation, not the owner of it.   Tap into existing communities and networks for product/service/solution ideas and reward your brand advocates.

I do hope this has served to clarify things a little and has given you a good idea on what you should be considering whilst writing your marketing plan, lets hope that I don’t get any more half cooked ill conceived plans next week, LOL.

Regards….. Ashe, IT Bloke – London.

Well as 2009 winds down and were about the leave the naughty’s we can now look back and realise what a  hell of a year it has been in  the ever increasing  world of Social Media,  we saw exponential growth of social media. According to Nielsen Online, Twitter alone grew 1,382% year-over-year in February, registering a total of just more than 7 million unique visitors in the US for the month. Meanwhile, Facebook continued to outpace MySpace. So what could social media look like in 2010? In 2010, social media will get even more popular, more mobile, and more exclusive — so it is wise to get prepared now.  So what are the near-term trends we could see as soon as next year? In no particular order, I will have have a stab for you:

1. Social Media begins to look less Social:

With groups, lists and niche networks becoming more popular, networks could begin to feel more “exclusive.” Not everyone can fit on someone’s newly created Twitter list and as networks begin to fill with noise, it’s likely that user behavior such as “hiding” the hyperactive updaters that appear in your Facebook news feed may become more common. Perhaps it’s not actually less social, but it might seem that way as we all come to terms with getting value out of our networks — while filtering out the clutter.

2. Corporations look to scale:

There are relatively few big companies that have scaled social initiatives beyond one-off marketing or communications initiatives. Best Buy’s Twelpforce leverages hundreds of employees who provide customer support on Twitter. The employees are managed through a custom built system that keeps track of who participates. This is a sign of things to come over the next year as more companies look to uncover cost savings or serve customers more effectively through leveraging social technology.

3. Social Business Becomes Serious Play:

Relatively new networks such as Foursquare are touted for the focus on making networked activity local and mobile. However, it also has a game-like quality to it which brings out the competitor in the user. Participants are incentivized and rewarded through higher participation levels. And push technology is there to remind you that your friends are one step away from stealing your coveted “mayorship.” As businesses look to incentivize activity within their internal or external networks, they may include carrots that encourage a bit of friendly competition.

4. Your company will have a social media policy (and it might actually be enforced):

If the company you work for doesn’t already have a social media policy in place with specific rules of engagement across multiple networks, it just might in the next year. From how to conduct yourself as an employee to what’s considered competition, it’s likely that you’ll see something formalized about how the company views social media and your participation in it.

5. Mobile becomes a social media lifeline!

With approximately 70 percent of organizations banning social networks and, simultaneously, sales of smartphones on the rise, it’s likely that employees will seek to feed their social media addictions on their mobile devices. What used to be cigarette breaks could turn into “social media breaks” as long as there is a clear signal and IT isn’t looking. As a result, we may see more and/or better mobile versions of our favorite social drug of choice.

6. Sharing no longer means e-mail:

The New York Times Google Android application recently added sharing functionality which allows a user to easily broadcast an article across networks such as Facebook and Twitter. Many websites already support this functionality, but it’s likely that we will see an increase in user behavior as it becomes more mainstream for people to share with networks what they used to do with e-mail lists. And content providers will be all too happy to help them distribute any way they choose.  I have said it once but I will say it again, 2010 will be the year that Social Media and Word of Mouth Marketing through it really comes of age and if your not ready to run with it then you could very easily be left at the Wayside by your competitors, so it has never been a more prudent time to start looking into it, Regards….. Ashe, IT Bloke – London.