Eggblogg

Social Media in Business conference - one or two takeaways

Last Friday I was at the 'Social Media in Business' event where I met some lovely people and was generally inspired by the talented speakers and their big thinking.

I do enjoy taking time out of the office to go to these conferences, even though there's the inevitable catching up when you get back. Which is why I'm in the office on a Sunday morning while outside is the most glorious sunshine.

Anyway, I thought I'd share some the highlights of the day here on my blog. I figured I owe it at least to my Tweeps after all the bizarre tweeting I was doing on Friday!

Venue - sunny Richmond, on the riverfront in the UK headquarters of PayPal/Ebay. It was certainly different from the usual hotel venues, mainly because there didn't seem to be any sort of 'front of house' organisers - you know, the gals on the desk when you arrive, people to tell you what's going on. I suppose you could say it was all very relaxed, we were kind of let loose in the building, free to explore and find out where everything was.

Only trouble is, I'd saved myself for the muffins/croissants which I was sure we'd get at the start of the day, only to find a serve-yourself tea and coffee counter. As the morning went on I'm afraid I moaned a bit on twitter about the lack of food. A few desultory biscuits did appear at the next break, and we were given box salads from Pret a Manger at lunchtime, so that made up for it somewhat.

Anyway, the chill out room/eating area was fun, and the locals were very friendly, so enough about this - what about the presentations...?

Our host for the day was Jamie Riddell, someone who I've been connected to on Twitter for some time now, so it was a pleasure to finally meet him. When not introducing the speakers and calmly refusing to be flapped by the odd (obligatory) technical hitch, Jamie was encouraging and monitoring the Twitter back channel. This allowed him to get up at the end of each presentation and refer to the conversations going on in the audience. Spooky!

All the speakers were interesting, but I'll just mention those that stood out for me.

Tamara Littleton of eModeration gave us many great examples of social media in action. She pointed out that much of what is called social media marketing is in fact not dissimilar to the old broadcast advertising model of 'one-to-many'. She gave the example of Sony Ericsson's 'South African wave' campaign, which, although it involves people uploading their own videos, it's not user-generated content in the same sense as a wiki, because no-one taking part is necessarily interested in what other people are doing, so there's no community in that sense.

Continuing the community theme, Jon Bishop of Gumtree threw down the gauntlet by saying that social media is not for the IT, customer service or PR departments to own. Cue various PR jokes throughout the day. I liked Jon's visual representation of the work of community management, a blend of looking after members and facilitating their continued involvement, and attracting new members. He made a good point about 'taking it offline to increase engagement online'. 

I for one enjoyed the presentation by David Parfect of Facebook, who explained the kinds of presence a business can have on Facebook and gave us plenty of stats (24 million 'active' users in the UK, 50% of them coming back daily, 35+ is the fastest growing user group). This pres may not have been 'cutting edge' for some attendees but it clarified a few things for me and was well delivered. It certainly suggested some things for me to experiment with on FB and I will report back when I've done so!

David Cushman of 90:10 is always good value - I've been a fan for a while and follow his presentations on Slideshare. I really like his thinking, and if I was ever looking to get back into the world of employment I would be banging down these guys' door for a job. David talked about networks and the real ROI of social media. My notes don't reveal much more than that so I was either tweeting too much at that point or too enthralled to pick up my pen.

Working with teenagers is not something that has ever appealed to me, but Clare Hudson of In4merz made it sound fascinating. Clare is a PR who runs a thriving online community for fans of the various pop artists she promotes. The members generate a great deal of the content and are rewarded for their participation.

Even more interesting was Clare's account of her background and how she wants to do more for teenagers who she feels are getting little or no careers advice in school. As well as giving talks herself, going to schools and introducing them to the possibilities of a career in marketing or PR, she also has ambitious plans for offering them careers training.

It was a thought-provoking day, lots to go away with including some interesting new contacts such as Hugo Pickering (thanks for lending me your iphone charger, btw!) and John Taylor of Parcelgenie.

Feedly - a great way to keep up with blogs

I may have mentioned this before but I've become a real fan of Feedly. Put simply, it's an RSS feed reader, but I so often get asked 'what's a feed reader' that I'm going to explain what I think Feedly is and why I like it.

Please note this is not a technical explanation! Think Top Gear rather than Car Mechanics Magazine!

I subscribe to a lot of blogs. That doesn't mean I read them all regularly, alas, but when I find a good blog post I'm compelled to subscribe, so I don't miss anything good. When you hit the 'subscribe' button on a blog, you're generally given a choice of how you want to subscribe, for example, like this:

Now you could subscribe by email, but if you subscribe to a lot of blogs that will soon clog up your inbox and if you're anything like me you'll miss a lot of good stuff.

A web-based news reader means you can keep an eye on all your chosen blogs in one place, and every time the blog is updated, the latest post pops into your reader. I used to use Google Reader, one of their many free tools, but I found I missed a lot of stuff. Although I appreciate many of Google's free tools, (Analytics, for example) there was something about the layout of Google Reader that made my heart sink whenever I looked at it. I never got around to categorising blogs properly and the whole thing was a mess. This is what it looked like:

Then one day I came across this fabulous short video by Heidi Allen explaining how she uses Feedly, an alternative to Google Reader. It convinced me to give it a go, and I've never looked back.

Here are the main reasons I like Feedly:

1. You can import all your blogs from another feed reader (I moved mine over from Google Reader in virtually one click)
2. It's very quick and easy to categorise your blogs, making them easy to scan by category/topic
3. The layout is magazine-style, with a big choice of layouts. I generally have 3 'featured' (popular) blog posts across the top, each with a thumbnail image, so there's always something to catch my eye
4. The many different choices you have regarding layout means you're less likely to miss things
5. You can subscribe to new blogs very simply by just clicking the 'add to feedly' button on your toolbar while you're logged in, and choose what category or categories your want to put them in, right at the time of subscribing
6. It's easy to read full blog posts in your Feedly window, and retweet or share from there
7. You can add all manner of widgets to customise your Feedly page

... plus, it just looks really great, and makes me want to actually read blog posts!

That's it really - I'd recommend giving it a try.

When is a re-tweet not a re-tweet?

.. when it's been tweeted by someone else, who has placed 'RT' in front of your @name.

This happened to me the other day, when I noticed someone was broadcasting their message about an event, but instead of asking her contacts to retweet, she was simply tweeting it to her own contacts with 'RT @eggboxrobin' (and various others) in front of it.

So it looked like loads of us had re-tweeted it, when in fact we had not.

I didn't want to make a big deal of it, so I sent the culprit a direct message to the effect of 'I'd be happy to RT your message, but not happy about it being made to look like I already have!'

The result - no reply. Yet I noticed she was still broadcasting the same tweet at frequent intervals. So I went to her twitter page and saw that she was regularly mis-using the RT prefix. I thought, maybe she has just made a mistake, and has no intention of hijacking people's accounts (because that's how it felt).

So I sent another message, saying 'hey - I think I see what the problem is, you need to use @ rather than RT when you want to direct a message to someone'. Just a friendly word... should do the trick, I thought.

But no! A few hours later, the RT trick was pulled on another of my accounts, and despite my sending another message to her about it, the instigator didn't seem to see a problem with it, in fact even sent a reply to me using RT.

Of course, by just putting RT in front of a name, the tweet doesn't actually go out to all that person's followers, as does a real RT. But it does send a strong message to all the perpetrator's followers that:

a) their message is being re-tweeted again and again so perhaps that means it's worth checking out

b) plenty of influential and/or locally known people who may not normally RT everything they're asked to, are in fact re-tweeting THIS event, which also gives it credibility

Ironically, I would happily have re-tweeted this event had I been asked nicely. However, call me old fashioned, but I like to make my own decisions about what I re-tweet, so being faced with someone else 're-tweeting' me feels mighty rude.

Am I being over-sensitive? How is this different from someone hijacking your account? When you suddenly start sending pornographic links then it's obvious your account has been hacked. But this is something more insidious and less easy to spot. It could potentially damage your online reputation and that's what worries me.

Socialnomics video updated with 2010 stats

Erik Qualman has updated his 2009 video 'Social media revolution' (which has been viewed over 1.8 million times). Here's the 2010 update - some stats have changed, and David Ogilvy has been ousted by Mad Men (threatened libel suit perhaps?), but the music is the same, which is a shame. I often show this when I'm giving a talk about social media, so I've heard it a few too many times!

Too many emails

One of the most common reasons for people unsubscribing from email lists is 'too many emails'.

Email marketers have known this for a long time, but over-mailing seems to be creeping back in. Some email marketing service providers structure their pricing on the size of the email list, rather than number of emails sent, and this is perhaps why companies are tempted to think 'if it costs the same to send out 10,000 emails a month as 1,000, why don't we send 10,000?'

True, a direct response email sent twice a month can be yield more sales than if sent once a month. But finding the optimum frequency is important, because once you tip over into 'too many emails' then you lose good customers.

Here's an example - last weekend my husband was offered 2 free tickets to a concert in the Brighton Festival, which runs for the whole of May. We couldn't go, alas, but the person offering them said he often gets emails to say 'you've won 2 free tickets to ...'. 'We need to get on that list!' I told my other half. And he replied that he was probably already on the list, but because he gets upwards of two promotional emails a day from the Brighton Festival, he no longer opens any of them, but simply deletes. 

Our loss? Maybe, but it made me think about all those emails going unopened. Sometimes more is less.