Archive for June, 2010

25
Jun
10

Social media networks are hard to find

By Barry Dewar 2 Comments
Categories: social media
Tags: , , ,

The hardest thing to do when you are passing yourself off as a social media consultant is to find your networks. Clients will come to you and say they want 5000 followers on Twitter or that they want to share their news with 10,000 Facebook friends. What they haven’t thought about is who those people are or where to find them.

That’s my job right?

Yes, that’s my job but you’re going to have a better idea than me. I need to do a lot of data mining in your head and the collective head of your company to get the information I need to then go and find the people who might be interested in becoming fans of your brand.

It’s bloody hard. Try finding a niche market of disabled kids who don’t actually want to identify themselves as such online due to it being the only place they can compete on a level playing field. Or try finding ethnic or religious groups who, culturally, just don’t get the medium or have their own closed networks which serve them perfectly well.

Sure, finding people who like cheese or sourcing advocates for technology or entertainment is easy. Too easy maybe. But I haven’t ever had a brief like that. When people come to me it’s because they have already thought about it and come up blank.

So, what to do?

I don’t have a magic Twitter nose. I can’t always find these people either but what I’m learning is that the best way to do it is not online. You need to find these people in their own comfort zones. Go to a local meeting in someone’s front room, or get a clipboard and interview people on the street. It’s never easy, and it’s not cheap. But sometimes it’s the only way.

And you thought “doing social media” was easy…

24
Jun
10

Social media customer service

By Barry Dewar 5 Comments
Categories: social media
Tags: , , , , , ,

There’s been a move recently, by some very high profile companies, to begin using Twitter for customer support. They monitor the service for mentions of their brand and, if there’s a problem, they very publicly and visibly step in to elevate the problem and make sure it’s solved.

They do this because they can see the potential for social networks to amplify any negative feeling. It’s a good point. But it doesn’t solve the problem.

The Emperors new clothes

In pretty much all these cases, the customer service from these companies is basically just bad. By tackling visible complaints all they are doing is creating a handful of individual happy customers while simultaneously  making the rest of their customers that little bit more pissed off that they’d not getting the same treatment.

If social media is to teach us anything it’s that we have to change the way we interact with out customers across the board. Online and off we need to treat them with more respect and ensure that they are always satisfied. As social media grows in it’s influence people will become wise to these new tricks. Companies who hand-pick those who shout the loudest to get the best treatment will be viewed with the same derision as cold callers are at present.

So here’s my advice

Sort out your customer service first, then offer the same level of service in your social media channels. This way you will grow a network of happy brand advocates who talk about you just as glowingly in the hairdressers as they do on Twitter.

23
Jun
10

Things not to lose sight of

By Barry Dewar 9 Comments
Categories: social media
Tags: , , , , ,
  • None of my clients have iPhones
  • Only half of my clients know what “social media” actually is
  • If you ever say Twittersphere out loud people will laugh at you
  • You can’t explain social bookmarking, they just won’t get it
  • (I don’t get social bookmarking)
  • No-one reads this
  • “Things not to lose sight of” is a crap title

Please add your own below:

22
Jun
10

Streamlining your LinkedIn strategy

By Barry Dewar 1 Comment
Categories: blogging, facebook, marketing, social media and twitter
Tags: , , , , , ,

LinkedIn used to be rubbish. Really. It was nothing more than a glorified spreadsheet of contacts that you could show off to other people. It was for salesfolk to get worked up over who had the most leads.

In recent months it’s come on in leaps and bounds. It’s now, arguably, the most focussed social media website out there. Not only is it a cracking way to present your online CV (although pretty much everyone still asks for a paper one!), it’s also grown a number of routes for some genuine business networking.

It stands alone in that it’s targeted at the world of work. You can join groups, share expertise, email contacts, upload news, etc. But let’s be clear, it’s commercially focussed. If you’re creating a voice for yourself, a brand image, then there are better tools. LinkedIn can showcase this brand but it’s not the place to perpetuate it.

Brand building involves a great deal of trial and error

If you’re fully committed to it then you’ll be tweeting a lot, updating your Facebook status a lot and trying to find ways to get your content on just about every social media forum there is. Every update is something of a shot in the dark, a calculated one, but a risk all the same. If you spend all day crafting a single comment on someone else’s blog, it might be a masterpiece. It might be loaded with crafty keywords, it might link to all the right places and it might have all the right bait to drive traffic to your site. But while you were doing that one of your competitors threw up 20 tweets, 5 Flickr pics, 7 Delicious bookmarks,2 blog posts and a YouTube video for good measure. Who do you think generated the most buzz?

Showcase the very best of what you are achieving in the social media space

Don’t link all of your accounts on LinkedIn. Especially not your twitter stream, instead handpick the tweets you want to include (by using the #in hashtag). None of your potentially useful network of business savvy people want to know that you’ve just farted. Instead, craft regular status updates just for LinkedIn, answer some pertinent questions and engage in some good group chat. If your blog is business oriented include that, ditto your Amazon reading list. What you’re trying to avoid is extraneous information overload.

It helps to think about LinkedIn as you would your old skool CV. Get the best stuff on there and make yourself sound awesome. Otherwise it goes in the bin.

21
Jun
10

Social Media Breakdown

By Barry Dewar 4 Comments
Categories: social media
Tags: , , , , , ,

The term “social media” is used a lot at the moment. People employ the phrase in a massively generic way to represent anything that involves interactive content. They reckon that if you label it as this, you can somehow talk about it as a single entity.

It’s a dangerous thing to do. Social media represents a number of high-profile and very diverse websites. Most prominently Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Each of these is very powerful and have their own sophisticated networks and culture. But it’s important to remember that they are not the same.

If you’re a business, you can’t approach Twitter in the same way as you approach Facebook for instance. On Facebook you create little hubs of content which remain there for a while. They are static and allow your “friends” to interact with you, and one another, based on conversations which you are, essentially, directing.

On Twitter however, your content is current for a matter of minutes. It floats by on people’s streams and then it’s gone. Each tweet may generate conversation but that too is always moving away from you. It’s transient and Twitter really requires a greater commitment to regularly creating great content. What Twitter does do, however is allow you to jump into other peoples conversations in a way that they walled garden of Facebook doesn’t allow.

YouTube is a hub of conversation but I defy any marketers to make use of that aspect. Sure you can make great videos which generate a buzz but the conversation is completely subjective and not much help from a communications point of view. It is a constant though, in the same way as Facebook is, so you can focus on it for longer term projects.

So, please, fellow social media professionals, can we stop using the term as a catch-all? Give each tool in your arsenal the attention it needs and we’ll get a step closer to gaining some respect for what we do.

*image credit Josep Altarriba

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