Even Estate Agents Should Fear Twitter…

March 10th, 2010

soldThis story was brought to my attention today and it really made me smile. Yes, before any of you say ‘Nancy!! What on EARTH were you doing reading The Mirror????” I would like to say that I actually know Peter personally, and the news can be verified by him. It’s a case of a tabloid telling it as it actually happened! He sent me the article to look at…via Twitter (naturally enough).

Anyway, the point is, when a tool can be used to bypass the not-inconsiderable expense involved in selling your house through an estate agent, then there clearly is something to that tool. It isn’t just serving a purpose, it is changing how things are done. I would like to remain a little level headed about it though – people have been bypassing estate agents and selling their houses on Ebay for a while now, so it isn’t the actual bypassing itself which is the great thing. It is the medium he used.

I would like to point out, however, that to undertake a transaction such as this one, you need to:

a) be a trustworthy person with a decent reputation (I can vouch for the fact that Peter certainly is that)

b) have built an audience which you have some rapport with and who you trust

and

c) (perhaps this is just me, but) be doing it genuinely, not because you are actually an Estate Agent in disguise hoping to bag a decent commission (again, I know Peter certainly isn’t that).

As Peter himself said to me, they got sick of waiting for nothing to happen with the estate agents (more than a year they waited, so it’s not like they were being impatient) but the final straw came when the agent (who hasn’t managed to achieve anything to that point) announced that their fees were going up to cover for the recession. Peter’s thought? It shouldn’t be me who pays you for bad times, and he turned to the community he has built and trusts. Is this evidence of community being recession proof? Perhaps, or perhaps it is just smart thinking.

I will continue to maintain that Twitter is a tool which requires authenticity and trust. I don’t want to see it go the way of MySpace where it becomes little more than a bland sales channel. If we can prevent against that, and keep using it for the conversational tool that it is, then fantastic stories like this continue to arise – Peter, I hope you truly enjoy a pint or two with the money you didn’t have to pay in commission and fees. Your ingenuity is brilliant. You deserve it!

Thank you to Azhure* for the image

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What’s Your Blog’s Raison d’être Today?

March 5th, 2010

reasonI was delivering training last week to two fantastic women who were reasonably new to social media, but who were keen to learn and spent the day questioning and exploring. I love doing training sessions like that one because I absolutely love helping people to really understand what social media is all about and how it relates to them. But I also like the fact that it forces me to go back to basics with much of the material and question everything that I have been doing over the years.

For those of us who have been online for a while, it is easy to get complacent and to think you know exactly what you are doing.

But do you? Take a moment to think about your blog for instance…

  • what was your purpose on the day you started? If you wrote it down (what? you didn’t write it down?) go back and look at it.
  • what audience was it targeted at?
  • what were you hoping to achieve with your blog?

Now – how closely aligned to your past goals is your blog as it stands today?

Things change of course. A blog shouldn’t be static. It should move and change as often as necessary. But sometimes as you are moving, things can become a bit blurry and the clear focus you had for your blog to start with.

If your blog was there to comment on latest news stories and break stories where you can, is it still doing that?

If your blog was to inspire people within your own industry, is it still doing that?

If your blog was to give people advice on a particular area, is it still doing that?

It can be difficult to maintain enthusiasm for a blog over months and years, especially as more and more blogs come online, many of them repeating the same kind of information over and over again. If you lose focus or you forget your raison d’être, that enthusiasm can be even harder to maintain. Believe me, I know this from experience.

So go back to the birth of your blog and try and decide whether your purpose is the same today as it was then. If it isn’t, then restate your goals and start afresh with the same blog. It will make it a lot easier to still be writing in another 5 years time if you do.

Thank you to ellajphillips for the image

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Twitter Naysayers and Twitter Hysterics: It’s Somewhere Between the Two

February 16th, 2010

middleI was alerted to an interesting comment which appeared on LinkedIn by a colleague of mine recently which was a brief but characteristic tirade from a Twitter Naysayer. I won’t quote it word for word as I regret to say I haven’t got a link to the original comment so it wouldn’t be fair. However I can give you a general gist of the comment.

Essentially, the complainant was (quite vehemently) stating that because a large company like Ford actually only had about 8500 followers then such tiny numbers simply didn’t justify using Twitter at all. He (or she) then emphasised their point by giving an example of an acquaintance who had been on Twitter for 18 months, put out around 500 sales messages to their 50,000 followers and achieved no direct business. On the basis of this, Twitter was for ‘Twits’ (I took the liberty of quoting that – sorry) and therefore it was a pointless exercise altogether.

Hmmm…let’s look at this closely.

Now, before I begin, let me say that I am not one of the Twitter Hysterics either. I don’t see Twitter as the answer to all questions, the solution to all problems, and the greatest invention in the world since the wheel. I see Twitter as an incredibly useful tool if used correctly, but I also see it’s faults and its drawbacks and will immediately condemn anyone who says that if you aren’t on Twitter, you might as well go and throw yourself in the Thames.

However, the naysayer above appears to have missed quite a few points of Twitter.

Firstly, Twitter is simply a communication tool. Like the telephone. If I counted all the minutes I spent on the telephone, and then did an ROI calculation on the basis of all of the business I earned directly from that activity, I too would conclude that the telephone was useless and I shouldn’t waste my time with it. What this author is missing is that Twitter isn’t a panacea for closing sales (like some people seem to suggest, and I take issue with them as well), so to judge it on that basis alone is like throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Secondly, has anyone noticed the obvious error with this person’s colleague and their activity?

That’s right – they put out 500 ’sales messages’. In other words, they have viewed Twitter as a broadcast tool, broadcast their sales messages and then wondered why they haven’t got any business. If I suggest the words ‘relationships’, ‘personality’, ‘conversation’ or ‘dialogue’, perhaps that might give a further clue as to why this person saw Twitter as a useless channel. As a broadcast medium, you’re absolutely right. It isn’t the most effective channel at all and perhaps you’re right. You shouldn’t be using it. Direct mail is far more effective in terms of ROI.

Thirdly, this person is making the same mistake that the Twitter Hysterics make, only in the other direction. The Hysterics are the one’s who spend most of their time crowing about how successful they are because they have 50,000 followers and look at the big numbers (ooooooo…). The Naysayers are the one’s who say ‘as a percentage of the audience, 50,000 followers is absolutely pathetic’.

What both of them have totally missed is that it isn’t about numbers. I know I have said it before, but I am going to repeat myself. If I have 100 followers who are my precise target audience, who are the people who I want to and will work with, and who are the right people for me to spend time forming a relationship with, then it isn’t going to make any difference if I have another 49,900 followers or not. It might be good for my ego, but it isn’t particularly useful for my business. Similarly, those numbers might seem really small, but if I had 100 new clients, I certainly wouldn’t be complaining.

I think this kind of discussion will continue on for as long as Twitter exists as a communication tool. You will get the people who will dismiss it and find their own reasons for doing so, and you will get the people who paint it with rose coloured paint and find their own reasons for doing that. The reality is that neither of them is completely correct, but neither is completely wrong. They are just extreme – and the reality, like it usually is, is somewhere in the middle.

Thank you to John Linwood for the image

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Teach a Man to Fish, or Give Him a Lecture on What he is or isn’t Allowed to do Near the Water?

February 9th, 2010

fishingTiger Two spends most of its time and energy training and teaching people how to use online communication tools. We write courses, we give seminars, we offer demonstrations, we do training sessions and we offer private tuition. We don’t do this because it is going to offer us the biggest profit margin. In actual fact, we do it because I truly believe in the power of education over rules and in empowering people to do things themselves.

This blog post from John Cass discusses the merits of social media guidelines in companies and how important social media training is to go alongside those guidelines. If employees don’t understand what it is they are supposed to, or not supposed to be doing, then how can they understand and respect the guidelines. In my opinion, doing this is treating them like children. You tell a child that they are not allowed to poke kitchen utensils into a power point, or they are not allowed to suck their thumb. These are rules – but they aren’t accompanied by education as to why they shouldn’t be done and what other things they can do. This is OK for children because most don’t have the cognitive or reasoning skills required to understand why these things are bad, but to say that an employee is in the same position is, to me, patronising in the extreme.

Most working adults are also reasonable, rational human beings. Most working adults have the ability to understand why guidelines are in place when given the tools and the knowledge that inform them. I suspect that most adults dislike being given more rules which they have to live by and would rather be given a role in the process of the business than simply being told what they are and aren’t allowed to do.

I am always surprised when I hear of companies who ban their employees from social media sites. Have those companies thought that maybe training their employees in how to work best with them for the company might actually produce benefit, and probably improve morale? Sadly, it is probably cheaper and easier for the upper level management to do a blanket ban, than have to go to all the effort of training (I would like to hear of a company whose training budget is bigger than their IT budget). But in my opinion, all they are doing is losing the chance to start using the technology for the good of the company, and they are treating their employees like toddlers.

Don’t get me wrong, there will always be employees who do behave like children and mess about, skyve off of work and take advantage of things. But why should everyone else, including the company, suffer because of them? And has anyone tested to see what the result would be if that person was given the responsibility of being company community manager or social media spokesperson after they have been trained in the technologies and seen how they could make a difference? I would like to hear about it.

You may think that I have an ulterior motive in this post and you would be right. I would like to see more people being educated in social media use because I think it would make the whole online experience better for everyone. I don’t want to be told what to do. I want to be taught how to do something and be able to take some initiative. I don’t think I am alone.

Thanks to Rickydavid for the image

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The News Binge is Leading to a Massive Headache

February 3rd, 2010

headacheAt the end of last year, I read Flat Earth News by Nick Davies and, although I have to confess I wasn’t a particular fan of mainstream media before I read it, any last shred of respect I had for newspapers and corporate media bodies was destroyed by the revelations in that book. So I read Adam Vincenzini’s reproduced blog post with interest this morning. I hadn’t come across Adam’s blog before, but he embarked on an experiment a while ago to try to live without newspapers for a year and gain all of his news from the internet. As such, his brief post on the fact that the 24 hours news cycle, which has arisen out of our greed for ‘knowledge’ and has resulted in a lot of boredom and what I was class as substandard, scraping-the-bottom-of-the-barrel stories.

It makes me wonder – has the destruction of all barriers to publishing online assisted this? Couple the desire for instant information with the need for neverending novelty and isn’t this inevitable? Yes, everyone can be a ‘published writer’ now, but does that mean everyone should? And if you haven’t got anything original to add, should you perhaps choose not to add anything at all? These are all questions that I think need answering. The human mind is capable of so much originality, but when everyone is trying to be original all at once, then perhaps that originality will inevitably dry up? I don’t know the answers to these questions, but I do think they need to be considered.

Vincenzini’s example of the iPad cacophony is perfect. I noticed it myself when I went through my Google Reader a couple of days ago after my sojourn away from the daily PC. After I had read the first couple of articles, I got impatient. I then marked as read every post which had iPad in the title. Even that wasn’t enough so in a fit of frustration I marked the whole lot as read. I know I probably missed some really good posts in that block, but I just couldn’t be bothered wading through the repetition. I am sure I am not the only one who suffered iPad fatigue after a matter of minutes.

So, what can we do about it? Particularly those people who are starting out with a blog, but also those people who are already bloggers and those who prefer to read rather than contribute.

Firstly, decide who your blog is for. Is it for you – to keep a record of what you are doing, your thoughts about a subject or your writing? Or is it for an audience of customers, fellow enthusiasts or prospects? In the former case, you can do as you will, but in the latter case, remember that this audience is struggling just as much with the excess of information as you are. Give them something original.

Secondly, if you are writing about a well covered topic (such as social media!), think twice before you add your voice to the fray. Do you really need to write something else about the latest gadget, site or social media trend? Or could you go to your list of possible blog topics which you have saved for a rainy day, and write about something different?

Thirdly, consider how often you are writing. It is highly commendable that you want to write five times a day, but is that going to give you the most impact. I have to use the examples of Brian Solis and Dosh Dosh who both write less frequently, but whose posts are so well researched and thought out that you don’t want to miss one. If either of them wrote three times a day, their writing would definitely lose something, and I know I for one would resort to skimming like I do with many other blogs.

The fact we can all create content is a wonderful thing, but I think the euphoria of that has passed. The time has come to be a bit more thoughtful about what you are producing and asking yourself whether it is really news, really necessary, or really valuable to your audience. Doing so will save your hard effort from getting lost completely in the ever increasing noise.

Thanks to Twaize for the image

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Does the World Keep Spinning If I Step Off For a Moment?

February 1st, 2010

gumtrees
I have recently returned from a wonderfully relaxing holiday back home to Australia. I spent just over three weeks with my parents, swimming, enjoying the sunshine, reading, running and generally having a well deserved break. I did go online, but not much. I went online to update my friends on Facebook with what I was doing and load some photographs up, and I scanned through my email perhaps four times just to make sure there were no emergencies (although I had completely confidence that the guys back in the office in the UK were completely comfortable to deal with anything that came through the door).  Otherwise, I spent each day without my mobile or laptop. And guess what…the world continued to spin.

So many people worry when they are unplugged that they might miss out on something or that something dramatic may happen whilst they are not there. It is when you allow this to happen that social media can start to become a chore, or even a drag, on your time and your life. I have said it before and I am sure I will repeat it many times over the course of the coming year – social media is a tool. It is a tool to communicate, connect, share and collaborate. It is not there to take over your life, prevent you doing your actual business or, and I think this is most important, to replace quality time for yourself with people you care about.

No matter what, you can’t experience the taste of the Southern Ocean or the feel of sand whipping against your legs on an 8 mile long beach on social media. You can’t laugh with your brother until you are in tears and accidentally bump heads on social media. You can’t listen to the sound of kookaburras as dawn breaks, and feel the heat of the day starting to seep through the ground on social media. In short, there are a multitude of wonderful sensory experiences which must be enjoyed in order to make your life better, and which will ultimately improve all of your relationships, both online and off.

The reason I wanted to say this was that I have returned with a new enthusiasm which only comes from the benefit of distance and relaxation. I really looked forward to getting back to my cyber colleagues and seeing what had happened in the social media world. Yes, things had changed, but nothing had changed so much that I am out of the loop because of my holiday. All of my genuine contacts were still there, and they all wanted to hear about what I had done and what kind of experiences I had had.

Perhaps I am old-fashioned, but I do firmly believe that sometimes you need to take the time out to re-ground yourself and regain perspective. Everyone has different feelings about the online world. Some of us love it, others hate it, some are tired of it, some are scared of it and some can’t work out what it is they feel about it. I would recommend stepping away from it for a short period and then coming back and see how you view it.

I promise you, the world will still be spinning when you do.

The image is one of mine which I took on Kangaroo Island

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Opening Our Wallets for Quality Content

December 22nd, 2009

walletThere are many predictions about for 2010 and one of them is that publishers are all going to at least experiment with putting some of their content behind a paywall over the course of next year. Rupert Murdoch has been the most vociferous about this, but many other publishers are looking at similar models. I have already commented about how I don’t believe Murdoch’s ploy will work, but then it is no secret to anyone who knows me that I really don’t regard any of the ‘journalism’ (I use the term incredibly loosely) in The Sun as ‘quality’ and I have serious doubts about the rest of the rather biased Murdoch press (and I make no apologies for that view). So I for one won’t pay.

However…

There is a lot of utter rubbish on the internet. I don’t think any of us can deny that the user generated content movement has been a good thing and a bad thing at the same time. It has been good because it has given everyone a voice, but it has been bad in that some of those voices perhaps ought not have been offered the platform. As an advocate of free speech, I won’t deny anyone the right to speak. But I reserve the right to ignore it if it isn’t well written, well thought out or well argued. We all have to filter as there is far too much information available for any single person to possibly take in. And I try and filter by quality.

The irony is, in doing so I actually pay. That is because I regard things like Prospect Magazine and The London Review of Books as quality, and in order to access their online archives, I subscribe to the paper magazine. I also subscribe to Skeptic Magazine and Scientific American as I rate both of them highly. As such, I pay out fees every year to receive what I regard as quality writing. So if they all went purely online, would I pay?

See, there’s a dilemma and I am afraid I am going to have to contradict myself from a previous blog post having spent a lot of time thinking about it. Yes. I would continue to pay for these publications. I won’t pay for ‘newspapers’ online as I don’t like reading them offline, but for the information which I trust to provide me a less biased and far less sensational view of the world I would continue to open my wallet.

My biggest problem is I still prefer my quiet reading time to be spent with paper and print. My eyes get tired from reading for too long on a screen and I find there are just too many distractions when you have a browser opened. I may, of course, be forced to change in the future and as such, I will find myself paying my subscription for online content. So be it.

2010 is going to be an interesting year for the internet. I think the halcyon days of everything free and everyone giving everything away to anyone who wants it are coming to an end and things will fall back into balance. In this new world, some of the existing publications will succeed, and others will fail. And until I am proven otherwise, I will retain my idealistic view that quality will prevail.

Thank you to ES for the image

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The Rage Against the Machine Christmas Message

December 21st, 2009

I took great pleasure in seeing the sour expression on the face of Simon Cowell when Rage Against the Machine took the Christmas Number 1 last night. That’s not because I am a particular fan of the winning song (I have to admit I don’t really care for it that much) but it was really good to see cheesy, commercialised, keep-the-masses-happy pop beaten by something alternative. However, it wasn’t just the fact that the alternative track won the coveted prize – it was how it won that provides the crowning message for 2009. Social media is a powerful force and it is a force that is changing the way we communicate, interact, express our opinions, learn, shop and connect.

The online movement for the Rage Against the Machine for Christmas Number 1 was huge and although not ‘coordinated’ in the traditional sense of the term, was driven by word of mouth, networks and the power of the crowd. This isn’t the first time this has happened this year. Earlier in the year we saw the embargo on the Trafigura story ripped to shreds by the crowd who saw a story that had to be told. The old fashioned stalwarts of censorship and only telling the people what those in power want them to know started to look shaky. The same can be said of the Iranian Elections which were followed and discussed around the world in a manner in which a closed country such as that one would never have sanctioned and would have prevented at any cost if they could.

These three incidents – three amongst many – show that the way people communicate and gather information and the way they express their opinion has been fundamentally changed by social media. Whether it is Twitter, Facebook, blogs, YouTube, podcasts or other social networks, many people are no longer content to sit and blithely accept what marketing, propaganda and PR tells them. This is a good thing, and it has far reaching consequences for our everyday life, whether in business, personal relationships or consumer activity. It means that to maintain an edge, it is all the more important to gain at least some understanding of social media for business and for communication.

And it warms my heart to know that I am not the only person who find the X-Factor objectionable…

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Mobile Mobile Mobile: a thought from the Out Crowd

December 9th, 2009

iphoneThe LeWeb Conference in Paris is one of the longest running social media conferences in existence and, although this is my first one, is said to be one of the leaders in discussing the future and where technology is going. This year, the talk is all real-time, geolocations and…mobile.

I can’t disagree with the trends, but I would like to raise a point about mobile and mobile platforms. As many of you know, I am an Android user. The reasons for me not adopting the iPhone were pretty simple – in the UK, the only mobile carrier offering the iPhone was O2. I am an ex-customer of O2 and nothing in the world could make me shift back to them. Their customer service was truly awful, they were expensive, and as soon as you were no longer a ‘new customer’, they didn’t actually care one iota about you until the time you said you were going to leave. I actually did leave (despite their protests and promises of gold plated handsets and millions of free minutes) and won’t go back.

But – back to the subject – the iPhone. At that point I decided to try one of the early Google phones and I really love it. I am now an Android fan and although I have had the opportunity to see, use and experiment with the iPhone, and although there are other carriers in the UK which have the iPhone now, I am not shifting for the forseeable future.

However, when the question was asked here at the conference, approximately 75% of the audience held up their hands to affirm that they had an iPhone. I certainly knew I wasn’t part of the ‘in-crowd’ then!! But I wondered – with the popularity, hype, number of applications and developers (of the sessions this morning, almost all of them were iPhone-centric) will the iPhone become the VHS of the mobile world and will everything else be the Betamax?

I would hope not. Mobile technology gives so much scope for innovation and difference. From a pure fashion point of view, your mobile phone says a lot about you (I have a black HTC Android phone – suggesting I am a geek who is super-uncool?), but more importantly, not all platforms are equal. I think the only way that things can continue to develop and grow is for the competition to keep competing and for the out-crowd to continue to make a noise. That will keep the iPhone on its toes and it will continue to improve, along with all of its competition. Once VHS won the war, did it constantly strive to better itself? Not really. It took DVDs to do that.

I get the sense that it will only be a few years before everyone will have shifted from desktop computing to portable computing and much of that will be via mobile. And I hope I will still be happy with my Android based phone because they will still be a major player in the market. Even if I am the final out-crowder left…

Thanks to Ninja M for the image

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Do They Ever Learn?

December 2nd, 2009

dunce“Hi. I’m new to social media, but I am really excited to be here. So, to start, why don’t you have a look at my amazing widgets for sale for you at a discount price if you buy within the next 20 minutes at [insert link here]”

Honestly, do people really do this kind of thing? Still? Sadly, they do – and the more people who get involved in social media there are, the more we see this or some variation of this. Whether on LinkedIn Groups, in Twitter, on Facebook or anywhere, the die-hard marketers abound.

Perhaps the word ‘conversation’ is a little too difficult to get to grips with? Or maybe there is a sense of laziness involved? (I want results and I want them now and I don’t really want to have to put the hard graft in) Or perhaps it is a lack of understanding? Whatever it is, the people practising there are rapidly finding themselves out in the cold, wondering what it was they did to get there.

I don’t know about you, but I will always spend a bit of time looking, listening and learning before I embark on any kind of marketing, interaction or relationship. If you just met someone at a party who looked nice, would you walk up to them and say ‘wow, you look great. I am single, available and well worth it so why don’t we just forget everything and go back to my place now?’ And if you did, would you expect them to fall at your feet and agree, or slap you across the face? Unless you were at that kind of party, chances are it would be the slap. Why would you do that, if the person really was gorgeous and you really did want to establish some kind of a relationship? I mean, you are destroying your chances before you even start.

But, that is what a lot of people do. They seem to see business as completely separate from the rest of human interaction. But business interactions are as much a part of human condition as anything else. If it doesn’t work in any other relationship, what makes you think it is going to work in business?

I wish people would realise that everything they do will have repercussions and unless they are selling their products and services to a machine rather than another human being, bowling on in with a message of self promotion isn’t going to win you friends or loyal customers. Honestly, I don’t think social media has actually changed things – I think it has made it more public when you get it wrong.

Feel free to argue with me – I would be interested to hear the opposing view.

Thanks to Cayusa for the image

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