See, there are a lot of different uses for SM and they require fundamentally different approaches to the medium. They each have their own flavour, blended from vastly differing sets of ingredients.

Are you, for example, a well known brand?

If you are then you are duty bound to protect the reputation of that brand by  communicating with your followers. You need to listen to what they are saying and act on what you hear. Tailor your content to be interesting and interactive. Don’t just feed it your offline stuff.

Maybe you’re a celebrity?

Ah. Now. That’s a bit different. Your social media content if you are a public figure is entirely based on your character. Maybe you are fiery and controversial. Maybe you’re all knowing and smug. Maybe you’re an expert at something.

If you’re a well known face then people are following YOU and simply want to hear what you think. Be honest with them and don’t try to water yourself down. If you do deign to actually speak to any of them, they will faint.

Or are you a social media beast?

There’s lots of them about. If your following has been grown by a series of purposeful iniatives. If your existence in people’s timelines is simply so they get to hear what you’ve got to say about types of differing  social media user. Well then you’ve made a rod for your own back.

You have to keep dreaming up new ways to say the same thing. Y0u have to keep in with other experts in your field. And you have to keep reading and thinking so that you can filter the industry news through a knowledgeable lens.

You might be none of the above

I know it sounds crazy, but you might just be an ordinary person. Just someone with a Twitter account and a Facebook page. If that’s the case then don’t bother reading this. Don’t waste your time with blogs about how you should be using social media. Just go on posting your updates and chatting to your friends.

You may well find that your stream is the best of all.

Image credit: Piotr Bizior

3 months is a long time between updates. Much longer than I had intended but I have been busy.

Today, however, fuelled by good coffee and free wifi, Imma post something.
Since my last post there has been one very significant change to the social media landscape: Google+. It’s long been predicted, denied and debated and finally it’s here. But is it any good?

Well, frankly. No. It’s not.

It does bring some nice video-conferencing tools to the table, and makes photo sharing much easier (maybe too easy?). But I was really hoping for more from Google.

I know that it’s all about the marketing but the first thing that bugs me is the terminology. Circles? Really? Just as the world had got the hang of following, friends, groups and lists Google wades in and crowbars a new term in there. And you can have different types of circles. And those circles can intersect.

Sorry Google but in trying to simplify a complex issue, you’ve made the problem worse. The reason for Twitter’s early success was it’s simplicity. Ditto with Facebook. They both loaded up on users because their initial offerings were very easy to use. Google+ looks user friendly with it’s big icons but it’s trying to to do much.

I can’t help thinking they would have done better to conentrate on the bits where they can gain a competitive advantage. The Google+ button is one of those. Maybe if they’d started with a kind of virtual bookmark sharing system which is easy to use then people would understand it better. The reason this is important is because the main issue, in my experience, is with getting people to sign-up in the first place. Why would anyone want to sign up to Google, requiring yet another password to be committed to memory when they are being offered the same thing as they get already from Facebook? Would it not be better to encourage people to sign-up to a service that is genuinely new and useful. Then, when they are on-board, start to add the tools that they get elsewhere and try and keep them there for longer.

That’s what I would have done.

I really am barely using Google+. And I do this for a living.

Would love to hear your thoughts.

I’ve had a big change of clients recently which has caused some changes in my work patterns but I think it’s safe to say I’m back. I made it to #EdCM last week for the first time this year (I KNOW!) and I’m finding time for Twitter again after putting it on the back burner.

It’s been a long time since I was actively building my network, creating content and engaging with people.

But you know what?

It didn’t matter.

When I re-inserted myself into the social media matrix it was as if I’d never left. The foundations that I’d spent so long building actually held the whole thing up. This blog is still getting good traffic, people still email me with enquiries, my friends are all still there on Twitter and the burritos are still good at @illegaljacks.

So there’s a lesson for you. The work that you put in at the beginning of digging your digital plot, the strategy work and planning. That’s never going to be wasted. It’s what roots the whole thing. After that you have a very fertile foundation on which to grow your digital garden.

I’m off to water the flowers.

Image credit: Robert Michie

While it may well be quick and easy to set yourself up with a Twitter account and start tweeting, this does not mean that your presence will be a success. In fact it probably won’t because there’s a hell of a lot of planning that needs to go into setting out your stall.

So if you want to do it right, here’s some building blocks. If you like, it’s my own 10 Commandments of Twitter.

1. Get your name right.
   Make sure that your Twitter name tells people who you are. Acronyms don’t work because they are impenetrable outside of your own circle.

   You may not be able to fit your organisation’s name into the amount of letters available. If that’s the case, go for something which best represents you and give a full description in the profile.

2. Assign responsibilities.
   Who will be tweeting on behalf of your organisation?
   Who will source the content?
   Who will monitor your stream?
   Who will respond to questions?
   Who will cover for holidays/sickness?

   If there are multiple owners of the account, list them by name in the profile. This openness takes away one of the most difficult barriers in government communications.

3. Set goals.
   What are you trying to achieve? Is this just to push your news items onto Twitter? Or are you trying to engage your audience? Are you trying to raise awareness?

   Whatever the goal is will affect how and what you say and how you react. Record your goal and evaluate your activity against it in 6 months – 1 year.

4. Timetable activity.
   Social media can give people the impression that you are available 24/7. In reality this is not always the case.

   Work out when you can realistically be available on Twitter and stick to those hours. You may not want to publish this but any deviation from your core hours will affect expectations.

5. Set up your dashboard (Hootsuite)
   Visit http://www.hootsuite.com/ and add your Twitter account.
   Spend some time learning what Hootsuite will allow you to do. The key things are extra columns to track your @mentions, DMs, keyword searches and peer lists.

   Use Hootsuite to manage your presence at a glance and save time.

6. Build search queries.
   Think carefully about what information you want to keep up with on Twitter. Ideally you want to be finding comments from people relating to your field along with content from similar organisations.

   Add these searches as columns in Hootsuite.

7. Find similar accounts.
   Do some research into other organisations who’s content you find useful. This is inevitably going to be useful for followers of yours.

   Make a Twitter list of these similar accounts and add them as a column in Hootsuite. Monitor this stream and try to retweet any content which is likely to be of benefit to you and your followers.

8. Content strategy.
   So you will be tweeting interesting stuff from people you follow and content that you have uncovered. You also have your own content to promote.

   Outside of this, what else do you have to say? Will you be generating content in order to engage with your audience, like a blog with comments enabled? Will you be highlighting content which colleagues are creating?

   Work out a plan of what content you will be pushing and how you are going to keep on getting it.

9. Monitoring.
   Monitoring may not be done by the same person who tweets the content. Just make sure that the team talk to each other and that anything which is picked up in monitoring is fed into a process for tweeting and/or engagement.
10. Evaluation.
    After 6 months – 1 year, look at your performance in relation to the goals you set out at the beginning.

Commit to engagement. Draw up your service level agreement which outlines who will be looking after the account and when. Followers expectations should be managed if you can’t commit to replying to people who ask legitimate questions.

Plan any sign-off processes that you envisage. For instance, what do you do if someone tweets you with something positive. How do you respond? More importantly, how do you respond to negative coverage?

Make a plan to monitor Twitter and the social web in general so that you can respond to any coverage that you are getting which is not under your control. Develop your strategy for dealing with such coverage.

Evaluate your efforts. Before you start, work out what your goals are; awareness, media relations, resonance… From there you can plan how best to achieve them and you can measure the success of your presence after 6 months.

Don’t tweet drunk.

It all feels very insular. Outside of these networks, does anyone know or care about all the little waves of interest that rise and fall in our dashboards on a daily basis.

There’s a lot of talking. A lot of discussion about what we find cool, what we’d like to do and how cool social media is. Take a step back though, and look again. You’ll see that not that much is actually happening.

The conversations are great and I’ve developed some new friendships. But why haven’t we changed the world yet? This is supposed to be the tool which brings us together, makes us stronger and allows us to forge a new tomorrow.

Blessed are the geeks.

And what of the businesses that we have tempted into our rockets? Where are the ones whose trajectory has been shifted noticeably upwards with the addition of a few tweets and a Facebook page?

So, is social media cliquey? Yes, it most certainly is. And by focussing inwards in these cliques, everything that we see is magnified disproportionately.

But is social media diminished by this?

No, I don’t think it is. Smart businesses are harnessing these cliques to bolster their brand.

It’s just business though. It’s not the paradigm shift it sometimes seems to those of us who have immersed ourselves in social media.

If we’re to use it successfully it needs to be approached as a business function. Not a magic bullet.

Put it in your business plan. Don’t make it your reason for being.

Don’t say anything online that you wouldn’t be comfortable shouting in the middle of a crowded room.

Recent stories, in particular the Ryan Babel/Howard Webb furore have led me to revise this. While I’m pretty sure that it would be OK to make a joke about Howard Webb being a Man Utd supporter as a result of the penalty decision, it’s clearly dependant on the subtleties of context which are all too absent when a tweet like this is taken in isolation.

You have to think about each individual message which you post online as a stand alone entity. If people stumble across it they will be unlikely to check up on anything else you have said, instead they will take that line verbatim. There is no place for subtlety, irony, sarcasm, double meaning or any other language modifiers.

My new rule is.

Don’t say anything that you wouldn’t be comfortable being repeated out of context by a scandal hungry media.

I may not stick to it though.

What I hadn’t banked on was the pervasive nature of underhand marketing tactics. There have been a few things recently which have annoyed me. I already ranted briefly about marketing types making recommendations based on nothing but loyalty to their own clients.  This time my hackles have been raised by The Mashable Awards. 

I have nothing against the awards in principle, or awards in general.

What gets my goat is the requirement that any vote in the awards is automatically retweeted or posted to your Facebook account. It can’t be turned off. So if you want to vote for a few things then you are actively spamming your own followers on behalf of Mashable.

It’s most annoying because Mashable are the ubiquitous social media follow. Everyone with any interest in the arena is reading what they say and this begins to look like an acceptable approach to viral marketing. 

It’s not. 

It’s insidious. Any vote I might make on the site is purely an endorsement for that brand, it is in no way an implicit endorsement of Mashable, yet if I vote I am promoting their content without consultation. The status updates that it generates are junk mail and should be treated as such.

It may not seem like a big deal. If we are all following Mashable anyway then we do kind of endorse them right? Maybe, but that’s not the problem.

Rather, if other hooked up organisations begin to adopt the same approach, our Facebook feeds or Twitter streams will quickly fill up with this crap.

Just as we do with spam we will learn to ignore it and software will be developed to automatically remove it from our lives. 

Our carefully selected, permission based social media networks will cease to be of value and we will move on to something else.

Marketeers who use social media. Don’t take a leaf out of Mashable’s book. If you truly value your customers and have respect for whatever they CHOOSE to say using social media channels, trust them to work out whether they want to tell the world that they have just clicked on your call to action.

He’s been to the swimming pool with my wife and I since he was a few weeks old and, as far as I knew, he couldn’t swim. He enjoyed being in the water, splashing and playing, but he couldn’t actually travel from A-B without assistance.

Then yesterday I come home to find him excitedly waving a badge at me. Turns out he’d swum a length! On his own!

See, I thought I had him pegged. But I didn’t. He was way better than I ever knew and all he needed was a bit of encouragement.

You’re way older than 4, are you just splashing about?

Image credit: Timothy Smith

They use that information to help them make decisions. It might be small decision like “what should I watch on telly tonight?”, or it might be a big one like “should I move to Dunfermline?”*

It’s your job, as a creator of content, to make those decisions as easy as possible by providing all of the relevant information. It’s NOT your job to steer those people to make a decision that you may prefer by only providing some of the relevant information.

If your offering is good enough then you should have no worries. If it’s not, then you’re going to be found out sooner rather than later.

* for the record, the answers are “QI” and “No!”