TigerTwoTiger

Just take a moment to think about how many social media sites, forums and online conversations you are actively involved in. For many of us, our social media activity resembles the old target of influence. There are probably a couple of sites you are intimately involved in, checking back and contributing to them several times a day. Then there will be a few more that you are reasonably involved in, spending time with them daily or a few times a week. And then there will be a lot more that you are only peripherally involved in – you have a profile, you visit occasionally, but you can go days or weeks without ever opening them up.

This is pretty normal, however, have you ever considered why the select few sites are so important to you? What is different about them? Is it their functionality? Is it their entertainment value? Is it the community on there?

I am going to go out on a limb and suggest an answer which you may not all agree with, but which pretty much sums it up for me. The sites I spend most time on are Facebook and several car related forums. I can check these several times an hour. Twitter was in this list, but I have let is slip a little recently, so I am down to a couple of times a day for that. And I think the reason is this:

On the sites I am intimately involved with, I know the people I am speaking to on there personally. I have met many of them, I have shared lunch, drinks or an event with them. I have got to know them as human beings rather than as avatars. That makes my interaction with them a lot deeper because I know I am talking to a real person whom I like and look forward to building more of a relationship with.

I have noticed a similar thing with Twitter, as well as with blogs, Ecademy, LinkedIn and many other social media sites. If I know the author or individual personally, I feel a better connection with them online. This is why personal interaction has always been, and will always be so important, irrespective of how deeply we immerse ourselves in a cyber world.

Nothing can take the place of hearing someone’s voice, or seeing their facial expressions and reading their body language. As great as an emoticon is, it just isn’t the same as spontaneous laughter, and a text speak message will never carry the same weight at a sentence spoken with genuine feeling. To that end, we constantly encourage people to make the effort to meet up with their online contacts face to face. I don’t know about you, but when I speak to someone online that I haven’t had the opportunity to meet, chat with on the phone or over Skype or at least hear on a podcast or see on a video, they adopt a kind of generic look and generic voice in my mind. It is only when they become personal to me that they truly stand out.

This may go against the mad popularity scramble that seems to be growing on the internet, and it may show me up to be old fashioned, but I can’t stress the power of the personal enough. Have a think about where you spend most of your time online and who you spend most of your time interacting with directly. Are they people you have met or not? I would be really curious to know everyone else’s experiences.

Thank you to steveleggat for the image

An article in last week’s Marketing Week caught my attention commenting on the continuing strength and value in old media techniques. The article, entitled Britain’s still got some real journalistic talent outlined the recent coup of investigative journalism in the MP’s expenses scandal, as well as the resounding success of ITV’s production and showing of Britain’s Got Talent. Both of these things were achieved through some long, difficult work on the part of the journalists and/or producers, and both of these things were consumed through traditional media channels whilst being backed up by the internet.

Reading this brought to mind some thoughts I have had recently about the effect that the internet has had on research and investigative journalism. The internet has driven us all to a place where  instant gratification is the norm. 24 hour news means that ‘breaking news’ has become almost laughable as channels battle to break something vaguely interesting before anyone else. The blogosphere has become battleground where bloggers struggle over who gets the story out first, who tops Techmeme, and who enjoys the most links. I am not completely condemning this – in any case it is simply the way the world is nowadays, good or bad. But what it demands is that in order to be the first, you have to sacrifice something – and that is often sustained, investigative research.

I always loved (and, to be honest, still dream about) spending my days in the British Library when I was writing my Masters dissertation. I loved waiting for books or journals to be delivered, and then chasing up references or ideas as they came to me while I read. I loved how tactile the whole experience was, the atmosphere of the reading rooms, and that little spark of excitement when you discovered a thread of information that would lead you towards the proving (or disproving) of your hypothesis. I miss doing that with blogging – blogs are very much part of the instant gratification culture. If we all spent as much time researching our blog posts as I did researching for my Masters, the internet would slow to a point of almost stopping! Not ideal.

The question I ask though is, if blogs can’t offer you the quality of research that a story like the MP’s expenses could, what are they good for? For me, the answer is simple – thoughts, opinions, ideas. What blogs represent to me are the spontaneous musings that you get when you discuss something in a group. When you engage in good conversation, no-one ‘researches’ before they answer. They say what they think and feel based on what they already know and what they are finding out from the other people in the group.

To that end, the old media and the new media play very different roles for me. I turn to the London Review of Books (old media) to read researched, considered and erudite reviews of new books. I turn to my favourite book blogs to read people’s instant impressions, ideas and feelings about the same book. I read the article, then I go to the ‘cyber pub’ and talk about it. That way I learn twice as much.

If you remember that blogging is not a replacement for quality journalism, and there will always be an important place for that self same style of journalism, then we can perhaps approach our blogs differently. By all means, seek to be the first one to put your opinion forward, but remember that it is an opinion, so it will be just as valuable if it is second, or fifth, or a hundred and fifth. And in the meantime, take the time to appreciate the work of those ‘old media’ journalists who do spend months over a story. There is very much a place for both of us.

Thanks to Wonderlane for the image

Firstly, apologies for my absence on this blog since introducing myself a few months back. You’d be absolutely right to assume that we’re stacked. With the changes in the marketing scene, this has become an incredibly busy year for us – brimming both with work as well as excitement.

Right this minute, we’re putting the finishing touches on our free workshop for the Online Marketing Show at Olympia exhibition hall, London. It’s likely that you, our fellow industry marketeers, have had some contact from Marketing Week or New Media Age about it. So you know, Nancy’s workshop will be at 2:00pm on Day One (Tuesday 30th June), entitled ‘Effective Online Reputation Management with Social Media‘.

We’ll be there giving her our support so do say hello if you spot any one of us with Tiger Two badges!

I have discussed before the issue of sustainability when it comes to social media, but I think it is worth looking at again as social media engagement slowly becomes a part of mainstream marketing and PR activity and loses its ’shiny new thing’ status. The reality of business is there is always far more to do than there is time in which to do it. Whether you are running your own business, or working for an organisation, the demands upon you pile up. Anyone who has an empty in-tray or to-do list is either retired or kidding themselves.

As such, when we first started writing blogs, using Facebook and Twitter, or getting engaged with LinkedIn, it was pretty exciting. As our networks began to grow, and we started receiving comments and getting involved in conversations, checking stats, sites and networks became addictive.

But real life – the day today effort to meet demands, run your business, fulfill your responsibilities and manage your life can and does get in the way. When the shine wears off and real life continues to clamor, it can become more difficult to sustain your social media presence.

As much as we advise the continuity and consistency is key, everyone realises that unless you are fortunate enough to be able to do nothing but sit on the internet all day, it isn’t always possible to maintain your activity at the level you may have done so in the past. You may have a few days away from the computer. There may be a project which is pressing. You may have a sick child at home, or finally get the chance to go away on a long overdue holiday. A break isn’t going to destroy everything you have built up online. In fact, if it helps to refresh you and rekindle your enthusiasm, then breaks are very good things.

Using productivity tools like ping.fm can help you as well, although ensuring that you continue to stay personal is vital. When you are struggling for time, automating everything may seem like an easy solution. But you need to consider whether that automation may actually undermine the relationships you have built. Sometimes it is better just to have a breather than it is to try and force excessive information through automatic means just to stay ‘visible’.

Overall, social media sustainability isn’t an easy thing to achieve. You need to find your own level of engagement and adjust it as and when necessary. You will probably find your relationships online will be all the stronger for it.

Thanks to ryan.dowd for the image

Here’s a question. Is it better to have 500,000 followers on Twitter? Or is it better to have 100 followers who are engaged and targeted? Is it better to have a website with 5000 pages of content, or a website with 50 pages of well thought out, valuable material? I am not trying to dictate an answer by using value terms in my questions, despite the fact that I am very much of the opinion that less is more and quality trumps quantity, but recent events are arising which may be proving me wrong.

None of us can avoid the whole celebrity Twitter stuff. I make it my business not to follow celebrities, mostly because I am not really that interested in what they have to say (I can read most of it in the papers anyway if I have a mind to) but also because I can’t really separate a message designed for an undiscriminatory 500,000 strong audience from broadcast marketing. However, in the wake of Oprah and the other celebs, there seems to be even more of a mad rush on various social media sites for pure numbers without thought or care aboutwho they are.

Similarly, I was at a talk recently, the subject of which I have seen backed up in articles and heard in third party discussion. The suggestion was that to help you get good search engine placement, more is better. The talk I went to even went so far as to suggest that your best bet was to automatically generate articles which are simply rewordings of articles you have already generated purely for the sake of boosting your Google rankings. You too can have a site up there with Mashable! with minimal effort of your part and no need to come up with new ideas or original subject matter.

Am I missing something here? Am I wrong in thinking that both of these tactics are a return to the old style of marketing where as long as you shout loudest to the most number of people, you will be assumed to have the best product? Am I being naive by still thinking that what matters is expertise, engagement, genuine conversation and value? I don’t think I am, and I won’t stop training and advising people to think carefully about their audience, select who it is they want to speak to and then genuinely make an attempt to engage with them.

If you look at the long standing blog sites which really do have hundreds or thousands of pages, none of these people have resorted to regurgitating what they have already written over and over again (or worse, letting a bot do it!) simply to get ranking. They have ranking, respect and following because they have taken the time to offer quality, and to really speak to the people who matter. These are the people who deserve to have the recognition, not those who are trying to find shortcuts just so they can briefly scramble to the top of the heap and shout out their untargeted marketing message as loudly as they can until they are toppled by the next scrambler. Once again, we are faced with a choice. Do it quick. Or do it right. And once again, I can see which way many people are leaning.

I may not get to the top of the heap in record time, but I will continue with my policy of quality as opposed to quantity. I will take care in deciding who I connect to or befriend. I will think about what I write and write only when I have something to say. I will continue to try and produce content which is as valuable as possible to the people who matter. And I will continue to advice my clients to do the same. It may mean I will be temporarily buried, but I still believe that slow and steady will win the race.

And if it doesn’t, at least I can continue to be proud of how I interact.

Can you say the same thing?

I have just experienced a fascinating example of the sinking authority of printed publications. These kind of changes always interest me. I know when I was doing my MA that the only authority I could provide was of a printed sort and adding references from online sources required extra diligence in order to ensure they were legitimate. I am not sure how long this will be the case.

As a member of the London Chamber of Commerce, I receive their regular London Business Matters magazine. Unusual to a print publication nowadays, this particular magazine arrives in the post in paper format and does not have an online equivalent. That has never really troubled me until now – I actually really enjoy still reading paper magazines in order to give my eyes a bit of a rest from the screen every now and then. In the May 2009 Edition, there was an article at the back in their Motoring section entitled Fatal Distractions which discusses a disturbing but perhaps inevitable trend amongst motorists who are increasingly Tweeting while they are driving. I was particularly surprised by the comment that

Analysis of Twitter from esure found that an average of 52 motorists per day are even flaunting their dangerous use of social media behind the week [by Tweeting while they are driving]…

Of course, the first thing I did was to Tweet that statistic, but unlike most Tweets, it isn’t possible to link through to a paper article. After entering a conversation with @jangles who searched in vain for any mention of this online, I realised that without being able to provide a link to an online source, the paper source had very little authority to my followers.

Wow. What a change. Although I finished my MA several years ago when print still held sway, by the time I am doing my PhD are things going to have changed in the academic world as well? To be honest, I wouldn’t be surprised. Granted, in my field of study (believe it or not I am actually an Art Historian and will eventually be looking to do my PhD in Art History!) perhaps things might be slower, but the changes that the digital age have brought are well and truly far reaching. If my assessors can’t click a link to see my source online, will my reference require more evidence. It will be interesting to see.

I admit that many years of academic study has instilled in me a habit of never making any bald statement without being able to provide a reference (I often find myself wanting to do it even when there isn’t any need!) but in the case of Twitter, that isn’t always easy. If you are an influencer of any size, you do need to consider what you are saying and who is listening.

I am certainly going to keep a copy of this article just in case anyone asks and cares to look at it.

Thanks to janerc for the image

A while back, I started a spreadsheet which listed every new social media site I came across, categorising it and giving it a comment in order to try and keep them all together in my own mind. If there is one thing I strive to be able to do is to at least advise if someone asks me about a site, and it is tough to offer advice if you had never heard of it before. As you can imagine, the spreadsheet grew to such a point that it became almost impossible to look at, and even harder to keep up to date. All you have to do is watch the RSS feeds of Techcrunch and Mashable! to get an idea of how many new social media sites are appearing every day – and they are just the larger ones.

We all receive constant invitations and recommendations to new sites on a daily basis. Some of them look really interesting, while others look like sites we already use in different pyjamas. I will always go and take a look, but I no longer immediately add it to my spreadsheet.

There are two major problems with site developers trying to jump on the bandwagon of an idea which has already been used. The first is that no matter how much funding you get for a social media startup idea, the only thing that is going to make a social media site successful is if it really becomes social. The reason Facebook and LinkedIn are still growing is because they have an enormous user base already. New users want to go where there friends are.

The second problem is that the western world’s concentration span seems to be reducing rapidly. The more information we are fed, the less time we spend on each piece of information. We can skip from site to site to email to mobile to Facebook to LinkedIn all in the space of a few minutes. For a new social media site to become successful, it needs to enjoy some loyalty from its users and that loyalty is demonstrated not only by how long they spend on the site at any one time, but how often they go back to it, how often they interact with it and how long they remain an active member. Getting a million users is all well and good, but if there is no real longevity with those users then the site isn’t going to survive.

As a ‘consumer’, you need to make the decision about which sites you can interact with over the long term. If a site doesn’t ‘float your boat’ or you can’t get on with it, then don’t just sign up because you should. The reality is that if you do, you will more than likely fade out quite quickly and any time you spend with it will be wasted time. Be realistic with who you are and what you want to achieve. As exciting as all of these new sites on the internet might be, unless your job is to write for Mashable! or Techcrunch, you probably don’t need to get involved until it proves itself.

Thank you to Yann! for the image

As businesses take their first steps in social media marketing and start looking towards the social media sites which have the largest communities, many have been exploring using Facebook as an integral part of their marketing strategy. As we often say, there is no point spending time in the places which the people you want to communicate with aren’t at, so in many cases, Facebook is an excellent choice. But one of the problems is the difficulty in understanding what the difference is between a Facebook Page and a Facebook Profile.

A Profile is what you have as an individual. For everyone who is on Facebook, we have a profile which shows our likes, dislikes and personalities. The profile is where you can post your status updates, and it is what people ‘friend’. Take it offline – the profile is essentially you. People become friends with you because of who you are.

A Page is what your company has on Facebook. It is the profile of an organisation, not that of an individual (although your organisation may be just you, but the page still represents your company. Of course, you can have pages for all sorts of other things, like TV shows and products, but if you are looking to get your company on Facebook, you will need to create a page.

I have noticed a worrying tendency for new Facebook users to set up a profile for their company, group or organisation. I can see why – profiles allow you to ‘friend people’, pages don’t. People can become your ‘fan’ on a page, but they don’t allow you to invite friends to the page. Also, pages don’t have status updates. They can only come from profiles.

So you may ask, why does it matter? Why not set up a profile for my company and then I can send status updates etc. There is one very good reason why.

It is against the Facebook Terms of Service. And if it is against their rules, they have every right to remove you from the site if you are breaching their rules. Sadly, a lot of people do it simply because they don’t know.

If you dislike the Page functionality, they you could look into setting up a Group for your company instead. That gives you the ability to invite people to it and slighly more functionality than the Page. But use Profiles for you, and Pages (or Groups) for your business. If Facebook is to be at all useful for your social media marketing campaign, you need to be on it – not banned from it.

If you are a member of a niche social network, there is a very good chance that it has been created using the Ning platform. A clever company with a bit of a silly name, Ning provides a platform for anyone to create a social network, for free, related to any topic that they could possibly want. The beauty of the application is that it offers everything a community manager could need, from discussion forums, the ability for people to build profiles and friend one another, photo and video uploads, blogs and groups, all for the bargain price of absolutely nothing.

Because it is so easy to create a niche social network on Ning, lots of people started doing it. And like lots of people, I (as a multifaceted person, which I am immensely proud of) discovered more than one Ning site which grabbed my interest. There are Ning sites for every single one of my hobbies and a whole host of hobbies that I don’t have. Where my problem was – which I suspect is the perennial problem for almost everyone who engages with social media – was that they began to get out of hand. In order to accept friend requests, read messages or receive updates, I had to go to each and every site individually.

This is what I love about social media evolution – when a problem arises, someone comes along and fixes it. I had just finished writing the course chapter on Ning and niche social networks, when one of our delegates emailed me in confusion, saying that although what I had written was quite clear, he couldn’t quite figure out what to do on Ning, as it all seemed different. I went to Ning and lo and behold, they had changed their interface (rendering my new chapter out of date!) and what a change for the better it is.

Ning now provides a personal dashboard for you to see and respond to activity on all of your Ning communities at once. When you log into Ning now you are faced with a screen giving you the latest updates from all of your communities, the ability to view messages, no matter what community they were sent in, the ability to accept friend requests from all sites, and even recommendations and invitiations to other, similar communities from your network. As frustrated as I was about having to rewrite the chapter, this is one change that has made life just so much easier for anyone who is a member of more than one niche community.

I understand why sites need to upgrade – nothing stays still online (and nor should it) but sometimes the upgrades barely seem necessary. Sometimes upgrades make things worse, or solve some problems while causing a whole host of new ones to arise. And every now and then, and upgrade just streamlines things in the right way, so that each time you go to it you feel yourself sigh with pleasure. Good work, Ning.

One of the many changes that the social internet has brought is that the divide between business and personal life has been blurred. Business is no longer a 9 to 5 activity. Mobile phones, email, laptops and high speed internet means that our ‘personal life’ is now inexorably permeated by business to the point that sometimes it is difficult to tell the difference.

This fact raises the question however of how much of you should be in your business – should it be defined by your personality, or should the business be something other than your personality. John Jantsch argues that personal branding is not business building, suggesting that the two of them should be separate. He warns that people who spend their time building their personal brand are not in fact building their business. He even goes so far as stating in the title of his post that ‘Business isn’t Personal’.

I can understand his argument – a business needs to be something that you can sell (everyone who has read the E-Myth will know this), and if you build the business solely on your personality, you haven’t really got a going concern. It is tough to sell yourself. However, I am not sure I entirely agree.

Yes, a business is an asset, but while you are in it, you are a fundamental part of that business. No matter what, whether you like it or not, your personality will affect how people see that business. Can we think of Virgin without Richard Branson? Even though he only owns a part of the company now, his personality still has an effect on our perception of the brand. Michael Gerber’s personality is a fundamental part of the E-Myth, and yet he has still built a business which can sell. If you try to separate the two entirely, you may end up doing less well at both.

John Jantsch does recognise this when he acknowledges that you can start with a personality, but then you need to allow what you have started to grow into a brand. Absolutely, but in my opinion you will help that no end by continuing to work on your own personal branding in relation to that business. Then, when you get to the point where the business sells, you will carry the residue of that success into your next venture and it will carry the residue of your personality to its next owners. They will be buying the business with the expectation of that residue.

The comment is made in the post that it is very difficult to sell a personal brand, and I am not really sure you would want to. What you want to do is to boost your company and personal brand simultaneously using one another for support, then take your personal brand to the next location to boost the next company. Of course, you don’t want to be doing that at the expense of your business brand – it needs to be a balance. Too far one way or the other won’t work.

Ultimately, social media demands that you have a personality, and that personality is visible. It is through this that people will begin to trust you and ultimately trust your brand. John Jantsch has a distinct personality – you see it in his blog (he even has a prominent photograph), you hear it on his podcast. He has built a great brand which is successful in part because of who he is. And even when Duct Tape Marketing sells, people will still associate his personality with the company. I would bet on the fact that the prospective buyers would be counting on that.

Thank you daveelf for the image