Advising a client this week on their marketing plans for a presence, it struck me they have a lot to learn about the medium they’re using, even though they already have their Facebook and Twitter presence up and running.
They’re showing how little they understand when they say they want to add a follow button to the order confirmation page in their shopping cart. Look, knock yourself out, it can’t hurt, but i would expect a 0.0001% clickthru rate on that. It’s not like many of us start following companies we buy from at most once a year, especially when it’s just a retailer of products made by other companies.
Offering useful advice, however, in a friendly, conversational tone — that might well get you some followers. Can you find a way to advise customers on using the product or service they’re considering buying? Can you offer advice on the decisions made before purchase or even on the industry as a whole?
Besides, in 12mths time average Australian Twitter users will probably have 500+ people they follow on average, so for brands, being followed by a customer won’t mean that customer’s seen your message. Lifestream marketing messages are ephemeral things. There’s no way for the marketer to determine an equivalent to impressions/month. It’s like radio or TV — broadcast. Without panel research or clickthru data to show it’s been acted on, we have no idea whether it’s been seen.
Think of Facebook, Twitter and anything that displays a stream of updates as a form of broadcast media, but an unusually fractured kind. On TV, every audience member’s viewing habits are different; on lifestream media, it’s not just their viewing habits but the programming that is different, according to the number and nature of things they follow.
People ask me how I keep up to date with all the tweets I get from the 1,000+ people and brands I follow. I tell them I don’t — but that’s not the point — by following 1,000+ people I ensure that there’s always something interesting to read whenever I have time for Twitter.
(This post was my first from an iPad. Another device further dividing attention into smaller chunks. I’ll tidy it up later, promise!)
Why add polish when in today’s society, being so geeky is so credible? I love this intro video for Diaspora. Now it needs to be mashed-up into a music video for some yet-to-break indie band. Call it “OK Go Make A Social Network”.
The thought for today: when branding, be true to who you are. Customers have a seventh sense for these things.
I’m moderating a new Digital Citizens Event coming up on Tuesday April 13th, with the theme of “Social Media for Social Good.”
Secret: I’ve never moderated at an event before (I’m usually either speaking or heckling the speakers) so this might be a refreshing change, at least for the crowd and the speakers. Please come along and heckle me — I am a large and slow-moving target.
The one frustration is it’s a topic close to my heart. I’d love to wade in with my own opinions and evidence but I hate it when other moderators do that — it’s not me you’re paying to listen to. But I’ll happy debate it with you afterwards over drinks
The evening begins with an open discussion of “what’s hot on the social web” and then we’ll get into the main topic.
If what’s hot on the social web is you, sweetie, I’d appreciate it if you could be on time.
The four speakers I’ll be wrassling are Karalee Evans, Mark Chenery and Nic McKay. We’ll then take questions and open the debate.
Bring an opinion, bring an idea, bring a question or just bring a good heckle, but please bring yourself.
Waiting to go on as Easter Bunny at my son’s childcare centre. A 2m, 100kg man in a bunny suit? Deep emotional scars for everyone.
About the speakers
Working as a communications and public relations professional for nearly ten years, Karalee Evans has developed successful communications models for the corporate and government sectors and most recently a not-for-profit organisation. During three years working for social good at headspace, Karalee developed and delivered a successful social media and marketing campaign (recently awarded Silver and Bronze at the 32nd International Caples Awards) focussed on advocating youth mental health issues.
Mark Chenery is communications manager of anti-poverty agency ActionAid Australia and former digital marketing journalist at AdNews magazine. He’ll be speaking about Project TOTO, ActionAid Australia’s attempt to give poverty a voice through social media tools such as Twitter and blogs, giving Australians an insight into the realities of poverty and to give poor and marginalised people the opportunity to tell their stories on the world stage.
Nic Mackay is currently the Managing Director of The Human Race, a social entrepreneur and a thought leader regarding the future of “corporate social responsibility”. He co-founded The Oaktree Foundation, Australia’s largest and most successful youth-run aid and development organisation, founded an Australian/South African non-profit organisation called Key Change Music, which is creating positive social change through music. Nic recently received the Rotary Club of Melbourne and Sir Albert Coates 2010 Young Achiever Awards.
If you use Twitter as part of your personal or company marketing, Frances over at Edublog asks interesting questions: when potential contacts are researching you on Twitter, will they judge you by the people who follow you? Should you therefore invest time in checking your follower lists and blocking the spammers, scammers and pornbots following you? Does it reflect poorly on you if they are there?
First, my usual word of warning: nobody really knows yet.
No matter how impressive the social media guru or digital strategy expert, this is still shortly-after-dawn in the Age of Social Media and nobody really knows anything for certain yet. Social Media was born as a means of subversive online communication — it only recently and reluctantly began to bend to the will of marketers. The industry is still developing the methodologies that will one day tell us for sure the answers to these big social media questions.
In the meantime (as Quasimodo said to the archdeacon) I have my hunches. Here they are.
Please don't judge him by his Twitter followers.
Relax, don’t do it
No, I don’t think a follower list full of spambots and pornbots reflects poorly on you. I don’t think you should prune your follower lists. I believe in most cases, people will not judge you by the calibre of people following you on Twitter.
If someone does judge you on the kinds of people who follow you on Twitter, it’ll vary greatly by age, industry and nationality. You won’t find the same standards applying in Paris as you do in Texas, or between tweens and seniors. Twitter is a very international community and there’s no easy way to track location or demographics of the people who view your Twitter profile unless they also choose to follow you.
So why worry about unmeasurable opinions of people you can’t identify?
There are more productive things you can be doing
For most of us, the investment required to curate our follower list will not equal whatever return we get from having a ‘clean’ follower list or the risk we take by not having a ‘clean’ follower list. (This may not be true for conservative politicians, church leaders and captains of industry.) I have 1,700 or so followers currently and I’m not even going to try to keep so many followers in line. The spambots and pornbots will eventually wither and die from neglect if Twitter’s own anti-abuse team don’t get to them first.
You won’t see me saying this often…
Let’s take a leaf from the pages of Old Media History. If you own a television set, TV networks can’t stop you watching their programming. There is no ‘block’ button on the control panel at your local TV station. Yet the demographic composition of a TV audience is essential to the success of a television when courting advertisers.
How do they change their audience composition? Through means much more subtle and yet even more effective than a ‘block follower’ button. They use programming changes to change the content being broadcast and when it is broadcast. And they use audience research to learn more about not just who their audience is, but what sort of content they need to offer in order to reach the audience they aspire to.
What is the Twitter equivalent of ‘programming changes’? Change what you say, change when you say it. Change what you reply to, and how rapidly you reply to it. Encourage interaction with the followers you aspire to have more of. Seek less interaction with pornbots. Respond less often to phishing scams. Please, for all our sakes!
‘Audience research’ on Twitter is not dissimilar to TV: time-consuming, inaccurate and prone to erroneous conclusions. But it’s still worth a try. Pick a follower who typifies your ideal audience. Take note of who they follow and what they reply to. Mimic. Repeat.
No undo
Remember, I’m making this up as I go along, based on what I observe every day and what I can find in my hunch bag, but here’s the big take-away: I am not a fan of the ‘block’ button. If you decide to block followers who your business contacts won’t approve of, what next? because there’s no ‘undo’.
What if you’ve just blocked someone still finding their way around social media etiquette the hard way? What if that person might have become a valuable business contact or customer if you’d just given them another chance? Even if you keep following them after blocking them to see if they turn over a new leaf, you’ve sent them a message: you don’t want them following you. It’s a small thing to not follow someone, but a very large thing to not let them follow you. There’s no undo.
No wonder TV sets don’t have a ‘block viewer’ button.
I was discussing the future of advice with a friend yesterday, and their opinion was that services like Wordy would one day replace most professional services, and that products like Yahoo! Answers would one day be capable of acting as your primary source of general life advice.
Yeah, maybe, but I’m betting no. There’s a good reason why bad advice is free and good advice is expensive. Sometimes you get lucky and you can score some good advice for free, but you can waste a lot of time acting on bad advice before that happens.
In the meantime, this module in Yahoo! Answers on men’s health made me laugh.
Why Yahoo! Answers isn't my first source of medical advice
Years after becoming a Twitter user, I find I’m still explaining it to people, and my explanation continues to evolve. Often, technology is best explained through analogy, by relating the technology to something non-technical your audience knows from the ‘real’ world. The challenge is finding an analogy that will be familiar enough to make sense to your audience, while at the same time, informing them about all the many benefits your new technology offers.
My previous Twitter analogy was a dinner party:
“Twitter is like a big dinner party with a group of interesting friends who are having several conversations on different topics at the same time. You’re able to dip in and out of conversations around the table. Sometimes you contribute, sometimes you just listen, and sometimes you pick up on something interesting from one conversation and carry it across to another conversation to share it there. You don’t need to be paying attention to everything all the time — if you need to go to the bathroom you can get an update when you return or just relax and enjoy how the conversations have evolved since you left.”
The best thing about that analogy is that everybody’s been to a dinner party like that before. But it doesn’t always work — dinner parties can be chaotic and stressful for some people, and Twitter is never really chaotic and stressful (if it is, you’re doing it wrong!) I’ve had a few friends grimace when I use this analogy, and I would rather turn people on to Twitter, not off Twitter altogether.
Kevin Marks works on interweb stuff for BT, worked on OpenSocial at Google and was a lead engineer at Technorati. After reading Kevin’s blog post on the idea of a ‘flow-past web‘, or more specifically, the comments on that post, I really like the idea of a ‘sushi boat’ or ‘sushi train.’
Twitter is like a sushi train restaurant because a sushi train has a wide variety of bite-sized morsels — and Twitter offers a variety of bite-sized ideas/complains/jokes/whatever. Like a sushi train, you can select the morsels you like and maybe share some of it with your companions to either side. And like a sushi train, things don’t disappear — they go around and around, and if one serve of salmon sashimi is taken, there’ll be another one around in a minute.
The main problem with my new analogy is that the morsels on a sushi train are only added by the chef(s), whereas on Twitter, the morsels are contributed by you and your fellow diners. Uh-oh.
So now I would love your feedback: can you visualise a sushi train restaurant without a chef, where you and the other diners prepare and present tasty sushi of your own? Where the whole point of the restaurant is to participate in both making and consuming interesting sushi?
Please let me know if you do. Because if not, I need another analogy…
Kevin Marks talking about the flow-past web and more at Web 2.0 Expo recently.
Catching up on some reading, I loved a recent post from strategist, speaker and author, Mike Walsh, Be Sweet, Please Retweet. If you’re learning how to build brand relationships with social media it’s well worth the reading. If you don’t have time, a couple of Mike’s points really stand out for me:
Broadcast networks now compete with ‘audience networks’
“On the Internet, there is no concept of prime-time. You can program television, but when online people discover and consume content, it is often because it has been sent to them by other people they know. Whether a tweet on Twitter, a blog post on WordPress or a shared link on Facebook, the most influential distribution assets now are not broadcast networks but rather audience networks.”
Social media only works if your creative benefits the consumer’s personal brand:
“Stunning art direction is useless if no one actually watches your ad. In a world of audience networks, people will only forward your content to their friends and followers if it makes them look smarter or cooler by doing so. Their brand, not yours is at stake.”
A passive broadcast audience must be persuaded to become an active brand evangelist:
“Broadcast is a powerful medium for rapidly raising awareness, but the reality of media fragmentation means that to get real engagement requires your customers to do the distribution for you. And that, quite frankly, is not easy. The trick of turning audiences into advocates requires more than just savvy media planning or bribing people with free iPods… it takes true creative genius.”
I don’t know that it always takes true creative genius. If you don’t have true creative genius on hand, aim for great creative, some luck, good timing and most important of all: give your audience something that will be good for their personal brand if they share it with friends.
I’ll be presenting this short talk at an Optus event, hAPPlication, in Sydney, all about launching the iPhone GS and iPhone 3.0 to Optus customers and press. It’s 2:48am now and the event is happening this evening (oh my! I must go get some sleep now) but here’s the presentation…
My social graph should be a Venn diagram – one of those graphs made of different sizes and colours of circles that everybody else learned how to interpret at school.
Me, I stopped listening at the point of realising they looked like a big window full of balloons. Swept up in that idea, my imagination took me out of the classroom window and into a sky full of coloured helium balloons.
I guess that doesn’t tell you much about my social graph. But it does help explain why I have trouble understanding why my relationships are best described by a graph when I’ve always considered them to be more a painter’s palette of oils or simply a noisy room full of diverse, interesting and creative people who have been kind enough to ask after my health, push a morsel of food in my direction and crack open a good bottle of wine.
Venn diagrams are beautiful because instead of growth or decay they show us how similar we are, how even the most different of us is connected through a series of overlaps linking, say, fascist with conservative, conservative with moderate, moderate with progressive, progressive with socialist, and socialist with Fidel Castro. Now Castro: there was a guy who knew how to compulsorily acquire friends.
Plotting the data points of my social graph I wonder if perhaps I am a close relative of the tulip, the internet startup and that nice young Mr Ponzi, because my social graph shows me accreting new followers on new social networks more quickly than I can say, “but what’s it all about and why, for heaven’s sake, would you want to follow me?” On Facebook I have 354 friends. On Twitter I cracked 1,000 followers this very day. LinkedIn tells me I could at the stroke of an Enter key tell a completely ludicrous “350,000,000+” people that I’m looking for new career opportunities. I bet they’ll all be excited to hear that.
Perhaps I will realise soon that nearly all these millions of people want to sell me something that I don’t want or need, want me only for the other connections on my social graph, or want me to help them transfer several billion from Nigerian bank accounts. I have been thinking that I’m at a party and I’m the special guest when really I’m caught in an Amway presentation and I’m the new conscript.
Perhaps my social graph will burst. Like a bubble or a balloon. Which is why my social graph should be a Venn diagram.
A friend of mine is running social media for the Obama administration. They’ve invited the community to contribute questions to an online town hall in the US tomorrow. So far, 41,306 people have asked 42,126 questions and cast 1,556,109 votes on which questions Obama should answer.
Wow. Has Obama succeeded in building an online political dialogue with the US electorate that will last beyond the current economic crisis? I sure hope so. We should all be watching and learning from what works and what doesn’t. This could be the world’s biggest e-government taking its first baby steps.
