TheWayoftheWeb

Content and Digital Marketing Specialists

social media

Like Minds: Measuring Social Media conference

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Commuting is a reminder that there’s live outside of London, and it’s amazing how many great events and conferences can slip by if you’re not looking beyond the capital.

One case in point is the inaugral Like Minds conference, taking place on Friday, October 16th, in Exeter, Devon. The topic is ‘Measuring Social Media and making it sustainable‘, including measuring social media ROI, carrying out online campaigns to compliment an offline mix, how to target and best engage online audiences, and turning customers into brand advocates.

Not bad for £35 (discounts for students, unemployed and freelancers).

And there’s a great line-up of speakers, including a couple I can personally recommend. The full list is: Trey Pennington, Olivier Blanchard, Darren Forsyth, Dhaljit Bhurji, Nick Tadd, Andrew Ellis, Laura Whitehead, Andrew Davies, Rick Waghorn, Carl Haggerty and James Barisic.

I’ve shared drinks and chatted with both Darren and Rick, and spent a lot of time chatting with Andrew Davies about the magazine and publishing industry – particularly as I’ve closely followed the start-up he co-founded, idiomag.com.

In fact, I’m feeling a bit hard done by – a chat with Andrew normally involves buying a couple of drinks at London prices. But with 11 speakers for £35, you’re getting each one for the price of a pint. And it’s compacted pretty tightly into just four hours, and after-party drinks – and it’s easier to get out of work for a half day at the moment than it is for a full day of talks. Check out alikeminds.org for details of the venue and booking.

Does social media really increase your emails?

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Social Media leads to more time spent on emails, according to a new study by Nielsen (Found via Mashable).

Apparently heavy social media users spend much more time consuming email each day, and it seems to only be increasing judging by the study. There’s no inference whether this is a good or bad thing, but the question I’d be asking is whether it’s also affected the amount of time spent on the telephone, in meetings etc. I probably spend less time on the telephone now than at any point in my life, and yet I’m keeping in contact with far more people on a far more regular basis than ever before.

How to tackle the email increase:

Nielsen and Mashable both point to the sign-up and notification emails as being the biggest cause of the email influx – but there’s a really, really simple solution.

In addition to my two main email accounts (work and personal), I have an account at OtherInbox which has been utterly fantastic at keeping all the notifications etc out of my way unless I actually need them.

Put simply, Other Inbox is web-based mail, but rather than the normal email address, you get an @username.otherinbox.com address (so mine is @badgergravling.otherinbox.com or @badgergravling.oib.com – cheers for the tip Tim). All I then do is insert the name of the social media site (or anything else I fancy) as my email address – so thewayoftheweb@badgergravling.otherinbox.com.

When that address is emailed by the site, Other Inbox automatically creates a folder of the same name and files every email from the site in the right folder.

So anything likely to clog your inbox gets filtered, filed, and saved for 30 days with a free account (paid accounts are really cheap and worthwhile for permanent archives). And you can integrate it with Gmail, access via IMAP etc, etc.

End result – a far less cluttered inbox every day, and storage for those set-up emails you’ll realise you need in two year’s time.

Bit of a round-up for a busy day…

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It’s been a busy day at work, so rather than adding to my list of ‘things I should really blog about when I find time’ file, I thought I’d clear a few things out:

  • First up is the news that that two Australian girls stuck in an Australian storm drain decided to update Facebook for help rather than phoning for help. My first response channelled the spirit of Bill Hicks, but it certainly raises an issue about how younger generations wish to communicate, even in emergencies. Should emergency services monitor the main social networks as a necessity, just in case? What happens if you’re a user of a niche social site, rather than Facebook or Twitter? And no monitoring system to my knowledge is 100% accurate at picking up every message on a service…
  • ‘Just’ 25% of women are influenced by social networks when making purchases. Firstly, the fact that 25% are conscious of the influence is pretty impressive considering how new social networking still is for many people. Secondly, they aren’t influenced by social networks – they’re influenced by other people – the social network just makes this less geographically limited. I’d agree with Matt Wise from Q Interactive, who conducted the survey, that “brands are failing to use social networks to effectively target women” (Except I’d use the words engage or serve women), but in a lot of cases, they’re also failing for men too. And I’m not going to mention the Brand Republic headline for the story…
  • Technorati appears to have given up on monitoring. I can understand that Technorati has lost direction, particularly given the plethora of real-time search services, plus Google blog search etc. But I’m surprised that rather than concentrating on making their core business better, they appear to be trying to emulate the big content sites – given the efforts of brands like AOL etc, I can’t see Technorati being a big draw for content consumers (although I could be wrong). And the fact that they’ve dropped blog roll links from their monitoring, whilst also producing a lacklustre monitoring nod to Twitter, really suggests that they’re in search of a plan. Because obviously as I write this, blogging is dead…

That’s probably enough for today – I’ll end on a more constructive note for Technorati – rather than throwing away the monitoring side of the business to jump on the blog content and real-time bandwagons, why not improve the core product, as people have asked for years, and perhaps also implement a decent alternative to Feedburner? Give me decent monitoring, monetisation and innovation in RSS delivery and I’ll be a lot happier, as my RSS readership continues to grow proportionally. There are a lot of issues with the real-time web at the moment, and the non-real-time web isn’t going anywhere any time soon.

Motorcycling and the art of social media

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As someone who combines an obsession with motorcycling with a love of social media marketing and tech, I picked up on a post back in July when Dave Winer met multiple world champion and motorcycling legend Valentino Rossi. One pioneered blogs, RSS, podcasting, and more, and the other has won eight motorcycling world championships, including claiming the last title of the 500cc two-stroke era, the firs of the 990cc MotoGP era, and claiming a title in the year he switched from the all-dominant Honda factory team to the underperforming Yamaha team.

And then during the Indianapolis MotoGP round I spotted a message by Robert Scoble: ‘Just had lunch with the #2 motorcycle rider in the world (Gorge Lorenzo) So young and good looking and popular. Nice to all the fans too.’

Seems like Fiat in the U.S is inviting a few prominent tech people to discover the excitement of motorcycling. But motorcycling should also appeal because it shares a lot of elements with social media marketing and other interests that inspire passion and devotion:

Community: If you park by the side of the road in your car, it’s pretty rare anyone stops to help (unless you’re an attractive lady or own a rare car). The unwritten rule of motorcycling is that you stop for another biker in trouble – and surprisingly this actually happens quite a bit.

Passion: Motorcycling isn’t a cheap or practical method of transport in most of the Western world – it’s for people who want to feel freedom and excitement, and want to be absorbed into that world by reading and watching everything, buying upgrades for their bike, the latest helmets and leathers, matching t-shirts, mugs and anything else they can find. The biggest selling items of memorabilia for Austrain manufacturer KTM? Bright orange, KTM baby dummies (pacifiers).

Tribal: There are countless tribes within motorcycling – by manufacturer (e.g. Harley-Davidson) , by individual model (e.g. GSX-R owners), by location, by sport (MotoGP, World Superbikes, road racing, off-road etc), by budget (e.g extremely low cost ‘rat bikes’), by age (classic collectors). And each has stronger or looser ties with others – and individuals belong to one, or many in self-forming networks of niche interest – just as we see played out on Twitter or Facebook.

It’s extreme: Granted, as an overall group, it’s pretty huge niche. But it still requires road riders to accept that they’re more likely to be injured by a myopic car driver, that spare parts, maintenance and insurance cost far more than cars, and that some people will instantly assume that they’re antisocial and only out to race around at high speed. And that any accident is always the fault of the motorcyclist.

And in a non-Bluetooth enabled crash helmet it’s one of the few times a chronic multi-tasker is totally and utterly focused on one thing – which is why so many world champions admit that they feel ‘flow‘ when it all goes well.

As someone who worked for one of the largest publications in motorcycling, Motorcycle News, for seven years, I spent a lot of time learning about (and working with) online and offline communities on two wheels, and it’s definitely shaped the way I approach all the other communities I’ve worked with since then.

Anyway, if you want to see for yourself, the final laps of the 2009 Catalunya GP are worth watching (Sadly MotoGP have disabled embedding).

Incidentally, I’ll keep my diary open for the British MotoGP round just in case, and especially the Isle of Man TT (one of the few events I didn’t get to visit for work…)

7 reasons why companies need social media managers

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There has been a lot of debate recently about the need for companies and organisations to employ social media managers and specialists in a dedicated role – the main criticism appears to be that the role isn’t needed because employees already use social media.

That might be the case in a limited number of small organisations, but someone will end up as an unofficial social media expert. And as someone who performed the role for a large organisation, I know there are a number of good reasons for having one person as the focal point – even if every employee is actively representing the group or company.

1. Justification: Are employees going to use social media effectively when they have senior managers questioning whether it’s worthwhile?

2. Guidelines: Most people have a reasonable amount of common sense, but if you haven’t got clear guidelines for employees to refer to if needed, you’ve got no excuse when they get things wrong. And all it can take is one personal attack for even the most responsible employee to make a mistake. That’s assuming they even keep up to date with the latest legalities of using social media in addition to their day job.

3. Analysis: Do you know what’s working? And is a social network referring the most traffic because of scale, or because other social networks are being ignored or done badly?

4. Co-ordination: Do you trust independant employees to know where exclusive news should be revealed first? Or could a status message or tweet destroy your carefully planned campaign? Is the right content going online at the right time, to coincide with the right development work?

5. Research and Development: Is Facebook more relevant to your company than Bebo? Will you reach the right people on Twitter? And should you be improving the forum on your site, or developing a widget for social networks? The answers are different for every organisation, and indeed, every campaign

6. Coordinating external resources: Do you know enough to decide between a good and bad external agency when it comes to social media? And in a large company, are you sure other departments aren’t hiring other agencies at the same time?

7. Crisis management: When something does go wrong, you need a plan in place, and someone who can manage an effective response.

Whether or not social media is a specialist role, or part of a wider remit, there needs to be someone with the authority and accountability to ensure that the work feeds into the wider business effectively, with an effect on product development, customer service, SEO, and business strategy.

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