Social Media KISS. from Pete Shannon

Difference between "The web" and other comms tools...

Tue, 15 Feb 2011 22:51:00 +0000

It has been said that “The web” was invented 20 years ago…but the platform/entity we have access to when we use our browsers was actually only invented yesterday.

Tim Berners-Lee did indeed first develop the WWW in 1990/91 but since then, although the basic elements of the protocol remain the same, the actual functionality of the web has been in continual growth and change.

As for “the internet”, this is simply the term for the vast network of interconnected computers across the world that the “web” sits on. It’s the network supporting, and providing access to, whatever new functionality and tools can be created.

This is a very different medium to televisions, telephones, faxes, newspapers etc. Since they were invented, there have been minimal changes to their actual functionality. Sure the TV evolved from grainy black and white CRTs from the 1920s to the 3D HD OLED behemoths of today, but the function is essentially the same.

The idea that the web is a platform, not a medium (and an OPEN platform at that) goes some way to neatly explaining the INSANE rate of change in the functionality of the tools that are available. The web, or should I say the functionality of the web as we know it, was only invented yesterday. In fact while reading this I’m certain that what you can do online has changed and evolved and adapted.

This realisation probably isn’t news to you. You’re perhaps used to thinking along the lines of “how will I/we ever keep up with the new tools and new features/fads/methods/../../” And the answer will always be the same. You won’t. So stop trying to.

All you need to do is get your strategy in place and evolve that strategy as new possibilities open up. So…

1 - Decide who you want to listen to, then go out there and find the best places to listen that exist right now

and then…

2 - work out what you want to say in your conversations and go out there and find the best places to converse.

At the risk of repeating pretty much every other post on this blog, forget about chasing the latest tools. Just get yourself out there and start building your network. The rest will follow.

Why you shouldn't create your own community...yet

Thu, 21 Oct 2010 00:05:00 +0100

There’s been quite a bit of chatter recently about how many friends - real, organic, squishy ones or screen-based, poking, tweeting ones - anyone can juggle in their lives. Clearly no-one can agree on the figure - estimates come out between 8 and 150 depending on classification and location.

This post is related to the cause of this limitation - TIME. In general, the more friends you try to juggle, the lower the quality of each relationship and the less time you have for each one. In the end, you have to take decisive action and perform a cull to get things to a manageable level.

With this in mind, how many online communities do you think any one person can be an active member of a still derive compelling value from each? No-one knows for sure but I reckon the answer will be pretty low. Just because there are some great social media apps out there, it doesn’t mean we magically have 25 hours in a day.

Joining and taking an active part in a new community may mean a web-user having to allow another part of his ‘active community portfolio’ (hmmm ‘acp’ - I think I’ve just coined a nice one there) to fall away.

So, if you’re going to build a community on your site and under your ownership then you had better be sure that it will be seriously sticky and ‘outpost adoptable’ (Not so catchy but I’ll consider that coined here too!). If you’re not 90% certain and above, then perhaps it would be better to focus your energy and resource into taking an active and meaningful part in the winning communities that are relevant to your niche until you are.

You will hear a counter argument to this being the 90-9-1 rule and how the people who do adopt your community will be developing SEO on your brand’s site. This may be true but if you’re not adding value even the 1% will bugger off somewhere else, leaving your precious in-house resource to try in vain to keep things looking fresh.

Shutting down your own community can be an embarrassing u-turn, so if you do commit be sure you know what you’re committing to and, more importantly, why.

Stephen Fry interview rushes on the impact of the medium and our desire to connect

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 10:51:46 +0000

The following video is taken from the rushes of the BBC documentary The Virtual Revolution, presented by Aleks Krotoski.

It’s great to have access to this unpolished video and also to hear Mr Fry’s comment

”..let’s get real about this. Connection is what humans crave, it’s what we are all about, it’s something that separates us from animals. It even comes before … language, because language is an example of … a neural technology that we have created to answer this need for connection. We are the social animal par excellence.”

Great minds and all that! —-> http://www.peteshannon.com/post/199164244/when-will-they-stop-talking-about-the-toolkit

Niche social media / new marketing... fencing anyone?

Thu, 14 Jan 2010 13:56:00 +0000

This is an ongoing story similar to the last post about sodapopstop.com but subtly different.

This isn’t a video about personal branding but about providing information and opening up to your niche customers.

I’m sure that Duncan Page is a great bloke and is passionate about his industry in his own quiet way but it is his knowledge rather than his passion that he has exploited to market his products using social media.

It’s also a demonstration of the fact that there can be a real lack of awareness in using social tools in SMEs - Duncan had clearly been lucky to have a relationship with an agency and to be led by the hand by this agency to get the ball rolling as it is now.

The soda-guy knows

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 09:39:00 +0000

I tweeted this video quite a few months ago but forgot to upload it here.

John Nese from www.sodapopstop.com knows his niche. He is honest, true, transparent. After 2 mins of this video I TRUST him. This video demonstrates the importance of being an engaging guy who knows his stuff and is enthusiastic about it (true ‘personal brand’ in horrible industry speak), not the importance of social media. It just so happens that social media could be used to highlight these traits and develop his business.

Sodapopstop.com could rev up the social media engines far further than it does at the moment, and there’s not much need for explanation as to why this might work well. Once you watch the video I hope you’ll see what I mean.

John Nese could perhaps wrap up the soda niche as comprehensively as winelibrary.tv has for wine. If he wanted to. No doubt you may be able to find social media companies online that will analyse what this guy should do, but I get the feeling that he may be quite happy as he is - don’t you?

Hey Grandma! Are you answering your phone?

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Just a little thought…

Are you scared like your mum’s grandma was?

Grandma: “What’s that odd thing on the wall and what do you do when it makes that shrill ringing sound?”

Grand-daughter Ethel: “Pick it up and talk, grandma!”

Grandma: “But what do I say to it?”

Right now if you’re not engaging with, or even just listening to, your customers using social media then you are being grandma. She had the opportunity to speak with cousin Alice 100 miles away but wasn’t sure of the etiquette.

We all have access to social media tools now and it should be obvious what to say and how to say it. If you were talking to a customer face-to-face what would you say? How would you interact to develop a relationship and meet their needs? Well that’s exactly how you’d engage in social media.

Pick up the phone!

Personality changes everything

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 17:26:00 +0000

I was on the tube yesterday and I experienced a fullscale KISS. moment about how personality changes everything.

It was a fairly average journey. The carriage was about 1/3 full and everyone’s outward appearance matched the grey skies outside and the drizzle on the dirty windows.

We were just coming to the end of the line at Wimbledon when the driver started to go through the motions on the loudspeaker. However, what he came out with was quite out of the ordinary and included stuff like…

“Waaaakey wakey!!! Rise and shine my lovely passengers. We will shortly be arriving at the end of the line - Wimbleydon. That’s Wim-blee-don. Please remember to take everything with you when you leave the train and have a safe onward journey home.” and “While you’re at home enjoying a cup of tea and a nice biccy spare a thought for me as I’ll be on my way back to Upminster. Although perhaps you’re off to see your aunt Mable - if so wish her all the best from me and save me a slice of that cake.” and later “It’s been fun chatting with you but we are now approaching platform two which means that the doors to your right as you look in my direction will be opening when I push the button. I’m in charge here so they’ll open when I say and not before…..oooookay we’re now on the platform….is everyone smiling? good [opens doors]….a smile will open many doors for you in life. It’s been fun! Cheerio”

By the time we left the train, most of the passengers were beaming, some were clapping and some were even starting conversations with each other.

The simplest of human touches and something unexpected broke up the monotonous, mechanical, utilitarian journey and injected personality into our experience. There was a connection with the driver and we all felt the warmth of his humour and…well…human-ness.

This is a pretty simplistic analogy but it is a nice demonstration of how we can be affected by exposure to real personality. Social media allow brands, even big, clunking, dreary monoliths, to engage with consumers and show that they have personality. By this I don’t mean a personality in old-school, broadcast terms like the masculinity of Marlboro or the playfulness of Dr.Pepper, I mean lifting the veil on a personality that we, as consumers, could have a conversation with.

Obviously companies have been able to show a human side through various advertising media in the past but social media allow them to extend this concept to actually engage and use this personality to make a real difference in engagement terms.

A couple of examples?

In my previous post I mentioned Zappos and they are relevent here as well. They have placed trust and power in the hands of many of their employees and allowed them to be the first points of contact that consumers have with the brand, mostly on the phone but also through Twitter. They are encouraged to be the best in customer service, but also to be themselves. In return, Zappos employees seemingly have the same pride and inclination towards truly accommodating customer service as that of a small business owner.

Zappos’ blog pages: http://blogs.zappos.com/blogs

Another example is Innocent, the UK company that makes smoothies etc. Not only do they have a very strong brand ‘personality’ but they expose their ‘human-ness’ to back up this broadcast personality. This is taken further in their blogs, online community activities and customer service.

http://www.innocentdrinks.co.uk

http://innocentdrinks.typepad.com/

The 'Alternative' Social Media Top Ten List...

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 14:26:56 +0000

Most top ten social media lists are about technologies. They’re all about Twitter, Twellow, Facebook and Friendfeed. In this post I’d like to give you an alternative top ten list to make your social media activities a success.

Yes, it’s yet another “Top Ten” but I think you’ll find this one is a bit different, especially considering this post. For a while now I, along with many others, have been banging on about how it’s important to consider the big picture in social media and how it’s never about the technology. This conviction is reflected in the list.

Most of this list was relevant 100 years ago and will still be relevant in 100 years. Whether you’re a Walmart, a Nike, a vast public sector organisation or a baker of speciality bread in Chichester, if you put all this stuff into action then you’re likely to see some great results.

10 – Know Your Audience

Who do we want to converse with? Where are they right now? and when we do find them, why will they want to talk to us and our brand?

It’s easy to forget that behind all the posts, tweets, comments and profiles live organic, squishy things called people. These people not only smell organic but act organic. They need to have reasons to converse and to come back for more. Funnily enough these reasons are generally along the same lines as their criteria in the real world. So if we always exceed expectations here we will have a fighting chance of success. Remember, it’s about quality here, not quantity.

In other words, always consider the ‘who’, the ‘why’, and the ‘where’ before the ‘how many’.

9 – Sweat

We’ve got to be willing to work hard and reach out time after time, day after day. It’s important to be active in our chosen networks and communities and not to rely on automated tools or expect to be able to use old ‘push’ broadcast and branding techniques. Because a lot of this happens in front of the screen, many people seem to think that we can just push some buttons and the clever applications will do the rest.

All real-world networks and relationships need nurturing with a human touch and our online presence requires even more effort in this area, not less. We need to stay away from auto responders and be willing to allocate resource to fully engage.

Take the online shoe shop zappos.com as an example. They diverted all efforts into developing customer service, with 400 out of 700 of their staff actively and directly engaging with their customers on Twitter (“We are a service company that happens to sell…..”). This development of relationships combined with incredible customer service sweat ensured the creation of a $1 billion (yes) word-of-mouth marketing success story.

*UPDATE* Hear what Jane Judd, a senior manager at Zappo’s customer loyalty team has to say about their efforts here

8 – Give It Time

It’s important to recognise that, however fast news can spread in the World 2.0, it will take time to build up our online relationships in that same space. News, rumours and virals are short term flashes whereas relationships have a much longer lifecycle and can be far more substantial.

If CxOs procrastinate about getting involved in social media because of the possibility of negative sentiment then they need to be shown that the negative stuff is going to exist out there whether they take part in the conversation or not. Also, news and rumour is hardly ever more powerful than relationships with strong foundations (watch this space for a post expanding on that soon). If we get to grips with this early then we can plan now and be ahead of the competition in the future. Build the foundations and things will be a lot easier when building online relationships using social media becomes a horrible land-grab. Which leads us on to…

7 – Have Patience

Deciding to make moves in this new Wild West online is just the beginning. Once the decision is made we have to have patience. It takes months to develop in this space and we have to be careful not to get impatient and get messy. If we keep engaging in a meaningful and valuable way, being open and genuine, interested and interesting, then we will be building solid foundations.

6 – Have Guts and be Forward Thinking

Whether we’re a small cog in a big corporate wheel or a one-man band, we’re the ones who can see and hear what’s coming and we’re the ones to make the changes happen. It’s up to us to stick our heads above the trees – not just internally in our organisations but also out in the big wide world. The area of social media is already big news but there’s still huge inertia. Overcoming that takes guts backed up by forward thinking.

This stuff isn’t going away and the wave (no Google pun intended) is developing faster than anyone could have imagined only 10 years ago. How steep do you want the learning curve to be when you finally hop on? Knowing what we know, there’s a far higher chance that, with our strategy and resource in place, we can beat the benchmark if we act soon.

5 – Use Eyes and Ears

Reading, listening and understanding. We may have defined our target audience but do we listen to them on a regular basis? Do we truly understand what they want and what they’re saying? This does not have to be done using some crazy, expensive, full blown research commission (we’ll just have to make sure we get the same budget allocation next year by spending money on something else, won’t we!). Grunig and Hunt’s 1993 public relations theory speaks about two-way symmetric communications at the heart of PR excellence. We’re now in a multi-way comms environment that has extended and supercharged Grunig and Hunt’s theory. To capitalise on it we’re going to need to pay close attention to those feedback channels and this is going to take a lot more of number 9 (see above).

The more we listen, the more valuable our interactions will be and the better our relationships will be. This in turn will affect our business and allow us to meet the needs and wants of our customers. Not rocket science. Also, the better our relationships become, the better positioned and more resilient we will be to withstand and tackle any of the dreaded negative, viral online PR.

4 – Know Your Strategy

Seeing as this is the social Media KISS* blog then I’m pleased strategy has made it into the top ten! My personal thinking is that it’s better to do something with social media than nothing but it’s ten times better to be strategic i.e. before taking the plunge, consider your objectives, consider your audience(s), listen to what’s already going on, pick your priorities and get everyone bought-in to the plan. Also pay special attention to resource constraints and success measures.

Things will change and we will have to adapt but build that flexibility into the strategy, not out of it. With this thinking in place we can be confident in our consistency and can adapt our activities collectively within the organisation.

3 – Expose Yourself and Show Transparency and Empathy

Please don’t dust off your flasher-macs, but by ‘expose’ I do mean a willingness to show our true selves to the world. We need to participate in a way that is much more than an exchange of business cards or a push of information about products. The only way to engage meaningfully is to offer something of value and to do that we need to expose our valuable assets, whether that’s knowledge, data, culture or entertainment, while showing our personality too.

This is potentially the biggest challenge and some businesses are understandably fearful of rejection or damage to perception of the brand. The arrival of social media is a bit like the arrival of websites into the mainstream. Back in the 90s many big brands were saying “well….we can see why some companies might have a use for them but we won’t ever need one”. However customers pretty quickly expected every company to have an informative website. Not having one, or having a placeholder, was seen as backward and a bit of a snub. Well, history is repeating itself again.

Soon customers will expect all brands, big and small, to be active, open and participating. This doesn’t mean placing traditional push messages in social spaces, this means actively encouraging dialogue with the brand and providing something of value to keep the relationship engaging, worthwhile and valuable.

2- Monitor and Measure

We now have the ability to find out what people are talking about on a given topic at a given time using both free and paid-for tools. Make no mistake about it, this is incredibly important. It’s as if we’ve given a box that can eavesdrop on every phone call that people are having about a particular brand at a particular time and report back what they are saying. Put it like this to your old-school colleague and see if he has an ‘aha’ moment. In addition, not only can we eavesdrop but we can also participate, thank, correct and engage in those conversations too.

Whatever we choose to do, those connections and conversations and recommendations are going on online right now and will only get louder. Whatever your goals are, from customer acquisition through to online support, listen, measure and adjust. Plug that box in.

1- Be Authentic

The number one commodity online from now is trust. We tend to buy from brands we trust, unless forced to do otherwise, in which case we do it grudgingly and will quickly change as soon as an alternative comes along.

In our strategic document I think the number one objective is very likely to feature trust pretty significantly. The best way to develop trust is to be authentic. To be ourselves. To show personality. To say thank you. To say sorry. Hang on – this is all the stuff that’s important if you want to develop trust in the real world too, isn’t it? Well fancy that! So we don’t have to go looking for that ‘authenticity building’ piece of software? We can’t get that whizz-bang agency to write our blog for us? You mean punters can sniff out ghost-written tweets and blogs immediately? Exactly.

There’s no silver bullet. It’s not about numbers of followers to your Twitter stream. It’s about quality, authenticity and true engagement.

Good luck and let me know your thoughts.

New BookMap - Crowdsurfing by Martin Thomas and David Brain

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 10:28:00 +0000

I’ve just posted a new BookMap. This time it’s for CrowdSurfing by Martin Thomas and David Brain. This book investigates the move towards embracing the crowd within corporations and political organisations. Much of the book is focussed on surrendering some control, not only to customers but also to partners and employees, giving them a greater say in the operation of the organisation.

The book investigates the new style of leadership required to capitalise on this phenomenon and delivers many real world examples of success and “must-try-harder” in the area.

You can find this and more BookMaps by clicking the tab at the top of the screen.

"If you do what you've always done...

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 10:24:00 +0000

As the wise old saying goes….”if you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always got”.

In a personal context this isn’t a bad rule to slot into our memory banks, just between “Next week I’ll start making my lunch each day instead of buying it” and “I will finish my Christmas shopping earlier this year”.

Well, it’s not true in the field of marketing and communications, not anymore. But it’s going to take a little while for this realisation to filter up to the bigwig decision makers.

In terms of marketing there’s an incredible inertia. Old school corporate types are still ploughing money into barely-measurable, broadcast marketing methods in the hopes that if they do what they’ve always done, they’ll get what they’ve always got. What is that anyway? Brand recognition? Positive weekly ad recall surveys? ROI? or tangible connections with customers? Changes are taking place in the way people are consuming content and media and expectations surrounding our conversations with brands are shifting.

That’s not to say there isn’t merit in some broadcast methods but the shift in the balance of power is eroding the traction these old-school methods once had. This change will require brands to stop telling us they’re great and actually start being great for real…. and letting us tell each other.

Gary Vaynerchuk's Crush It PDF BookMap

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 18:55:00 +0000

I like to draw what I call BookMaps once I’ve read a book to make sure as much of the good stuff as possible sticks to the inside of my skull. This is a recent one that I did after reading Gary Vaynerchuk’s Crush It - perhaps you’ll find it useful too! Feel free to download the PDF using the link below and stick it up somewhere.

Crush It collates all of Gary’s no-nonsense approach to using social media for business with a specific focus on authenticity, personal brand and working hard. It’s written in GaryVee’s unique in-your-face style and demonstrates his passion for this subject following his real-world use of it to develop his own wine-business on www.winelibrary.com

I’ll be putting a full review here on KISS. at some point under a new tab at the top along with several other reviews and BookMaps.

Download the PDF version here.

RIP Kanye West hoax

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 10:09:00 +0100

The past few hours saw a flood of tweets on Twitter with the keywords “RIP Kanye West”. There were enough tweets and retweets for the phrase “RIP Kanye West” to feature at the top of Twitter Trending topics section.

One thing to point out first - he’s not dead. At least, not in the last hour he’s not.

That’s the thing about Twitter - a medium with lightning fast capabilities, a worldwide reach and zero editorial control makes it a perfect place to start rumours and spread misinformation.

Will Kanye West be cursing whoever started this thing? I think not. The publicity is incredible and will continue for quite a while yet.

Should this situation ring alarm bells for brands and organisations? If they are considering the use of microblogging to develop relationships with their targeted publics should they reconsider? Again, I think not.

The ease of the spread of ‘negative’ sentiment is very real with all social media but a lack of participation does not make you immune. If Kanye needed to, he could engage with this viral hoax and either tackle it or turn it even further to his advantage by riding the wave.

Translating this across to the situation for a brand - if all there’s a debate going on about your company or product, especially if it includes misinformation, don’t you at least want to be in the same room?

When will they stop talking about the toolkit?...

Mon, 28 Sep 2009 14:37:00 +0100

A quick one this.

You want to understand social media better? Forget about the toolkit for the moment and learn the phrase “It’s all about the people”. That’s it.

It’s not about the technology. People are, and always have been, social animals. They have shared, communicated, discussed and recommended to their social groups since the development of language - No hang on, since even earlier - I’m sure that certain neanderthal grunts and fingerpoints at poisonous berries could be considered a 0 out of 5 star review.

The tools available online now aren’t creating new behaviour, they are simply supercharging behaviour that’s always been there. It’s this behaviour that matters. How can you shape it? Contribute to it? Sustain it? and do all this long term? Well, roughly speaking you do this by developing solid strategic objectives and exploiting the tools that are currently available, as they become available.

So, from the outset, don’t start by thinking about Twitter and Facebook, start by thinking about people and then incorporate the tools as appropriate to the job at hand.

The "all publicity is good publicity" myth...

Mon, 28 Sep 2009 12:12:00 +0100

I recently changed to O2 home broadband and came across the following while setting it up.

http://www.jibble.org/o2-broadband-fail/

It’s the story of Paul Mutton, a technically adept user who found a security flaw in the O2 routers (O2 wireless box II and O2 wireless box III) and simply wanted to let O2 know about it so they could correct the issue. The security flaw could essentially allow a hacker access to the user’s PC without their knowledge.

For several weeks O2 refused to take any action, quoting from standard response scripts in their emails and generally fobbing him off. Exasperated, Mr. Mutton approached the press office who, clearly having taken technical advice, simply replied with a ‘fix’ that simply didn’t work.

All the while Paul Mutton was recording his experience on his personal blog for the world to see.

It was only after a technical demonstration to Be (an ISP owned by O2), who escalated the problem to O2, that Paul finally received a telephone call from a tech support manager at O2 who was taking it all very seriously (perhaps Be also mentioned to O2 the existence of the blog?).

Anyway, O2 issued a press release, reassured their customers and have now nearly completed a firmware release to fix the security flaw.

Although it didn’t take a large scale public discussion of this issue on social networks to prompt O2 to take action, the danger of an online viral flood of scaremongering was always there. Paul Mutton held far more clout than customers of days gone by simply because he’s connected. Just like you and me. Companies don’t wait for a threatening letter from BBC Watchdog to take action on complaints of this nature anymore.

O2 were lucky. Very lucky. Paul Mutton could easily have given up trying to contact the powers-that-be at O2 and simply gone public. Sure he had blogged about it, but had yet released his findings to any social networks. Issues such as this spread like wildfire once released and O2 could have taken a real hammering.

I’m sure that the front line customer service staff at O2 are all now briefed about and ready to deal with the dangers of the Kryptonite effect (see http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/news/2004/09/64987) and how to avoid it. Are yours? or are you relying on your customers being as considerate as Mr Mutton?

Social media video - Social media statistics

Wed, 26 Aug 2009 09:45:00 +0100

Just a quick one today. I stumbled across this social media video that doesn’t really reveal anything new but does shout what we all already know quite effectively. It could be quite a useful video to use to persuade some reticent old-schoolers to sit up and think a little harder.

USA, NHS & John Prescott

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 15:27:00 +0100

I’m sure you’ve heard about the Palin/USA/NHS debate that has recently erupted on Twitter.

In brief: Republicans in the USA want to upset Barack Obama’s plans for healthcare reform and are publicly using the UK’s NHS as a warning against a ‘socialised’ healthcare system.

This has caused a wave of support by disgruntled supporters of the NHS both in the UK and around the world on twitter and other social networks. No big surprise and not much point going into great depth about why this is happening - this has been done to death. We know that people use the tools at their disposal to state their case and, yeah yeah, Twitter is currently that tool of choice (please see upcoming post, probably entitled “Please stop talking about the toolkit”).

What is interesting to note from is that a debate such as this is now wide open for all comers - and all comers can be heard. For instance Gordon Brown has voiced his support for the NHS and John Prescott has taken a camera out onto the terrace at the Houses of Parliament:

Watching this video reminded me about two things that politicians do not often remind me about. Authenticity and transparency. This video is authentic. The headlines have allowed the participants in the debate to open up and given them further freedom to be transparent. To show heart and passion. Now, we may not agree with ol’ JP above but I do think that there’s a real authenticity here and this is because he has concentrated on getting one thing across - the message. There’s no make-up or studio lights and there’s no journalist with an agenda either. Plus I also feel that I know him a little better.

Standard, daily, non-reactionary communications from politicians are, in the main, all agenda and spin with little authenticity. This is unlikely to change overnight in the political world.

However, the corporate arena is a different matter. If more businesses concentrated on being authentic and opening up genuine dialogue in the commercial world then they would derive real value. Authenticity promotes trust and relationships. Without building these over the coming years and simply doing the same old same old, companies will be whistling in the wind.

What the f*** is social media? Here are some thoughts...

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 11:22:00 +0100

Thanks go out to Marta Kagan for this update on what the F*** social media is. It was her original presentation one year ago that brought a lot of social media stuff together for me. I hope that its useful for you too.

The Space of Flows

Mon, 01 Jun 2009 10:24:00 +0100

When the internet was in its infancy and until quite recently, everyone accessing the internet was in their own little booth, their computer acting as a simple terminal. Internet ‘surfers’ were all surfing the same structure - the same ‘tree’ network - but could neither see nor interact with each other. Sure there was email but this is not ‘in-line’ social interaction but a rudimentary messaging system.

As we all know, for the past few years this has been changing. You can tailor, edit and personalise content, while breaking down the walls between the booths and interacting with others as well. This is perhaps why the term ‘surfing’ is in decline.

This seems to me to be the web developing to incorporate Space of Flows a la Castells. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_of_flows

Have a read through with the changing face of internet tools in mind and see what you think. It’s a very nice way to consider the development of the web - very organic rather than buzzword based.

Want to know about social media? Talk to your hairdresser...

Tue, 19 May 2009 21:05:00 +0100

He or she knows more about the benefits of Social Media i.e. Being Social without even knowing it.

People come back because they know him and other people in the salon. New customers hear about him through positive WOM.

This is such a great example of the simplicity of the activities required to use social media in a commercial context. Just keep it simple.

Great report into the changing consumer activity online

Wed, 04 Mar 2009 21:18:33 +0000

Great report into the changing consumer activity online