Archive for the ‘social media’ Category

I started to think about the impact that connectivity makes in our daily lives, after one of my colleagues was worried about getting mobile broadband connectivity on a trip to Cardiff. So this prompted me to think about the ten web services that I can’t live without.

Putting this blog on the list would be conceited and I left Facebook off because I think that it lacks quality. Jedward and the Cheeky Girls are proof that just because something is popular doesn’t make it good - I could spend a whole blog post writing about why I dislike Facebook but will leave it unsaid for another day.

Accuweather just missed the cut, but I find their service particularly the ‘Real Feel’ number invaluable. I even ponyed up for the premium mobile application.

The list is no particular order of merit:

• Bloglines - I have an eclectic and wide range of online reading material that I like to keep up with. Whilst I have a Google Reader account, it is set up as insurance against IAC shutting down Bloglines. I find Google Reader intrusive and not as productive as Bloglines. In addition, Bloglines works better on a mobile phone and power my blogroll
• Delicious - is my memory. I am a web pack rat and it comes in handy for research or pulling together case studies for presentations. I keep a minimal amount of bookmarks on my computer, mostly bookmarklets to take advantage of Google Translate, subscribe to a blog and pull up the local weather
• Google - as well as it being my default search engine, Google is also my currency converter, calculator, spell checker and timezone checker. The site has a surprising amount of shortcuts that make my life a lot easier. They don’t require any technical skill, more details here
• Teoma - one of the best kept secrets of the web, Teoma is my back-up search engine if Google isn’t giving me the kind of results that I want. If anything Teoma is more relevant than Google is on its search responses. It naturally doesn’t trawl as much of the web as Google and it isn’t as good for real-time or semi real-time content like the latest blog posts. But it does have a clean interface reminiscent of Google previously. If you hit the ‘Google found approximately 150,000 results’ and you can’t find what you are looking for in the first page (which you should have set to 100 results per page) then give Teoma a go
• Email - my primary personal email account is an Apple IMAP account (now sold as MobileMe), but I’m old school so I have a .mac address. I also have a couple of other IMAP accounts with a more limited circulation. IMAP is great as it allows you to sync your account across multiple devices and not pay a fortune for Microsoft Exchange
• iDisk - I know lots of people swear that Dropbox is the best, but I still like to use iDisk for large file transfers like presentations. Apple has progressively improved the product and I know it inside out
• Flickr - if Delicious is my memory of facts and figures then Flickr is my visual memory I use it as an aide memoire, image storage for my blog and as a kind of photo scrapbook
• Twitter - is the new IM. Instant messaging on my iPhone and on corporate networks can be a bit haphazard. Twitter gives you the direct message capability of IM but also allows for broadcast messages and syndication of content
• Skype - whilst all the fuss is happening in the iPhone world about Facetime I am more interested in Skype. Its combination of reasonably-priced VoIP calls and free Skype calling together with robust file transfer and chat messaging has made it ideal for business communications and keeping in touch with friends in far flung places
• LinkedIn - I’ve got business out of LinkedIn, polled opinions on the best content management system for a particular purpose and received recommendations on a web hosting company in Hong Kong. LinkedIn is an invaluable business tool

This is cross-posted from my personal blog.

At the end of June I referenced Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard as forward-thinking managers when they founded HP. My thoughts turned to HP’s founders again when I caught up with a friend who works in the business recently for lunch and we were shooting the breeze over some Japanese food.

One of the things that came up was how less-experienced practitioners often didn’t build relationships properly or say please and thank you when doing outreach via social media channels. I’ve been pretty fortunate in this regard mainly because I am quite big, have a northern accent and a shaven head which tends to give away my no-nonsense approach, so I suspect that people move on to easier pickings elsewhere.

The conversation reminded me of a set of rules that Dave Packard presented at HP’s second annual management conference some 52 years ago which demonstrated the kind of smarts social media practitioners should have. Politeness and respect are central to Packard’s approach:

Think first of the other fellow. This is THE foundation — the first requisite — for getting along with others. And it is the one truly difficult accomplishment you must make. Gaining this, the rest will be “a breeze.”

Build up the other person’s sense of importance. When we make the other person seem less important, we frustrate one of his deepest urges. Allow him to feel equality or superiority, and we can easily get along with him.

Respect the other man’s personality rights. Respect as something sacred the other fellow’s right to be different from you. No two personalities are ever molded by precisely the same forces.

Give sincere appreciation. If we think someone has done a thing well, we should never hesitate to let him know it. WARNING: This does not mean promiscuous use of obvious flattery. Flattery with most intelligent people gets exactly the reaction it deserves — contempt for the egotistical “phony” who stoops to it.

Eliminate the negative. Criticism seldom does what its user intends, for it invariably causes resentment. The tiniest bit of disapproval can sometimes cause a resentment which will rankle — to your disadvantage — for years.

Avoid openly trying to reform people. Every man knows he is imperfect, but he doesn’t want someone else trying to correct his faults. If you want to improve a person, help him to embrace a higher working goal — a standard, an ideal — and he will do his own “making over” far more effectively than you can do it for him.

Try to understand the other person. How would you react to similar circumstances? When you begin to see the “whys” of him you can’t help but get along better with him.

Check first impressions. We are especially prone to dislike some people on first sight because of some vague resemblance (of which we are usually unaware) to someone else whom we have had reason to dislike. Follow Abraham Lincoln’s famous self-instruction: “I do not like that man; therefore I shall get to know him better.”

Take care with the little details. Watch your smile, your tone of voice, how you use your eyes, the way you greet people, the use of nicknames and remembering faces, names and dates. Little things add polish to your skill in dealing with people. Constantly, deliberately think of them until they become a natural part of your personality.

Develop genuine interest in people. You cannot successfully apply the foregoing suggestions unless you have a sincere desire to like, respect and be helpful to others. Conversely, you cannot build genuine interest in people until you have experienced the pleasure of working with them in an atmosphere characterized by mutual liking and respect.

Keep it up. That’s all — just keep it up!

This isn’t about social media, although Shel Israel or Brian Solis would say much the same things with a sprinkling of digital pixie dust, these practitioners need to conduct themselves as mature adults and pick up a copy of Dale Carnegie’s How to win friends and influence people. This is cross-posted from my personal blog.

We are so used to manufactured pop music artists by the likes of Tom Watkins, Stock | Aitken | Waterman and more recently Simon Fuller’s 19 Entertainment. Some of these groups like Wham, Kylie Minogue and Take That had international success. We have gotten used to the dominance of western international recording artists.

Wonder Girls Korean fan site.

It is this heritage that makes the Wonder Girls phenomena: a Korean girl-band managed by a Korean team getting a Billboard top 100 hit all the more remarkable.

Wonder Girls MySpace page

That kind of success takes more than talent and good looks - the world music industry is littered with talented beautiful failures. The Wonder Girls are creatures of the internet age, they started off conventionally enough in South Korea and then used their South Korean fan base to spring board into the US marketplace.

There were two parts in this story which made a great use of social media:

• Live web chats and Where in the world are the Wonder Girls videos provided Korean and western fans with a regular update on their activities. This allowed the Wonder Girls to spend time building a new fan base in the US through touring without neglecting their Korean fan base
• Crowdsourcing fan calls-to-action: They encouraged Korean fans to sign up to western social networks MySpace and Facebook to provide a body of ‘friends’ and help build an online bridgehead into the US. (The Korean fan network is the Daum portal). Later when they became successful they encouraged Korean and western fans to request their track Nobody via Radio Disney’s website

You could argue that Wonder Girls are a part of the ongoing Korean Wave: a rise in popularity of Korean television and film culture which has swept Asia and started to gain popularity in the west like the Japanese film, manga and anime industries before it.

Wonder Girls Facebook page

However where the Wonder Girls breaks rank with the Korean Wave is in the proactive targeted nature of their marketing; which is more reminiscent of aggression and entrepreneurship of the Japanese car, camera and consumer electronics industries which shook things up in the 1960s and 1970s. Cross-posted from my personal blog. Here’s the video for my favourite track they’ve done ‘Nobody’, it has really high production values (watch out for the James Brown homage).

I found it interesting that WPP was using Twitter to provide guidance to employees currently stuck away from their ‘home base’ due to European airspace being closed due to volcanic dust.

We have been pretty fortunate with regards to having the right staff in the right place at this time. This was also posted over at my personal blog.

I have an obsessive compulsive relationship with Flickr. It powers the images on this blog and acts as a kind of visual diary for me. It powers the communications that I have with some of my friends such as my former colleague Bronney Hui. So it was only a matter of time before it was used to spam marketing messages out there. However, this spam is clever by nature.

The user signed up for a Flickr account, favorited one of my pictures and added me as a contact. With flickr this connection doesn’t need to be reciprocated. After a suitable amount of time they then notified me by Flickr of a set that they had created that they thought I would be interested in.

This set consisted of two trailers for “Shen Yun Performing Arts”. I was struck by how much more involved the process of creating this spam was compared to the usual email. This is cross-posted from my personal blog renaissance chambara.

Unless you have been living under a rock for the past couple of weeks you will all be aware that the (wrong, in my opinion) winner of X Factor was crowned on Sunday. Geordie lad Joe McElderry beat Olly Murs with over 60% of the vote, securing a record contract and almost certainly a place on Dancing on Ice in a couple of years.

But, in a strange twist of events, it seems that poor old Joe may be deprived of the 15 minutes of fame pretty much guaranteed to all X Factor winners - the coveted Christmas Number 1 slot. A campaign which was started on Facebook encouraging people to buy Rage Against the Machine’s track ‘killing in the name of’ has seen the song start to outsell the X Factor winner by an estimated 10% , making it the favourite to be number one this weekend.

Simon Cowell has spoken out against the campaign, calling it ’stupid’ and it’s participants ’scrooges’. Poor Simon, as if becoming TV’s first billionaire wasn’t bad enough, he now has to face the prospect of one of his many, many acts not doing as well as he had hoped. I, for one, think it’s an excellent campaign, not just because I think Olly should have won, but because it is an excellent example of the power of social media and how it can mobilise society. Ok, so it might not be over something as important as global warming, but if people can hold a strong enough opinion about this and feel compelled to do something about it, then maybe this model can work for important campaigns in the future. As organiser Jon Morter said, ‘Even if we didn’t quite succeed it will still be a great achievement in bringing people together and actually trying to do something’. (NME.com)

What do you think? Can something as simple as a Facebook group re-write music history, and possibly change the way we campaign in future?

I was challenged by some of my colleagues to think about digital and social media in 2010. At first all I could think of was the Roy Schneider film 2010: The Year We Make Contact.

I couldn’t nail things down to a 12-month period and as the Koran says ‘the man who predicts the future is a liar, even if he tells truth’. However, here is some trends that I think are going to become increasingly important.

Social media wouldn’t be social media without people and I see 2010 as a time when more people start thinking about how we deal with the trust-based issues that social media throws up. Social media allows people to be more connected, but also affects the fabric of society as we relate to each other in different ways.

We need to think about the implications for etiquette, ethics and what will be the new social norms that we have to deal with. I already get asked about what should you do if your boss sends you a friend request for Facebook or suddenly starts following you on Twitter? Its been eight years since Heather Armstrong, author Dooce.com was fired because of her blog, yet as a society we still haven’t got to grips with what social media means.

I personally live from a worldview similar to that articulated by Singaporean blogger Pat Law “As long as the information is online, even if you’ve placed it on private mode, your privacy is automatically placed on a pedestal for potential abuse. So never publish anything you don’t want people to know online.”

Social media has great power and an ability to mobilise people, from flash mobs to meet-ups with like-minded strangers: the ability to bring people together for good is well documented. However the ‘wisdom’ of mobs is something that is starting to raise its ugly head, from parties on Facebook that get crashed, to the vilification of Jan Moir following her Stephen Gately article. Repugnant though Ms Moir’s views are there is something sinister about the chattering classes online version of Orwellian ‘two-minute hate’.

A crucial part of the relationship between members of society is the role of the government is key. From a government perspective all this self-organising power can be dangerous: people getting together and standing up to authority – we’ve seen it before:

• Climate–change protestors
• Poll tax riots
• Illegal raves

Each time, the government has brought resources and legislation to bear against them. I expect this to be at least considered in the next year. We are already seeing the genesis of thoughts in this area with the three strikes internet connection ban against potential file-sharers.

If you look at countries like South Korea and China the real ID concept is likely to take hold. Where consumers access to web services will be directly tied to their real-world identity. Being the UK, this data is also likely to be sold to commercial enterprises resulting in better online targeting and mapping for marketers. I wouldn’t be surprised with the real ID was floated at a concept for public consumption next year.

A good reminder that government also doesn’t get things right is the current Digital Britain report, which is astounding in its lack of vision and imagination and would have been more appropriately named as a Digital Cripple report. As my pod neighbour Nick Osborne repeatedly points out to me: the Australian’s have set higher speed goals for getting broadband into the outback than the UK has. Finland has made 1MB speed bandwidth a legal right already. I don’t see anything changing in this area anytime soon. The bar being set so low provides a temporary benefit to telecoms companies. These same telecoms companies would like to move to a pay-per-bit model where you pay for each unit of data that you use rather like the way voice calls used to be.

Whilst I can’t see that happening in 2010, I could see it being openly discussed by the likes of BT. If bundles are used, it would only be to confuse and obstificate price comparisons by consumers.

The UK will still have analogue intellectual property laws for an increasingly digital world, I don’t see a dramatic change to correct this coming anytime soon.

From a marketing perspective, I think that marketing budgets are undergoing a long-term disruption. Social media will no longer be special but part of the normal mix.

Changes in marketing spend will come partly at the expense of search advertising. There is an argument to be made that Google Adwords as a platform has matured. With some noticeable exceptions such as some parts of insurance services key word prices are now optimally priced. Two factors have come along to affect search advertising.
Firstly, search is moving into the real-time web slowly, yet much of the interesting content is happening there. Real-time web advertising allows the media buyer to think about location and time slots on a much more granular level. I have already seen promotional deals offered on foursquare for local restaurants when I am at work.

Secondly, Facebook behavioural adverts are still relatively cheaply priced versus their competition, combine this that the trust has engendered after a number of false starts and their ad platform is looking increasingly viable for many of the intent-based campaigns that would have previously run on a search engine.

The good news for the search engines is that consumers are much more open to a curated web via friends and authorative individuals, many of the concepts of social search will be ready for an early majority audience in 2010. All they need to do is work out how to monetise social search effectively.

Continued pressure on spending within business is likely to affect social media in a number of different ways.

I expect there to be an increase in social media rightshoring. In the past, I have used a Philippines’-based moderation company for a large community project, but only the other week a senior international business-to-business marketer was asking me to recommend someone they could recruit to be their global head of social media, to be based out of India.

Given the myriad cultural differences that separate us, I am inclined to think that many of these rightshoring projects will fail miserably. Its hard enough speaking to my bank based out of a Bangalore call centre, what happens we ask these organisations to engage in conversations that are much more culturally sensitive.

Social media will be looked at to provide solutions to problems that businesses continue to wrestle with from knowledge management to customer relationships and workflow. As with previous iterations of solutions, I expect the results to be variable in quality due to organisation factors, culture and a lack of management expertise.

One of the break out trends for 2009 was ‘the web of no web’ where a mix of QR codes and augmented reality allow consumers to interact with the real world with online information. This has a huge potential, but there are two key challenges, the most dangerous one being that someone comes up with a creative execution so bad that consumers reject the ‘web of no web’ concept.

The second challenge is much more mundane and not likely to be solved in the next year: power consumption. Power technology has not improved as fast as display technology or electronic components with modern devices we devices and applications that can flatten a smart phone battery in a few hours. I already struggle to get a day out of my iPhone battery and powerful applications are only likely to exasperate the situation.

There you go, that’s my predictions for 2010, what are yours? This is cross-posted from my personal blog renaissance chambara.

Stories about TV advertising vs. online advertising always seem to catch my eye – as previous posts such as Its a generation thing and They call me mellow yellow will demonstrate – so it was with interest that I read the recent news story on NMA discussing Toys ‘R’ Us’s planned return to TV adverts.

Toys ‘R’ Us is running a social media campaign to promote the return of its TV ad character Geoffrey the Giraffe, launching both a presence for the character on Facebook and uploading older versions of the advert onto YouTube. However all this social media activity is merely part of a plan to build engagement online ahead of the TV launch this week. So is TV is the real star of the show?

Nowadays a brand running a social media campaign to advertise itself is nothing out of the ordinary but I did think it was interested that the company plan to relaunch the TV adverts. This decision comes as many other brands are pulling their TV advertising budgets and putting everything online.

I have not seen a Toys ‘R’ Us advert on TV for what seems like an absolute age though the fact that I am now having severe difficulties getting the ‘It’s a magical place..’ jingle out of my head surely shows how successful the adverts were for building recognition around the brand.

So what do we think is more effective? Is Toys ‘R’ Us just bucking the trend to dismiss TV advertising or is this part of a TV advertising revival?! The below stories suggest a bit of a trend developing…

Raleigh returns to TV advertising after 12 years

After Eight ads back on TV … after eight years

Telegraph to launch first international TV ad campaign

I’m sure I’m not the only one waiting with anticipation to see what will come out of the current FDA Hearing on Social Media. The very fact that this meeting is taking place puts the FDA under pressure to issue some coherent guidance on how pharma companies can and should be engaging in dialogue with patients and physicians online and how to address the issues around adverse event reporting. We’re fortunate enough to have a colleague at the hearing and below is her update from yesterday’s session. The updates are also being posted www.HealthieRForum.com

HealthieRForum Exclusive: From the Floor of the FDA Social Media Hearing

Nicole Preiss-Riley, Senior Vice President in Ruder Finn’s Healthcare practice, is onsite at the FDA hearing on social media.  Based on the sessions from the first half of the day, here’s what she has to report:

Presenters were asked to focus their remarks on five key questions:

1.     For what online communications are manufacturers, packers or distributors accountable?

2.     How can manufacturers, packers or distributors fulfill regulatory requirements in their Internet and social media promotion, particularly when using tools that are associated with space limitations and tools that allow for real-time communications?

3.     What parameters should apply to the posting of corrective information on Web sites controlled by third parties?

4.     When is the use of links appropriate?

5.     How should adverse event reporting be addressed online?

Thus far, presenters have selectively responded to questions rather than answering each one of the five as part of their respective comments – much of the discussion has focused on the unique character of social media and the value it provides to both providers and consumers.

It’s clear that the pharmaceutical and medical device companies are eager to work with the FDA to determine parameters for working within the social media sphere as well as a plan for implementing those guidelines.  However, the question has been raised repeatedly as to what product-related information companies should be responsible for conveying.

Much of the commentary has focused on moderated sites (i.e., WebMD) that have discrete editorial roles. What has not yet been addressed with any robust discussion is the broader social media landscape of bloggers and opinion-based Web sites.

How this type of content can or should be regulated has not been touched yet. One independent blogger who is scheduled to present at the hearing tomorrow said, “It’s been a good meeting so far.  Based on what’s been said, I hope the FDA will come up with guidance within the next year.”

I have to admit, I was fairly surprised when I started my new job and a member of my team already knew what I’d been up to the previous weekend.  I had underestimated my online visibility, as do a lot of people, and could have jeopardised my job before I’d even started.  Luckily I lead a quiet life so no damage done…

The online distinctions between business and pleasure, once so definite, now seem to be blurring. With the announcement of a partnership between LinkedIn and Twitter, allowing users to share status updates across sites, the gap between individual social networks, and indeed our online personas, is being bridged.   

Even Google is getting in on the act, announcing deals with Facebook and Twitter to include their live feeds into searches.  I googled myself and although I’m quite far down the list (I’m not as popular as the other Laura Strong from London) I’m definitely on there.

I’m sure many of you will have heard the story of an employee ranting about her boss on Facebook, only to be publicly humiliated and sacked on their own news feed.  The Guardian has devised three rules to avoid social media catastrophes as ‘behaviour is very important in public and we all live public lives now’: